Scott McCabe, The Examiner
2008-05-02 07:00:00.0
Current rank: Not ranked

WASHINGTON -

Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the escort service owner whose trial titillated the public and embarrassed Washington’s powerful, killed herself Thursday, according to police, two weeks after a D.C. jury convicted her of running a prostitution ring.

Palfrey, dubbed the D.C. Madam by the press corps, was found hanging by a nylon rope in a small shed next to her mother’s mobile home in Tarpon Springs, Fla., police said.

She was found by her mother, Blanche Palfrey, shortly after the 76-year-old woman woke up from a short nap, police said.

Police said Palfrey, 52, left at least two suicide notes and other writings to her family in a small notebook.

Biographer Dan Moldea, who discovered the phone number of Sen. David Vitter, R-La., in Palfrey’s billing records, said Palfrey told him she was going to take her own life.

“She wasn’t going to jail, she told me that very clearly,” Moldea told Time magazine. “She had done time once before [for prostitution]. 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.”

The trial, billed by a prosecutor as the “hottest seat in D.C.,” revealed little about the lives of the powerful men who used her service and concluded without the public testimony of Vitter, military strategist Harlan Ullman or Randall Tobias, a former State Department official.

 Instead, the testimony focused around the sad and sordid details of the women and a few low-profile customers.

Many lives were damaged in the case. A college professor who Palfrey said was one of her employees killed herself before going to trial on prostitution charges. Clients, including two lawyers, were publicly humiliated. Some who took the stand had their careers ruined, such as a U.S. Navy lieutenant commander who moonlighted as a call girl while teaching classes at the U.S. Naval Academy.

Palfrey, awaiting a sentencing scheduled for late July, spent her last days with her mother at the tiny retirement community 20 miles north of Tampa. Palfrey faced five to six years, according to federal guidelines.

Blanche Palfrey, a steady presence for her daughter during the trial last month, was distraught, said Tarpon Springs Police Capt. Jeffrey Young.

“When you have a suicide, it’s all the victims that are left behind,” Young said. “They’re the ones that have to pick up the pieces and go on with their lives and deal with this. That’s the tragedy in any situation like this.”