Newly released Justice Department files add sharp, unresolved details about the night Jeffrey Epstein died, from a guard’s pre-dawn internet searches to flagged bank deposits and unclear movements on surveillance video.

The records show that one of the correctional officers assigned to Jeffrey Epstein on the night he was found dead searched his name on a government computer minutes before his body was discovered. Those searches occurred at 5:42 a.m. and again at 5:52 a.m. on Aug. 10, 2019, and less than 40 minutes later another worker found Epstein hanging in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan.

New Department of Justice documents also reveal a July 30, 2019, $5,000 cash deposit flagged by the bank and reported to the FBI in a suspicious activity report months later. Chase Bank identified a pattern of cash deposits beginning in April 2018, and DOJ files include bank records showing seven cash deposits totaling $11,880 from December 2018 onward.

The guard tied to those searches and transactions is identified in the files as Tova Noel, who was one of two MCC workers accused of falsifying mandated 30-minute check records on Epstein. Both officers were fired, criminal charges were later dropped, and the files capture denials and gaps in memory during sworn interviews with DOJ investigators.

When investigators showed Noel the browser history, her response was “I don’t remember doing that.” Pressed again she said, “accurate. I don’t recall looking him up.” Those lines appear in the DOJ interview transcripts included with the forensic review of the Bureau of Prisons desktop computers.

The FBI’s forensic report spans 66 pages and covers the desktops used by Noel and her on-duty colleague, Michael Thomas. While Noel’s search history includes the predawn queries for Epstein, Thomas’s activity that night showed him looking at motorcycles online, not performing the required rounds on the Special Housing Unit tier.

The records indicate neither guard was completing the 30-minute welfare checks they were supposed to perform on the highest-profile inmate in federal custody. The two were later fired for falsifying records, yet criminal proceedings did not lead to convictions and the public still lacks answers about key movements and decisions that night.

The money trail adds another layer of questions. Noel owned a 2019 Land Rover Range Rover valued at about $62,000, and the bank’s suspicious activity report singled out the $5,000 deposit as the largest in a series of cash transactions. The FBI received the bank’s alert, but the files do not show a public explanation of where those funds came from.

The documents include an internal FBI briefing that says Noel was “likely the mysterious orange shape” seen in a grainy piece of surveillance footage near Epstein’s cell around 10:40 p.m. on Aug. 9. The briefing states, “At approximately 10:40 pm, a correctional officer, believed to be Tova Noel, carried linen or inmate clothing up to the L-Tier, last time any correctional officer approached the only entrance to the SHU tier.”

Noel told investigators she last saw Epstein “somewhere around after 10” and that the other guard on duty was sleeping between 10 p.m. and midnight. She also denied handing out linen and said she “never gave out linen” and did not know why extra linens were in Epstein’s cell, even though records show she began working in the SHU on July 7, 2019.

Asked outright whether she had any role in Epstein’s death, Noel answered simply, “No.” Her sworn testimony otherwise leans heavily on lapses of memory and claims that rounds were broadly falsified by staff, a statement that would implicate institutional failures if accurate or serve to diffuse individual responsibility if not.

The newly surfaced documents sharpen public questions rather than resolve them: a guard searching the inmate she was supposed to be watching shortly before his death, suspicious cash deposits flagged by a bank, and a pixelated figure carrying linen toward the tier that housed Epstein. Each detail deepens scrutiny of how the situation was handled and why so many answers remain missing.