The Doris Duke Case, with Peter Lance: Part 2

Episode Transcript
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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.

(00:26):
My name is Matt, my name is Noel. They called
me Ben. We're joined as always with our superproducer. All
mission control decands. Most importantly, you are you. You are here,
and that makes this the stuff they don't want you
to know. This is the second part of a two
part series. We are joined again with award winning investigative journalist,

(00:47):
screenwriter and authored Peter Lance to continue our exploration of
the Doris Duke case. Now, folks, in our previous episode,
we learned the facts about the murder of Eduardo Terrella,
as well as the I think it's fair to say
at this point blatant continuing cover up surrounding these events,
and we ended on a cliffhanger, so we're not gonna

(01:11):
leave everybody hanging any any longer, right, uh, Peter, thank
you so much for returning with us today to talk
about the fallout, the aftermath, the present day revelations about
the doors Duke case. We have a lot of stuff
we didn't get to in part one, so we're immensely

(01:33):
fortunate to have you back here with us for part two. Yeah. Great. Well,
In order to kind of set the stage, I would
like to do a quick recitation of the facts that
the essential evidence that I uncovered in my Vanity Fair
story first published in June of twenty and then this
book that I wrote, Homicide at rough Point, that led

(01:53):
a new, unknown living witness of the actual murder to
come forward and for the new Art Police to reopen
the case. What was learned in the course of my
initial investigation through the first officer around the scene, Edward
angel As told He told me uh that Sergeant Fred Newton,

(02:14):
who was the chief accident investigator, had determined within minutes
of Eduardo Terrella's death what happened. And Eduardo Terrella was
this wonderful renaissance man in war hero who had been
working for Doris Duke for seven years as a principal
designer and art curator. They were leaving her a state
rough Point in Newport, Rhode Island on Millionaire's Row Bellevue

(02:34):
Avenue on the late afternoon around five o'clock of the
seventh of October nineteen sixty six to look at and
pick up a reliquary, which is a work of art
that Eduardo had praised earlier in the day, and he
finally gave her the impromat, let's go out and get it. Uh.
He had just told her moments earlier that he was
leaving her employee after seven years. She was a notoriously

(02:57):
jealous and vindictive. She had a air temper. She had
stabbed her common law husband with a butcher knife two
years earlier, d and fifty stitches got away with that.
And so as they're leaving the estate, ad Wardo's driving
this sixty Dodge Palaro Wagon two ton station wagon, and
he gets out to open these massive iron gates twelve

(03:18):
ft tall by seven ft wide. They're fifteen feet away.
And as he's at the gates trying to just to
start to open them, she slides behind the wheel affirmative
Act one. She then releases the parking break by hand.
She then puts the car, moved the gearshift from park
to drive, affirmatively slams down on the accelerator, causing tire
with gouge marks of two inches in the gravel, and

(03:41):
they just roars forward at him. He then, to save
his life, does a kind of a lizard brain reaction
and he jumps up on the hood, which is a
thing that people do to say their lives that they
can't go left or right. And he's staring at her.
He broke his hip in the in the course of that,
but he's staring at her as she bursts through the
gates and the end affirmative Act five. She taps the brakes,

(04:03):
de accelerates, and you know, skids to a stop. He
rolls off. He's now in front of her, calling out
in pain, Doris, and then she decides to commit She
roars over him, crushing him under the vehicle and dragging
him across the street eighty feet onto a curb, knocks
down t post and rail fence, and hits a tree,

(04:26):
and he is He's just dead, instantly dead. And so
what I just described was heard by the witness who
came forward last summer to me. And what happened was
after my book came out, I was the uh considered
author and residence at the Brenton Hotel in Newport, Rhode Island.

(04:47):
All of this is on my website Peter Lance dot
com and I'm there at July three, rainy afternoon, and
this gentleman comes up to me says, I was, I
was there. I was. I was like her paper boy
for a rough Point. I said, you're kidding me? How
old were you? And you know I vetted him heavily
that night, and then I took him back the next
day and he said, I was coming out of Ledge Road,

(05:08):
which is just kind of to the east of of
the west of a rough Point. It's about six hundred
feet away, six hundred yards away actually, and I could
hear in the distance. It was very quiet in those days,
there was no competitive traffic. I heard a man and
a woman arguing, and I had established earlier that they
were arguing inside just after Eduardo told Doris he was

(05:31):
leaving her, and so she didn't want him to go
and and but they're shouting at each other in the
house and now apparently they took it outside. So as
he gets he's on his bike, he's about to deliver
the paper to rough Point. And there are two gates
at rough Point. There's a main gate in the front
and then there's a little service gate off to the side.
And when you go to Peter Lance dot com and

(05:52):
look at the Vanity Fair piece I filed in August
which has this detail. I did a video of Bob
that Vanity Fair edited is like five minutes long. You
can get the entire sense of what I'm about to
tell you. When what he told me, So, he's pedaling
on his tent speed bike, you know, frantically, and as
he gets closer, he keeps hearing all of the events
I just described. He hears the initial uh crash, you know,

(06:15):
as as as or the man crying out. As as
he goes up on the hood, he hears the first
crash of the gates opening. He then hears a d acceleration,
he hears the skid, he hears the man crying out,
and then he hears the man go as he's getting
really close no, and then she just drags over Eduardo
and kills him. All the fatal injuries, as I later

(06:35):
determined from autopsy reports that have been missing, were to
his upper body, and all of the damage was to
the lower gates. She did not crush him against the gates,
which was the cover story the police used. So Bob
tells me this, and I said, well, why are you
telling me this now? He said, because I read your book,
and I knew about your vanity fair thing. I didn't

(06:56):
even bother reading it, but people told me about it,
and I read your book, fine, Lee, and I just
thought about coming forward for all night and then for days,
and everybody told me, don't bother, Bob, you know that, like,
let it lie, let it rest. You really don't need
this in your life. He's a grandfather, he has multiple
grand shoulder and he's retired a steam fitter, a wonderful guy.

