D.C. Madam "Commits Suicide"

By Cernig

This one is going to spawn all kinds of conspiracy theories.

Police say a woman they believe to be convicted Washington escort service operator Deborah Jeane Palfrey has committed suicide.

Police in Tarpon Springs, Florida say the body was found in a shed near Palfrey's mother's home Thursday morning. There was a suicide note, but police did not disclose its contents.

Palfrey was convicted April 15 by a federal jury of running a prostitution service that catered to members of Washington's political elite.

Palfrey was, of course, the infamous D.C. Madam. Her wikipedia entry reads, in part:

Palfrey appeared on ABC's 20/20 as part of an investigative report on 4 May 2007.^[4] In combination with Palfrey's statement that she has 10,000 to 15,000 phone numbers of clients, this has caused several clients' lawyers to contact Palfrey to see whether accommodations could be made to keep their identities private.^[5] Ultimately, ABC News, after going through what was described as "46 lbs" [21 kg] of phone records, decided that none of the potential clients was sufficiently "newsworthy" to bother mentioning.^[6]

The scandal has led to the resignation of Ambassador Randall L. Tobias from his State Department position and as the Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Also named was Washington Times columnist Harlan Ullman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

On July 9th, 2007 Palfrey released the supposed entirety of her phone records for public viewing and download on the Internet in TIFF format, though days prior to this, her civil attorney Montgomery Blair Sibley had dispatched 54 CD-ROM copies to researchers, activists, and journalists. Senator David Vitter (R-LA) acknowledged on the night of July 9th that he had been a customer of Palfrey's escort service.

An ambassador, a think-tank columnist and a Senator, not newsworthy? Her apparent suicide is, I guarantee, going to spark new interest in the phone record TIFF archive and lead to speculation that it isn't complete- that there were larger revelations in the woodwork - and that there may have been dirty tricks involved. Such speculation is a part of human nature.