A body police believe to be 52-year-old Deborah Jeane Palfrey was found in a shed near her mother's mobile home Thursday morning in Tarpon Springs, about 20 miles northwest of Tampa. Police said she left a suicide note, but they did not disclose its contents or how she killed herself.
Police do not suspect foul play in Palfrey's death, according to a press release.
Palfrey was convicted April 15 by a federal jury of running a prostitution service that catered to members of Washington's political elite, including Sen. David Vitter, R-La. She had denied her escort service engaged in prostitution, saying that if any of the women engaged in sex acts for money, they did so without her knowledge.
You know, it's a sad end to what seems to be a rather troubled life (Palfrey apparently had done time during the '90s for similar crimes), and no doubt everyone has their pet theories. One hopes she left her black book with someone trustworthy. But one also has to wonder why she hadn't just dropped the rock already on these people, since she was awaiting sentencing at this point. It's easy to baselessly speculate from the cheap seats here.
Still, if there's a bunch of giant diaper pins at the scene, that may arouse suspicions. More seriously, this is not the first suicide in this case.
One of the escort service employees was former University of Maryland, Baltimore County, professor Brandy Britton, who was arrested on prostitution charges in 2006. She committed suicide in January before she was scheduled to go to trial.
Last year, Palfrey said she, too, was humiliated by her prostitution charges, but said: "I guess I'm made of something that Brandy Britton wasn't made of."
Having this sort of incriminating evidence on very high-profile people, I would guess, can be both a lever and a bullseye for the person holding it. Hopefully justice is found out and done in the case of Palfrey and Britton, because even if both women actually did commit suicide, it's as if they had been driven to it, not over puritan mores over prostitution so much as the money laundering and racketeering charges, but still.
It's the stuff of Robert Ludlum potboilers, and perhaps the unlikely will occur and the rest of the story will come out. People shouldn't have to die because of the sanctimonious pervs they service.
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