The Doris Duke Case, with Peter Lance: Part 1

Did billionaire heiress and socialite Doris Duke get away with murder in 1966? In the first part of this week's two-part episode, the guys join award-winning investigative journalist Peter Lance to explore what led him to dive into this decades-old cold case -- and learn how his discoveries led to a new investigation in the modern day.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show.

(00:25):
My name is Matt, my name is Noel. They called
me Ben when you're joined as always with our super
producer Paul mission controlled decads. Most importantly, you are you,
You are here, and that makes this the stuff they
don't want you to know. It's long been acknowledged folks
in both the US and abroad, that the wealthy and
the well connected get away with more than the average person.

(00:47):
Laws and theory apply to everyone, yet in practice we
see that members of society's upper echelons often escape the
consequences of their crimes. This is a two part series,
and in this two part series, we're diving deep into
a story we mentioned in an earlier Listener Mail series.
It's the story of tobacco heiress Doris Duke, who on

(01:08):
October seven, fatally struck her employee Eduardo Terrella with a
motor vehicle and what she initially claimed was an accident.
And that's just scraping the surface of this lurid tale.
Today we are uncovering the real series of events, and
good news, we're not diving in alone. We are joined
by the world's pre eminent expert on the Doris Duke case,

(01:32):
the award winning journalist, screenwriter, and author Peter Lance, who
earlier this year published new evidence that profoundly challenges the
official narrative. Peter, thank you so much for joining us
on air today. Peter. Great to be with you, guys.
I I heard your first initiation of this story and
I was thrilled that you wanted to come back and

(01:53):
do a back to back episode. So let's get into it. Yeah,
don't bury the lead there. This is going to be
part one of a two parter, with the first part
largely dealing with some of the background and some of
your original research into this case, and then part two
digging into sort of bringing it up to the present
and the new information that's been uncovered. So yeah, let's
dive right in. Would it be okay just for the

(02:15):
purposes of people who maybe didn't hear our listener male
segment or just are unaware of this, maybe set the
scene with who doors Duke is? Who EDWARDO Terrella just
let's set up who these characters are and maybe the time, Okay.
In nineteen sixty six, Doris Duke was the richest woman
in America, third richest in the world after Queen Elizabeth

(02:36):
and Queen Juliana of the Netherlands. She was a fabulously
wealthy heiress to American Tobacco Company, which produced Lucky Strike cigarettes,
Alcoa aluminum, and Duke Power, which is now called Duke Energy.
She was as as a young little girl really uh,
I think at the age of twelve she inherited a
massive fortune from her father, who on his deathbed said,

(02:59):
try no one, Doris, and as a result, she was
notoriously paranoid. Over the years she became notoriously jealous um
with a violent temper and uh. She had five four
estates in a Park Avenue apartment of Duke Farms in
New Jersey, Acres, Rough Point in Newport, Rhode Island, the

(03:20):
scene of the crime in this case, Falcon Lair in
Beverly Hills, Benedict Canyon, which is the old Rudolph Valentino estate,
and Shangri La in Honolulu Diamond Head, which is an
Islamic theme to state. So she was incredibly powerful, incredibly wealthy,
and for years, seven years prior to this incident in

(03:41):
the fall of nineteen Eduardo Terrella was her principal art
curator and designer. He had residences and all of her
estates he designed. She never bought a work of art
without consulting him. They traveled all over the world. He
was her constant companion. Happened to be gay. I did
not know this when I first started to do the
look into the story, but he was a war hero.

(04:03):
He won the Bronze Star in the Battle of the
Bulge Uh and he was an incredible renaissance man. Started
as a song and dance man, ended up designing hats,
designing clothing, went to Beverly Hill, Sax Fifth Avenue, and
then eventually got into movie design and became very close
to Sharon Tate, Kim Novak, Liz Taylor, Richard Burton. And

(04:24):
he was on literally on the precipice of a new
career at the age of forty two, when minutes after
he told Doris he was leaving her, she crushed him
to death under the wheels of a Twuton Dodge Polaria
station wagon now now Peter. The initial thing that one
might think, is he's leaving me he was her lover,
that there was some you know, chemistry going on that department.

(04:46):
But it was very clear that he was gay. Was
he closeted gay? Was it was there a presumption that
he was her lover? Did she think of him that
way or was this just literally like an abandonment issue
kind of thing. Good question? Uh, well, he was very
di slighted ly gay. Had a partner, Edmund Carra, who
was a very prominent sculptor on the West coast. In fact,

(05:06):
Doris had been out to visit them. They had a
place up by Big Sir as well as in l A.
She hired Edmund. She knew Edmund. She was not jealous
of him, but she had a voracious sexual appetite for
men and women. Uh and she after my vanity fair piece.
Ran I was contacted by a gentleman who was a
big game hunter in the Himaliyas and incredible guy ninety

(05:28):
years old, sounded on the phone like he was sixty.
And he told me that he was her lover. After
this happened for like seven months in Hawaii, and that
in pittle of talk one night he asked her about this,
and she basically said, and he said, I'll never forget this. Uh,
he got what was coming to him, nobody two times me.
That was a direct quote from him. So we don't

(05:49):
know what was in her head, how much he may
have coveted at warda who was handsome, had movie star looks,
you know. Uh and uh. But anyway to answer your question,
and we don't really know what her motive was except possession.
I'll tell you briefly. Her common law husband, uh, Joe Castro,
Joseph Arman Castro, is a brilliant jazz pianist and bandleader.

