The Jeffrey Epstein Files 8: You are the Judge

As the #Epstein documents are released - a review of the death investigation that CrimeWaves has done over the last two years. 

The most recent documents and the resume of their significance on Epstein's death (along with a number of videos) can be found at: https://www.declanhill.com/jeffrey-epsteins-death-what-the-documents-tell-us/

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This is the best independent investigation into what actually happened to Jeffrey Epstein inside that New York prison. 
It is the result of a two-year investigation, by Declan Hill and his students, into Jeffrey Epstein's death.
We read tens-of-thousands of pages, interviewed dozens of people involved in the case.
In this final episode - we show shocking new evidence both for a possible verdict of self-harm or murder.  
-  The FBI investigation of Epstein’s death was so bad that they destroyed a rope found inside his cell. 
- The prison paperwork shows a potential killer was in Epstein’s Unit that night who left at exactly the time the alleged killing was supposed to have taken place. 
-  An independent panel of medical examiners examined photos of Epstein's body and saw contusions, abrasions and bruises - none of them were reported in the official autopsy report.
- And we show you a shockingly similar, double-murder of members of Jeffrey Epstein’s political, circle the year before his death. Is there a connection?

You are the judge.  

On this episode, you get to decide what happened to Jeffrey Epstein inside that cell on the Special Housing Unit of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown Manhattan.  If you have followed our CrimeWaves series on Jeffrey Epstein’s death - then you know more than most commentators, journalists and pundits.  

After listening to the evidence - vote on the post on the CrimeWaves YouTube site or wherever you get your podcasts with a single word: 

Murder - Suicide -Undetermined. 

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CrimeWaves is a TrueCrime podcast based out of the University of New Haven with Associate Professor of Investigations Declan Hill, a former organized crime journalist, and his  students.   

CrimeWaves focuses on showing you the world's best investigators and their methods and techniques.  

We pride ourselves on our independent, non-political stance with investigations. 

Please follow, like, subscribe, rate or review the site.  It is massively important for a small channel like ourselves. 

If you would like to see the transcripts or see Declan Hill's other work on organized crime in sports and gambling you can find him at www.declanhill.com or Substack at https://substack.com/@declanhill on Twitter at: declan_hill

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Twitter: declan_hill

Transcript

Jeffrey Epstein Death: You Are the Judge (Full Transcript)
[00:00:00]
Introduction to the Investigation

Declan Hill: 

This is the best independent investigation into the death of Jeffrey Epstein. And this episode of CrimeWaves is the most shocking of our series. We're gonna show you how a hitman could have got on that wing that night of Epstein's death, and more importantly, exited the institution. We're also gonna show you an extraordinarily similar murder of a high ranking member of Epstein's social political circle that had exactly the same method, and we'll show you that there was a bizarrely long time with Jeffrey Epstein's body still purportedly hovering between life and death with a prison.

Authorities and medical personnel stripped his body of his prison uniform, thereby destroying more potential evidence. And we're also gonna show you that the FBI investigation was so bad that they did not do mind-numbingly. Simple investigative things like interviewing all the inmates on that wing in isolation.
Or even examining their hands and feet for any sign of a wound or struggle. [00:01:00] And we're also gonna show you that that same FBI investigation was so bad at examining a suspicious death that they allowed the Bureau of Prisons to destroy a rope that was found in Jeffrey Epstein's cell. Now remember, always if it could happen to Jeffrey Epstein, it could happen to anyone inside America's deeply corrupted prison system.
And on this episode, you are the judge. This episode is gonna be designed like a trial. We're gonna lay out the evidence like lawyers. First, a prosecution lawyer will present the case for regarding Jeffrey Epstein's death as murder, and then a defense lawyer who in this case will lay it out for being a suicide.
And you, the listener, can decide what you think after hearing all the evidence on both sides. And we're gonna give you the choice of three verdicts, murder, suicide. Or undetermined. Now, our pledge [00:02:00] is always to be resolutely, independent and free from any political bias. So if you find something where we've made a mistake, please let us know.
We read all your comments and take immediate action if we've made mistakes. So look, if you like this approach of independence non-biased, please take a moment, like follow or subscribe to the show on YouTube. You can subscribe by clicking on that button to the bottom of the screen, or just drop us a comment or a compliment. They actually make our day here at CrimeWaves.

Content Warning

Declan Hill: 

Now, in this episode, we're gonna be dealing with the issue of suicide. So please, if there's anyone who is contemplating self-harm, please don't. This is a very difficult subject for some of you. So please, if any of our listeners are in any way contemplating.

Suicide or, or just in that nighttime time of life that happens to all of us. Please reach out for help. Almost every country in the world [00:03:00] has a phone number that you can call just to talk things over with a sympathetic person. And the national helpline here in the United States and Canada is very simple.
9, 8, 8. That's nine. Eight. Eight. In the uk there are a number of national help centers, but the Samaritans are very good. They're at one. One, six. 1, 2, 3. That's one. One, six. 1, 2, 3. Thank you.

The Case for Murder

Declan Hill: 

It was murder. 

