From the moment the news broke that the body of Virginia Giuffre had been found at her Australian farmhouse home in Neergabby, north of Perth, last Friday, dark theories started spreading online.

Her family announced that the 41-year-old, who famously accused Jeffrey Epstein of trafficking her as a teenager, had died by suicide.

However, officials in New York had said exactly the same when Epstein was found dead in a jail cell in 2019. On that occasion, there was widespread scepticism at the idea that security could have broken down so comprehensively that he was given the opportunity to take his own life – a scepticism that continues to this day.

And once again, many are not swallowing the suicide line. Social media is bursting with speculation that sinister forces – in the form of the rich and powerful men among whom she was ‘passed around like a platter of fruit’ – could have once again silenced someone who could expose them.

Given the abundance of unanswered questions surrounding the Epstein saga, it’s hardly surprising that it continues to attract so much fevered speculation.

Insiders tantalisingly claim that what is publicly known about the secretive Epstein’s nefarious activities is only the tip of the iceberg. In February, the Trump administration started to release previously classified files relating to the paedophile financier, but there have been no bombshells. Not yet, at least.

Here, Tom Leonard examines the puzzles and mysteries thrown up by the world’s most enduring sex abuse scandal that have yet to be satisfactorily explained – and which are now fuelling claims of a massive, and ruthless, cover-up.

DID SOMEBODY GET TO HER?

Police said the ‘early indication is the death is not suspicious’ but it’s increasingly clear that some of those close to Giuffre are not convinced she took her own life.

Just weeks before her death, Giuffre went online to say she was about to die from catastrophic injuries sustained when her car was hit by a school bus, only to later admit she wasn’t

Epstein was ruled to have died by suicide in prison while awaiting trial for sex trafficking. However, many are unconvinced and believe he may have been silenced

Sceptics – including several Republicans in Congress – quickly seized on a 2019 tweet by Giuffre which, with hindsight, is certainly thought-provoking.

Replying to another X user who claimed the FBI would kill her to ‘protect the ultra rich and well connected’, Giuffre announced that ‘in no way, shape or form am I suicidal’.

She added that ‘if something happens to me – in [sic] the sake of my family do not let this go away… too many evil people want to see me quiteted [sic].’

Both Virginia’s father, Sky Roberts, and her Australian lawyer, Karrie Louden, have made clear they’d like to see further investigation into her death.

Roberts said there was ‘no way’ his daughter killed herself as she ‘had too much to live for’. He insisted ‘somebody got to her’.

Meanwhile, her Australian lawyer, Karrie Louden, said Giuffre had shown no sign of wanting to harm herself, adding: ’We’ve got big question marks over it.’

Family members have spoken of Giuffre’s fragile mental state in the last few months of her life – especially after her estranged husband, Robert, obtained a restraining order that prevented her from seeing their three teenage children.

Just weeks before her death, Giuffre went online to say she was about to die from catastrophic injuries sustained when her car was hit by a school bus, only to later admit she wasn’t.

In 2019 Giuffre wrote on X that ‘in no way, shape or form am I suicidal’

But her lawyer insisted there was no evidence she’d resort to suicide. ‘When I got the phone call, I was like: “Are you joking?”,’ Louden said. ‘There’s suicide and there’s misadventure.

‘She was in a lot of pain but she was looking forward to things in the future. She wanted to renovate the house and all sorts of things like that.’

ECHOES OF VIRGINIA’S DEATH

Virginia Giuffre is not the only Epstein victim to die tragically and, in the view of some of the people close to them, suspiciously.

Carolyn Andriano, an Epstein accuser whose court testimony proved crucial in convicting Ghislaine Maxwell in 2021, died two years later from a reported accidental drug overdose in a Florida hotel room.

The 36-year-old mother of five said she’d had a difficult life in which she’d been sexually abused by a relative when she was four and struggled with drug abuse – issues that left her vulnerable to exploitation by Epstein and Maxwell.

Giuffre famously accused Jeffrey Epstein of trafficking her as a teenager

Giuffre, with a photo of herself as a teenager, when she says she was abused by Epstein and Maxwell, among others

Epstein and Maxwell during a pheasant shoot. In June 2022, Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison for sex trafficking offences

Some argue it’s no surprise that damaged women like Giuffre and Andriano might have found it impossible to escape the dark shadow cast by the abuse they suffered. Another alleged Epstein victim, Leigh Patrick, fatally overdosed on heroin in 2017.

