One of them pointed out that for a sociopath, even a delay in legal proceedings could be sufficient benefit to commit murder, and pointed out that that's what accused murderer Alex Murdaugh's alleged motive was. Another pointed out that Ivana could have had damaging information. Someone else wondered how often people die in falls where the cause of death is said to be "blunt force trauma to the torso" as opposed to e.g. the head or neck.
I then tried googling to find out if anyone has actually tried to assemble a real conspiracy theory about the death, but I didn't find anything. One of the hits was a 5 minute youtube video that said that social media was "abuzz" with conspiracy theories about her death, but I watched the whole video and there was only one quote of one social media comment saying that it might not have been an accident.
Interesting how with Vince Foster's suicide, a large contingent of right wingers couldn't shut up about how he had actually been murdered by the Clintons. But here, there's not a peep.
Anyway, I'm just a person who likes complete information. As you might have seen from my previous posts, I understand that coincidences happen, but I also think it's a bit too dismissive to simply say "that was a coincidence" when something improbable has happened for which there might be other explanations.
Yes, sometimes "coincidence" is clearly the best (and only) answer right at the outset -- if the only other explanation is that something supernatural has occurred, or that there was a conspiracy among hundreds of only-loosely-related people, then "coincidence" simply has to be the right answer. That's the answer to conspiracy theories about the moon landing, the government's role in 9-11, the JFK assassination, the Pearl Harbor attack, and who wrote Shakespeare, to name just a few.
But we're not there yet in Ivana's case -- there are "non-accidental" explanations for Ivana's death that do not require supernatural intervention or a vast conspiracy. That doesn't make them right; all I'm saying is that one needs to look at all the evidence and then decide which theory is better -- the "coincidence" theory, or the "other explanation" theory.
As just about everyone knows, it's possible to convict somebody for a crime even under the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard based on circumstantial evidence alone. That's because circumstantial evidence can be used to persuade a jury that innocence is not a reasonable explanation, given the number of coincidences that would have to have occurred to support it. To be sure, our prosecutors and courts do not do a great job with circumstantial evidence; we've seen too many convictions, including of people on death row, overturned when the "real evidence," like DNA evidence, exonerates them. But the basic point remains the same -- it is possible to make judgments based on circumstantial evidence, which basically means you're rejecting the "coincidence" explanation. If you think OJ Simpson killed his ex-wife, you are rejecting the "coincidence" theory on the basis of your view of the circumstantial evidence.
The facts here do seem to warrant a police investigation. Suppose the dead person actually was young and in perfect health, and one of her relatives was deeply in debt, a known sociopath, and stood to inherit a large sum of money from her death. That would presumably warrant a thorough investigation, even if there was no sign of obvious foul play or forced entry. Here, the facts differ only in matters of degree, so I'd think an investigation of some kind should be conducted.
Encouragingly, the Washington Post indicates that New York police "began an investigation." So they probably know answers to most of the questions I'm going to ask already, but they haven't shared them with us. (The article goes on to say they "found no sign of forced entry or obvious sign of trauma suggesting criminality"; one can hope that doesn't mean they stopped investigating.)
Questions I would want answers to:
1. Who called the police? Googling yields a quote, apparently from the police report, that the police came in response to a 911 call from an "unaided caller". I have no idea what that means. Could it have been intended to mean unID'd as in unidentified? What are we to make of that?
2. The reports that I have seen don't say whether anyone else was at the scene when the police arrived. As noted above, the police found no sign of forced entry, but how does that line up with the fact that there was a caller? We can try to speculate to put the pieces together -- maybe the caller was someone who knew her and discovered the body and called the police and was there when they arrived, but the reports don't confirm or exclude that possibility. But for all we know, the caller was there when it happened.
4. The police reported that she was found unconscious and also that she pronounced dead at the scene. I can't tell if that means she was alive but unconscious when they arrived, or if "unconscious" includes "possibly dead" but you have wait for a doctor to actually pronounce the person dead.
5. Just when was the time of death? Can we figure out when the accident occurred? Can we figure out how long she might have lived after she fell? Whether she was necessarily unconscious from the time of the fall to her death? Can one tell whether she moved herself after falling? Did she have her cell phone on her? Did she normally have her cell phone on her around the house? I've put all these questions together because they might lead in different directions; but part of the point is that if you fall down the stairs and experience trauma but haven't hit your head, you might be conscious enough to call 911 yourself if you have your phone, or to drag yourself to a phone if you don't.
6. What sort of shape was Ivanka in? She was former ski instructor, and is said to have been an alternate for the Czech team at the 1972 Winter Olympics in Japan (although snopes.com couldn't confirm this). Obviously, 73 is a somewhat advanced age, but the elderly people that I've known that have been seriously hurt in falls have been in their 80s. So the question is whether Ivanka was an "old 73" or a young one. Rich people are often able to keep themselves in better shape as they age, and have more to live for, so without knowing any more I'd guess she was in better-than-average shape. But medical conditions don't always respect wealth, so she may well have been predisposed to falling. We just don't have enough information to know at this point.
7. How far down the stairs did she fall? Was there any sign of anything she might have tripped over?
8. Echoing the Washington Post comment, how often do people die of blunt trauma to the torso, in falls or otherwise?
9. Did she have balance problems, had she fallen before?
10. Were there any drugs/alcohol in her system or evidence of drug/alcohol use? Obviously if she were some kind of alcoholic, the fall might not be so unexpected. But if there were drugs in her system that she didn't knowingly ingest, that could be a different story.
11. What was her relationship with Donald Trump like? I see from this People magazine piece that she continued to have good access during his Presidency, and that she gave him advice on his tweets, although after the election, she noted that he was a "sore loser" and looked forward to her kids moving on with their lives. This could cut both ways of course: the closer she was to him, the more damaging information she might have; but then again, if he actually liked and esteemed her, that cuts against him having her killed.
12. Did Ivana have information that could have been damaging to Donald?
13. Is anyone doing an analysis to attempt to determine whether she accidentally fell or was pushed down the stairs? Here's an example of an attempt to do that, although I have no idea whether the person's ultimate conclusions were accepted.
Of course, even if the answers to these questions make the "other explanation" more probable than coincidence, that still doesn't mean "coincidence" isn't the explanation, since improbable coincidences happen all the time. And we haven't even gotten around to considering arguments from the other side -- e.g., isn't pushing someone down the stairs a particularly stupid way to try to kill someone, given the good chances that they might survive?
Regardless, the answers to these questions should either (1) lead to more evidence that supports another explanation, or (2) lead nowhere, in which case we probably just have to accept the coincidence explanation.
No matter how much one dislikes the Trump children, one has to acknowledge that the death of a parent -- whether unexpected or expected -- is always hard. As a fellow human being, my sympathy goes out to them.
