Report: Experts raise new questions on Epstein suicide
by WorldTribune Staff, October 9, 2025 Real World News
In the investigation into the death of Jeffrey Epstein, investigators failed to interview potential witnesses, did not properly preserve certain evidence, and did not run basic forensic tests, a new report by CBS News cited experts as saying.
Jeffrey Epstein
The two key corrections officers on duty on Aug. 10, 2019, the night Epstein died in his cell in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown New York City, were not interviewed by investigators until two years later, according to court documents.
One of those corrections officers was the only person to attest to seeing Epstein hanging by a bedsheet from his bunk, the report said.
Details pulled from 90 photos of Epstein’s cell and other evidence collected in the hours his death — but before FBI agents arrived to process the scene — appear to show a succession of basic oversights, ranging from an absence of evidence markers to items being moved, experts told CBS News.
“The FBI literally has all of the best tools. I mean, spared no expense. They have every tool you can imagine. And they used none of it as far as we can tell,” forensic analyst Nick Barreiro said after reviewing the photos, many of which have never been published. “How are there not way more people pointing out the absurdity of this?”
The CBS News report states: “Nothing about the CBS News review into the investigation of Epstein’s death suggests foul play. But the review found that the federal probe did not follow typical investigative procedures into a suspicious death.”
Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s co-defendant in the trafficking of underage victims, said in an August interview with the Deputy U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche: “I do not believe he died by suicide, no.”
Epstein’s brother, Mark, told “60 Minutes” in 2020 that, in his view, the evidence he has seen to date points more to murder than suicide.
Five years later, he still questions the investigation: “This was never properly investigated as a proper homicide, it was never investigated,” Mark Epstein told CBS News recently.
Emergency medical technicians wrote in their report on the incident, which was obtained by CBS News, that the staff they interacted with could not say when Epstein was last seen alive or describe how he “was found in [the] jail cell other than to say ‘we found him on the ground.’ ”
Inside the cell, piles of linens were strewn about, mattresses were squeezed into a corner on the floor near his bunk bed and Epstein’s personal items were rearranged or moved, photos from the scene show. Experts who reviewed photos of the scene for CBS News said there were also inconsistencies between the investigators’ official reports and what the images show.
“In those photographs, it was obvious that things were moved around,” said former New York Police Department detective Herman Weisberg, who is now managing director of Sage Intelligence. “It definitely appeared to me that the scene was, for lack of a better term, staged a bit.”
Weisberg and other experts emphasized that, regardless of whether Epstein’s death was a suicide, the cell should have been treated as a crime scene using standard investigatory practices.
“It almost appears to me that whoever was investigating this just took it at face value that it was a suicide with no foul play whatsoever, suspected,” Weisberg said. “But in a situation as high-profile as this, I would always, as an investigator, consider that there might be foul play.”