Deirdre Hey, the self-described Winooski heroin addict who told Seven Days in April police exaggerated her role as a local drug dealer, is behind bars.

A week after the story ran, a federal grand jury indicted Hey, 47, on charges of conspiring to deal heroin and using her home  to sell heroin and cocaine. Hey is being held awaiting trial and faces more than 20 years in prison, according to court documents.

Court documents say that Hey "confessed," to having relationships with at least six groups of out-of-state drug dealers, buying drugs from them and allowing them to use her LaFountain Street apartment as a base of operations, prosecutors alleged in court filings. As each group was arrested, Hey told investigators, she moved to the next group.

Most recently, according to court documents, Hey aligned herself with two New York City men, Tyshawn Mack and Thomas Parker, beginning in late 2013, and allowed them to use her LaFountain Street apartment as a base of operations to sell heroin. Both Mack and Parker have been indicted on federal charges.

Prosecutors allege Hey also brokered a deal inside her apartment whereby Parker and Mack bought an assault rifle and several handguns that had been stolen from a home in Underhill, according to court documents.

"Hey is not simply a user of heroin," Assistant U.S. Attorney Nancy Creswell wrote. "She has admitted using runners to sell drugs for Mack and Parker and she sells drugs herself. She allows her apartment to be used as a base for drug sales. Moreover ... she has been involved with the trading of firearms for heroin."

In interviews with Seven Days in April, Hey, who had previously been charged by state prosecutors with selling heroin, scoffed at assertions that she was, in her words, a "big-time dealer." Rather, Hey said that she sold small amounts of heroin to fund her own addiction, and was so destitute that she couldn't pay her gas bill.

"I am not a conduit for people coming from out of state. I'm not, and I don't know how they get that," Hey said inside her apartment. "Yes, I have made some mistakes and I admit what I have done. But I am not some big-time dealer. I have nothing."

When they arrived at her apartment to arrest Hey, federal agents found a one-liter bottle half full of used hypodermic needles in her bedroom, along with bags of heroin, according to court documents. She told them she had used heroin just the day before. 

Before her most recent arrest, Hey said that she was ashamed at what drug addiction had done to her life.

"I had a wonderful life," Hey said. "If you would have said two years ago that this is what's going to happen in your life, I would have said, 'Over my dead body.' But look where I am."