How did he piss off the Clintons? 
Given the show today’s 'pubbies make of “being religious”, I can see that “kneeling with force” is something they’ve had plenty of practice with.
They weren’t a fan of Temple of the Dog.
Will their reign of terror never end?
True. Or rather, so that a few hundred people with enough wealthy and influence, can be profited off by a class of true sociopaths, and then said sociopaths can do what they want. Remember, Epstein didn’t start out rich; in all likelihood, he blackmailed Leslie Wexlerand that made Epstein rich enough to… yes, fuck all the children he wanted.
I too think Epstein committed suicide. A true sociopath doesn’t want to lose control, and he knew that losing control was all that awaited him. A sociopath isn’t troubled by physical pain or death, his own or others. And he has no desire to make amends or provide clarity for anyone.
This article draws an interesting parallel with the suicide of the disgraced Robert Maxwell, Ghislaines father.He too faced ruin and jail and chose to jump off his yacht. Epstein must have talked about that end with Ghislaine.
A lot of people have committed suicide by hanging from kneeling or sitting positions. But the point here is the presence of broken bones, which is (we’re told) quite unusual.
In accounts of Cornell’s death I’m not seeing anything about a broken bone or bones—is that what you’re saying happened with his suicide? Citation?
Not the result I was expecting, but if we take the worse number (6%) for hyoid fractures due to prison suicides and calculate out the probabilities…
Suicide hyoid fracture: 6%
Strangulation hyoid fracture: 33%
Prison homicide: 0.003%
Prison suicide: 0.018%
Probability of hyoid fracture due to homicide: 0.00099%
Proability of hyoid fracture due to suicide: 0.00108%
The odds are about even that you would end up with either result. Suicide is slightly more likely, but they’re close enough to be near 50/50.
Feel free to double-check my math.
If we take the 25% rate, instead, then the suicide probability is 0.0045%. Suicide would be 4.5x more likely.
My guess would be that all of these statistics are based on fairly small sample sets and, further, that some cases might have been misjudged. It would probably make the most sense to average the two values and say that suicide is something like 2-3x more likely.
I buy suicide over homicide because its massively more simple an answer. Occam’s Noose.
Yup. You need some overwhelming evidence to convince me that something extraordinary happened (a hit staged to look like suicide, for a high profile prisoner in federal custody).
Reminds me a little of the mystery surrounding the defenestration of Abe Reles.
As far as I can see both your maths and logic is wrong.
You’ve multiplied the odds a normal prisoner had of dying (3 in 100,000) vs the occurrence of a fractured hyoid bone in strangulation…and that literally makes no sense in any way.
For starters, as the vast majority of those murders in prison won’t be strangulation, you cannot obtain the “Probability of hyoid fracture due to homicide” by multiplying all murders by the number of times the hyoid fractures when strangled. I’m no pathologist, but it seems deeply unlikely that a person who is stabbed or beaten to death is going to see their hyoid fractured 1/3 of the time.
Secondly, you can’t use the relatively low odds of murder in prison to determine if a person who is actually dead died in a particular way, because, you know, he’s actually dead. Sure, prior to his death, and ignoring any argument that he was a high risk case due to whatever dirt he may have had, the odds of him dying were pretty low. But ever since he died…well, those odds sort of hit 100% at some point. Now you get to look purely and simply at the circumstances of his death, e.g the hyoid bone, and say what the likely causes were.
So we come to the rather clear stats you gave (“Suicide hyoid fracture: 6%
Strangulation hyoid fracture: 33%”) and assuming:
- Your stats are correct
- The report of the fracture is correct
- There is no other pertinent evidence such as a gunshot to the head or a bottle of poison
Then strangulation is going to be 5 and a bit times more likely to be the cause of death than suicide.
The statistic that I’m trying to figure out isn’t for the general population, it’s for Jeffrey Epstein. If he was murdered then he was strangled. That is a known. The breakout of different murder techniques can be skipped over since “strangulation” just folds up into “murder”.
So, if we only knew that he was dead - that is to say, we didn’t know about the hyoid bone nor have any other information except, “He dead” - you would say that we wouldn’t be able to calculate the odds that he was murdered versus committed suicide? :dubious:
Knowing that he died doesn’t get rid of the question of murder vs. suicide. While I know that he was either strangled or self-hung, I have no way of knowing which of the two is more likely other than by looking at how likely those two things are relative to one another. Suicide is far more prevalent. If we simply knew he was dead, then we would compare the suicide rate to the murder rate.
