She Thought She Could Do Better

Palfrey would not take just any client. When the man asking for an escort sounded like a "jerk," she said, "I'd just turn them away … Somebody would say, 'I want someone with big blankety-blanks.' I'd say, 'I'm sorry, are you referring to a woman's breasts? We have people who are large breasted, or perhaps busty. But we don't have women with those.' The tone of my voice would become so elitist; I would talk to them like I was the Queen of England looking down upon a peasant."

Running the escort service "345 days a year" (she took off holidays and "snow days"), Palfrey became bored. In 2006, after 13 years, she shut down her escort service and began to make other investments (she earned about $2 million overall). She was in Germany buying property when she learned her California house had been raided by the police. Her defense was that her escort service was perfectly legal: her clients just engaged in "fantasies," as far as she knew. To find witnesses for the trial, she says, she released all her phone records—figuring that the bloggers and the reporters would turn up plenty of names. She apparently reasoned that her clients would all deny having had sex. Indeed, one of them—Randall Tobias, a deputy secretary of State—resigned after admitting using the service for "massages." (Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana admitted his name was on the list and that he had "committed a great sin." Harlan Ullman, the military strategist who coined "shock and awe," was mentioned in court papers and has declined to comment.) But the prosecutors amassed enough evidence to convince a federal jury that Palfrey had been running a prostitution ring.

Facing several years in prison for racketeering and money laundering, Palfrey, 52, told Dan Moldea, a writer who interviewed her, that she would rather kill herself than go to prison, according to the St. Petersburg Times. She was living with her 76-year-old mother in a mobile home in Florida. Last Thursday, her mother lay down to take a nap. When she arose, she found her daughter dead in a toolshed, hanging by a nylon rope from the ceiling. Police said she left a handwritten suicide note. Rosslyn tells NEWSWEEK: "I'm shocked, I'm numb. She acted so strong, tough as nails, the steel woman. That people could put someone over the edge for something so minor is so sad. It's not like she was a mass murderer. She wasn't a terrible person. But some of her clients sure were."

© 2008