And a murder takes three things. Motive means an opportunity. And in Jeffrey Epstein's death, we have them all. The list of very powerful people who had reason to silence. Jeffrey Epstein is really, really long. [00:04:00] Just the number of major banks in their executives who were in some way involved in Epstein's activities is eyebrow raising.
There was Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan, Rothschild's Bank, Barclays, and there were both Democrat and Republican politicians who were implicated in his network. One of them, Stacey Plaskitt, the Democratic politician for the US Virgin Islands, had received tens of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from Jeffrey Epstein just weeks before he was jailed.
And his social connections were legendary. Donald Trump, bill and Hillary Clinton, British royalty were at one point all friends of his. However, as soon as he entered prison one sure way of getting him to flip was for him to start naming people higher up in the chain. So he could receive a softer sentence or maybe get outta jail.
And this is not to say that any of the people or institution named were involved in his activities or in a [00:05:00] homicide, but it is to say that as soon as those prison doors closed on Epstein on July 6th, 2019, he had a lot of powerful frenemies, the means for murder. The means were certainly there. Jeffrey Epstein had been placed in America's most corrupt criminal detention center, which is saying a great deal.
There were serial sexual abusers, rapists, smugglers, gangsters, drug dealers, and murderers. And those were just some of the prison guards, the Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown New York. The MCC was a deliberately maintained prosecution deal factory that punished any professionalism by the guards and tried to break prisoners.
There was a catastrophic camera failure that lasted at least 10 days that most of the guards and thus criminals would also know about leaving an open field for any criminal [00:06:00] attempt on Jeffrey Epstein. Now, the opportunity for murder was there as well, and there are two ways that a potential killer could have entered Jeffrey Epstein's cell first, a hitman could have come in from the outside.
Presumably he would've been dressed as a correctional officer with keys and door passes, or simply a corrupt prison guard. And there were many of them could have been paid off to kill him. The second and easiest way was for one of the inmates on his wing of the special housing unit, the  SHU was for him to be paid off to kill Jeffrey Epstein.
Now, either way, they had a number of challenges. First was to make the killing look like a. And in the words of the greatest or arguably the greatest spy master, the 20th century, that's the former head of the Soviet Secret Services, a guy called Felix Drazinsky. He said, quote, anyone can do a murder, [00:07:00] but to make a murder look like a suicide, takes an artist.
And we have plenty of artists. So if Jeffrey Epstein was murdered, they, whoever they were, had to make it look enough like a suicide for people to just put it aside as that went, the second challenge was to get on that wing that night, and that seems impossible that someone from the outside could enter the most secure unit.
The  SHU of this detention center, yes, it was corrupt. Yes, there were criminals among the prison guards, but there were so many purported locked doors that it should have been impossible for anyone to enter. But that's exactly what the paperwork done by the MCC Central command shows. It clearly indicates that there was an extra person on that wing that night.
And on the first episode of the CrimeWaves series, we've shown that very paperwork done by the that shows that there was an extra [00:08:00] person in the  SHU that night. And not only that, but they, the central command shows them leaving at exactly 12:35 AM that night. And this is big. It's very big. It's undiscussed news by any other outlet that we know of, because that's exactly when Epstein is supposed to have died.
Now the official explanation is that this was a ghost count, a mistake by the prison guards to cover that. Jeffrey Epstein's Bunky had left the institution that day, okay? But Epstein's cellmate had actually left the jail 16 hours before. So why list him at all? And if you just realized in the middle of the night that your most important prisoner in the entire institution is alone in his cell after being placed on suicide watch with explicit instructions never to leave him alone, don't you at least phone the guards to check on them?
Nope. Not if you work in the MCC. In fact, if you [00:09:00] read the explanations of the guards, none of them makes any sense. They say that someone had left the SHU unit, therefore their note should read 73, the number of inmates minus one, not plus, what? It also makes no sense in that the guards on the SHU like the people who were actually there, faked the count.
They actually pled guilty later on to simply signing all their count sheets at the beginning of their shifts and then falling asleep for most of the time. Yet, the count sheets at the central command at the MCC. Changed in the middle of the night at 10:00 PM they showed that there was an extra person, the plus one figure, and then at 3:00 AM it disappears.
So to sum up the MCC paperwork indicates that there was an extra person on the SHU at exactly the same time that Epstein's death is presumed to have occurred. That's a really, really strange mistake to make in all [00:10:00] the prisons in all of America on that night when the most famous inmate in the country dies.
There are purportedly two challenges against this paperwork indicating there was an extra person on Jeffrey Epstein's wing that night. The first is that there was one camera in the non-functioning camera system that was supposedly showing all the entries and exits to the unit that night. Now, there are a number of problems with that.
 , with the cameras. One is that we, the public, have not been shown the full unedited camera,  , vision for the entire night. There are a number of minutes missing, and if that's the length of time needed by someone to enter the unit, to have hours of edited video with missing minutes is useless. The other issue is that when CBS News investigations actually got an expert to examine the released video of the  SHU that night, it didn't show [00:11:00] what the officials report, that it does a complete picture of entry and exits to the unit.
There were shadow zones on that field of vision that a knowing person like a guard could avoid the one camera in the unit from recording them. Another challenge for an outsider is actually the easiest one in a place like the MCC, and that's getting keys to all the doors. Now putting aside the fact told to us on CrimeWaves by one of the former inmates of the MCC, that it was not unusual for guards to leave the doors unlocked at night.
Put that aside. These regular MC keys were those 20th century old school keys, which turn a lock. And those actual metal keys don't record the time or identity of the past being used to enter the doors. So a corrupt guard could theoretically pass their keys to someone to make that journey into the heart of the  SHU without trace.
And [00:12:00] remember, always some of the prison guards at the MCC were convicted of schemes as difficult as getting through a few locked doors. They smuggled in drugs, phones, even a gun to prisoners in the SHU. They had forced sex with some of the female inmates. They killed a prisoner. They did all of this in some cases for years, and no one saw them do.
So for them to smuggle into the MCC, an outsider would've been difficult, but not the impossibility that it might have seen in a well-run prison. For example, the MCC didn't have the difficulty of being in the countryside where people approaching the institution, a scene driving up. It was on the streets of lower Manhattan, so somebody could walk up to the delivery door, its main entrance without suspicion.
The final challenge of potentially killing Jeffrey Epstein without waking him up, there were no drugs found in his system that would've made him too sleepy to hear someone entering his cell, nor was there [00:13:00] any sign in his post-mortem medical examination of another person on his fingernails or any sign of a struggle, aside from a very important bruise on his arm.
However, he did have headphones on, and when his body was found this next morning, these headphones were still plugged. And this is a piece of similarly seemingly unexamined evidence. They were plugged into an MP three device, so he couldn't hear anybody coming in. So a professional killer from the outside with the help of a crap guard inside the MCCs deeply compromised system, could have killed him A quick karate blow to Epstein's throat as he slipped his hearing blocked by the earphones.
Then a series of bed linen torn up to use as a noose to cover up the actual method of killing.

