A Convenient Death

by Alana Goodman

  But Epstein had no intention of going down quietly. He did not believe he had done anything wrong.

  “His theory was always that sixteen-, seventeen-, eighteen-year-olds are having sex with their boyfriends,” said Alan Dershowitz, the high-profile defense attorney who represented Epstein off and on for years, in an interview. “So, what’s the big deal? They made $250. They gave him a massage. He masturbated. That’s the end of it. He didn’t think he ruined anybody’s life. He never thought he did anything wrong. To the day he died, he never thought he did anything wrong. He thought that the culture was all screwed up about sex and young women.”

  Epstein’s lawyers were confident of his chances. They believed the federal case against him was “pretty weak” due to several factors. First, Epstein had already entered a non-prosecution agreement with the Department of Justice more than a decade earlier that allowed him to plead guilty to state charges in Florida and avoid federal prosecution in that district. Because the latest charges involved some of the same incidents and victims, they argued that the federal government’s Department of Justice was not allowed to retry him in another state.

  Second, Epstein’s lawyers felt they could make an argument for double jeopardy based on the prior prosecution. Finally, they thought the government had flimsy evidence when it came to interstate transportation of the girls, the key basis for bringing a federal indictment.

  “He had a pretty good case,” said Dershowitz. “Although the deck was stacked against him because he was Jeffrey Epstein, he might very well have won the case.”

  * * *

  —

  Epstein might have had another reason to feel he could get off easy.

  When the feds raided his Manhattan mansion after his arrest in early July, they found “a vast trove of lewd photographs of young-looking women or girls.” The photographs were locked up and highly organized. It amounted to child pornography. But it may also have been something else: blackmail, featuring not just young, innocent children but also the perpetrators.

  It is unclear how Epstein acquired his photo stash, but friends said he had an extensive video surveillance system throughout his house in New York. Everything was monitored—the guest bedrooms, the bathrooms.

  “There were cameras everywhere,” said one longtime friend in an interview. “Why? That’s good evidence that he’s a blackmailer, and it’s good evidence that he has some bad stuff on people.”

  * * *

  —

  Meanwhile, Epstein continued his daily monopoly of one of the third-floor legal conference rooms, which were technically supposed to be available to all inmates on a first-come basis. He filled his time with various legal matters. On Thursday, August 8, Epstein’s financial attorneys established a trust in the Virgin Islands to house his assets. The move shielded the full scope of his fortune and created more legal hurdles for accusers who sued him for damages. Epstein also signed a new copy of his last will and testament that would transfer his $577 million fortune in disclosed assets to the trust in the event of his death.

  The next day, August 9, Epstein met with his defense lawyers in the cramped third-floor conference room to talk trial strategy. By all accounts he was in a fighting mood, “just barking out orders with all the stuff that I had told them we need to start working on,” said Schoen, who was back in Atlanta for the Jewish sabbath but received a readout after the meeting. “He [was] so excited about going forward.”

  The team planned to file an appeal motion the following Monday to try to get him out on bail—a fairly long shot. His lawyers were more confident about other avenues they were pursuing, such as their attempts to get the case tossed due to the non-prosecution agreement Epstein had entered with the federal government years earlier in Florida.

  “We had a significant motion to dismiss. This was not a futile, you know, defeatist attitude,” Epstein’s lawyer Martin Weinberg would tell the court later.

  The huddle lasted until nearly 8:00 p.m., when Epstein was escorted back to his cell by the overnight guard Tova Noel. That would be the last time anyone outside the prison saw him alive.

  2

  A Corpse on 9-South

  It seems to me that he outsmarted everyone so far, and his ghost is still laughing at us.

  COURT STATEMENT BY ONE OF EPSTEIN’S VICTIMS

  Shortly after 6:00 the next morning, the two guards on duty, Tova Noel and Michael Thomas, set out to deliver breakfast trays to the inmates on 9-South. Prison sources would later report hearing sounds of shrieking from the vicinity of Epstein’s cell. Then handheld radios in the facility crackled to life, blaring the alert to all the guards on the morning shift: “Body alarm on South, body alarm on South.”

  Thomas said that he and Noel found the sixty-six-year-old inmate unresponsive and hanging from his bunk by a strip of orange fabric. The guard said he cut Epstein down from the makeshift noose.

  “Responding [prison] staff immediately initiated life-saving measures,” said the MCC warden Lamine N’Diaye in a letter to the U.S. District Court judge Richard M. Berman later that morning. They called paramedics who transported Epstein to the hospital five blocks away “for treatment of life-threatening injuries.”

  Epstein’s cell was six feet by nine feet, according to MCC employees we interviewed, about half the size of an average parking space. The floor was dark gray concrete. A bunk bed, around four feet high with a metal frame, spanned the length of the far wall, and a concrete table the size of a TV dinner tray was bolted to the wall to the left of the door. This was the only furniture. Next to the entrance there was a metal toilet with no seat. The one window in the room, behind the bed, was latticed with thin wire bars.

