Operator of D.C. Call-Girl Ring Is Dead in Apparent Suicide

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Police: 'Palfrey Confirmed Suicide'

Police in Tarpon Springs, Fla., held a news conference Thursday confirming that 'D.C. Madam' Deborah Jeane Palfrey committed suicide by hanging.

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Her business, Pamela Martin & Associates, was a "legal, high-end erotic fantasy service," Palfrey 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 had been 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 federal 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 Northern 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."

The place where she died, Sun Valley Estates, is a community for people ages 55 and older, with dozens of mobile homes lined on small streets with clean-swept sidewalks and driveways.

Neighbors said Blanche Palfrey has kept to herself in the past year since the scandal broke involving her daughter.

"She's tore up," said a woman who lives across the street, declining to give her name.

Her husband added, "It's a terrible thing for a mom to find her daughter like that."

Duggan reported from Washington. Staff writers Petula Dvorak, Allison Klein and Carol Leonnig and staff researcher Madonna Lebling, all in Washington, also contributed to this report.