By Seamus McGraw

April 12, 2006

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LOWER HEIDELBERG, Pa. (Crime Library) — It all seems so tragically obvious: A 39-year-old woman, nearing the end of a stormy and sometimes violent marriage, is found hanging by the neck in an old gristmill at her home.

But even now, three weeks after the death of Kristin Bean, authorities are awaiting the results of a toxicological study and are not yet prepared to officially declare her death a suicide. "We're still waiting for the lab results," said Berks County Coroner Dennis Hess, "and until we get them we're holding back."

The official silence about the cause and manner of her death, while temporary, has ignited a firestorm of suspicion and doubt among the amateur detectives and crime buffs who haunt the Internet, authorities acknowledge. Much of that suspicion has focused on Kevin Bean, the dead woman's 46-year-old estranged husband who, despite her death, is still facing charges of assaulting the woman during an argument in January. And in a bizarre twist, he also is facing charges that he assaulted a 61-year-old deputy coroner and a 46-year-old technician who, authorities said, tried to prevent Bean from touching his dead wife's body after it was taken to Reading Hospital.

The strange saga began about 5 p.m. on Jan. 11 when Lower Heidelberg Township police were summoned to the couple's Hains Mill Road home after a report of bitter and bloody fight between the couple.

It was, by all accounts, a serious incident. Kristin Bean later told authorities that her husband had tried to suffocate her with a pillow, and that he had cut her arm with the broken handle of a glass pitcher, a cut so severe that it required nearly two dozen stitches.

By the time police arrived, Kevin Bean was gone, but he returned a few hours later, still wearing a shirt stained with what appeared to be the woman's blood. Oddly, as Bean's attorney would note during a subsequent court hearing, the blood was only on the back of the shirt, and not on the front where one might expect it to be found if he had attacked her in the manner she had described.

It wasn't until the next day that Bean was arrested, authorities told Crime Library. A court date was set for the third week of March, and Bean was released, though he was ordered to stay away from the Hains Mill Road home.

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Contact Seamus McGraw at seamusm@ptd.net

Seamus McGraw

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