Lexington County’s coroner ruled fitness trainer Elena Moore died of a heart condition months after her body was found, and said her husband was the only person who fought to get her help.
Authorities now say 39-year-old Elena Katherine Moore of Lexington, South Carolina, died of natural causes tied to a long-running heart problem, not violence. Lexington County Coroner Margaret Fisher announced the finding after an autopsy, toxicology work, and a full review of Moore’s medical and mental-health records.
Fox News Digital reported that Moore died from complications of cardiac dysrhythmia with premature ventricular contractions. Fisher said investigators found no evidence of traumatic injuries, including broken bones, strangulation, or sexual assault. Toxicology detected alcohol but no other substances.
The ruling came nearly four months after Moore’s body was found on June 17, 2026, about a week after she was last seen alive. It also closed a painful stretch of public speculation that had hovered over her husband, Brannon Slice.
Fisher was blunt about what the exam did not show.
She told reporters the case never looked like a killing.
"We never saw anything that would indicate homicide. Nothing."
She said officials reconstructed Moore’s final movements and pulled her medical and mental-health history before reaching that conclusion.
"We were able to follow her path. We were able to pull her medical history, her mental history. We knew that this was not a homicide."
Moore had lived with an irregular heartbeat since she was 14. Records also showed cardiac arrhythmia, sinus tachycardia, and hypertension. Those details mattered once the coroner ruled out foul play.
Fisher went further on Brannon Slice. She said he was never considered a suspect or a person of interest.
She described him as the person who kept pressing the system while his wife was in crisis.
"The only person that really tried to help this girl to get her help through the system is her husband."
Fisher added that Slice reached out repeatedly.
"He reached out. He tried many times to get her help."
That defense lands hard after weeks of online guesswork that often treats the spouse as the default villain. Here, the coroner put the official record on the other side of that assumption.
The timeline before Moore disappeared is where the institutional failure shows.
On June 5, 2026, she was involuntarily committed after a severe mental-health crisis. On June 11, the unnamed facility discharged her and put her in a taxi. Slice had offered to pick her up. The facility arranged the cab instead.
Fisher did not hide her frustration with that release.
"This whole situation would be different if somebody at that mental health facility... they all saw her medical, her mental crisis."
Then came the line that should stick with every policymaker who talks a big game about care and still waves unstable patients out the door.
"But yet she was released."
After the taxi ride, Moore went into a CVS on Sunset Boulevard in Lexington and told a manager the driver was stalking her and trying to hurt her. The manager called police. Officers arrived after she had already left. The taxi driver later went inside looking for her.
Slice later told investigators she checked into a Planet Fitness gym at 6:38 p.m. that evening. Surveillance also caught her walking through a Publix parking lot on Old Cherokee Road. She left the gym and was not seen alive again. He reported her missing to the Lexington Police Department on June 12.
Moore’s body was found June 17, six days after she vanished. A general view of the Lexington recovery scene was documented days later. Families in cases like this often wait in public silence while rumors fill the gap. This one waited nearly four months for a cause-of-death announcement.
Close friend Sondra Campbell had told Fox News Digital what Moore said to her in the weeks before a body matching her description was found. The public framing around that friendship centered on fear for Moore’s safety. The coroner’s completed work, however, pointed back to disease and a failed handoff from the mental-health system, not a homicide scene.
No arrest followed. No suspect list expanded. The official finding was natural causes rooted in a heart condition Moore had carried since adolescence, complicated by a crisis that still ended with a discharge into a taxi.
When a woman in a documented mental-health emergency leaves locked care and is dead within days, the public is right to demand answers. In Lexington, the coroner gave them: the heart failed, the husband tried, and the facility still let her walk.