  Photos of the cell taken by investigators in the aftermath showed signs of confusion and perhaps even a struggle: one mattress on the floor, one still in place on the bottom bunk. Piles of crumpled orange sheets and fabric, a lot more than one bed’s worth, were strewn around the room. A discarded sleep apnea machine was next to the toilet, with an upended paper coffee cup tossed on top of the wires. Nearby, there appeared to be a couple of brown puddles—or stains—on the concrete floor.

  After Epstein’s death, investigators found a yellow legal pad on the table with a few lines scribbled on it in ballpoint pen:1

  [Guard] kept me in a locked shower stall for one hour.

  [Guard] sent in burnt food.

  Giant bugs crawling on my hands.

  No fun!

  “No fun” was underlined.

  Epstein allegedly hanged himself from the frame of the upper bed bunk, about four feet high. The photos of his prison cell after his death, obtained by his brother, appear to show multiple attempts to tie nooses to different pieces of furniture. There are small scraps of orange fabric tied to the window grates, the metal frame of the bed, and even a supporting bar under the table, about half a foot off the ground.

  Medicine bottles were lined up neatly on the top bunk, where the mattress had been removed. There were no drugs found in Epstein’s system during the toxicology report, and Dr. Michael Baden, a respected independent pathologist who observed Epstein’s autopsy on behalf of his family members, said the bottles contained over-the-counter pills.

  Epstein was six feet tall, nearly two feet taller than the height of the bunk bed. To hang himself from it, prison insiders said, he would have had to lean forward and possibly kneel, to cut off his circulation, until he suffocated.

  “For him to pull the sheet tight, that means he would have had to go to the bottom bunk, tie the sheet through the wiring that’s holding the top bunk, put it around his neck, and somehow try to lean forward, or something like this, to apply the pressure to cut off his circulation,” Albie Rivera, a former MCC correctional lieutenant who worked at the prison for more than a decade, told us.

  Epstein, strapped to a gurney and still clad in an orange jumpsuit, was wheeled into New Yor
k-Presbyterian Lower Manhattan Hospital around 7:30 a.m. A paramedic worked a manual breathing tube into his mouth, but resuscitation efforts were no use by then. He was pronounced dead at 7:47 a.m., although a subsequent autopsy would indicate he was deceased long before he arrived.

  Dr. Michael Baden, the pathologist hired by Epstein’s lawyers to monitor the autopsy, told us that the financier had been dead for at least forty-five minutes, but more likely for hours, before the two guards reported finding him and started initiating “life-saving measures.”

  * * *

  —

  As news spread that Saturday morning, reactions were varied and emotions mixed.

  Moneymen, political players, socialites, and media moguls waking up on the Upper East Side—the few who hadn’t yet made it out to the Hamptons—must have breathed a sigh of relief. In some ways, the deceased could be said to be “in” elite Manhattan circles but not “of” them. Perhaps, at the same time, he reflected the true nature of his world—their world—in ways they would never admit, even to themselves. At any rate, he was gone, and whatever secrets he had held were safe.

  Others reacted with outrage. Gloria Allred, the celebrity attorney representing several of Epstein’s underage victims, was home at her beachfront condo in Malibu on August 10 when she first got word that Epstein was dead. She scrambled to contact her clients so that she could break the news to them before they heard it on TV or, worse, from an inquiring reporter.

  “It was, of course, surprising and shocking,” recalled Allred in an interview. “I had no reason to believe that this would happen. Could happen. Never entered my mind.”

  “I was concerned about [my clients] because, naturally, there would be the questions that everybody has: How could this have happened? Why did it happen?”

  Allred had plenty of questions about Epstein’s death. How could such a high-value inmate, who had reportedly attempted suicide just three weeks before, have had the means and opportunity to kill himself? Wasn’t he supposed to be on suicide watch?

  “I felt that the system had failed the victims for many years in Florida, and elsewhere, and now the system failed them again,” she said when reached on the phone. “It’s failed Epstein, and it’s failed the court.”

  Epstein’s legal team was even more shocked.

  In the days before his death, “we did not see a despairing, despondent suicidal person,” one of his attorneys, Martin Weinberg, told U.S. District Court judge Richard M. Berman days later.2

  Weinberg noted that Epstein had been preparing to file a bail appeal motion on Monday, August 12. “The timing for a pretrial detainee to commit suicide on August 10, when his bail pending appeal motion is being filed on August 12, strikes us as implausible,” he said.

  “We’re not here without significant doubts regarding the conclusion of suicide,” said Weinberg. “We are not here to say what happened. We don’t know what happened. But we deeply want to know what happened to our client.”

  Finding information, even for Epstein’s lawyers and family members, would prove difficult. The self-proclaimed financier’s cellmate had been transferred the morning before he died, and he had not been replaced, despite directives from prison psychologists that Epstein not be housed alone.

  MCC officials also neglected to preserve the scene where the body was found. Thomas, the prison guard on duty, claimed he cut downEpstein’s body from a noose, making it difficult for investigators to determine what position he died in. Prison officials had also called paramedics to transport his body to a hospital, instead of keeping the body in place, as they are required to do in the case of an inmate death.