The second theory of a potential. Jeffrey Epstein murder is simple. It's at someone in the MCC system, [00:14:00] left two doors open, one a cell door in the L wing of the  SHU, the second Epstein cell door. Again, this is a possibility in almost any other prison in America will be difficult to believe. But in the MCC was deeply corrupt and the special housing unit was the home of either sex offenders like Epstein cooperators who had flipped to testify against their former criminal buddies.

As many people, powerful people were afraid that Epstein would do, or the very, very violent, like Epstein's former Bunkie, the corrupted cop who was convicted of murdering or ordering the murder, four of his associates and his method strangling them with a plastic zip tie. Now, there's also nothing in Jeffrey Epstein's one post death medical examination that rules out Epstein  , rules out homicide.
  . In episode seven of this series, we examine the evidence leading towards a verdict of suicide. And we on CrimeWaves obtained [00:15:00] an undisclosed report by a group of independent coroners who had declared Epstein's death, probably a suicide. Now no one else has seen that report, but when we went in and we showed it to other professionals, and the problem they identified was that it was a group of star struck medical professionals.

None of them had actually examined Jeffrey Epstein's body. And they'd based their opinion, not on medical facts, but on quote their knowledge of the prison system. And it was also very clear that the pathologist knew who they were examining. They knew in the summer of 2024 that if they were to say that it may have been homicide or even undetermined, it would've fed into a US political electoral frenzy.
And at the very least, they knew that the establishment, both political, judicial, and medical, had declared it to be a suicide. So for them, what would be the point of bucking the system? All [00:16:00] the medical examiners who authored that report were establishment people. They speak about this and they say their very credentials made them much less likely to rock the boat of that professional murder than independently examine the facts, and thus, they make much of their collective, general knowledge of the state of American prisons.

However, judging from their errors in context, they didn't know the specifics of the MC, the number of two B convicted murderers, sexual abusers, drug dealers, and smugglers among the prison guards. Now, even with this conventional background, their assessment of the original autopsy is not kind. They pointed out that no one had tested Epstein for some drugs, commonly found among criminals like GBH which is usually known as the date rape drug, which renders their victims unconscious. and this is big. They also found evidence of a potential struggle in the photos of [00:17:00] Epstein's body that were not listed in the autopsy notes. For example, they found a quote, linear lateral contusion on Epstein's left wrist that could be consistent, could be with a tie being placed around his wrist.
In fact, they pointed out that there was so many contusions, abrasions, and lacerations on Epstein's body. It, it, it was just very odd. It was also odd because that link, that that potential injury around the wrist is a link to an oddly connected murder, very similar to Jeffrey Epstein's body, very similar to Jeffrey Epstein's death, and I'm bringing it up now because it's at this point in a trial.

Where it's customary for lawyers to not only cast a shadow of doubt on the verdict, but also outline a credible alternative to the theory advanced by their legal opponents. We have one. [00:18:00] We have a murder that is so similar to Jeffrey Epstein's in character and connections of the central person involved in its symbolic, showing us its links to Epstein's social and political circle.
Declan Hill: Even the medical evidence is breathtaking, if you'll excuse the pun, similar, A case that features lines on the wrist to the victim. And it's a sign of our deeply divided time that seemingly no other media outlet has linked these two possible murders. Here, then is that case.

