Remember the “suicide” death of that Tom Cruise photo extortioner who supposedly hung himself while he was on house arrest? Everyone was saying it looked like a Church of Scientology job, not that uh, we would ever suggest that. The National Enquirer has the details of how the guy was found, and it sounds even more suspicious.

The shower stall where he hung himself was too low for him to have done the job properly and he would have had to bring his knees up under him to hang himself. Who commits suicide like that? Wouldn’t someone chose a more effective method than squatting to die if they were serious about it?

David Hans Schmidt, 47, was found hanged in the shower of his Phoenix home on Sept. 28 – after police were alerted that the court-ordered house arrest monitor he was wearing had gone silent..

He was just days away from pleading guilty – and faced two years in prison – when he was found dead.

Police sergeant Any Hill told The Enquirer that they were treating the case as a suicide.

But a bizarre detail could cast a cloud over the investigation.

“Schmidt had been hanging for at least a day when he was found, revealed an insider.

“And the shower stall was so low that to achieve the drop needed to hang himself, he had to bring his knees up under him, like he was squatting.

“It was such an unusual situation that some people have discussed the possibility of foul play.”

[From The National Enquirer, print edition, October 15, 2007]

Now this is pure speculation, not that we’re above that or anything, but if Schmidt was about to plead guilty for the Tom Cruise extortion case is it possible that details about the pictures could have been leaked? Is it reasonable to think that some information may get out as part of his plea bargain and that someone might have feared that?

So far all we know about the Tom Cruise photos were that they were of his wedding, but how valuable would regular non-scandalous wedding photos be after the fact? No one wants to see wedding candids of celebrities months afterward unless there’s something going on that the celebrities wouldn’t want to get out.

Schmidt is said to have a lot of other “powerful enemies,” so it’s possible that even if it was foul play there were any number of people or shady cult organizations that could have been behind it. It sounds like the case is going to be considered a suicide despite the odd nature of how the man was hung, and we will probably only have our active imaginations to fill in the details of how he died and who was responsible.

Speaking of imaginations, if someone was killed and then hung like that to make it look like a suicide how would you do it? Would you smother them with a pillow so there aren’t marks and then hang them up with their knees under them so that it looks like they were asphyxiated that way? Did this guy even get an autopsy? It doesn’t sound like it.

Header image via The Bosh.