Lexington County Coroner Margaret Fisher announced that 39-year-old Elena Katherine Moore died of natural causes from a heart condition, closing months of public speculation after the South Carolina fitness trainer’s body was found.
Fox News Digital reported that Fisher tied the death to complications of cardiac dysrhythmia with premature ventricular contractions and said the autopsy showed no traumatic injuries.
The ruling carries clear stakes for a case that drew intense local attention. Moore vanished after a mental health discharge, her husband faced online suspicion, and investigators had to separate medical fact from rumor.
Fisher said Moore died of natural causes stemming from a heart condition. She described the mechanism as complications of cardiac dysrhythmia with premature ventricular contractions.
The autopsy found no evidence of traumatic injuries, including broken bones, strangulation, or sexual assault. Toxicology testing detected alcohol but no other substances.
Fisher delivered the determination at a news conference described as held on a Friday, nearly four months after recovery of the body. She stressed that the medical file and the physical evidence lined up.
Fisher told reporters investigators never saw signs of a killing.
"We never saw anything that would indicate homicide. Nothing,"
She said the office reconstructed Moore’s path and reviewed her records 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."
Those findings matter because the case had been framed in public talk as a possible crime. The coroner put a medical cause on the record and rejected a homicide theory.
Fisher also addressed suspicion aimed at Moore’s husband, Brannon Slice. She said Slice was never considered a suspect or a person of interest.
She went further and credited him with pressing the system for care when 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 he kept trying.
"He reached out. He tried many times to get her help."
Slice reported his wife missing on June 12. He told Lexington police she had been released from an undisclosed facility the previous afternoon. An incident report previously obtained by Fox News Digital also reflects that he later told investigators Moore checked into a Planet Fitness at 6:38 p.m. that evening.
In a climate where missing-person cases often turn into online blame campaigns, the coroner’s on-the-record defense of Slice is a direct institutional answer to that pressure.
Moore was involuntarily committed on June 5 after a severe mental health crisis. She remained at an unnamed mental health facility until her discharge on June 11.
Slice offered to pick her up. The facility arranged transportation instead and placed her in a taxi.
Fisher did not hide her frustration with that release decision. She said staff had seen both the medical and psychiatric picture and still sent Moore out.
"This whole situation would be different if somebody at that mental health facility... they all saw her medical, her mental crisis,"
She finished the point in blunt terms.
"But yet she was released."
Investigators reviewed medical records dating back years. Those records showed an irregular heartbeat since Moore was 14, plus more recent cardiac arrhythmia, sinus tachycardia, and hypertension.
That history sits at the center of the natural-causes ruling. It also frames the discharge fight Fisher put on the table: a patient in documented crisis left the facility the same day she later disappeared.
On Thursday, June 11, 2026, Moore left a Planet Fitness gym in Lexington, South Carolina, according to the Lexington Police Department. The same date marks her discharge and taxi ride.
The taxi took her to a CVS on Sunset Boulevard in Lexington, a store where she had previously worked. Inside, she told a manager the taxi driver was stalking her and trying to hurt her. The manager contacted Lexington police. Officers arrived after she was already gone. The taxi driver went inside looking for her.
Later that evening, Moore checked into a Planet Fitness at 6:38 p.m., as reflected in the incident-report account of Slice’s statement to investigators. She was subsequently seen on surveillance footage walking through a Publix parking lot on Old Cherokee Road.
Her body was found on June 17, six days after she disappeared following the release. A photo caption tied to the scene is dated June 19, 2026, and notes she was last seen alive June 11.
Authorities have publicly confirmed a medical cause of death, a clean trauma exam, limited toxicology findings, and Slice’s status outside the suspect category. They have also confirmed the commitment window from June 5 to June 11 and the basic path from taxi drop-off to gym check-in and parking-lot surveillance.
Authorities have not publicly named the mental health facility in the material reported by Fox News Digital. No public street address for the body-recovery scene appears in that reporting. Full quantitative toxicology detail beyond the presence of alcohol has not been released in the account.
Close friend Sondra Campbell spoke with Fox News Digital about statements Moore made to her in the period before a body matching her description was found. Verbatim on-the-record wording from Campbell is not included in the article body provided for this report.
Investigators and the coroner’s office had to determine whether violence explained the death, whether toxicology pointed to a different cause, and whether the husband belonged in a criminal frame. Fisher’s announcement answers those questions with a natural-causes finding and an explicit clearance of Slice.
No charges, arrests, or criminal statutes appear in the reported record of this announcement. The operative posture is a coroner’s medical conclusion, not a prosecution.
That still leaves a governance problem in plain sight. A woman with a long cardiac history and an active psychiatric crisis was discharged, placed in a taxi rather than released to her husband, and dead within days. Fisher said the facility saw the crisis and released her anyway.
For readers who care about competent public institutions, the sequence is the story under the story. Police took a missing-person report. The coroner pulled years of medical and mental-health history. The autopsy tested the homicide theory against the body itself. The public claim that this was a murder did not survive that process.
Slice’s June 12 missing report, the CVS manager’s call to police, the gym timestamp, and the Publix surveillance together form the last documented trail. Fisher said her office could follow that path and still found no homicide evidence.
Moore was described as a South Carolina fitness enthusiast and personal trainer. She was 39. Her disappearance after a mental-health discharge invited the darkest assumptions, especially online.
Fisher’s press remarks directly countered that drift. She rejected a homicide indication, described a cardiac mechanism, and named the husband as the person who tried to get help through the system.
The contrast is sharp. One track followed rumor. The official track followed medical history, autopsy findings, toxicology, and a reconstructed timeline from facility discharge to final sightings.
Fox News Digital’s reporting also notes that SLED appears only through related-link presentation on the page, not as a developed body of independent findings in the primary article narrative. The on-the-record cause-of-death voice in that account is Fisher’s.
With a natural-causes ruling on the record, the criminal-suspect narrative lacks official support in Fisher’s announced findings. Any remaining public accounting centers on the discharge decision and on how crisis patients with known cardiac disease are released and transported.
Investigators already reviewed long-range medical records and the death investigation path Fisher described. No public results beyond the announced cause, autopsy trauma summary, and alcohol-only toxicology note are detailed in the Fox News Digital account.
Families in similar crises are left with a hard institutional lesson. When a facility overrides a husband’s offer to take a patient home and releases someone in documented mental crisis, the downstream risk is not abstract. In this case, the coroner said the whole situation would have been different if the facility had responded to what staff already saw.
Moore’s death is now recorded as medical, not homicidal. The husband the internet was ready to condemn is, in the coroner’s words, the person who tried to get her help. The facility that released her remains unnamed in the public narrative and faces the criticism Fisher delivered without soft edges.
When officials do the autopsy work and still have to spend a press conference killing rumors, the real failure is upstream: a system that discharges a patient in crisis and then leaves the family to bury the consequences.