 The Mysterious Murder of the Other Jewish Mega-Millionaire

Barry Sherman was a jerk. 
In the ranks of completely unsympathetic, appalling human beings. He ranks up there with Jeffrey Epstein. He was a Canadian billionaire, but Sherman had [00:19:00] a long list of court cases, over 1200 filed by him and against him, and the crux of the allegations being that Sherman would betray, berate, or bully almost anyone, if he could get away with.
And the biggest of his misdeeds ranks high up in Canadian corporate scummy practice, which is high praise deed in a country of complacent, often complicit regulators. See, Barry Sherman ran a generic pharmaceutical company, and in the 1990s they were testing a new drug for children out of the Toronto sick kids hospital.
One of the doctors helping with the research discovered in the middle of the clinical trials that the drug didn't just not work, but actually had harmful effects on the children. It was making them ill, if not risking their death. So she did what you would hope any physician would do. She had immediately informed the rest of the research team, the children's parents and the medical community, that they were stopping the trial of the drug.
Barry Sherman sued the doctor [00:20:00] personally to repeat, he took the doctor to court for making sure a drug that harmed children was pulled. Then he tried to get the doctor fired from the hospital and the University of Toronto where she was based and he nearly succeeded. And then to ensure that everyone learned the lesson of never crossing Barmy Sherman, even if children's lives were at risk, he kept the legal suit against the doctor going for 18 years.
He was also immensely politically, politically influential. Like Jeffrey Epstein, his connections were with the very top political class. At his funeral, to their shame, the former Ontario Health Minister gave one of the speeches, and that politician was joined by a host of other powerful political leaders.
And the then Prime Minister of Canada,  Justin Trudeau. Barry Sherman was also a massive Zionist that's a prominent supporter of Israel. He gave huge amounts of money to [00:21:00] Israeli causes and did enormous amounts of business in that country. This is exactly the same as Jeffrey Epstein.
Now, examining Epstein's social and political circle is like watching a game of musical chairs played with no chairs. The party is definitely over, so no one wants to admit that they were ever friends with him. However, there is one undeniable community of Jeffrey Epstein's. Just about all his closest connections were prominent members of the American Zionist movement.
And this isn't to say that Jeffrey Epstein's death is linked to Israel, or that someone in the Zionist community killed him, or that members of the Zionist community took part in his sexual activities. But if this were a murder in the Italian community, I wouldn't necessarily think it was a mafia killing.
But when the families around the victim are all named Bonanno, Colombo, Genovese, or Luce, it's at least worth taking a look at the mob to see if they were involved. [00:22:00] Not to do so would be investigative malpractice. So just a few examples of many of Epstein's Israel connections in the 1990s with his then mentor, Leslie Wexner.
He helped found the mega group. To become a full member of Mega You had to be Jewish, a billionaire, and a massive supporter of Israel and its goal, and help promote Israeli interest in American public life. Two, when Epstein's lawyers were negotiating a deal on his sexual trafficking charges in Florida, Epstein was waiting in Israel, a country with a stated policy of never deporting Jewish sexual,  , sex offenders until he received a favorable deal from American prosecutors, including Alex Acosta, who had become President Trump's first Secretary of Labor.
And then after Epstein served his very lenient sentence, there's a photo from the social columns. It's taken a few months after Epstein's death,  ,   , Epstein's release from jail. Not as a news article, but [00:23:00] just as a piece in their social pages, and it shows him parking surrounded by a number of prominent Zionists and two future members of Trump's cabinets.
Now, let's be clear. I'm not saying that any of the people in that photo were involved in any way in Epstein's crimes or his actions, but it's one of the reasons why many people speculate that Epstein was a member of the Mossad, which is the Israeli spy agency, and that some of his activities were effectively high level compliment, taking videos and photos of prominent politicians with young girls so he could later blackmail them.
To return to the Barry Sherman story, he and Jeffrey Epstein ran with the roughly same social political circle. They were both prominent Zionists. They were both massively politically influential. They were both jerks who had a long list of people who had motives for killing them. And they were [00:24:00] both potentially murdered in exactly the same way.
In December, 2017, the Shermans Barry and his wife, honey, were selling their mammoth mansion in Canada's elite rich area of North Toronto. And according to the police records, on the 15th at approximately 10:45 AM a real estate agent was giving interested buyers a tour of the house, and she took them into the inner swimming pool area and saw the bodies of the Shermans hanging from the three foot pool rail by their necks in what ranks up as one of the bloodiest and oddest moments in Canadian real estate history, finding the bodies of the sellers hanging dead in the middle of the house.
The agent didn't phone the police. Rather, she closed the door so the buyers couldn't see the bodies ushered them politely out of the house, and then called one of the Sherman family members in Florida. And only [00:25:00] after that called 9 1 1 an hour later. And when the police arrived, they discovered that there were no signs of forced entry.
And the both honey and Barry Sherman had money in their wallets. In Honey's case, the official search warrant reveals that she had over $7,500. So robbery wasn't considered a motive in their death. And there are also extraordinary similarities between the Jeffrey Epstein and Barry Sherman death. They were both botched by the original investigators in almost exactly the same way.
In both cases, the friends, colleagues, and families of Sherman and Epstein insist there was no indication of any self harm on the part of their loved ones. But at first, the police resolutely refused to. And two, everything in the case is depended on an accurate analysis of the hanging wounds of the hyoid bone in their neck.
The police examiner said that the wounds on Honey Sherman, the wife, [00:26:00] were indicative of murder. Yet they wrote off virtually the same wounds on Barry Sherman as suicide. And it's often the case that a hyoid bone would be broken in a strangulation or homicide, but neither of the Sherman's hyoid bones were broken.
But Epstein's was broken in three places. Thus, at first, the Sherman deaths were written off as a murder suicide that Barry Sherman killed honey because she wanted a divorce and then overcome with remorse and guilt, he killed himself. The Sherman family largely denounced this claim, and a few weeks later, like Jeffrey Epstein's brother hired a prominent senior medical examiner.
He did an autopsy of Sherman's body bodies and claimed that the neck and wounds indicate that the Shermans had been tied up and then hung, and he pointed out exactly like Jeffrey Epstein, that there was a thin [00:27:00] mark on the wrists that indicate the Shermans could have been tied up. There were also some things that dogged the similar things that Dogg the Epstein investigation.
If it were a suicide, why would Barry Sherman have chosen a low three foot high pool railing to kill his wife and then hang himself as a practical murder weapon? It makes absolutely no sense. It does, however, have a symbolic power if it were an arranged killer. Two of Canada's richest people at home, beside that very image of wealth and intimacy, their own indoor swimming pool hanging dead, like executed criminals in medieval France.
Now, three years after those killings, the Toronto Star got access to the police's second investigation and discovered there was a whole host of alleged sorted motives. Among the interview notes, and arguably [00:28:00] chief among them was the allegation that Barry Sherman owed over a a billion dollars to various companies and different people in Israel.
And I spoke with a Canadian investigator soon afterwards.  ,  , I was fascinated like the rest of Canada, about the mystery and who could have killed two of our richest people with no convictions or even arrests. That investigator smiled and ironic smiled and said, quote Barry Sherman tried to do in Israel what he'd done so often in Canada.
He tried to rip somebody off and they don't mess around. Often with lawsuits, someone came in, killed them, displayed their body, so everyone gets the message that you don't mess around and left the country that day. Again, I wanna be very clear, this is not to claim that there is necessarily an Israeli link in either death.
This is just speculation of one unrelated investigator and a whole bunch of interview [00:29:00] notes in the Sherman case. Indeed, I wanna point out that one of Barry Sherman's sisters herself, a prominent member of the Zionist community in Canada, claimed that it was most likely that her brother and sister-in-law had been killed by Islamic terrorists.
 , in fact, on the other side, Sherman's House had been the scene of a noisy protest organized by the Jewish Defense League, that's an organization once on the FBI's list of terrorist groups when he was,  , announced publicly as a prominent financial supporter. Of Justin Trudeau. So I'm only gonna add four facts to this case.
One. A former Mossad agent  Ari Ben-Menashe  claimed that Jeffrey Epstein was connected with the Israeli Intelligence Agency. 
Two, the former Secretary of Labor in Trump's first cabinet, Alex Acosta, who gave before Jeffrey Epstein, such a sweetheart judicial deal for his sexual trafficking. He would claim in a [00:30:00] presentation that was widely reported by political that he had done so he'd given this sweetheart deal to Jeffrey Epstein because he had been told that Epstein was connected with intelligence three at the level that Epstein played connections with an ex-Israeli prime minister, ex American presidents, to-be-American presidents and British royalty.
He didn't need to be a sworn member of Mossad. He was just automatically what Victor Ostrovsky, that's another former Mossad agent claimed, were the hangar on - Sayan - the friends of Israel who had help the country in any way they could.  Victor Ostrovsky was an ex-Mossad agent, was also the author of a series of blockbuster books on the, on what he claims, is the deeply rooted corruption inside his former Israeli spy agency.
His essential theory is that by the 1990 1980s, the Mossad was essentially a bunch of grifters ready to be hired out to almost any government, corporate [00:31:00] agency or rich, wealthy person who wanted to do something scummy in the world. There was obviously a couple of exceptions Palestinians  ,and  various other Arab nations.
But generally that was the rule. Thus, the similarities between the two deaths are striking. Both men had a lot of enemies. Both men ran with a very powerful set of politicians and business people. Both men had deep connections with the Zionist movement in Israel, and both investigations were screwed up by normally reputable police agencies like the FBI and the Toronto Police.
And all the killings featured examinations of that very same bone in the neck. The police and government examiners said those neck breakages must mean that it was suicide despite someone in the Sherman case definitely being murdered, honey, the wife, and the same need for the families, Epstein and Sherman's to call in an independent examiner who examine the same break in the hyoid neck [00:32:00] bone and declared it a homicide.
There was the same hanging of the bodies in oddly low places of only three and four feet high, and there was the same media suppression of the coverage. Just as every mainstream corporate media outlaid in America were the exception of Fox News, but certainly CBS 60 Minutes, New York Times or CNN, it immediately declared Epstein's death, a suicide, and anyone who thought otherwise was a conspiracy theorist, the only major Canadian media outlet that's the Toronto Star - where I worked briefly - to compare the two deaths, ruled that the Shermans were of course murders.
But they said, of course, anyone who said that Jeffrey Epstein's death was not a suicide, had to be a conspiracy theorist is ladies and gentlemen, that's the fundamental problem of Jeffrey Epstein's death. [00:33:00] Any attempt of a serious examination of the case has been immediately shut down. There has been no credible government investigation or proper inquiry.
Improper,  , important leads, questions. Other cases like the Sherman murders have been ignored or downplayed. I'll now turn over the case to the defense who will argue that Jeffrey Epstein must have committed suicide. And while you listen to those arguments, I ask you to remember only one thing. Every single government investigator who examined that case risked their very career if they came up with any other explanation than the officially accepted version of Epstein's Mysterious Death in that closed cell New York,[00:34:00] 