(06:13):
They were together for almost ten years common law, and
two years before this happened, well one night and they
had a tumultuous booze and and barbiturates field relationship or
a roller coaster for many years. One night she's playing
a little something on the jazz piano in Falcon Layer
and he made a crack and she got a butcher
knife and slashed his arm a hundred and fifties stitches

(06:35):
for just a little comment about her piano playing. And
they she covered that one up. He never went to
the hospital, never went to the police, and she got
away with that, So that'll give you an idea of
her sense of power and entitlement when it led up
to this event. So clearly, just with that understanding of
maybe Doris's character a bit that she could do something
like that and not get in trouble with it, it

(06:56):
kind of casts light on the way, at least I
personally think about this incident right with with Eduardo, how
was it viewed when this when this all went down? Initially,
what was the official story of what occurred? Okay, how
about if I tell the somewhat of a summary of
the actual event itself, and then later in the one

(07:19):
or the next hour, so we can get into the
real details of what I ultimately uncovered. So there's the
phony story that was presented by the police, and then
there's what really happened, as I determined. So what what
happened was that Doris and Eduardo were driving out of
the estate. He had asked her to rent a station wagon,

(07:40):
ostensible ostensibly to uh, you know, pick up some artwork
and move it down to his mother's house in New Jersey.
Didn't want to tell her right away that he was
leaving her. In fact, he'd been warned all his friends
don't do it, do it by phone? You know, he
literally was. He had just done a movie with Taylor
and Burton called The Sandpiper. He made the equip one
I think of three eight thousand dollars the year before

(08:03):
in in modern dollars. He had twenty more years of
like career ahead of him. He was on fire and
he did the next film he did, Sharon Tate was
in uh called Don't Make Waves. They were very close, ironically,
so anyway, he uh. She wanted to pick up this
thing called the Reliquary of st Ursula, which is a
very interesting thing. It's a it's a statue of a woman,

(08:25):
a bust of a woman who was a saint, a
famous saint in the Middle Ages, with a with a relic.
It's a kind of a Catholic thing, you know, they
revere bones of saints. We do. I I used to
be a Catholic anyway. And so they were going to
get this reliquary that she had actually bought a year before.
It had been restored and they were going out to
pick it up at the antique store in town so

(08:45):
that Eduardo could give it his impromatur and nihilobsta, you know,
like this is worthy of getting okay, and so literally
minutes before and I interviewed a servant at the place
that they got into a wicked fight, which is classic
Newport for a big fight. Uh and uh. So they
get into this wagon and Wardo was driving out of
the estate. Her estate, rough Point had these massive iron gates.

(09:07):
They were twelve feet tall wrought iron. Each one was
seven ft wide. They were freely swinging, but they had
a stop at the bottom that kept them so that
they would not swing out where they would swing inward.
So he pulls the wagon. He's in the driver's seat,
she's in the shotgun seat, and they pull it up
to like fifteen feet before the gate, plenty of room

(09:28):
for him to get out. So he got out of
the vehicle. And then they kept it wrapped with a
chain during the day. He just didn't even get a
chance to unravel the chain. When she basically committed four
intentional acts, she slid over behind the wheel. She then
uh released the parking break by hand, and this is
a very important element. She then put it into gear.
It was on the wheel gearshift. She shifted from park

(09:50):
to drive, and then she slammed down on the accelerator
with such force that it caused tire with gouge marks
in the gravel driveway behind her. And then he hears
the noise and he turns and she just goes out. Uh. Now,
I might as well tell you what really happened, and
then we can tell what they said happened. None in
this way, I think to tell you the truth. So

(10:12):
what happened was he went up on the hood of
the car, which is something that's a phenomena that that
people do when their cars approaching to save their lives.
It's like a lizard braid instinct if he can't go
left or white. So he literally jumped up on the
hood of the car. He's staring at her through the windshield,
holding on. He broke his right hip, but he was
otherwise alive and well. She then burst through the gates.

(10:35):
Now here's the key. There are two more intentional acts
after this. She burst through the gates and then suddenly,
for unknown reasons, she taps the brakes. The car decelerates
and comes to a slight skip of a stop. He
rolls off onto Bellevue Avenue. The millionaires row in front
of her estate eighty foot wide street and he's hurt,

(10:56):
he's calling out, and she decides. You know, how many
moments did she, you know, take We don't know, but
within short order she decided to commit and she just
drove over him and dragged him across Bellevue Avenue. The
car mounted a curb, knocked down twenty ft of post
and rail fence, and smashed against a tree literally so

(11:17):
that it was parallel to rough point across the street.
And he was dead, dead, dead under the rear axle.
She was the only living witness. The police essentially wrapped
it up in ninety six hours with her as the
only witness. And we can get into the details of
the cover up later on. And basically they just declared
an unfortunate accident despite the fact as I as I

(11:38):
later found, the chief accident investigator for the department, Sergeant
Fred Newton, who later became chief, determined within moments after
he began investigating after the crash that she committed intent
to kill homicide. But because they were going to cut
her a deal and what I call a murderous quid
pro quo and led her off for these charges, uh,

(11:59):
he had to change. He had to alter the official
police report, which ultimately I got it was like the
great white whale of my the ark of the covenant
of my investigation. But anyway, that was That's essentially what happened.
But they claimed falsely she crushed him against the gates. Okay,
that was the claim she claimed in a very short interview.

(12:20):
The only interview she did was like, uh, four questions,
five answers in her bedroom three days after the incident
took place. She said, oh, you know he got out.
We had done this a hundred times before. Also untrue.
I'll tell you why. And uh, I slid behind the
wheel and suddenly I was on him as if like
the cart like took over like Christine and a Stephen

(12:41):
King novel with a life of its own, and just
drove forward. And then I was on him like that.
That was it on the basis of that. But in
order for that to fly, he had to have been
crushed against the gate. But as we'll see when we
get into this later, when I got forensic evidence, autopsy reports,
pictures of the gates, I found two of using photographers
in their progeny who helped to get me these photographs

(13:04):
that have been missing for years. You'll see that we'll
see that. Essentially, there was no blood on the gates,
there was no damage to the gates. There are photographs
of the gates with Sergeant Newton in the foreground like
moments after it happened, working the scene. There's no blood,
there's no trail of blood. But the first officer on
the scene, Edward Angel, who I'll talk about, found blood

(13:24):
and skin in the middle of Bellevue Avenue exactly where
EDWARDA would have been when she, you know, ran over him.
So that essentially I had a major accident investigator named
harm Jansen who works for a principal company in Elsa Gundo,
California that does this kind of work, and he just
was so intrigued. He did a probably ten thousand dollars

(13:45):
of free research and he said to me, look, if
it had been a single sequence events, he would have lived.
I said, what's that? A single sequence events that he
goes up on the hood, she blows to the gates,
keeps on going, he bounces off. There's nothing to impale
him on on the other side of this straight he
would have lived with a broken hip. A double sequence
events is what happened. She tapped the brakes, then he

