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What equipment would allow you to kill someone in seconds leaving only the marks left on Epstein? How many seconds are we talking? Getting a garrote on a resisting victim is not trivial unless you have the element of surprise, and strangulation takes a while to set in. Even after someone goes out they are not dead immediately. Whether by blood or air choke, it takes seconds to put someone out but much longer to kill.
Unlike the movies, real life garrotes function by instantly crushing the windpipe, the killer doesn’t need to sit there for three and a half minutes choking the guy out. And controlling a resisting victim is pretty easy when you have three or four people.
You said “a soldier” so I assumed you had some tool in mind that would allow one person to reliably strangle a victim. It does seem plausible that a crushed trachea could keep the air supply cut off after an attacker walks away, though in this case if he was killed he would have been hung afterwards which would have maintained pressure on the blood vessels as well.
Honestly for a single attacker the best tool might have been a taser to subdue him and then they could have just strangled him with the sheets since they have the stage the hanging anyway.
Typically when a soldier uses a garrote, the victim is pushed forward with a knee to the back, while the garrote is pulled backwards with force. This crushes the trachea to the point the airway cannot reopen, and possibly even breaks the neck. It is a useful technique for quietly and quickly removing pickets, and if you want to see a demonstration there are World War II era training films that show the technique. This is consistent with the postmortem analysis that found physical effects that differed from those you would see with a suspension hanging, and were more consistent with a violent strangulation.
Yeah that makes sense in light of the broken bones and cartilage. Apparently those injuries can happen in older individuals from hanging, but I can’t imagine he had much space to get a good drop if he did hang himself, so it still seems pretty suspicious to me.
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