Ruled an accidental drug overdose, 30-year-old Elisabeth Wright’s 2015 death in the stairwell of a 19th Ave apartment building brought only a confusing CHS blotter entry:

A person found in a building stairway near 19th and Madison last Wednesday night was believed to have fallen to their death or died of an overdose. Police said wine bottles and drug needles were found near the base of the stairs where the body was discovered just before 7 PM on March 11th. The King County Medical Examiner was investigating to confirm the official cause of death.

Seattle Police and prosecutors say that story changed this week when Leo Driver came to the lobby of the East Precinct at 12th and Pine and confessed to a terrible crime some five years ago inside the Views at Madison apartment building — strangling his former girlfriend to death:

The King County Prosecutor’s office announced charges Wednesday of first degree murder against Driver, now 32 years old.

According to charging documents, Driver provided a cold and straightforward account of the murder saying he took his on and off girlfriend of six years into a stairwell, accused her of cheating on him, and proceeded to strangle her:

According to the charges, the county medical examiner determined the death to be an accidental overdose due to the presence of drugs in the woman’s system. Because of the finding, police say Driver was never interviewed about Wright’s death.

Police say that Driver’s mother told them Wright was a drug user and had been staying in her apartment and had stolen the mother’s credit card. Driver’s mother told police that Wright sometimes slept in the building’s stairwell, three floors above where she was found. Police say the mother told them there had been an argument earlier in the day over the theft and that Driver had been present.

Prosecutors say that the examiner has now determined that Wright’s injuries were “consistent with Driver killing Elisabeth Wright by manual strangulation.”

Drugs can be a confounding factor in suspicious death investigations. CHS reported on the case of Devan Schmidt, a 29-year-old found dead in a Madison Valley home in 2015 found with drugs in her system and, an independent investigator concluded, evidence that she was murdered.

In the case of Wright’s murder investigation, there are also complications beyond Driver’s confession. Prosecutors acknowledge that Driver suffers from mental illness, sometimes hears voices, and “sees things that are not there.”  But police say he was on his medications at the time of his just past midnight confession and said he decided to confess “because his family was still suffering, and he wanted peace.”

“He said on the day he killed Wright he had this condition,” police write, “but clarified that, ‘I did what I did because I wanted to,'”

Driver is currently held in King County Jail on $1 million bail. The Capitol Hill resident does not have prior felony convictions but has been convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors and violating protection orders. Driver has not yet entered a plea on the murder charge.

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