(14:06):
rolled off and then she dragged him to his death.
All the injuries to his body is fatal injuries our
upper body, and all the damage to the gate is
lower gate and none of it suggests anything like he
was crushed against the gates. This is something that really
stood out to me reading your work, especially that that
moment you just described that doesn't match her official explanation. Uh,

(14:28):
foot slipping and hitting the wrong pedal. Maybe that happens once,
But the idea that there's the pause and then there's
more acceleration, I think is in no small part damning.
And you made a fantastic point, uh that that I
found pretty disturbing, which was about how not just contemporary
reports and law enforcement, but even later biographers seemed to

(14:52):
consciously downplay or ignore this death. And there's there's this
really um disquieting thing you point out, which is that
very shortly after to death, Doris Duke begins making massive
amounts of donations to the city of Newport and just

(15:16):
openly connect the dots for our audience here, I feel
like I'm asking an obvious question, But Peter, what makes
these donations so suspicious? Well, first of all, she gave
ten thousand dollars and you can multiply that by eight
to get the current dollar figure. Okay, so like the
effectively eighty thousand dollars to Newport Hospital. Why did she

(15:40):
do that? Well, you're not gonna believe this, but it's true.
The county medical examiner, Philip ce McAlister, who was an
Irish immigrant of war veteran, a wonderful man who happened
to be my family doctor. Okay, this is how small
a town Newport is, had no idea. I had no
idea that he did this. He literally the night of
it was his job to determine the cause of death.

(16:02):
He allowed himself to go on her payroll, and so
he stuck her in a room. He locked her away
at Newport Hospital in a private room and the near
the I c U, so that state investigators, who were
duty bound to interview anyone uh behind the wheel in
a vehicular homicide could not get to her. In fact,
they didn't get to her until that interview in the

(16:23):
bedroom I told you about a few days later, And
they weren't even told when it was gonna happen. They
got there at the very end, and Louis Parati, one
of the surviving investigators told me he's eight six. The
fix was in by the time we got there, So
you know, that's that part of the story. Uh. And
so then she had Newport. If you've been to Newport
at all, Millionaires Row Bellevue Avenue, this incredible street behind

(16:46):
it on the water side is the thing called the
cliff Walk. There's a beautiful pedestrian walkway. It's one of
the top tourist attractions in New England and for years
Doris had tried to block it off with chain link fences.
She had been in litigation at the City of Newport
because she was so paranoid. She had vicious dogs in
her state that were constantly mauling people. Okay, so within

(17:08):
I don't know how many days, I think eight days
after this event, she gave the equivalent of several hundred
thousand dollars to restore the cliff Walk. So I call
it a murderous quid pro quote. She basically bought her
way out of murder charges. The police chief, Joe Radissy,
who we can talk about, later retired to Florida, bought
two condos and a new building, even though his last

(17:30):
salary was seven thousand dollars a year. The lieutenant who
interviewed her in the bedroom was promoted to chief over
the captain of detectives. Another guy at present was promoted
to to sergeant. Even Fred Newton was promoted to lieutenant,
although I believe he was absolutely honest about his appraisal
of what happened, and eventually he became chief. But everybody

(17:52):
got sort of taken care of in the food chain
in Newport, Rhode Island and the upper echelons of law enforcement,
and uh, and Doris just skated. And however, and this
is you know, you can you can prompt us with
a question. The family of Eduardo. He was the youngest
of nine children in this wonderfully middle class Italian American

(18:13):
family in Dover, New Jersey. And he his eight brothers
and you know, five sisters and three brothers asked Doris
to settle with them for his wrongful death. You can imagine.
And why not. So they asked for six hundred thousand
dollars multiply that time eight. She refused. She They then
went down to two hundred thousand. She refused. This is

(18:35):
at a time when she was making one million dollars
a week in interest on her money. She could stand
in the corner of a room for a week, do nothing,
and be a million dollars richer. And she refused, forcing
them to follow a wrongful death case in Providence five
years later, after which she had restored a number of
more than seventy colonial era houses that saved Newport from

(18:56):
bankruptcy after the Navy had begun to pull out. The
report was on the verge of bankruptcy, and Doris comes
in moves these colonial houses around to the point where
Amistad was shot in Newport. That's how beautiful this town
is from in the colonial era that she was responsible for.
And by the time the wrongful death at trial happens,

(19:16):
she's found civilly liable for his death. And guess what
when they get to the damage phase, how much she
owes his family. Seventy five thousand dollars was the total,
and after the lawyers took their cut, each brother and
sister got fifty six hundred and twenty dollars for the
death of this remarkable man. Well, he was a remarkable man.

(19:37):
I mean you're talking about how he was going to
kind of sprinting his own wings, kind of going his
own way. It was going to become a big consultant
behind Hollywood in the motion picture industry. Um, he was
making a lot of money on his own outside of
Doris and that relationship. And I think you mentioned in
the Vanity Fair Peace in any way, Um, that that
calculation from his family was based on how much money

(19:59):
he would have continue to generate during his life. So
it wasn't even like a cash grab or some kind
of like greedy thing at all, exactly. Although here's here's
a very interesting thing. I'm jumping ahead, guys, But Doris,
you use the term hoggio hagiography in your last broadcast,
which is a term I found that it was very appropriate,
which is the reverence of certain figures as if they're

(20:21):
religious figures. Hog giography, Right, you clean up after somebody,
after whatever evil they've wrought in their lives, and suddenly
they're up on Mount Olympus. Well, Doris, during her lifetime
she was such a controversial and troubled figure. She hired minions,
She had private investigators, lawyers, press flax that would go
in and clean up after her. Example, the photograph that

(20:43):
was in the Daily News the next day, which shows
the underside of the vehicle was missing from the archives
of the Newport Daily News when I went to find it,
that one negative was missing for reasons we can discuss later. Uh.
The entire transcript of the wrongful death trial missing from
Rne Island judicial archives. The only way I was able
to piece together the trial was from press clippings and

(21:04):
from the appellate record, which I was able to get.
But the actual transcript, with the photographs of the tired
gauge marks and all that other stuff gone. So she
would regularly have these people go and just remove things
and and literally, you know, get away with murder in
the case of Joe Castro, get away with an attempt
to kill murder. We're gonna pause for a word from

