The last guard to check his cell has now told Congress her side, and the blurry orange figure on the stairs is still unexplained.
The guard who was the last to check on Jeffrey Epstein's cell told House investigators that the officer working beside her on the night Epstein died was on his 22nd consecutive hour on shift and slept through the 10 p.m. count, according to the House Oversight Republicans' final report, which the committee released Nov. 10 alongside the transcripts of its 19 interviews and depositions.
As we noted at the time, the 137-page report concludes that federal investigators and prosecutors let Epstein's crimes after 2005 go on, and that no documents it reviewed implicated President Trump. Buried in its section on the Metropolitan Correctional Center is former correctional officer Tova Noel's account of Aug. 9 and 10, 2019, given in a transcribed interview on May 18.
There are three theories: One, he actually killed himself. Two, the DOJ - headed up by Bill Barr whose pedocentric-author father hired Epstein to teach at Dalton in the 70s - had him murdered while in custody. Three, Epstein was smuggled out of jail and replaced by a mask-wearing homeless dude, with skeptics pointing to different nose and ear shapes on the body vs. photos of Epstein when he was alive.
Asked how many counts she did on her first shift, Noel answered: "I counted at 10 [PM], improperly." MCC rules required counts at 4 p.m., 10 p.m., midnight, 3 a.m. and 5 a.m., each done by two officers. Her partner, Officer Bonham, "was tired" and slept through it, she said.
On her second shift, Noel "didn't do any" counts at all. The officer who joined her, Michael Thomas, told her he was tired and slept for "pretty much for the...duration of the shift," she testified. The committee says Thomas did no rounds or counts for his entire midnight-to-8 a.m. shift.
Instead, Noel was surfing the web at the desk computer in the Special Housing Unit. A forensic review of the machine found she clicked on "latest on Epstein in jail" at 5:42 a.m. and again at 5:52 a.m., which we first noted when the files came out. She told the committee she never typed in a search for Epstein and only clicked links on "the homepage where the news loads."
Noel also told the committee she had never been trained for the unit. She was out on injury leave when the special training was given, and a supervisor told her to sign the training log anyway, which she did. Officers there routinely worked "five days of double shifts," 16 hours at a stretch, and she said that even then there were "not enough people" to get the work done. She called the culture of skipped procedures "the MCC way."
At 10:39 p.m. on Aug. 9, one working camera caught the orange figure, what appears to be someone carrying orange linens up the stairs toward Epstein's tier. Noel said she was off camera at the time and has watched the clip "numerous times":
"I don't know what it could've been. Only thing I could tell you: Rest assured, it wasn't me."
The observation was logged by the inspector general as an officer carrying orange "linen or bedding," noting it in their final report as "an unidentified [corrections officer]," despite the fact that the officers on duty said they didn't replace any linens, as that was done during the previous shift.
"At approximately 10:39 p.m., an unidentified CO appeared to walk up the L Tier stairway, and then reappeared within view of the camera at 10:41 p.m." reads the entry.
Asked whether it could have been Bonham, she said: "He was sleeping." A supervisor? "I would've had to let them in," she said, and she let nobody in.
Former Attorney General Bill Barr, deposed in August 2025, told the committee he thought the figure was likely a correctional officer, and that Epstein "absolutely" died by suicide. Noel, who hit the alarm when Thomas found Epstein at about 6:30 a.m., agrees: "Because he was the only one in his cell."
The committee said it "was unable to definitively dispel certain theories," could not identify the figure, and could not account for the missing footage from cameras near Epstein's cell that MCC staff knew were broken and never fixed. It also found nothing that disproved the FBI and Southern District of New York's suicide finding.
The report's other new testimony came from former JPMorgan executive Jes Staley, questioned in July about his 2010 emails with Epstein. Shortly after midnight on July 10, 2010, a redacted sender wrote to Epstein that "the snow white" had been "f..ed twice as soon as she put her costume." About an hour later Staley emailed Epstein: "That was fun. Say hi to Snow White." Epstein asked what character he would like next. "Beauty and the Beast," Staley answered. "Well, one side is available," Epstein wrote back.
This was one of the photos taken at the scene...
Under questioning, Staley said he never had sex with "a person dressed as Snow White" and may only have crossed paths with her in Epstein's apartment. Asked why he would say hi to her, he answered: "I don't know. Just, say hi."
The committee called his account "not credible" and concluded that Epstein used fictional princess names as code "to identify and traffic women to his associates," and that the evidence suggests Staley and former Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine "were complicit in - or had knowledge of - this scheme." In 2002, Levine had emailed Ghislaine Maxwell "Beauty and the beast..." Levine has denied the separate abuse allegations Epstein's former assistant Sarah Kellen made against him.
Other oddities include;
- No Cellmate Assigned: Despite a July 30, 2019, directive from the Psychology Department requiring Epstein to have an "appropriate cellmate" due to suicide risk (emailed to over 70 staff), his cellmate was transferred on August 9 without a replacement. Multiple staff, including the warden and lieutenants, were aware but took no action, violating BOP policy and SHU post orders.
- His former cellmate - Nicholas Tartaglione, who Epstein told his lawyers had "roughed him up," begged a New York judge to move him to another prison after he said guards began threatening him after Epstein's death. He also claimed that James Comey's prosecutor daughter offered Epstein a deal to frame Donald Trump.
Victoria's Secret founder Les Wexner, whose deposition the committee released earlier, called Epstein "a crook and a con man" and said "he would make Bernie Madoff look like a Boy Scout - so complete, so diabolical."
Democrats take over the committee in January, and Rep. Robert Garcia, its top Democrat, said Republicans had released "a report based on an incomplete investigation and zero public hearings on Jeffrey Epstein." He promised "tough questions of the powerful men who associated with Epstein, including Donald Trump."