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Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

That is interesting although I'm wary of any allusions to a suicide or accident (of Robert Maxwell) being nefarious without some pretty significant proof. Like... it's just a recipe for getting painted as a tin foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist.

As for the relation to Robert Maxwell, didn't his connection to underage girls at that time come from him being a teacher at an elite school? Wouldn't you expect such students to have famous and/or rich parents?

But here's the big one... can we please stop shoe-horning long form content into "Twitter threads"? That's not a thing. It's a terrible way of presenting long form content and it needs to die.

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That’s true in average cases but at the highest levels of power, having inconvenient people killed is just another power like getting caviar delivered by private jet.

I don’t think what you’re saying is wrong, but all of these people live in the real world where accidents/sudden illness/etc do happen every day, so it would be nice to have some evidence beyond “this guy benefitted from this other guy dying.” I’m not a lawyer or anything, but even the legal system isn’t really supposed to look at motivation as evidence in a case, though I’m sure it sways juries.

"but all of these people live in the real world where accidents/sudden illness/etc do happen every day"

Yes, but we can also use Bayesian methods. If someone with powerful, murderous enemies dies in an extremely improbable way, it's not statistically sound to just say "accidents happen every day".

Of course you would need proof to actually convict someone, but it could definitely be a legitimate reason to start asking questions.

>I’m not a lawyer or anything, but even the legal system isn’t really supposed to look at motivation as evidence in a case, though I’m sure it sways juries.

"Motive, means and opportunity" is typically what investigators need before charging someone with a crime so not quite sure if it follows that it's not supposed to be brought up in court?

Even ignoring conspiracies there's many, many people in our government who have people killed as a legitimate and legal part of their job.

If you include legitimate killings by military personnel, there's a LOT of killers walking the streets. It's a very standard part of life that's hard for most people to really grasp.

Once you consider that there are literally thousands upon thousands of legitimate, legal killers in the country, and a smaller set of people with the power to order those killers to do killing, it really doesn't make sense to assume that all the killing is above board.

Physological evidence from the corpse, which was recovered, pretty conclusively demonstrates that Maxwell's death was a suicide.

Thanks for the warning about the twitter thread -- I didn't bother to click the link.

I definitely agree with your comment about Twitter threads.

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