(21:27):
our sponsor and we'll return with more on door stew
from Peter Lance. And we've returned one thing that I
think we need to emphasize Peter this story. Something really
disturbs me about it is. Uh, this story may not

(21:49):
have come to light ever without your work, and I
believe it will be helpful for us to explore a
bit of your personal genesis of exploration here. So, Uh,
folks may not know, but you, you and I were
talking off are you actually began your reporting career less
than a year after this incident occurred, and you're you know,

(22:13):
you're in the region, you are connected with this. The
question that I think is on a lot of people's
minds is what inspired you or what drove you five
decades later to dive into this story and how did
you start putting these pieces together? I mean, just learning
about your process almost makes me visualize one of those

(22:37):
old school like crime boards with the red string connecting
one thing to another, Like, how how did this come about?
I'd be really curious to learn. That's a great question.
And the reason I put the wrote the book in
the first person is I wanted to explain that question.
I mean, what kind of person, after fifty years, goes
back to try and examine a case like this, financing

(22:58):
the investigation essentially on my credit cards? I mean I
didn't get an advance for a book. I didn't you know,
no one was like helping me out when I did
this initial investigation. Uh and so, But I was a
young cub reporter. I always wanted to be a newsman.
I talked about this in the book. From the moment
I was throwing copies of papers on porches at the
age of ten. Uh. And then in the nineteen sixty seven,

(23:20):
I was an undergraduate at Northeastern University in Boston. They
had this program called co op and for six months
the first summer, from June to December, I learned the
craft of journalism. You know, how do you write a
five point lead? How do you like read upside down
when the cops don't want to show you the accident report?
You know that? How do you interview people? How do
you get people to tell you things, etcetera. Now, because

(23:42):
I was a local boy at Towny, I had grown
up there, that helped a lot. My mother was the
deputy clerk of the Superior Court, a total rosie, the
riveter of the law and never even went to college
a little long had a law degree, but she was
so good at it that they kept her throughout the
sixties and seventies. Everybody knew her. Uh, And so I
was you know, I had a good support system in Newport.

(24:04):
So the first year and I and I got a
chance to cover the America's cup races, the jazz and
folk festivals. I mean Newport for a town of it
was then forty six thousand people when the ships were
in before the Navy left. Now it's like more like
twenty six thousand. But back in those days, it was
an incredibly small space that had all kinds of international

(24:24):
events happening all the time. So I cut my teeth
on some amazing news stories and national and international news
stories while I was learning the job. But eight months
when I got there in June, the whole town is buzzing. Oh,
Doris Stukes, you got away with murder. And I was
a freshman in college at the time. I was focusing
on that. I didn't really know much about it, and

(24:46):
and so that stuck in my crops. The second summer,
I actually did a four part expose on slum housing
in Newports, substandard housing, because I grew up like within
a hundred yards of this e an African American community,
one of the oldest in America. Many descendants of enslaved
people still lived there, and this neighborhood had been thriving

(25:08):
until the eighteen fifties and eventually, with Jim Crow, etcetera,
had deteriorated into essentially a ghetto, and the black kids
from my grammar school, which was right across the street
when I was in the sixth grade. Some conservative naval
officer got on the committee and Jerry, manager of the
school district. So all the black kids had to go
to an inferior school six blocks south, and you know,

(25:30):
the white kids from way far away, the doctors and
lawyers and the sons of daughters of the slum lawyers
could go to this good school, right, So that kind
of stuck with me. So the second summer I was there,
I decided to do an expose on slum housing and
it got printed in the Daily News four part series
and they won this award called the Savelle and Brown
Award given by the New England ap managing editors. No

(25:53):
paper under a hundred thousand had ever won. At The
Boston Globe came in third, and the Daily News sold
fifteen thousand copies day. And I just found out the
year after we won that award they changed the rules
that said only a hundred thousand circulation papers could participate.
But it really shook up the town it created, and
it had a wild effect, believe it or not, on

(26:15):
Doris Duke's restoration work, which I talked about in the book.
But they set up a community housing Corporation to build
houses like Habitat for Humanity for the people that lived there.
They set up an Escoro fund. The first night of
the series ran uh and it really had an impact.
So that really defined my career as an investigative reporter.
I thought, if I could achieve something like that in

(26:37):
a local town at that age, what else could I do?
And that really is why I became decided to become
an investigative reporter for the rest of my career. Now, Peter,
we look up to you a lot. It's pretty obvious.
We we all make true crime shows, we've all kind
of individually worked on true crime podcasts and I p
and just the fact that you know, you've you've learned

(26:59):
some much you've been on these kinds of investigations. One
of the hardest things that I personally have found it
maybe Ben and all you guys have found this too,
is trying to get information out of officers of the law.
And it's often because they, you know, for one reason
or another, they can't or won't speak to a certain

(27:20):
you know, investigation. How How did you get information? How
have you kind of navigated getting information from police officers
and from police departments? Well, I began with a blank slate. Essentially.
I decided in the summer of eighteen, I had just
finished adapting my last two Harper Collins books into a
ten hour scripted dramatic series. My mid career was in Hollywood.

(27:44):
We can talk about that later, uh, And I happen
to see a rerun of the Trump's statement on CNN.
You know, I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and
not lose any votes. Being a light bulb went off
and I went tors S Duke, you know. And I
had always kind of wanted to get into it, and
I never had the skill or the time to do it.
My life got in the way, you know. So I
just decided to start. And there was a Facebook group

(28:05):
but dedicated still is Facebook group called if you grew
up in Newport, Rhode Island, Share Some Memories had then
had ten thousand, five hundred members, and every three or
four months, a guy named Larry Bettencourt, a member of
the group who now has his own group, would like
post crash photos of the of the Eduardo Terrella crime
scene death scene. And so I started mining that group.