But, like Giuffre’s father, Andriano’s family considered her tragic death highly suspicious. They said she had been about to start a new chapter in her life after buying a house in North Carolina with her husband.

Her mother, Dorothy Groenert, said Andriano had been ‘ecstatic’ and ‘all set up for a whole new lifestyle’ shortly before she died, and had recently told her she was free of drugs and alcohol. She attacked the police’s decision to swiftly close their investigation into her daughter’s death.

A SUICIDE OR A SILENCING?

The most persistent conspiracy theory about the Epstein scandal is that the man at its centre didn’t take his own life but was murdered. It’s not hard to see why many still believe this.

The 66-year-old financier was found dead in his tiny cell at the bleak Metropolitan Correctional Centre on August 10, 2019, a month after he’d been charged with sex trafficking girls as young as 14. He was in a kneeling position, with a strip of bedsheet around his neck, the other end tied to the top of his bunk.

A few weeks earlier, he had been found on the floor of his cell with bruises to his neck, prompting fears he’d tried to kill himself. But after only a few days on ‘suicide watch’ the jail informed the Justice Department that he would share a cell with another inmate and a guard would look into the cell every 30 minutes.

But his cellmate was transferred the day before Epstein’s death and not replaced and the two guards assigned to check his cell overnight fell asleep at their desk for about three hours and later falsified the record of their duties.

Meanwhile, two cameras in front of Epstein’s cell also malfunctioned that night, while another camera had footage that was ‘unusable’.

The New York coroner ruled Epstein’s death a suicide but a renowned forensic pathologist, Cyril Wecht, told the makers of a 2020 Netflix documentary on Epstein that ‘there was no evidence at all to indicate that he had jumped or leaped from his bunk [bed]’.

WAS BLACKMAIL A MOTIVE?

The FBI reportedly found myriad hidden cameras in Epstein’s various homes and were seen removing boxes of CDs and hard drives from his Manhattan mansion.

These details tally with claims by Giuffre and other accusers that he secretly filmed sexual activity to use as blackmail material. Consequently, they said, many people wanted him dead.

Giuffre once said he was ‘watching everyone all the time. This was a blackmail scheme…. When he told me, “People owe me favours” and “I will never get caught” and “I can get away with things”, he meant it.’

ANOTHER PRISON FATALITY

Epstein’s wasn’t the only curious prison suicide in this scandal. Jean-Luc Brunel, a sleazy French model agent and close Epstein associate, was accused of grooming girls and then trafficking them through an agency set up with the American’s money.

Virginia Giuffre claimed Epstein once boasted to her that he’d ‘slept with over 1,000 of Brunel’s girls’.

The Frenchman almost certainly knew Epstein’s deepest secrets. He was arrested in France by police investigating Epstein on suspicion of raping and trafficking underage girls, only to be found dead in his Paris jail in February 2022.

Like Epstein, he’d reportedly hanged himself and, despite previous attempts to kill himself, he hadn’t been placed on suicide watch.

He died just two months after Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted in New York of child sex-trafficking and some say the two events were not unconnected.

Spencer Kuvin, a lawyer for some of Epstein’s victims, told the Miami Herald that the timing of Brunel’s death was ‘a hell of coincidence – it’s almost like it’s someone is trying to send a message to Ghislaine to shut up’.

Maritza Vasquez, Brunel’s longtime model agency bookkeeper, said she believed both he and Epstein had been silenced, adding: ‘Ghislaine Maxwell is going to be the next to commit suicide in jail. They’re going to kill her also because they have to disappear these people to protect the big fish.’

MYSTERY OF EPSTEIN’S MONEY

‘Follow the money’ is often cited as the key to solving crimes but, in Epstein’s case, that has been painfully hard to do. Epstein went from being a school maths teacher to a money manager for billionaires who, at the time of his death, was estimated in court papers to be worth $560million. He owned four multi-million-dollar homes and two Caribbean islands.

Both Republican and Democrat politicians have called on the government to release a list of all of Epstein’s business clients arguing that this may reveal who was also involved in his sex trafficking ring. But some Epstein experts suspect such a list doesn’t exist.