The Hennepin County Medical Examiner's office concluded that prominent community activist and artist Susan Spiller, whose body was found in her North Side home last week, died of "complex homicidal violence."
An autopsy also found that 27-year-old Major Connell Ivy, of Minneapolis, was killed by multiple gunshot wounds. Ivy, whose age was previously reported as 42, was fatally wounded in an early-morning shooting on July 16 outside a Willard-Hay home, police said.
Authorities have publicly shed little light on how Spiller died.
Her official cause of death, released on Monday, suggests that there was more than one cause; police sources have revealed that she was either stabbed or beaten to death.
Spiller's body was found by police officers who were called to the house shortly before 9 a.m. on July 16 for a welfare check, officials said. When they arrived, they found signs of forced entry and Spiller's body in an unspecified part of the house. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
A source with knowledge of the investigation described the crime scene at Spiller's modest wood frame home on the 5100 block of DuPont Avenue North as particularly grisly.
Her death was the second killing that occurred on the North Side in the span of seven hours.
Ivy was fatally wounded after gunfire erupted about 2:30 a.m. following an apparent dispute outside a house on the 2300 block of Thomas Avenue North. The shooting left another man with serious, but non-life-threatening injuries, police said.
