“Nothing could go wrong there…”

San Diego County’s Chief Clown of Convolutions, Contusions, and Coroners Ronald Bozo demonstrates to County officials how a person might bind their hands and feet prior to hanging themselves and so ensure no turning back, in an effort to justify his ruling of suicide in the Rebecca Zahau case. (He neglected to shove a t-shirt into his mouth as a gag a la Zahau, because he needed to be able to speak, unlike Zahau, who might have feared she’d somehow repent of her decision and cry out for help despite the nylon cord crushing her windpipe.) Similarly, said Bozo, Mr. Epstein most likely choked himself hard enough to break several bones in his neck prior to hanging himself in his cell, “just to make sure there were no mistakes this time. Remember, he’d already had an incident and been put on suicide watch once.”

On July 13 of 2011, Rebecca Zahau was found dead outside the Coronado home of her boyfriend. She had apparently been hung from a second-story balcony. Her wrists and ankles were bound, and she had a shirt stuffed into her mouth as a gag. She had suffered four instances of head trauma, and a knife was found at the scene with her menstrual blood on the handle. The San Diego County Sheriff’s Department ruled her death a suicide.

Oddly, Zahau’s family has long questioned the ruling, which Sheriff’s spokesman Ed DeNile called “as plain as the bloodied, broken, but not criminally suspicious nose on your face.” So it is perhaps not surprising to hear that members of that family, as a corollary to their recent announcement of a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of Zahau’s killer, expressed dismay at the news that the same team of investigators had been called in to help with the case of Jeffrey Epstein. The wealthy sex offender, pedophile, and alleged trafficker was found hung in his cell on August 10, after allegedly telling a friend he had compromising information about prominent, wealthy, and powerful former associates.

“Am I the only one taking crazy pills here?” asked Zahau’s cousin Amory Zahau-Zapruder, apparently echoing a scene from the Ben Stiller film Zoolander. “You get another case where there are signs of strangulation prior to hanging, and you call in the same clowns who pulled a Colonel Klink in San Diego?” But officials with the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York where Epstein died said they “saw nothing” amiss with the unprecedented collaboration.