The death of a top adviser to former US president Bill Clinton has been shrouded in mystery after the publication of a delayed police report. Mark Middleton was found hanging by an electrical cord from a tree with his chest blown out by a shotgun blast last May, in an alleged suicide.
However no gun was found anywhere at the scene, according to a Perry County, Arkansas sheriff’s report made public by the Daily Mail on Tuesday. Middleton is known to have signed sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein into the Clinton White House on at least seven of the 17 occasions he was known to have visited, and also flew on the late pedophile’s ‘Lolita Express’ private plane.
Written by Perry County Sheriff’s Deputy Jeremy Lawson, who said he was called to the Heifer Ranch in Perryville, Arkansas when an employee found Middleton’s vehicle abandoned on the grounds, the death report reveals that a gun case and three boxes of 12 gauge buckshot were found in the black BMW SUV – but no gun.
While early reports of his death claimed the businessman hanged himself with the help of a “makeshift gallows,” lugging a table onto the farm owned by animal charity Heifer International some 30 miles from his house, the police report does not mention a table.
Instead, Lawson describes glimpsing “what at first appeared to be a man sitting near a tree,” which gradually resolved to include “a rope of some type going from the tree limb to the male.” The “rope” was determined to be an extension cord.
Sheriff Scott Montgomery admitted at the time he had no idea why Middleton would have “picked that location to commit suicide,” telling Radar Online that “to our knowledge, he had never been there before.” Nor did the businessman leave a suicide note, Montgomery said.
Still, the sheriff initially stated the cause of death was suicide. “He found a tree and he pulled a table over there, and he got on that table, and he took an extension cord and put it around a limb, put it around his neck and he shot himself in the chest with a shotgun.”
Middleton’s family also insists he killed himself, arguing he was suffering from depression. They successfully sued to stop the release of photos depicting the scene of death.
However, one former business associate told Radar Online it was “physically impossible for Mark to have killed himself,” insisting “He knows nothing about guns! He hated guns; he couldn’t have tied a noose to save his life.”