DC Madam possibly commits suicide in Tarpon Springs

[professorpan]

A friend of mine just pointed this out:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 76_pf.html

Young said that when the mother and daughter woke up Thursday, "they were both kind of tired. The mother said, 'I'm going to go take a nap real quick.' And that was the last she had talked to her."

Hmmm. They both got sleepy.

[barracuda]

May 1 - Walpurgis Night.

Thanks for reminding me. From Goethe's Faust:

MEPHISTOPHELES

What?


FAUST

Mephisto, seest thou there
Standing far off, a lone child, pale and fair?
Slow from the spot her drooping form she tears,
And seems with shackled feet to move along;
I own, within me the delusion's strong,
That she the likeness of my Gretchen wears.


MEPHISTOPHELES

Gaze not upon her! 'Tis not good! Forbear!
'Tis lifeless, magical, a shape of air,
An idol. Such to meet with, bodes no good;
That rigid look of hers doth freeze man's blood,
And well-nigh petrifies his heart to stone:--
The story of Medusa thou hast known.


FAUST

Ay, verily! a corpse's eyes are those,
Which there was no fond loving hand to close.
That is the bosom I so fondly press'd,
That my sweet Gretchen's form, so oft caress'd!


MEPHISTOPHELES

Deluded fool! 'Tis magic, I declare!
To each she doth his lov'd
one's image wear.


FAUST

What bliss! what torture! vainly I essay
To turn me from that piteous look away.
How strangely doth a single crimson line
Around that lovely neck its coil entwine,
It shows no broader than a knife's blunt edge!

[hava1]

ok, with such a sure target... IF we had a real opposition movement in this country, we would have had multiple discrete body guards around her 24x7. Just think of how AWESOME it would have been to catch the fucker(s) who did it live and in person.

Perhaps the reason there is no real opposition is because there is no real opposition. The values should determine that, not only the power balance. THe opposition is afraid to be "associated" with whores, sex slaves and "madams", lest it harm their image. The status of sex slavery is only recently acknowledged as equivalent to "political persecution", but it will take eons for the western liberal bourgeois fesminists from the left to rid themselves of priviliges that they derive directly from sexual slavery.

For the time being its OK to adore a terrorist but not a sex slave, that's the "opposition" so far. But it is changing...hopefully.

[compared2what?]

You know, this strikes me as kind of problematic just in broad practical terms. Which is not to say that I don't also find it highly dubious on the specifics. Because I certainly fucking do.

But...in ascending order of persuasiveness (as assessed by me, obviously):

(1) Statistically speaking, hanging is not a very common way for female suicides to go. Suicide is a much commoner cause of death for men than it is for women, despite women being something like three times more likely to attempt suicide, in part because women traditionally prefer not to kill themselves "violently."** The tables I just went and checked my vague impression of that truth against didn't make a distinction between hanging and suffocation when breaking out the cause-of-death data by age and gender. But according to them, only two out of ten female suicides die by hanging or other methods technically deemed suffocation, whatever they are.

(2) Without knowing all the forensic details, it's difficult to say whether it would have been a disadvantageous choice for someone whose mother was napping nearby because it's not necessarily a quick death or because it's not necessarily a quiet death. But there's a very high risk that it would have been one of them, because anything that would break your neck would probably not be quiet and anything that would asphyxiate you might require more time undetected than she appears to have been able to take for granted.

(3) And finally, unless she absolutely despised her elderly and supportive mother, it doesn't make a lot of sense for her to choose a scenario that makes the grisly discovery of her corpse by her mom almost inevitable, if there was nothing confining her to the house, which there doesn't appear to have been. That might be less of an issue if she were so distraught and/or drunk that she was insensible to every concern other than the need to end her life. However, such a state would have been perceptible. And according to her mother, there wasn't anything particularly out of the ordinary earlier in the day.

I could probably itemize further, but I don't know that it would get any more persuasive. Basically, this suicide just doesn't conform very well to the phenomenon as I have encountered it. Which has been oftener than I'm at all happy to say.