Do you disagree?
If I know that an old man died - and no further information - would you say that I can’t calculate how likely he is to have died due to heart disease vs. traffic accident? Obviously, I can. It’s just the ratio of heart rates among elderly men versus traffic deaths among elderly men.
So knowing that he either suicided or was murdered - I can take the probabilities of those.
Under the heading of murder and suicide, there are various means that it could be - but in this case, it’s an overly compressed neck either way. As said, we skip over that one since we’re not asking for the general population, we’re asking for Epstein.
Those figures are pretty easy to conclude. There is around a 99.999% chance that Epstein is dead. In theory it might be someone else’s body switched in, but much as I love the Count of Monte Cristo it seems unlikely in this instance.
Prior to his death then an approximate risk of him ending up dead in a cell with fractured hyoid bones could probably have been estimated. I note that the model you’ve used would still be no use because you’ve applied the risk of hyoid fracture in strangulation to all forms of murder (which as previously noted seems hideously unlikely). I suspect you’ve also used a statistic for suicide through hanging, when I’d imagine many prison suicides use other methods.
Your claim that “if he was murdered he was strangled” is obviously questionable (for example drugged, then placed in a noose, would not have the same odds as strangulation I’d imagine). That’s really just a quibble though, as it doesn’t actually do anything to determine either way if he killed himself or was killed.
As far as I can see, all we can say based on the numbers are two things:
- Statistically suicide in prisons is 6 times more common than murder.
- The reported broken bone happens 5 times more often with strangulation than hangings.
Whether or not point 1 applies in this case is probably a question for debate: are uber wealthy child molesters with known connections to extremely powerful people are more or less likely to commit suicide than other prison demographics, or more or less likely to be murdered. I would have thought point 2 is relevant either way though, unless there is a known genetic link between being attracted to children and having weak necks.
nm
That’s certainly true. I don’t know enough about prison murders, though, to say how exceptional it is to be murdered in what seems to be a “safe space” versus out in the general population. People in jail are pretty exceptional at figuring out ways to defeat the system. So while it may well seem like a one-room, locked door mystery is a simple equation for suicide (outside of fiction), I’m not confident enough in the case of prison life to say that normal expectations translate. I’d want to know, for example, how long the camera was out and what percentage of the cameras were out in the prison.
For this particular metric, minus more in-depth knowledge, taking the base rate of murder seemed more reasonable. With more in-depth knowledge, you might be able to make a better estimate.
Wrong. This would only be correct if prison suicides and murders were equally likely to involve strangling. I strongly suspect that a much higher proportion of prison suicides involve strangling, than prison murders do.
But we do have more information. We know that he was found locked in his cell alone with a sheet wrapped around his neck attached to a bed frame. To use your example, by itself the smart money is that an old man died of a heart attack, but if I added in the fact that his body was half way through a windshield, on an icy road, I suspect that you might want to change your bet
First apologies to all for the weird order of thread posts. Please mentally place my previous post before Sage Rat’s reply.
I agree that such things could happen and are more likely to happen in prison than in the outer world (just a death by heart attack while driving could result in someone being found half way through a windshield), but in making whatever calculation you want, you still have to include as a factor what proportion of murders in prison involve a prisoner alone in a locked cell with a sheet wrapped around their neck tied to a bed post, as opposed to what proportion of suicides. Ignoring such a big honking covariate in your calculations is going to mess up your calculations.
Consider, though, that Epstein’s death had the strong appearance of being a suicide. Which means that, to arrive at the conclusion that he was murdered, you have to find someone
[ol][li] who wanted him dead[/li][li] who had access to him[/li][li] and felt the need to fake a suicide[/ol][/li]
The first one is a pretty big number; the next one is a far, far smaller number; the third one eliminates a very large fraction of the inmates (especially alongside #2).
The bit about access is a sticky point. For that to have happened, there had to be collusion with MCC staff/security. Collusion is almost never leakproof, which is where most CTs topple over.
An interesting twist:
Jeffrey Epstein signed new will just two days before he died.
:dubious:
I heard elsewhere that this trust is in theory shielded from civil actions from former victims of Epstein. If so, this could have been the final fuck-you before taking The Easy Way Out.