Police: 'D.C. Madam' commits suicide
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Tim Morris The Associated Press
The Associated Press
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TARPON SPRINGS, FLA. -- Deborah Jeane Palfrey, facing a likely prison term of four to six years for running a Washington area call-girl ring, apparently hanged herself Thursday in a storage shed behind her mother's mobile home in the small Gulf Coast city of Tarpon Springs, authorities said.

Dubbed "the D.C. madam" after a grand jury in Washington indicted her 14 months ago on prostitution-related racketeering charges, Palfrey, 52, repeatedly told journalist Dan Moldea last year that she would rather die than live behind bars, Moldea said.

He said Palfrey, who was incarcerated for 18 months in California in the early 1990s after being convicted of running a prostitution ring, told him on three occasions: "I'm not going back to jail. I'll kill myself first. I'll commit suicide first."

After a weeklong trial in U.S. District Court in Washington that included graphic testimony by 13 former call girls, Palfrey was convicted April 15 of financial racketeering, money laundering and using the mail for illegal purposes. Allowed to remain free while awaiting her July 24 sentencing, Palfrey went to Tarpon Springs to stay with her 76-year-old mother, Blanche Palfrey, a widow.

Her attorneys asked Judge James Robertson last week to throw out the guilty verdict, arguing that the government had failed to prove its case.

Vitter never called as witness

On Tuesday, Palfrey dropped a civil case against employees at Pamela Martin & Associates that sought damages on grounds they had engaged in prostitution in violation of the contract she says they signed with her. The Justice Department said the suit was an attempt to intimidate the employees from testifying against her.

Her civil case was the last known legal proceeding that could have resulted in Sen. David Vitter, R- La., being called as a witness. Vitter's name appeared on the client list of Palfrey's $250-per-hour escort service. There was no immediate comment Thursday from Vitter's office.

Police in Tarpon Springs, 30 miles north of St. Petersburg, said Blanche Palfrey called 911 shortly before 11 a.m. to report a gruesome discovery in the shed outside her home.

Capt. Jeffrey Young said at a televised news conference that the elder Palfrey awoke from a nap and began looking around for her daughter. She

discovered her daughter "apparently hanged herself using a nylon rope from a metal beam on the ceiling of the shed," Young said.

Young said police found "approximately two" suicide notes in the mobile home, along with "some type of notebooks that had just notes to the family and so forth."

He said Blanche Palfrey, who often accompanied her daughter to court during her trial, had "no indication" that Deborah Palfrey intended to end her life.

The medical examiner in Pinellas County will make an official ruling on the cause and manner of Palfrey's death, Young said. "Obviously the mother's very distraught," he said. "Discovering your child in this state is not something anybody wants to go to."

ABC News reported on its Web site that Deborah Palfrey said in an interview last year that she would never return to prison. "I sure as heck am not going to be going to federal prison for one day, let alone, you know, four to eight years," ABC quoted her as saying.

Appearing on ABC's "20/20" program a few months after her indictment, Palfrey spoke of Brandy Britton, a former college professor who hanged herself in 2007 shortly before her scheduled trial on prostitution charges. Palfrey said Britton had once worked for her.

"She couldn't take the humiliation," Palfrey said. "Her whole life was destroyed."

Prison was terrible memory

Moldea said Palfrey's 18-month California prison term was a terrible memory.

"The first time she did time, it damn near killed her, she told me," he said. "She wound up in a fairly tough prison, and the stress caused some sort of an illness that affected her eyesight. It was just a horrible, horrible period for her."

After her release, Moldea said, "she began looking forward to what she was going to do with her future. Although she had a college degree, she viewed herself as a convicted felon who couldn't do anything else. So she came to Washington and got back into the business again."

Her business, Pamela Martin & Associates, was a "legal, high-end erotic fantasy service," Palfrey has said. The mostly young women she hired as escorts were required to be college-educated, socially refined and conversant in current affairs. She dispatched them to homes and hotels in the Washington area for what she said was "quasi-sexual" game-playing with male clients, at $250 an hour.

She said she was unaware that many of the 132 women she employed from 1993 to 2006 were engaging in sex acts with clients for money.

But a jury agreed with prosecutors, who argued that Palfrey knowingly ran the business as a front for prostitution.

Palfrey caused a stir in Washington after her indictment when she gave volumes of her phone records to ABC and posted them on the Internet, resulting in public identification of some prominent clients.

An IRS agent testified at the trial that the business, which Palfrey ran by phone from her California home, took in about $2 million over the years.

Moldea said he and Palfrey had lunch April 11, during the trial. "That was the last time I saw her," he said. "She was upbeat. She thought she was going to walk. I think she felt confident that the government hadn't made its case."