**Most suicides, irrespective of gender, involve firearms, but that's more because more suicides that involve firearms succeed than it is because men and women are equally likely to shoot themselves.

[sunny]

A friend of mine just pointed this out:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 76_pf.html

Young said that when the mother and daughter woke up Thursday, "they were both kind of tired. The mother said, 'I'm going to go take a nap real quick.' And that was the last she had talked to her."

Hmmm. They both got sleepy.

And just after waking up?

[8bitagent]

Damn. This reminds me of the Franklin Coverup case, which left a wake of "mysterious" deaths, accidents, etc to so many of the main witnesses, investigators and even high level officials(like William Colby, former CIA head) trying to expose it.

One could argue why spooks would need to wipe her out, given its not like
this involved the usual Republican elite rape of children or homosexual affairs...but who knows.

Remember when in the late 90's that Clinton secretary was shot to death in a StarBucks...police claimed it was a robbery, but nothing was taken.

Terrence Yeakey, Hunter S Thompson, Gary Webb, Danny Casalaro,
Blake and Duncan, Mark Lombardi, Paul Wellstone, William Colby,
Gary Caradori, etc....

How many artists, writers and investigators that were exposing key pieces of the elite have been accidented/suicided...or at least have odd circumstances of death?

[brainpanhandler]

We can hope that if she had the foresight to predict her murder then she might also have had the brains to safely stow the incriminating evidence somewhere. She may yet speak from the grave.

[Avalon]

Gary Buell wrote: For the record, Joseph Cannon is not an asshat.

For the record, Joseph Cannon's blog Cannonfire is increasingly unreadable. It used to be top-notch political and current affairs reporting and analysis, but now features such pervasive and mean-spirited, ugly ranting about his readers and others that it is painful to watch.

It's reminiscent of the change in blogger Xymphora, whose previously insightful analysis has turned to a constant litany about evil Jews. With Joseph, his hatred initially centered on 9/11 skepticism advocates, who he stubbornly continues to call "trannies" (presumably for the advocacy of controlled demolition, AKA "CD," and thus "cross-dressers" in his mind?), but now extends to "Obama bots." Courteous and constructive criticism by his regular readers gets the same over-the-top abusive reaction that people who continually try to engage him on 9/11 get. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the provocations are deliberately manipulated at this point, seeing how Joseph has made it very clear how to push his buttons and make him fly off the handle.

Joseph has said he has severe pain from sciatica, and he wouldn't be the first person I've watched who had his online persona change due to pain or pain meds. But understanding that doesn't make his almost constant belligerence any easier to wade through. He's been sounding close to a breakdown for months.

It's sad to see this change. A big loss.


[edited due to hitting the SEND button when I wasn't finished]

[Avalon]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3233420

The Palfrey-Cheney Connection
Posted by npincus on Thu May-01-08 05:33 PM

Palfrey faced up to 55 years in prison for money-laundering, sentencing scheduled for July 24. Her defense attorney, Preston Burton, said she planned to appeal. Why would she kill herself with an appeal pending? She has an aged mother with a heart condition; why would she she choose to hang herself with the likelihood her ailing mom would find her like that? Palfrey was a fighter- again, why would she give up with her appeal pending?

Palfrey believed her life could be in danger, and stated that it would not be suicide if she were found dead; she said so on a radio program along with implicating that the VP himself, and other extremely powerful, high-profile men in Washington were clients. LISTEN: http://freepress.org/radio/theprogressi ... 252007.mp3

Is it possible that facing of a 55-year sentence, Ms. Palfrey was going to do some talking, in hopes of a reduced sentence? Were some persons concerned that an angry or vindictive Palfrey might write tell-all?
.

The district attorney's office gave the figure as 57-71 months, making it just under 6 years max, not 55 years.

[crikkett]

Though it does seem fishy, it's certainly feasible that someone would commit suicide before going to jail. A friend of mine made that choice several years ago.

I'm sorry that happened.

[Stephen Morgan]

From behind. 10 feet away.

