Nearly two years after the death of legendary San Francisco drag queen Heklina, her friends believe her case has been largely ignored by the police due to homophobic bias.
Close friend and fellow drag performer Peaches Christ (Joshua Grannell) discovered Heklina’s body in a flat they were sharing in London on April 3, 2023, but there hasn’t been any significant news to come from the police investigation into her death until now.
The London police have released CCTV surveillance footage of three men leaving the Soho flat early in the morning on the day Heklina — whose birth name was Stefan Grygelko — was found and are asking for the men who appear in the video to come forward with any information they have about the drag performer’s death.
Peaches Christ told the San Francisco Chronicle that she was shocked to learn about the video footage and thinks that the London police haven’t fully investigated the case because of anti-LGBTQ+ bias.
“What I believe happened is so upsetting. I’ve been keeping my mouth shut for all this time and trying to have some sort of reconciliation with an official autopsy report or certificate of death that says how she died, and two years later, I still don’t have that,” Peaches Christ said in an interview with the Chronicle. “The lack of closure and my anger is indescribable.”
At the time of her death, the 55-year-old queen was rehearsing for an upcoming two-week run of the musical parody Mommy Dearest at the Soho Theatre alongside Peaches Christ. The two were sharing an apartment and spending their time preparing for the show.
Peaches Christ said she returned to their Soho flat on Monday after spending the weekend at a nearby hotel while Heklina arranged a sexual encounter. When Peaches Christ came to pick up Heklina, the front door was ajar, and she found her in the living room and still wearing drag.
“When Heklina was found by me, she was in drag in a very compromising position,” Peaches Christ said. “I think the bias started happening from the moment she was found. This was considered a dismissed case from the moment we started going down this road.”
After Peaches Christ was cleared as a suspect and allowed to return to the U.S., communication with the London Metropolitan Police slowed to a trickle. She and Nancy French, another close friend and executor of Heklina’s estate, often went months without hearing from the police and had no substantive news about the case until the CCTV footage was released.
French said that although she is listed as Heklina’s “next of kin” she has yet to receive a cause of death, autopsy report, or final death certificate.
“This CCTV footage should have been released 21 months ago,” she told the Chronicle. “Releasing it now just proves their ineptitude and mismanagement that we’ve been dealing with for almost 2 years.”
Peaches Christ said that she’s been frustrated by the police’s seeming indifference to Heklina’s case, telling SFGATE that she doesn’t “think detectives took it seriously or cared.”
“It’s like taking a knife that’s already stabbed me a million times,” Peaches Christ said. “When I go to bed at night and when I wake up in the morning, it’s what I think about. We’ve been demanding answers and getting nothing, and I’m pissed at them for dragging it out.”
Initially Peaches Christ didn’t want to go public with details about Heklina’s death because she didn’t want people to jump to conclusions, but then she remembered how open Heklina was about her personal life.
“This is one person who was shameless when it came to her private life,” she said. “I am not airing her dirty laundry. Her escapades with straight men in drag is not news to anyone who knew and loved her, including her family.”
Heklina was also found with drugs at the time of her death, but Peaches Christ said she didn’t know the drag icon had relapsed. A postmortem at the time “indicated that foul play was not suspected in Heklina’s death,” SFGATE reports.
“Our thoughts are with [Stefan’s] family and friends who still have a lot of unanswered questions about what happened to him,” Detective Chief Inspector Dean Purvis of the Central West Command Unit said in the news release. “We know that the three men in the CCTV images were at the flat in the early hours of 3 April 2023. I am asking them to contact police. We need to establish what happened, and how [Stefan] was when they left.”
Heklina had been an icon within the San Francisco and international drag community since the ‘90s. Over the course of her long career, her aesthetic influenced drag culture, and she helped launch popular club nights including Trannyshack (later renamed T-Shack and then Mother) which became an institution and ran for over 10 years. She and Peaches Christ also performed together for decades doing hilarious drag parodies and touring internationally.
After her death, her influence could be felt when a memorial card appeared on an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race and the famous Castro Theatre had a funeral that was so well attended that they had to close off the street so overflow crowds could watch the event of a jumbo screen.
Peaches Christ said she intends to continue pushing for answers from the police and is in talks with filmmaker Brian Benson about making a documentary about Heklina.