“Time to say goodbye,” the message by the late US convicted sex offender allegedly concluded, according to the paper’s source
Late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s purported suicide note has remained locked up at a courthouse for years, out of reach of investigators, the New York Times has reported.
The message was allegedly discovered by Epstein’s cellmate, Nicholas Tartaglione, in July 2019 after the disgraced US financier had been found unresponsive with a strip of cloth around his neck at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City, the paper said in an article on Thursday.
Epstein survived that incident, but was found dead in his cell on August 10 the same year. The convicted sex offender apparently hanged himself with his bedsheets, but skeptics continue to insist that he was murdered to cover up for the powerful individuals supposedly implicated in the case.
Tartaglione, a former police officer serving four life sentences for a quadruple murder, told the NYT on the phone that the suicide note was written on a piece of yellow paper ripped from a legal pad and tucked into a graphic novel that Epstein used to read.
According to the cellmate, in the message the financier claimed that the investigators had “found nothing” on him despite looking for months. He said that Epstein’s note concluded with the words: “What do you want me to do, bust out crying? Time to say goodbye.”
Tartaglione claimed that he had given the paper to his lawyers, suggesting that it could have been useful to counter claims made by Epstein after the July 2019 incident that he had been attacked by his cellmate.
The note eventually ended up being sealed by a federal judge as part of Tartaglione’s criminal case and still remains locked up in a New York courthouse, the NYT said. This means that the investigators, who looked into Epstein’s death, lacked what could have been a key piece of evidence, it added.
A spokesperson for the US Justice Department confirmed to the paper that the agency hasn’t seen the note. It was also not found among the massive trove of Epstein files published by the DOJ earlier this year, according to the article.
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The New York Times said it filed a petition on Thursday for the judge to unseal the note.
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