The Case for Suicide

Declan Hill: since my colleague prefers speculation to fact. Let me just give you the facts. Indeed. If you examine the entire case of the prosecution that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered, it's entirely based on conjecture, speculation, and hypothesis. The government releases hours of videos. They claim that a couple of minutes are missing and something must have happened during those minutes.
They don't know what they claim, all kinds of things. Murder, hitman, unlocked doors and widespread conspiracies. But really, ladies and gentlemen, it will not do the case for the defense that Jeffrey Epstein overcome with legal woes and inside and inhumane prison provides you with facts. The murder proponents provide you with conjectures, the count of medical examiners who after examining Epstein's medical file, declare his body to [00:35:00] be, his death to be most probably a suicide is five.
There are three who declare it to be undetermined and the only medical doctor who claims that it is most likely homicide was paid by the Epstein family and he's outnumbered five to one by his fellow professionals. Now, I'm not claiming that those are insurmountable odds or the Dr. Michael Badden does not have a high reputation in his field.
It's just that four of those medical examiners don't work for the City of New York or have any financial ties to the Epstein family. The proponents of the murder claim, the government investigators did not speak to all the inmates in the MCC fine, but the investigators did speak to over a dozen MCC inmates and none of them provided any credible information on a possible murder.
We're gonna provide you with the real actual words spoken by those prisoners, [00:36:00] staff and guards at the prison that day. Quote, you killed him. You weren't making rounds. You killed him. When the electronics technician, the person in charge of fixing that broken video system but didn't do it, was interviewed, he claimed that that entire day, August the 10th, 2019, inmates were screaming at him and other guards.
You killed him. You weren't making rounds, you killed him. Quote from their report, the electrician electronics technician said that when they were delivering food to the inmates, he heard the inmates saying, you killed him. You weren't making rounds, you killed him. The electronics technician told the OIG, that's office for Inspector General investigators.
That's the report I'm quoting from. That the inmates also told him that Thomas and Noel, those were the,  , correctional officers on that there at that time, just sat at the  SHUs officer station and never checked on the inmate. And this is true. We can see that on the [00:37:00] video. The electronics technician told the OIG, he understood the inmates to be saying that Thomas and Noel were directly, were indirectly responsible for Epstein's death because they had not conducted rounds during their shift.
The electronics technician said he believed that Epstein took his own life and said that he had no reason to believe otherwise. And that's consistent with interviews. Of the three inmates who were on the LT with Epstein that night, who did actually consent to be interviewed, they made errors or contradicted the guard in details of the discovery of Jeffrey Epstein's body in the morning.
But they all stated that they had heard nothing that night. Not no intruder or footsteps down the hall, and they all three of those inmates who were interviewed thought Epstein had killed himself. Here's another quote from that OIG report quote. Additionally, the inmates who were interviewed [00:38:00] consistently reported that on the evening, Epstein died.
The SHU staff did not systematically conduct the required rounds and counts, which was one of the primary mechanisms for the SHU staff to ensure the safety and security of inmates housed in the  SHU. As a result, Epstein was unmonitored and locked alone in his cell for hours with an excess amount of linens, which provided him an opportunity for him to commit suicide unquote.
Now, in the CrimeWaves episodes, we did interviews with a couple of high level drug dealers, turn cooperators. And they spent years inside the American prison system and the MC, and they consistently say Epstein probably killed himself. In fact, when I first asked them that question, homicide or suicide, they both started laughing to them, veterans of the MCC, the idea that it was murder conducted in such a subtle way that it could confused, it could be confused with [00:39:00] suicide was funny.
There's another inmate who says the same thing, but William Mercy was on the suicide watch with Jeffrey Epstein. In fact, he was the inmate coordinator tasked with scheduling other inmates to observe suicidal prisoners like Jeffrey Epstein. In his time there, he witnessed an attempted suicide when a prisoner managed to hide razors in his hair and slit his wrist open in the cells.
He writes about the non-active intervention of the guards well the inmates abuse and taunt them for failing to find the rest razors. Now, William Mercy was tasked with observing Jeffrey Epstein. He spoke to him for hours inside the MCC C'S suicide watch after Epstein's alleged earlier suicide attempt.
Mercy like Epstein described him as,  , describes him as charming and polite and they spoke about investments driving taxis in New [00:40:00] York. Epstein claimed to have driven a New York cab,  , be a New York cabbie when he was a young man. And Mercy writes all about this in a relatively unseen blog. None of the mainstream media has picked up on this.
It's on medium and he's completed a book. It's excellent. I strongly recommend it. It's called Doing Time, my year at   MCC Federal Prison with Jeffrey Epstein and Paul Manafort. And it's a strong recommendation to read because he writes with no agenda or slant in his political views on the MC or Epstein, and this is what he writes,
quote, the very last night I ever saw Jeffrey Epstein was the only time he struck me as depressed and possibly suicidal.
I reported for work and I found him sitting on the stone floor with his back on his bunk while eating the prison food, giving him out of a styrofoam plate that was sitting between his legs. Jeffrey, [00:41:00] what the fuck are you doing? Why are you eating on the floor? It's just easier this way was his response.
It kind of made sense, but he did strike me as resolved to his fate that night. He'd recently been denied bail and was facing the reality of spending the rest of his lives behind bars, even if he snitched on whoever else was included in his pedophilic quests. What I thought might be the end of the Jeffrey Epstein story was in some ways just the beginning speculation as to whether Epstein killed himself or was murdered in some sort of conspiracy run wild.
I didn't see how anybody could get into a  SHU cell and kill him without several people being involved, and that conspiracy would unravel quickly under investigation. I assumed he killed himself and that assumption was reinforced when a knucklehead I'll call inmate white, return for the  SHU,   , returned from the [00:42:00]  SHU to contribute his 2 cents to the debate quote.
While there, he was housed in the cell next door, next door to drum roll, Jeffrey Epstein. And when White was released from the  SHU and returned to our unit, he reported to me that nobody came in or out of the tier that night. And that at some point in the wee hours, he had heard the sound of sheets tearing from Jeffrey Epstein's cell, a cell in which he had been left all alone after his bunky had been returned to general population.
