Herhold: 48 Hours sheds more light on Alex Tichelman case

The big advantage that a show like "48 hours'' has over a newspaper is time. It can spend months putting together a story, like the one that ran Saturday night on Alex Tichelman, the woman charged with manslaughter in the overdose death of Google exec Forrest Hayes.

As a devout follower of the Tichelman case, I was naturally glued. My verdict? I think the "48 Hours'' people did a solid job of reporting, particularly in shedding light on her past. But there is still a mystery about what drove a talented and beautiful woman to drugs and prostitution.

From classmates at a private school in Maine that specializes in teaching troubled young women, the television program learned that Tichelman cut herself on the arms. She made an image of herself as the devil. She was punished by having to build a road.

Then, after a sojourn working strip clubs in San Francisco, she returned to Atlanta, where she lived with a musician and entrepreneur named Dean Riopelle.

Two months before Forrest Hayes died in November, 2013, Riopelle died of a similar overdose. The show replayed Tichelman's call to 911.

Tichelman, 26, has not been charged in that case, though Santa Cruz Assistant Police Chief Steve Clark says his team was "surprised'' at the similarities between the cases.

A friend of Riopelle's named Todd makes a convincing case that Riopelle, who was besotted with Tichelman, took drugs to be closer to his girlfriend.

She was endlessly fascinating to men. Even while she was arranging a meeting with Forrest Hayes on his boat through a site called "Seeking Arrangement'' -- the show has an amusing interview with the website's proud CEO in Las Vegas -- Tichelman had a relationship with a musician named Chad Cornell. Cornell had no idea of her shadow life.

Because of the Hayes family's reticence and Google's secrecy, we know far less about Forrest Hayes, a Midwestern native who worked at Sun and Apple before joining Google X, the branch that develops such things as Google Glass and the driverless car.

The 48 Hours piece did add some details to our understanding: Clark says a crucial 7-minute video from the boat, which has not yet been made public, shows Tichelman injected herself first and then injected Hayes. (According to defense, he used the light on his smartphone to show her where to inject.) Clark says that when Hayes fell unconscious, Tichelman patted him on the cheek, and then cleaned up, wiping down fingerprints. Those details work against her. "I think it's important to see how cold she was,'' Clark says.

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Herhold: 48 Hours sheds more light on Alex Tichelman case