  By the time the Department of Justice investigators arrived, a parade of correctional officers, prison staff, and paramedics had already walked through Epstein’s cell, potentially disrupting or contaminating the scene. The prison also immediately transferred the other inmates in Epstein’s tier to other locations in the prison, making it more difficult to locate witnesses.

  “Instead of having the cell in the condition it was found, if he had been dead for 45 minutes or two hours or four hours, there were efforts to move him and, therefore, make it more difficult to reconstruct whether or not he died of suicide or some other cause,” Weinberg told the court.

  If Epstein had indeed killed himself, that should be clear in the autopsy required by New York state law. However, if something fishy happened, it seemed not impossible that the government report would be untrustworthy.

  One of Epstein’s attorneys had a connection with Dr. Baden, and persuaded Epstein’s brother, Mark, to hire Baden to independently observe the autopsy.

  Baden is perhaps the most well-known forensic pathologist in the country and host of HBO’s documentary series Autopsy. Baden, eighty-five, a grandfatherly man with a white mustache, was the former chief medical examiner of New York City and has conducted more than twenty thousand autopsies over his career. He is famous—or as famous as a pathologist can be—but he also is well respected in the medical community. A rare breed.

  The autopsy was conducted the day after Epstein’s death by Dr. Kristin Roman, fifty-four, a respected veteran with the city’s Medical Examiner’s Office. “The beautiful thing about the body is that it doesn’t lie,” she once told a reporter. “It tells you its story.”3

  As the two pathologists examined Epstein’s body, the first thing that caught Baden’s eye was the unusual location of the ligature mark. It was right in the middle of Epstein’s neck, a thin, dark red line running horizontally across the Adam’s apple.

  “The ligature mark on the neck was lower than in the usual suicidal hanging. Usually the ligature is high up near the mandible, the jawbone. And here it was in the middle of the neck, which is more common in homicidal strangulation,” Baden revealed over the course of a series of interviews.

  The doctors also noticed there was no sign in the legs of a purplish marbling effect—known as lividity—that is typically seen when blood settles in the lower extremities after death.

  “The lividity and settling of the blood is normally on the lowest part of the body,” said Baden. “If he dies hanging, upright hanging, the lividity is both front and back on the legs, because that’s where the blood settles. And in this instance there was no such lividity present, so it didn’t look like a normal, traditional hanging.”

  When the pathologists looked under the skin, they found something else—an anomaly that Baden said he had not seen before in his sixty-year career.

  There were three separate fractures in the front of Epstein’s neck: the left and right cartilage (also known as the Adam’s apple), and a horseshoe-shaped bone under the chin called the hyoid.

  In the early 1970s, Baden was appointed by Governor Nelson Rockefeller to sit on a medical review board that examines every death that takes place in the New York state and city prison systems. He continues to sit on the board to this day.

  According to Baden, nearly 90 percent of the thousand suicidal prison hangings he has reviewed include no fractures. Around 10 percent have a fractured hyoid, and in rare cases he has seen a fracture of the cartilage.

  “We’ve never had three fractures,” said Baden. “We haven’t seen that, that I can recall, in almost fifty years we’ve examined every single case.”

  Baden said these injuries are far more common in strangulation murders.

  “We’ve had multiple fractures if there’s been a manual strangulation or ligature strangulation, where the loop, the rope, or the hands go across the Adam’s apple, the thyroid cartilage,” he said.

  According to Roman’s notes, which were obtained by Epstein’s brother, Mark, the body also had bruising on the back of the neck and an injection mark on the inner arm. There were also burst capillaries in Epstein’s eyes, which Baden claimed were more consistent with manual strangulation, which can build up pressure in the face.

  Baden said t
he bruising could have been caused by an Emergency Medical Technician placing a brace around Epstein’s neck. He said the injection mark was fresh and could have come from attempts by paramedics to revive Epstein, but he said federal officials have declined to say whether paramedics injected him with anything.

  The findings were enough to raise questions. At the conclusion of the autopsy, Roman said she needed more information to determine the cause and manner of death. She issued a temporary death certificate, indicating that the autopsy was “inconclusive.”

  3

  Stonewalling

  In the wake of the autopsy report, social media theories flourished. Epstein was killed by the Mossad, claimed YouTube commentators and anti-Semitic bloggers. He was assassinated by the Clintons or Donald Trump, claimed Republicans and Democrats depending on their partisan affiliation. He was still alive and living it up on an island—maybe extracted from the prison in a CIA operation—and the dead body was a fake or a double.

  The Office of Chief Medical Examiner in New York City, perhaps realizing the exploding PR crisis, took quick action in an attempt to quash the theories. Five days after issuing a temporary death certificate and labeling the cause “inconclusive,” New York City’s chief medical examiner, Barbara Sampson, announced that she would be changing the manner of death to “suicide.”

  What had prompted that change in just a few days? Sampson declined to give specifics, saying that the determination was made “after careful review of all investigative information, including complete autopsy findings.” But the announcement came only amid immense public pressure and withering media scrutiny into the story.