And his conclusion was that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself. Nobody killed him. And White was most emphatic in the statement. He had no agenda in saying this, and I have no reason not to believe him. And to this day, I believe Jeffrey Epstein killed himself of that. I have little doubt, unquote,[00:43:00] 
They were incompetent. They were fatally, near murderously incompetent, but they were not the killers in this particular case. That's the consistent message of all the MCC guards, staff, and inmates interviewed by government investigators. Epstein killed himself. Now, you'd think that one of them would express some doubt on this version of the story, but consistently they all stated the view that it was self-harm.
Why? Why did many of the people who actually lived and worked inside that   MCC think that Jeffrey Epstein's death was a suicide? Because they know the truth. They know the awful unspeakable truth about that institution. The one that few in the New York legal and media establishment want anyone to know about.
It was a torture center. It was designed to break prisoners, to make them sign deals [00:44:00] with the prosecution, to get them out of that hellhole. And when I use those words, torture center, I am not embellishing independent monitors, not defense lawyers, but Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, even the United Nations special rapporteur on Human Rights all said those inhumane conditions inside the MCC, specifically the  SHU unit where Epstein was placed.
Those two former Mexican drug cartel members who served over 14 years in the US prison system said on CrimeWaves of all the prisons that they were in that special housing unit. The MCC was the worst. It was deliberately maintained hellhole. And the government doesn't want you to know that story. They fed out the idea after Epstein was found dead, that he'd committed suicide to their little chums in the corporate media, but they didn't provide any details about the conditions inside that prison.
It was only in the local independent media.  , the New York [00:45:00] outlets like the Gothamist, where that we looked at, they have been writing about this situation for years, and they found that no one had cared about it because all the people affected were mostly whether they were innocent or guilty poor.
All this was done. That system was maintained so that powerful New York politicians could go to their liberal fundraisers and say platitudes about inequality, inclusion, and diversity, while they went to other fundraisers and they talked from the other side of their mouths about getting tough on crime, where their numbers of solved CCRA cases were so high.
So to repeat, the MCC was a deliberately maintained prosecution deal fact, and it had broken men with longer and more extensive criminal backgrounds than Jeffrey Epstein. Chapo Guzman went mad in that institution. He, he's gotta be arguably the toughest, most methodical, killer and gangster of the Western Hemisphere.[00:46:00] 
He's a man who ordered the killings and torches of thousands of prisoners,  ,   , people he'd lived for years inside a Mexican high security prison. He'd been on the run from authorities for decades, but he Chapo Guzman, according to his own defense, lawyers, cracked within months of being inside the  SHU at the MCC.
So, to repeat, the issue was the most part. The MCC prisoners were working class men who had no power, or influence. And as far as the establishment were concerned, they could live or die, like shit covered rats and no one besides their own family cared. And I say shit covered rats deliberately, and I'm sorry to use such language, but it's an accurate wording of the Jeffrey Epstein's life inside the MCC.
That place crawled with bugs and rats. I read you the description in that episode, the case for the defense where a prisoner was bitten by a rat, and the MCC guards wouldn't let him see a doctor until his hand had swollen up. [00:47:00] And we know that these conditions affected Jeffrey Epstein in the final words that he gives to the world.
It's a scrawled handwritten note that ends quote, giant bugs crawling over my hands. No fun, unquote. 
The food he was given was many times, literally shit. And again, I'm not using that term lightly. This is what the other prisoners who worked in the MCC kitchen would put in the food packets for a sex offender in the  SHU if they were lucky.
Other times the inmates would put in cockroaches and. And all of this got to Jeffrey Epstein, and we know it did again, the prosecution. They, they, they talk about theories about murderers and hitman, but the facts are clear. On July 23rd, his roommate in his cell screamed to get the guards that Epstein had tried to kill himself in the middle of the night.
Epstein was then put on suicide watch because of it. And the prosecution will point out that the [00:48:00] inmate was a corrupt cop who would be convicted of murdering four of his associates, at least one by tying a plastic zip tie around his neck after he'd tied up their wrists. Yes, that's a method very similar to the one that could have killed Epstein.
Fine, but it doesn't explain why that corrupt drug smuggling convicted crop murderer and his defense lawyer summoned the guards if it intended to harm Epstein. If it had been paid off by someone to kill Epstein, why would he shout and summon help? It makes no sense. Particularly in the light of Jeffrey Epstein's other actions in the days before his death on August 8th, two days before he was found dead in himself, he made a new will.
Why? Why would he take time out of his legal defense to get himself out of that hell to make a new will? These are the facts unlike anything presented in the case for murder, we've documented evidence of [00:49:00] everything leading to a verdict of self harm because Jeffrey Epstein's life was just about to get even worse, he'd been denied bail despite Epstein offering the richest financial bond in US legal history.
Jeffrey Epstein was not going anywhere. He was destined to stay in the MCC until his trial. And on Friday, August 9th, the day after Epstein made a new will came the release of the Ghislaine Maxwell documents. Thousands of pages detailing Jeffrey Epstein's sex life. And more importantly, opening him up to previously uncharged crimes with no statute of limitations.
The system had just got his buddy Harvey Weinstein and put him in jail. We know that Jeffrey Epstein wrote a letter to Larry Nassar. That's the doctor, the center of the sexual abuse case at Team USA gymnastics. So on the night of August 9th, 2019, due to MC incompetence, [00:50:00] Jeffrey Epstein was alone in his cell for the very first time in six weeks.
There was no other watching eyes, no other person in close proximity. He had just made a last phone call with his then girlfriend, Karyna Shuliak, a woman who had kept loyal to him for years. And we've interviewed a number of people close to Jeffrey Epstein in the production of the series. All of them couldn't believe that such a man would kill himself, but that's the way of many deaths by self-harm.
The family and friends are taken completely by surprise. On that night, Jeffrey Epstein would look around his room and see large cockroaches. The guards had treated him badly. The food was awful, and we know that these things were on his mind. This isn't like the case for murder. It's not conjecture. We have his last note, scrawled with ballpoint pen.
Epstein wasn't supposed to have that pen but it read. 
Quote, 
They kept me in a locked shower for one hour. [00:51:00] Noel sent me burnt food, giant bugs crawling over my hands. No fun.
That would be Jeffrey Epstein's life from now on. A 50 foot prison cell covered in bugs, and perhaps he thought, why not go now with some control over my exit? Why not keep peace with my friends and business associates by silencing myself? And my suicide. I give them a gift of my silence.

