How To Solve A Problem

Convicted Washington escort service operator Deborah Jeane Palfrey committed suicide, apparently to avoid prison. Apparently.

Police said the body was found in a shed near Palfrey's mother's home. There was a suicide note, but police did not disclose its contents or how she killed herself.

"She wasn't going to jail, she told me that very clearly. She told me she would commit suicide," author Dan Moldea said. Palfrey contacted Moldea last year to provide her help writing a book. "She had done time once before [for prostitution]," Moldea recalls. "And it damn near killed her. She said there was enormous stress — it made her sick, she couldn't take it, and she wasn't going to let that happen to her again." That's interesting when you take into account that when a former employee of Palfrey's, Brandy Britton, hung herself before going to trial, Palfrey told the press, "I guess I'm made of something that Brandy Britton wasn't made of."

Pending her scheduled July 24 sentencing, Palfrey was free stemming from a series of racketeering and money laundering charges as part of running a prostitution ring, that had as clients many prominent Washingtonians. She faced as many as 55 years behind bars (though sentencing guidelines could have limited her prison time to 71 months.)

The trial was one of very few such cases prosecuted in the federal courts - most prostitution violations are dealt with at the state or municipal level, and attract little publicity. But in the Palfrey case, prosecutors obliged a string of obviously embarrassed clients and employees of the escort service to appear on the witness stand and testify under oath. Nearly all testified that they had engaged in sexual acts in exchange for money, a version of events that contradicted Palfrey's claims that she had been running a high-end sexual fantasy service — and that any actual sexual activity was against the rules, and clearly stated when employees were hired.

Palfrey ran her operation — which covered the Washington D.C., Baltimore and northern Virginia area — by telephone from her home in California. Clients would contact her, often in response to advertisements in Washington newspapers and magazines, and she would set them up with women. And it was Palfrey's phone records that led to problems for prominent Washington figures once her prosecution got under way. She had thousands of pages, including 10,000 to 15,000 numbers of clients calling in to her California residence. Her johns included Louisiana senator David Vitter, Randall Tobias, a senior State Department, and Harlan Ullman, a well-known military specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Knowing without question that she killed herself rather than face jail dispells all those paranoid thoughts that a madam with her hooks in prominent government figures would meet an untimely end. It's not like she was planning on writing a book that would divulge anything of a secretive or scandalous nature. Let's all remember that our government nor the folks who run our country would ever think to resort to killing somebody that could harm the nation. Never.