DEDHAM, Mass. (AP) – A Quincy dominatrix was not immediately a suspect in the disappearance of a New Hampshire man who allegedly died of a heart attack during a visit to the woman’s makeshift “dungeon,” a police detective said Friday.

Testifying in the manslaughter trial of Barbara Asher, Detective Mark Sambataro of Salem, N.H. said he initially had “no theory” about what happened to Michael Lord.

That contradicts claims made by Asher’s lawyer, who said in her opening statement that detectives focused on the dominatrix as a suspect early in the investigation and failed to look for other explanations for Lord’s disappearance.

Although his body was never found, investigators believe Lord visited Asher on July 3, 2000, and died from a heart attack during a bondage session. Asher, 56, is accused of failing to call paramedics and dismembering his body and disposing of it behind a restaurant in Maine.

Under cross-examination by defense attorney Stephanie Page, Sambataro said he didn’t consider Asher a suspect until she confessed during an interrogation.

But the alleged confession was not taped, and Page maintains the police fed information to Asher about Lord and bullied her into admitting to the crime.

Sambataro said police recorded most of the two-hour session, during which Asher repeatedly denied having seen Lord on the day authorities believe he died.

When police claimed they had surveillance video of the 53-year-old Lord entering Asher’s apartment building, and that Lord wrote about her in his diary, she asked that the recorder be turned off, Sambataro said. That’s when she allegedly confessed.

But police did not take notes during the confession, he said.

When Sambataro was asked in cross-examination if the claims about the surveillance video and diary reference to Asher were true, he admitted those and other statements made to Asher during the interrogation were false. He said detectives used common police interrogation techniques.

When asked about passages from a transcript of the interrogation in which detectives made threatening statements to Asher, Sambataro acknowledged the passages were accurate. In one, a detective told Asher, “If I want to make your life a living hell, and miserable, I can do that.”

Page claims there never was a confession and that there is no physical evidence that Lord was ever in the dominatrix’s apartment.

On Thursday, Sambataro testified that Asher described during the interrogation how she watched her boyfriend dismember Michael Lord’s body, then helped him load the parts into trash bags for disposal. Investigators believe the body parts were dumped in Augusta, Maine, but they were never found.

AP-ES-01-20-06 1847EST