 You are the Judge

Declan Hill: 

You are the judge at this point in this series. If you followed all episodes of our CrimeWaves series, you actually know more about the conditions and circumstances around Jeffrey [00:52:00] Epstein's death than most media commentators and pundits. You know that there was both motive means and opportunity for someone to kill him, you know, about the appalling conditions inside his jail that could have driven him to suicide.
So please take a moment and go to the poll and put down your opinion as to what happened to Jeffrey Epstein when he was alone that night in his cell on the night of August 9th, 10th, 2019. We give you three options, suicide, murder, or undetermined, meaning we simply don't have enough evidence to decide how he died.
And the link to that poll, is it at the YouTube post site of CrimeWaves under the post sections? Or if you're listening to it,  , on another podcast platform, just go to the comments section wherever you're listening, and put down in a single word, murder, suicide, or owned undetermined your own views.[00:53:00]
So what's my verdict? After two years of investigation, I'm an investigator. I teach my students the following. We don't believe that Jeffrey Epstein was killed, and we don't believe that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself. We give that respect, but we are investigators. We're not a belief system. So here's how I would place my personal verdict here.
Now, September 25, 6 years after Jeffrey Epstein's death undetermined. There's simply not enough evidence to be clear as to what happened. And in this next section I'll show you why I believe this to be the case.