(28:29):
I I kind of came out and saying, Hey, I'm
Peter Lance, I'm a newporter. I'm like, I'm trying to
find out. And because it was a legend still to
this day, it's a legend. Every time people have friends
from out of town and they take them around the
Ocean Drive past Bellevue Avenue. They waxed eloquent about this
incident that Doris Duke get away with murder. Everybody believes
it in the town, but no one had ever really

(28:50):
tried to prove it one way or the other. And
I and I want to start by saying, I never
ever set out with a goal as an investigator. I
don't say, Okay, I want to prove it Doris did this.
That's fatal to any investigation. As you guys know, once
you do that, you start excluding evidence that might be exculpatory.
So I just let the Luigi Board of Investigation take

(29:10):
me where it will. And in the case, in this case,
several about four really important police officers who had worked
the case and who knew fragments of the story but
didn't know the whole story opened up to me. Uh.
One officer was called Detective al Conti. He did not
work the case, but he was a celebrated detective who

(29:32):
got millions of dollars and jewelry the stolen on Bellevue
Avenue recovered over there. He helped me try to get
the police report that had been quote missing for years,
and I knew that the police department had it, but
they denied it. He helped me with that, and most importantly,
he put me together with Edward Angel and Edny Angel
was the first officer on the scene that night, who

(29:52):
is the one that found the skin in the blood
in the middle of Bellevue And he's the one that
told me Fred Newton's theory of the crash, and that
was a crucial piece. Another officer, William Waterson. Bill Waterson
interviewed Dorris briefly at Newport Hospital where they took her
before she got locked away. Uh. He then went back
to the scene and he found Eduardo's passport under the vehicle.

(30:13):
Uh he and he described the injuries that Doris at
that point had when he saw in the hospital as
steering wheel injuries, like as if you you know, prior
to seatbelts and restraints, you know what would happen if
you hit your head on the steering wheel, you know,
a cut lip, a bruised nose. Uh. And then another officer,
Norman Mather, has retired in Florida. These these men are

(30:35):
all retired. He told me that he was there that
night and when the chief arrived, Chief Radissy, he literally said, okay, Mather,
you go right it up, you know, go back and
write it up. So he goes back to the police station.
But the last vision he had was the chief arm
in arm with Doris walking into rough point. Now is
that when the deal was cut? We don't know. We

(30:56):
weren't there. But what happened when he got to the
headquarters he was type up to, you know, the report
in triplicate, as was the case back then, you know,
carbon paper in between the pages, and all of a
sudden another sergeant ripped it out of machine, you know,
crumpled it up and threw it in the waste pass basket, saying,
the chief has this now. And the next day this

(31:16):
guy who was then a proby a probationary officer who
could have been fired at any time, went in and
knocked on the chief's door and said, Chief, what's going on?
He said, mother, this is my case, and I get
the hell out of here. And basically don't let the
door hit you on your way out kind of thing.
And that was you know, that was his contribution to
the story. So many of these people were important. Uh,

(31:36):
and we're gonna get at the I'm sure we're gonna
get by the end of this first hour to this
new living witness that came forward. But when this witness
came forward, he basically dovetailed everything that I had documented
that Fred Newton had said about the six intentional acts
that led to Eduardo's death. And that was what caused

(31:57):
the Newport Police Department to reopen the k last summer. So,
so quick question just for anyone unfamiliar with law enforcement,
is it somewhat unusual for a police chief to take
a specific case and make it quote unquote their case.
It's very unusual. It's unusual to take the person of interest,
which is a new term. But you know, the suspect,

(32:19):
I mean, she wasn't even a suspect. It was undisputed
that she was behind the wheel when she killed this man.
And Rhode Island Law says that the what was then
called the Registry of Motor Vehicles had to investigate, had
to do an interview with all people in vehicular homicide.
But those two individuals, Mr Parotti and Mr Mazarone, who
is now dead, we're not able to even get near

(32:40):
her to do that. Okay, So and then this is
this is I have to tell you this part of
the This proves the cover up by the cops. I
just have to throw this in now. So what happened
was there's a Newport lawyer named Bill O'Connell. I went
to school with his brother, James Jamie O'Connell, who's a
famous doctor in in Boston, went to Harvard Men and
he ministers to the poor and the homeless of Boston.

(33:02):
He's very famous Dr James O'Connell and Bill O'Connell I
asked him about this and he he said, you know, Peter,
I had heard from Joe Julihan and Joe Julihan, so
this is double hearsay. Now. Joe Julihan was a remarkable
Newport lawyer. He represented me at one point as a
wonderful guy, and he worked for a while with Doris
Duke's lawyer, Aum Arabian, who was kind of the Roy

(33:23):
Cohen of New England at the time. He was brilliant
but ruthless okay, and Joe, who had been doing civil work,
wanted to learn criminal so he was he would sit
as second seat at trials just to observe Adam's technique.
And he told Bill, who told me that after this
first uh, you know, ratas basically the chief. This interview

(33:43):
happened on a Sunday, that the incident happened Friday at
five o'clock in the afternoon on the seventh of October.
So now we're at ninth the ninth and around in
the afternoon they interviewed her and then four question interview
and the case is closed. The next morning at ten am,
Chief Ratasy announces to the eight p U p I
and the New York Daily News, which had a veteran
reporter in town, Okay, the case is done accident. And

(34:07):
then the Attorney General of Rhode Island at the time said, ah,
don't rush to judgment. We this is happening too fast.
So Rattissi literally walked it back. He called the press
back an hour later and said, oh, no, no, no,
the case is still open. It's still open. Uh. And
so what happened then, according to O'Connell through Hullahan, which
I proved ultimately in in my investigation is that the

(34:30):
chief went to Arab Arabian. The chief of police goes
to the lawyer for the suspect and says, Aaron, you've
gotta help me come up with something to close out
this case because the ag is all over me, and
Aarum says, I'll tell you what. You write up a
transcript of an interview with her, and the chief goes,
you mean you want to interview her more extensively. No, no, no,

(34:50):
you're not going to interview or just do a transcript
transcript like you did interviewer. And in fact, they typed
up a phony three page transcript of an in of
youe Q and a Q and a three pages that
never took place, even though it says at the top
this interview is being conducted by Captain Paul, this interrogation
by Captain Paul Sullivan at rough point such and such

(35:11):
a time the next day, the eleventh of October. And
how do we know it's a fake Because the first
question they asked, they get Doris's birthdate wrong. They say
she's born in the nineteen her answer, when in fact
it was nineteen twelve. She crosses out the twenty eight
and initials d D. Now, if a trans you know,
a stenographer had been doing this in real time, she

(35:34):
or he would have caught the mistake in real time
and would have been reflected in the transcript. This is.
These are the lengths they went to. And then when
Mr Parati from the State asked the Chief to get
the transcript, he said, oh, you don't need that. You
got the transcript of the other one. A little fourth question,
when that's good enough, you don't need this? Why did
the chief hide it from the state Because he knew
anybody with a brain could have seen that mistake and

(35:56):
realized it was a fraud. But the cover was the
cover up was already in motion. At that point. Doris
was ready to writer check to the cliff walk restoration
in Newport Hospital, and by then it was done. And
Bill Waterson said to me. I said to him, did
any of you guys object? He said, listen, Peter, the
Chief was a kind of guy. He had absolute power.

