Page 28 Daily Mail, Saturday, August 17, 2019a side door to the kitchen, the
house ceases to be nondescript. A
wide, winding staircase leads to a
hallway lined with photographs of
young naked women. It leads to his
bedroom, and a closet where many
more photos are stored: erotic
pictures featuring women who
have been brought to this house.
How the girls were lured here is
something I wanted to understand,
as our investigation got under way.
One of the first clues is tucked
away in a police report from March- A girl of 14 got into a fight at
school with another pupil who
called her a ‘whore’.
Let’s call this girl Mary. Like
about a third of the children at this
Florida county high school, she’s
from a Hispanic background. Her
parents are poor Cuban immi-
grants. Mary qualifies for free
school lunches.
But when she is sent to the
principal’s office, Mary is found to
have $300 in her purse. The notes
are all $20 bills. Alarmed, the head
teacher calls her parents and asks:‘Is Mary selling drugs?’ Her family
can’t believe that, but the school
needs to know what’s going on. So
they send for the psychologist. And
then Mary starts talking.
The story she tells is so sickening
that the school staff have no
hesitation in calling the police. In a
high, halting voice, speakingthrough tears, Mary tells Palm
Beach police officer Michele Pagan
that she was taken to Epstein’s
house. She won’t say who took her,
or why she agreed to go. But she is
adamant about what happened
when she was led upstairs.
‘This white-haired guy came into
the room. Wearing only a towelL
ATE one afternoon, while taking
a leisurely stroll on the Upper
East Side of Manhattan, a friend
of mine named Tim Malloy ran
into a trim, silver-hairedneighbour of ours from Palm Beach
in Florida.
The man was walking down Madison
Avenue, and several things about him were
striking. For one thing, he was wearing
slippers. Expensive, embroidered, mono-
grammed slippers. But slippers all the same.
For another, he was accompanied by two
exceptionally attractive women. As the man
half shuffled, half walked down the avenue,
the women walked slightly behind him, as if
they were attendants or staff.
The threesome turned onto 71st Street and
headed toward an enormous townhouse — a
house that was almost a fortress with a 15ft
front door. Like our neighbour’s slippers, the
house had a monogram: raised brass letters
that spelled out ‘J E’.
The initials belonged to Jeffrey Epstein, a
staggeringly rich and powerful man who was
also a registered sex offender with a strong
taste for teenage girls. Not just 16 and
17-year-olds, but younger girls as well.
Epstein was alleged to have abused dozens
of adolescent girls. He’d done a bit of prison
time for his crimes. A bit of time. And now
here he was, out in the world again.
Accompanied by two beautiful young
women.
I had been hearing hair-raising stories about
Jeffrey Epstein for a couple of years. I
wondered why it had taken so long for the
Palm Beach police to catch up with him.
And, once they did, why he had served so
little jail time.
Those were the obvious questions, but there
were others: How had Epstein made his
money, possibly billions? No one seemed
to know.
W
E dId know that Epstein liked to
get massages from two, even three,
young women every day, in his Palm
Beach mansion or wherever else he
was in the world. But who were these girls?
Where had they come from? How did they
find their way to his home?
Stirred by that sighting of Epstein up in
New York, Tim Malloy and I began to
investigate. We partnered with John Connolly,
a tough, no-nonsense journalist who had once
been a cop with the NYPd and had been fol-
lowing the Epstein story for close to ten years.
And we began to put the pieces together.
We were never in any doubt that Jeffrey
Epstein was guilty. The question is, what
exactly was he guilty of?
There was no way of guessing from
the exterior of his Palm Beach home at
358 El Brillo Way. Built in the Fifties by a run-
of-the-mill architect, it has none of the
elegance of neighbouring properties. It’s big,
with a large swimming pool: that’s the most
you can say for it. It’s totally bland.
But it’s the last house on a dead-end block,
and this makes it secluded.
Beyond the gate, past the guard and through
He’s sold millions of thrillers. But
could JAMES PATTERSON’s true-life
probe into the shocking behaviour
of his Florida neighbour Jeffrey
Epstein be the most chilling of all?
JAMES PATTERSON, one of the
world’s most successful authors
whose novels regularly top the
best-seller charts, happens to
live half a mile from Jeffrey
Epstein’s home in Palm Beach,
Florida. Over the years he had
become fascinated and appalled
in equal measure by Epstein and
determined to investigate just
how and why so many young
women found their way to his
home on a secluded street. This
is the deeply disturbing story of
what he discovered...