Best Bitter

Me: Cait's been busy: I'll let her tell about the New York Times story that I couldn't mention until now (This will also appear in the NYT Magazine this Sunday I think - the investigative journalism is SO interesting and shows what real journalism can still look like)

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cait oppermann: What I’ve been working on (in secret) for the last month and a half: A NYT Magazine exclusive investigation on Jeffrey Epstein’s death.

Images:

-Dr. Baden, private medical examiner hired by Jeffrey Epstein’s brother, Mark Epstein, who speculated his injuries were more consistent with homicide.�-Bill Mersey in his home, a former inmate at MCC assigned as a psychological companion to Epstein.

-Mike Tisdale, another former inmate at MCC who was also assigned as a psychological observer to Epstein.

-Robert Adams, former corrections officer at MCC who interacted with Epstein during his last weeks.

-process, ephemera, context, the modern-day clipping

This story includes tireless reporting by a team of NYT reporters, one of whom I got to witness conduct an interview. The NYT team created some incredible visual accompaniments to the story which add so much more clarity and understanding to visualizing this place and what may or may not have happened there. More than anything else, I’m always grateful for the opportunity to work on stories like this that matter and have real reasons to be shared with the public.��Thank you so much to the NYT Magazine team for consistently sending me down difficult but important roads like this one. Thank you to Allison for assisting on the portraits of Dr. Baden, thank you Cassie for spending days running around New York at odd hours under odd circumstances and being exactly the right person for that. Thank you, Hannah and the NYTM photo team for the commission and faith.

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Memorial Day 2026

We were at my parents’ house and Mother asked if my brother and I wanted our beat up green footlockers and I said sure but didn’t Dad want them and Dad said why would I want them they’re not mine. And I said what do you mean they’re not yours? Didn’t you bring them home from the navy? And Dad said haven’t you heard of the colors ARMY green and NAVY blue and I said oh, well then whose footlockers are they? And then I said oh no they’re the army man’s who lived next door? The guy who died in Vietnam? And I said Jesus I wrote my name on it. Why did you let me write my name on it? And why did you let me use it as a toy box?

And Dad said the soldier wouldn’t have minded that you wrote your name on it. He had little boys and he liked you with your little girl pink-ness and strollers filled with dolls. He was always glad to see you when you came out to play. It’s ok. And Dad said those footlockers were hardly in Vietnam before they came back home and I said what do you mean he’d been there for years and Dad said no he’d only been there for two weeks.

And I said well I just got this story so wrong. I thought the footlockers were Dad’s and I thought the army man had been there for years and I thought he was a captain or a Green Beret or someone important. And Dad said no he was just a kid. And he was killed so early into the war that it was noteworthy. I remember all of us neighbors talking about him. You know---one dead out of a thousand was something; one dead out of 58,000 was just a number.

And somehow this makes it all worse. It’s been decades since that army man died and I was just a little girl and it’s OK that I got his story so wrong. But it doesn’t feel OK. It seems as if I should have gotten his last story right and known that he was younger than my youngest is now. I should have known that he wasn’t a battle-weary and war-scarred veteran.

I should have known that he’d just gotten to that jungle across the world. The footlocker had barely arrived in Vietnam before it was sent back home again. Still today I can read the number 131091 so clearly written in black marker. I look at the date written and realize that this footlocker had served in the 1940s and again in the 1960s. The footlocker had a longer life than my friend the army man next door.

And I thought did the footlocker come home next to his body or did they just load up a bunch of them? Did they have a plane just for bodies and another one for footlockers? Or had we not yet gotten that good at the logistics of returning dead boys and their boots and bibles?

And I said I got most of this story wrong but I know that his wife came over all the time didn’t she? And my mom said yes she came over because she was young with two little boys who liked to play army. She had no family around and so she got the boys bathed and tucked into bed and then she’d knock at our door late at night. We’d drink coffee and talk about the boy who was sitting around a campfire when a sniper shot him in the head.