(36:17):
He could rip the badge off your chest, you know.
And all of us had families, we had careers. None
of us could buck the chief at the time. And
with that, we're going to take a quick moment to
hear a word from our sponsor. But we'll be right
back with more Peter Lance, and we're back. She had

(36:40):
a quick clarification um to Matt's question, Uh, we I
definitely have seen this as an issue and doing crime stories.
I'm sure Ben has to when talking to police officers
or officials who were involved in, like say, an active
investigation if you find the right one. However, if they've
retired and they maybe something didn't sit right with them,
there little more maybe willing to talk. Is that what

(37:02):
you found? Yes, in fact, the I'm sorry I didn't
I didn't get to that from your question. Map. But
but when we get to the reinvestigation, which was then
closed again, uh, you'll see how the current police department
ended up reaffirming this unfortunate accident thing in the face
of massive evidence from me. My book has sixty pages

(37:24):
of annotations, four hundred thirty eight pages, nine fifteen end notes,
and this new witness that came forward who dovetail. In
the midst of all of that, they concluded there was
quote no evidence to change the original verdict, no evidence,
not conflicting evidence, or you know what, no evidence literally
and I am convinced that the police department in Newport,

(37:46):
circling the squad cars, as many police departments do, just
do not want to admit fault. They don't. And this
is true of the books I've done on the FBI.
I've done four major books on the FBI, and the
Road to nine eleven, where the you know, negligence begets
gross negligence, and then that goes to cover up because
they're embarrassed and they don't want the outside world to

(38:07):
realize that they may have screwed up. And this is
kind of a human instinct maybe, but that's the way
it is. That's why you guys always get it's under investigation,
you know, like right, you know and and and so
you get these honest That's why I want to shout
out to these wonderful retired men who fully cooperated with
me and told me the pieces of the truth that

(38:30):
they knew so that I could put it together. I
call it a mosaic. William Casey, I adapted Bob Woodward's
book Veil the Secret were awards of the CIA for
HBO a few years ago. Never got made, but William Casey,
then the CIA director, talked about fragments of a mosaic
human human intelligence, spies on the ground, sigin signals, intelligent eland,

(38:50):
electronic intelligence, spy satellites. And you take all these little
pieces of broken glass and you put them together, and
you step back and you get a snapshot of the
truth as best you can get it, you know, And
that's what investigative reporting is, That's what intelligence work is about.
Man Ben does just yes, yes, I think you're you're

(39:13):
speaking to our language, R. Peter. This is something that
we've we've also first we found exactly what you're describing.
We've also uh seeing uh you know, it's I don't
want to say it's beautiful, but it's so true that
often in the case of genuine conspiracies rather than conspiracy theories,

(39:33):
we see exactly what you're describing, maybe an original cover up,
maybe just negligence or even incompetence, and then the actual
the multi generational multidecade cover up is the cover up
of the original cover up or mistake, because people don't
want to be fallible. This is um, you know, I
know what we're doing a lot in in this episode

(39:55):
today is we're we're alluding to a lot of things
that we're going going to explore, and that's because we
already have to set up and present that there was
a genuine conspiracy. People were, by hook or by crook,
cowed into silence for a long time. Um. One of
one of the questions that I had to your point

(40:17):
about circling the wagons or circling the police cars there
is how much, if any influence does Doris Dukes a
State have on the city of Newport after her demise?
And I asked that because sometimes in some cases like this, UM,

(40:37):
when very well to do people are able to pay
off someone for a secret or to keep a secret,
then once they have passed away beyond the reach of
human justice, then things start to come out. But this
just didn't. It stayed like as you were saying, It
stayed something like a bit of local war for a
very long time. So was there some power or influence

(41:00):
from the Duca state that I continued to power this
cover up or what happened? Was it supposed to just
fade into history? Well, it's a great question. It's it's
the question I'm going to seek to answer in my
next book. My next book will largely cover the the
new witness that came forward the reinvestigation that was opened
in July, the tortuous five month investigation where Jackie Weese,

(41:24):
the detective was the cold case detective. Uh, by ten
weeks after the fact, had not even read my book,
which was what prompted the witness to come forward after
he had read the book. And it's not an ego thing,
but it's just she began to turn and I did
a It's on my website Peter Lance dot com. I
have a timeline that I created of this latest investigation

(41:46):
and where it went wrong. Uh. Just factual, not opinion,
just straight facts and basically, Uh, they ended up concluding
that not only did they conclude there was no evidence,
which is like one city council member called it an
embarrassment that they would reach that conclusion, but they also
decided that they'd embraced this original accident theory, which was corrupt,

(42:10):
as I prove in my book. So Uh, the answer
is that, UM, I think inherently many police departments that
have cold case detectives don't really want to solve the
cases because they're embarrassing that for the reasons we just
talked about, right, they just can't admit fault as to
Doris Duke's power. That is something I'm going to explore.

(42:33):
The Newport Restoration Foundation is a seventy five million dollar
foundation nonprofit that runs Doris's Rough Point Museum the home
as a home museum and also still owns like seventy
five or so restored colonial houses and rents them out
for five million dollars a year or so an income. Uh.

