The death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia yesterday has taken a turn for the conspiracy-theorist following comments from the Houston businessman who discovered the judge's body.
This is the news as it was delivered to the general public yesterday:
A federal official who asked not to be named said there was no evidence of foul play and it appeared that Scalia died of natural causes.
According to CNN, Scalia died in his sleep. A government official said Scalia went to bed Friday night and told friends he wasn't feeling well. Saturday morning, he didn't get up for breakfast. And the group he was with for a hunting trip left without him.
Someone at the ranch went in to check on him and found him unresponsive.
So - a sad death with the elderly judge passing quietly in his sleep - completely reasonable.
Except, as MySanAntonio reports, the "someone" was John Poindexter - owner of the 30,000-acre luxury ranch who is reported to have said the following...
"We discovered the judge in bed, a pillow over his head. His bed clothes were unwrinkled," said Poindexter.
"He was lying very restfully. It looked like he had not quite awakened from a nap," he said.
Scalia,79, did not have a pulse and his body was cold, and after consulting with a doctor at a hospital in Alpine, Poindexter concluded resuscitation would have been futile, He then contacted federal authorities, at first encountering a series of answering services because he was calling on a weekend.
While it is of course a "natural" thing to die if someone is suffocating you with a pillow, we sense that is not the norm for "natural causes."
Adding further to the questions surrounding the death, there will be no autopsy performed on Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a source familiar with the case confirmed to CNN.
The decision for no autopsy was made both by the family and the Texas Justice of the Peace, the source said.
Scalia’s death marks only the second time in sixty years a justice has died before retiring from the Court, and leaves the Court split 4-4 between fairly conservative and fairly liberal, during a heated presidential election year.