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Police reported no signs of a robbery or a violent attack. When the medical examiner was slow to announce a cause of death, speculation began to swirl. The local Northwest Florida Daily News reported getting inquiries "from Massachusetts and Oregon and dozens of places in between."
When one story mentioned suicide as a possibility, Klausutis' father-in-law, Norm, wrote a letter to the editor: "Losing Lori was the most painful event in my life of 62 years. It was far more painful for her husband. … She was extremely happy with her life, job and family. For those who knew Lori, the thought of suicide, as your published reports suggested, is absolutely unthinkable."
Finally, on Aug. 6, Assistant Medical Examiner Michael Berkland announced his findings. Klausutis, he wrote, "died as a result of an acute subdural hematoma which occurred as a result of a closed head trauma sustained in a simple fall."
The position of the body and her hands showed she had made no effort to break her fall, he wrote, and the nature of her brain injury wasn't consistent with an attacker hitting her. Her heart had a "floppy mitral valve," suggesting she suffered from an abnormal heart rhythm that led to a fainting spell. It also explained why she had felt ill, he said.
At that point, her husband made his one and only public statement about the case, praising Berkland's "thoroughness and attention to detail" and adding, "He did a wonderful job in finding the right answers without rushing to make a quick diagnosis,"
But Klausutis' death occurred while the nation was caught up in speculation about the disappearance of Bureau of Prisons intern Chandra Levy and her ties to Rep. Gary Condit, D-Calif. Soon the stories merged in the public's mind, with some labeling Scarborough the Republican Condit (who was never charged with any crime).
Posts on such sites as Truthout and the liberal Daily Kos all but accused Scarborough of murder. Filmmaker Michael Moore talked about registering the domain name "JoeScarboroughKilledHisIntern.com." Rumors claimed her death had something to do with the 2000 election or 9/11 or that it had prompted Scarborough to resign from Congress two months afterward - although Scarborough had announced his resignation before her death. He married his second wife, a Jeb Bush fundraiser named Susan Waren, shortly after his September resignation took effect.
Scarborough, who writes occasional opinion columns for The Washington Post, declined to be interviewed. His fullest comments came in a 2005 letter to Vanity Fair protesting a suggestion he had been caught in "a sleazy sex scandal cover-up."
"Here are the facts," he wrote. "(1) Lori worked in my annex office in Okaloosa County, Florida. (2) I met her no more than three times; I was never alone with her. (3) I didn't leave Congress because of her death; I announced my retirement from Congress in May 2001 - she passed away several months later." The magazine apologized for "any emotional distress."
The "Scarborough scandal" picked up steam in 2012 thanks to an unrelated controversy involving Berkland, the medical examiner who had determined that Klausutis died from an accidental fall.
Berkland had failed to pay the rent on a storage unit he'd used for three years When opened, it turned out to hold more than 100 containers of human tissue, including brains, hearts and livers. Officials said the remains, kept in leaky cups and dinner boxes, were from private autopsies he had conducted, not ones he'd handled for the state.
Berkland, an osteopath, had somehow landed his Florida job despite being fired in Kansas in a dispute over his caseload and autopsy reports, including unproven allegations that he had fabricated some details. In 2003, he was fired from his Florida post for being slow to complete autopsy reports.
After the storage unit discovery, Berkland was arrested. Because this was his first criminal offense, he was eligible for a pre-trial intervention program. Upon its completion, prosecutors dropped the charges.
Despite Berkland's unrelated troubles, no evidence has emerged to contradict his findings in this case. "That thing has been scrutinized by a number of other pathologists, and it's a solid diagnosis," he said in an interview Sunday. "There's nothing to reopen."
Once Scarborough became a prominent critic of the Trump administration, the right picked up where the left had left off.
Trump, a president with a penchant for fanning the conspiratorial flames with fabricated allegations, seemed eager for something to use against Scarborough.
In a November 2017 tweet, the president asked when NBC would "terminate low ratings Joe Scarborough based on the 'unsolved mystery' that took place in Florida years ago? Investigate!"
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