(42:53):
And and they employ probably a hundred people and or
maybe more with their extended families. That people are in
the business of, like the Doris Duke philanthropic legend, which
they want to continue to perpetrate if you will perpetuate. Uh.
And then there's other people in Newport. Uh, some on
Bellevue Avenue, although a number read my book and we're like,

(43:16):
run on brother, you know, they didn't say it that way.
Oh that was quite good, Yes, quite good. Yes. Uh.
In other words, there are certain elements in the town.
And this is what I'm gonna get into. Part of
what I'm the reason I'm doing a follow up to
this is I want to know that I want to
answer that question. There's a great question. How is it
that Doris died in nineteen three at the age of eighty,

(43:38):
she had a two thirds of a page New York
Times obituary, even more in the l A Times where
she died and there was one sentence thirty four words
devoted to Eduardo Terrella, his death arguably one of the
most important events in her life, and there was one word,
one sentence devoted to it. Today, now here's the larger question.

(43:58):
The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation is her major foundation based
in New York. Guess who. And I'm not gonna I'm
not impugning him because I love the man. I think
he's a hero. Anthony Faucci is like vice chairman of
the board of that. Well. It's also like NPR. Are
you hear it on NPR? Constantly brought to you by
the Doors Duke Charitable I'm like, where have I heard

(44:18):
this name before? That's where? And they give out hundreds
of thousands of dollars and grants, many to the state
of Rhode Island. So people, you know, look, we're you
guys know, we're never in the room when the deal
is cut, right, We're not flies on the wall. We're
never there when that So all we can do is
try and put together the best, uh you know, uh,

(44:39):
reportable version of the truth. As my old friend and
mentor Carl Bernstein used to say, Uh, you know, but
in this case, you just have to consider what's out
There's you know, how they discovered Pluto downgraded now from
a planet, but they discovered it before they even had
a telescope that was precise enough to discover it because

(45:00):
of the planetary alignment of other celestial bodies and how
it fits in in the Solar system. Well, that's kind
of what investigative reporters do. They try and piece together
the truth, the best available version of the truth, from
all this stuff. So that's part of what I'm going
to be looking at. And one of the biggest disappointments

(45:20):
I had in this whole thing is the city manager,
Joe Nicholson. Joe Nicholson's father was a lawyer, wonderful man
who represented my father. I trusted Joe throughout this whole thing.
He's in charge of the police and fire departments. He
you know, said that he was trying to help me
find the missing police report at the time, and I really,
you know, during this whole police investigation, would text him

(45:43):
in the background on background and he ended up completely
dropping the ball on this thing when they just decided
to close the case summarily on November eighteen, and then
after members of the city council were embarrassed about it,
he then listed two additional statements and final statement he
issued It's all on my website Peter Lance dot com.

(46:04):
He basically came up with this theory that only a
lawyer could come up with. Well, because it't we because
we could not get into the mind of Doris Duke
at the time of the event. We're just going to
embrace the accident. Now, I ask you, gentlemen who cover
murder cases all the time, right, whenever is someone convicted
of murder based on what is in the mind of

(46:25):
the killer, it never happens. Why, because of the Fifth
Amendment right against self incrimination. Almost never do killers take
the stand right, And the only way you can divine
what's in their head is if you can cross examine
them in a court of law. And that was never
the issue in this case. Because Doris was dead, nobody
could be indicted, nobody could be arrested. So the City

(46:47):
of Newport when they took this on the police department
when they opened the case, which Nicholson promised me they
would see through and the Jackie weeee, the detective said,
we will not ignore this. We will find justice. F
eduardoh at the it's her phrase. She asked for my help. Uh,
we'll get into that later on and then maybe in
the next hour. And all of a sudden, it's like

(47:08):
the iron gate came down boom, you know, and it's
all like, okay, we're gonna move on now. And I
did an event in Newport on the tenth of December,
the last big kind of book signing. I went back
and like a hundred people showed up, and people are
like kind of outraged in the town that this is.
It's you know, it's my hometown. I'm ashamed that they would,

(47:30):
you know, do this. And there's been international publicity. The
Associated Press did two stories when they opened the case
and closed it. Over five thousand media outlets worldwide, from
the Washington Post to the Taiwan News covered this and
and that's kind of the record that Newport, Rhode Island
wants to stand on. It doesn't look good. It stinks
like limburger to be, to be frank with you. But

(47:51):
the the one thing that really um that you really
hit on, and it's something that I think needs to
be addressed more. Is not just the intransigence of local
law enforcement. But on your website, uh, you keep track
of the official statements from law enforcement. I believe that
there are multiple statements right there, like three, Yeah, there

(48:13):
are three statements based on the re the closing after
the reopening the case. But there's also you know, we
can get into if you want, a series of cover
provable cover ups by the Newport Restoration Foundation, the Guardian
of her Memory locally beyond you know, a nonprofit by
the way, uh that it's seventy five million dollars. Their

(48:35):
last nine tax return showed that the top five officers
had a salary, a combined salary and benefits of seven
hundred and fifty thousand. That's ten percent of the net
worth of the foundation paid out in executive salaries. And
yet they had given away I think eleven thousand, eight
hundred dollars uh that year, which was eighteen, the last

(48:56):
year tax forms were available. So the point is that's
a little bit of a scandal in itself. They had
never mentioned Eduardo in the twenty years of their existence.
It started as a home museum. Literally was the twentieth anniversary,
and yet when they got news of My Vanity Fair
piece was gonna go, was originally going to go in
the summer of and then they held it for a

(49:18):
year and it was actually better. It was published in July,
but as soon as they got word at the end
of the rough Point tour, they have like an exhibit
space on the second floor that changes every year, like
one year it's Doris's jewelry, Doris's clothes, you know that
kind of thing. They always changed it. Well, they started
in a wall sized exhibit called the Accident at rough Point, okay,

(49:39):
And they basically had five affirmative falsehoods, the worst of
which is that they Doris settled with Terrella's family during
the wrongful death trial, which is a bull faced lie, okay.
And they said she was unfamiliar with the car, where
that three page transcript she says, Oh, yeah, I drove
the car twice that day, you know. So the bottom
line is the restoration foundation at Sell and hundreds and

(50:01):
hundreds of people visiting that museum in all of tween,
all of up into up to March, had seen that
exhibit that was a lie. So I pressed forward, and
Terrella's niece wrote a letter and they finally changed accident
to incident in the headline, and they dropped the final paragraph.