MY favourite was Wesley Everest. Dragged from prison by some fascists, castrated, strung up from a bridge and machine gunned from the shore. Coroner says: suicide.

[crikkett]

May 1 - Walpurgis Night.

Damn! You made me look.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walpurgis_Night

[compared2what?]

We can hope that if she had the foresight to predict her murder then she might also have had the brains to safely stow the incriminating evidence somewhere. She may yet speak from the grave.

Hope springs eternal. However, my strong surmise would be that the story as we know it probably doesn't indicate what incriminating evidence she had, or even what the crime was.

Why, for example, was she living in California when her business was in D.C.? It's not like there's no local market for a business of similar size and nature to what was reported. Also, why wasn't she prosecuted in any of the applicable local jurisdictions, if the aim was simply to bust up her business? That's pretty easily done. And prostitution is not usually a federal case.

I haven't got even the beginning of a clue as to what unreported -- and possibly unrelated -- business I hypothesize was at stake. But that's what I hypothesize was going on from the start. Under that theory, what we read about was just the superficial medium in which she and whatever gangsters she did business with were cryptically threatening each other.

Because if the real deal was not any more complicated than that she was targeted because she could produce documentation of hooker-patronage by one or more powerful figures, there are so many ways for to have exercised that option, as well as so many opportune moments for her to have exercised it, she wouldn't have lived this long. It's just not that difficult to leak that kind of information to the public, if that's where your self-interest lies. From which I infer that she was protecting some other, larger interest. Which could be anything, but which, for the sake of hypothesizing something, I'm choosing to speculate that she was part of some other criminal enterprise that it was not in her self-interest to reveal. And that although she decided -- and probably with some justification -- that whatever goods she actually had were good enough that she could prevail in the course of outplaying whomever she was up against according to the rules of the game they were running on her, that was not the same game that led to her death.

This has been another episode in my Unfounded Speculation of the Week series.

Next week: TBD, as the cookie crumbles.

[Endomorph]

From the Washington Post report:


"Young said police found "approximately two" suicide notes in the mobile home, along with "some type of notebooks that had just notes to the family and so forth.""

Assuming that's accurate, that makes the "staged suicide" thing a lot less plausible. You'd have to either make sure that policemen willing to plant evidence were the first on the scene, or else have people sneak in and put in suicide notes for the police to find, somehow. In both cases they'd have to be forged in her handwriting.

Or else maybe you could just arrange for somebody in the police department to lie to reporters and say the notes existed, or get a reporter to lie and say that the police had told him the notes existed.

In any case, all of the above are trickier than surveilling the home and swooping in and doing a dirty deed at an appropriate moment.
[/img]

[sunny]

From the Washington Post report:


"Young said police found "approximately two" suicide notes in the mobile home, along with "some type of notebooks that had just notes to the family and so forth.""

Assuming that's accurate, that makes the "staged suicide" thing a lot less plausible. You'd have to either make sure that policemen willing to plant evidence were the first on the scene, or else have people sneak in and put in suicide notes for the police to find, somehow. In both cases they'd have to be forged in her handwriting.

Or else maybe you could just arrange for somebody in the police department to lie to reporters and say the notes existed, or get a reporter to lie and say that the police had told him the notes existed.

In any case, all of the above are trickier than surveilling the home and swooping in and doing a dirty deed at an appropriate moment.
[/img]

Highly significant snippet from WashPo posted by professorpan:

Young said that when the mother and daughter woke up Thursday, "they were both kind of tired. The mother said, 'I'm going to go take a nap real quick.' And that was the last she had talked to her."

Sounds kind of fishy to be so tired immediately upon awakening doesn't it? It may have been that carbon monoxide or something similar was introduded into the home in order to incapacitate them both, Deborah for obvious reasons, and mom to get her out of the way for a while. There would have been time for a well prepared operative to stage the scene, complete with forged suicide notes.

In such a scenario, there would be no need for police collusion, and a reporter wouldn't have to be lying about the existence of a note.

I'd still like to get a look at the notes, to hear mom's comment on them, and to see the autopsy report.