The Awful Official Investigations

[00:54:00] At 6:35 AM Saturday, August the 10th, 2019, the L tier unit of the special housing unit of the Metropolitan Correctional Center was a buzz. Their highest ranking inmate had just been found, presumably dead in his cell. Michael Thomas, the material handler who was giving CPR to Epstein's life,  , lifeless body, and the inmates were chanting, breathe, Epstein, breathe.
And at that moment, the morning watch, operations, Lieutenant. Lieutenant arrived and asked Tova Noel. That's the correctional officer in charge on the unit. What had happened and Tova Noel, who was gonna be later charged and convicted of criminal conduct for falsifying documents and inmate count [00:55:00] records and who would lie to official investigators, replied Epstein killed himself.
From that moment, two minutes after Epstein's body had been discovered, the government investigation stopped almost everything. From then on, every report, every investigation, every document, every bit of paper or official utterance became, in some way an attempt to bolster this version of events. Epstein killed himself, bill Barr, the then attorney General,  , the boss's boss of the Bureau of Prisons and the FBI.
Very early on in that investigation, long before anything had been finished, declared it, quote, a perfect storm of mistakes, and that Epstein had committed suicide. He said this days after his death, long, long before any investigation could be finished. So how could any ambitious government investigator publicly claim that the death might be far more complicated?
[00:56:00] How could they publicly contradict their boss? And the government was joined by that section of the corporate media who generally support the Democratic Party, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN. They were declaring it an apparent suicide minutes after the news of the deaths were released on four chan.
So anyone, and there were tens, hundreds of millions of people who questioned that. Such a high profile inmate with so much knowledge on so many powerful people might have been killed, was immediately dismissed as a conspiracy theorist. And that's not to say that's not what happened, but it is to say there's never been a proper, official, independent investigation.
And this CrimeWaves podcast is its only substitute if you're listening to us. We've done the best one. There have been four official investigations, and each one of them was worse than the one before it. [00:57:00] So let's go through in this section and show you how bad each of them was, and that's why it's impossible to determine how Jeffrey Epstein died.
Declan Hill: The first one was the internal prison investigation on July 23rd. It was supposed to have figured out what happened when Epstein was supposed to have attempted suicide when he was in the cell with an eventually convicted, quadruple murderer who killed some of his victims. By strangling them, not only did the prison investigators not examine either man for the wounds, they actually destroyed the video of that night.
Even though the defense lawyer of the murderer specifically asked for it to be kept two, the next botched investigation was by the FBI after Epstein was discovered dead on August 10th, 2019. Actually, to say the use the word botched is an insult to the word botched. [00:58:00] It simply wasn't an investigation one.
 , the FBI didn't examine any of the other's prisoners', hands, or bodies for any sign of a struggle or even searched their cells. They also destroyed most of the material inside Jeffrey Epstein's cell. Including a rope? Yes, a rope. They, they were examining a potential homicide or suicide. By hanging, they found a rope in the cell.
They didn't examine it. They let it be destroyed. Surely if this were a genuine case of self harm, the first thing that Epstein would've thought of is why not use a rope? Why bother ripping up sheets if a rope was available? And and speaking of material, that the FB, I didn't test those sheets that he was purported to have hung himself.
They weren't tested for any other DNA. Again. Why not? The Epstein death was a high profile one.   . You would think that the government would've wanted to [00:59:00] show everyone that they had conducted themselves correctly at every instance. Look, if a dead body were found in a driveway of a suburban house, a proper investigator would go up and down the streets asking for evidence, witnesses and camera footage.
In this case, the FBI investigators either did not do it or could not gather information from all the prisoners in the Epstein wings.   .I wanna take that because in a detention center like the MCC it should have been very easy to separate the inmates and simply go through each one.
Of all the prisoners who were interviewed, we know that some of them presented incredible testimony that Epstein had been murdered. Okay? What was that incredible story? In an institution like the MC, where prison guards who would be convicted of murder, widespread drug dealing, and systematic sexual abuse and rape of female prisoners, something it might seem incredible in another context might be worth examining.[01:00:00]
The next botched investigation was a medical examination of Jeffrey Epstein's body on August 11th, 2019. That's the next day, and there were only two people who examined Jeffrey Epstein's body. One declared it a probable homicide. The second working for the city of New York declared it to be undetermined.
Yet. Five days later, her supervisor changed that verdict to suicide. Why? What piece of new evidence had emerged to make the official verdict change? What piece of evidence, if any, made the chief coroner of the New York City declared to be a suicide after her subordinate, who was actually examining the body, declared it to be undetermined?
And note, when that group of independent medical examiners went through the photos of Epstein's body and the autopsy report, they were surprised to see that a number of potential wounds on his body were not described in that official report, and that includes that mysterious linear contusions around his left wrist.[01:01:00]
Now, some of those independent medical examiners, specifically commentated,   , specifically commented that there was a lack of photos and videos taken for every stage of the autopsy. And they pointed out, quote, this wasn't a routine autopsy. It was an extraordinarily high profile case that should have been more meticulous in its work Now, the fourth and final official investigation was done by the office of the Inspector, general Bureau of Prisons and 121 pages.
It seems like an exercise and passed the buck of blame because no one inside the prison is mentioned by name, with the exception of the two lowly officers who were actually on the L tier with Jeffrey Epstein that night. So any of their bosses, supervisors, or wardens who were nominally in charge of the institution aren't named.
In fact, to read that work is to be entirely ignorant [01:02:00] of the criminal context of the MCC prison guards. You genuinely find out more about that institution listening to this CrimeWaves series than any official report.

Thanks & Acknowledgments

Declan Hill:

Thank you for listening and watching the final episode of the Jeffrey Epstein series. We have worked long and hard, almost two years to bring you this truth, and if you like that way, our way of presenting important, complicated investigations, then please. Take a moment to like, follow, comment, or subscribe to the show on whatever podcast platform you like.
It's immensely important for us to continue bringing CrimeWaves, our independent, non-partisan approach to investigations. [01:03:00] So thank you again for listening to the series on the Jeffrey Epstein death. We greatly value your time and attention and lots of good wishes from myself and the students.  , that's Alex Klein, Jake Zenger, Emily Hinterneder and all the other students who worked on this series.
Thank you again.