(50:22):
Now I haven't been back, nor have I asked anybody
if they've gone in since the police did the new
cover up to see if they've restored the word accident
at the top of the exhibit. But it's still up
there as far as I know. So they continue to
They remove the reliquary of st Ursula for a whole year,
claiming they were cleaning it. They the gates of rough

(50:43):
Point were knocked down as a result of an accident
in the fall of and as of last summer June,
they had a little cow fence in in front of
the state. You know, on the twentieth anniversary of of
the You know, you think it's the twenty anniversary year,
you want to have the beautiful gates up. But the
gates are evidence. And just before I my book went

(51:05):
to press, I asked the guy to go in there
and he found the gates covered in a tarp over
in the corner of the estate, which I have, you know,
pictured in the book. The point is it's very ham handed,
but effective you know, cover up has many, many dimensions,
and it's there's a physical cover up and there's a
legal cover up going on right now to this day

(51:26):
in Newport, Rhde Island. And I'm hoping the hope I
have with this podcast of yours, this celebrated podcast, is
that maybe some people will, you know, just get interested
and want to see the truth come out. So we've
gone in a roughly linear fashion up to this point,
and you'll notice, fellow astute listeners, that we are discussing

(51:49):
this as an ongoing thing, something that originally occurred in
nineteen sixty six. But what revelations lead us to discuss
this in the present day? What led an award winning journalist?
We can see, by the way, Peter, for people watching
this on YouTube, we can see your Emmy's in the background, sir,

(52:11):
So what what what led an award winning journalists to
not just write an eight thousand word piece for Vanity Fair,
but what led you to write an entire book on this?
I think it's also important to clarify, just for perspective, earlier, Peter,
when you were referring to November, you were talking about

(52:31):
November of this year, just last month, that is how
fresh these developments are so um, what was could you
say that there was something you found that was new
to the case, that was something no one else had
heard of? Well, thank you. First of all. One of
the most gratifying things to me that happened was after

(52:52):
the Vanity Fair piece that hit on the seventeenth of
uh sixteenth of July, and the next day I commenced
writing the book. You know, twelve hour days for six months,
and the book was published in February and four editions
by the way hardcover, paperback, Kindle e book and audible
and if you can believe listening to me for ten hours,

(53:13):
I did the narration. But what drove me to do
the book was partly that COVID. You know, I was sequestered,
and I had the time, and I just there was
so much material that I just couldn't get to in
the Vanity Fair piece. Uh So I published the book.
And what happened was last summer I had a wonderful

(53:33):
opportunity with the Brenton Hotel, this beautiful new hotel on
Newport's waterfront, uh that had me come in as what
they called author and residence for a month, and I
they would put copies of my books in all their
tony rooms. You know, they they have fifty sum rooms
they put copies in. And then a couple of nights
a week I would come to their beautiful cocktail lounge

(53:56):
called the living Room, and I would you know, discuss
the book and would come down from the rooms, and
then newporters who had bought the book and wanted it
sign would show up. So on a rainy afternoon on
July three, uh, I was doing that, you know, and
all of a sudden, this this heavy set guy with
a Walrus mustache. It was kind of looking at me ominously.

(54:18):
My cousin, Sheila Tyler, who was like my right arm,
and you know, she she's at all the events and
helps me. She's like pointing to him, like I was
talking to some doctors from Philadelphia who was staying and
she had kept going like, you gotta talk to this guy. This,
this guy's got some information. I said, okay, you know.
So finally Bob came up to me and he handed
me this email and it said he said, why didn't

(54:39):
you get back to me? And and like what? And
I looked at it and it was dated the day
I started writing the book, and he had written to
me saying I was the paper boy at rough Point,
and I really responded immediately, I'll get back to you.
But I never did, partly because I was writing the book,
and also because there was another paper boy that I
found that was not really the paper boy for rough Point,

(55:00):
but he covered Bellevue Avenue and was on his way
there that night, and I interviewed him and I just
kind of, you know, put the two together in my head.
So anyway, after I apologize to Bob, I took him
to the bar. He's been sober for more than thirty years,
and he held me spell bound, okay, for three hours.
When you're in this kind of business, as you guys know,
you'll always get the pretender of the poser. I knew

(55:22):
the second gunman on the Grassy Knoll, you know. You know,
guys in prison constantly right to me. And so you
have to develop a sixth cents for uh, you know,
a detector if you will. Since we're on a podcast,
i'll use that term of legal term of art. You know,
I have a law degree from Fordham, but you know,
the detector. And so Bob was so amazing because I

(55:42):
had him tell the story to me five times, and
every single time he was absolutely dead on precise So
the next day I took him up to Rough Point
myself and I with my iPhone, I basically shot him
from five different angles. He had been well, we'll get
to that in the next hour. But you know the
d tales of what he learned and what I learned.
But as a result of Bob he had read my

(56:05):
book just like six weeks earlier, and what I put
in the book about Fred Newton's up on the hood
theory of the crash dovetailed precisely with his memory of
events that night, and that he went to the police
department the day before he went to me and they
reopened the case, and that became the major international news

(56:26):
the Associated Press covered. I did a second Vanity Fair
piece on August five, and then everything just blew up
and uh, stay tuned, And that's what led our listener
to write in and turn us onto your work in
the first place. They were referring to that second Vanity
Fair piece exactly. So the first one. You can look
it up right now on Vanity Fair if you by

(56:48):
your computer. Homicide at rough Point, written by Peter Lance
that's July. That's the original. One second piece is titled
The Doors to Cold Case Reopens colon The Only Own
Eye Witness speaks for the first time again August five,
Peter Lance in Vanity Fair. I'm sorry for jumping in,
but they're both on Peter Lance dot com. It's p

(57:08):
E T E R l A n C dot com.
So if you go there you can get all the pieces,
all the international coverage, and then all this latest development
on what happened, and stay tuned for our next part
in this series where uh, Peter, you're you're hopefully you've
agreed off air to join us for the second part,

(57:29):
so so everyone, uh, everyone's stay tuned. We're also going
to talk a little bit about some of your other
work in the next hour. So what a ride, What
a rob Matt Nol. This is why we made this
a two parter, right, Absolutely, we've covered a ton of ground.

(57:52):
We have much more to get into, so for now
we're gonna stop. If you want to contact us, you
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You can call our phone number. You can indeed just
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(58:12):
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(58:34):
that needs more than three minutes, then write it all out.
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(59:11):
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