(07:17):
And he basically when I took him up the next day,
he took me through every little angle of it. And
this is the most astonishing thing that he told me,
he said, After he literally made it to this service
gate and dropped, dutifully dropped the paper in a slot.
He turned and it was literally seconds after the second
fatal crash. Okay, the second crash across the street, and

(07:38):
he whipped pans over and he looks down the street
and he sees this station wagon, uh, and was what
he thought was a fire coming up. It was steam.
And then he sees a woman get out of the car,
a tall woman. Now he had never met Doris stood.
He knew he delivered a rough point. He knew that
there was a rich lady called Doris stood. She was
six ft two, and he sees her get out, walk one, two,

(08:00):
be four or five steps deliberately turned, and she starts
staring underneath the vehicle, like looking at it as if
searching for proof of life. Not in shock, not oh
my god, what did I do? What did I say?
You know, look my ed wired? Oh no, she's like
steely eyed and cold blooded, like you know, looking down.
And so Bob comes up behind her on his tent

(08:20):
speed and she doesn't see him because their back is
to him. Finally, as he finishes pedaling, the gears start
to click click click, and she turns and he says, ma'am,
can I help you? And he was always taught by
his father the code you always help people. If it's
a woman, you do even more to help the person,
you know. Uh. He noticed that she had no injuries

(08:40):
on her, she was not in any kind of shock
at all. But he said, ma'am, do you want me
to go up to the house, And three times in
a row, first he said do you want me to
get help? Then he said you want me to go
to the house, And then he said, you want me
to call the cops. Each time she pointed her finger
at him and says, you get the hell out of here,
literally with more velocity to her voice each time. He's
a thirteen year old kid, and he's like, whoa. Meanwhile,

(09:03):
she's trying to see under the car because he remembered
hearing a man's voice, and there's no man, and she's
crab walking back and forth in front of the vehicle
as if to keep him from seeing. And finally she
just gets him out of there, and as he's peddling away,
he thinks to himself and all of this, he tells
me the next day as we go up there, where
was the guy? Where was the guy whose voice I heard?

(09:25):
Next day, he then sees the Newport Daily News and
I'll stop talking. You can we can pick it up
from from there, just so you guys can get a
word and edgewise. I think we're all wrapped. Well, that's
that's the whole thing here, Peter. When when I I
watched that video that you're talking about, it's on the
Vanity Fair piece that's edited together. It's uh pretty horrifying

(09:45):
to to kind of live back, live through that again
with Bob, as he's taking you through that, and he
gets to a point in there where he discusses why
he didn't immediately come forward with it. Why, like, after,
you know, you're a kid, your thirteen years old, you
probably go home, you tell your parents, you're like, man,
this crazy thing happened. Why didn't he end up, you know,

(10:06):
going and speaking with the police or with reporters, or
why wasn't that a part of the story initially exactly?
So what what he told me was and it was
quite fully believable. And if you go to Peter Lance
dot com and you look at the Vanity Fair the
second story, you'll see a family photo is in the
cover of the first page, and his father was like
six ft four, big guy, former prize fighter, tough guy.

(10:29):
There were nine children. Bob you know, was the oldest
at the time. And basically the next the night of
when he got home, he started to tell his father,
and his father said, get dinner ready, kid, you know,
get you know, get the dinner ready, the potatoes and carrots.
So the next day he goes to pick up the
Daily News because during the week, the Daily News was
an afternoon paper, but on Saturday it was delivered in

(10:51):
the morning. So he goes to pick up the papers
to deliver and he looks at the front page and
he sees and it's it's all on Peter lance dot com.
He sees Doris Duke kills friend and crash. He sees
this photo of the of the underside of the wagon
on the front page, and then it says she crushed
him against the gates. And but he sees the name

(11:11):
Eduardo Terrell and he goes, oh my god, that's the guy.
So as soon as he finishes his root, he rushes home.
He says, Dad, Dad, this is what I was talking about.
And his father grabs him, bite his shoulders, pulls him
out onto a sun porch, away from the rest of
the people in the house, the family, his mother and
brothers and sisters, and says, listen to me. You tell
nobody this. You don't tell your mother, your sisters, your

(11:34):
brother and your friends. Nobody do you hear me? And
he's like, Bob, isn't shock because his dad was always
do the right thing, Dad, okay, come forward, never take
the path at least resistance right. He was a boy scout,
he was an altar boy. I mean, you know, so, uh,
he's got dad, But what about you know, the police,
especially the police, do you hear me? His father never

(11:55):
told him why and which is clearly in retrospect, his
father should have told of him. And for months he
dogged him, did you talked to anybody? Just asking no, Dad,
I'm telling you I didn't tell anybody, all right. So
finally five years go by he's ready to join the
Marine Corps and Bob his credit was, these guy's got
a photographic memory. And he was stationed during the Vietnam
War at Henderson Hall, which is the Marine headquarters in Washington,

(12:18):
d C. Where he had a top secret security clearance.
So this man is, you know, he may have been
a blue collar worker in life, but he he was
like very high level in terms of his you know,
analytical thinking and skill. And so he then in nineteen
seventy three takes two Marine buddies that he served with
to Newport and he tells them the story beat by

(12:40):
beat by beat. He also tells four other Newporters, including
Danny Sullivan, a retired firefighter who gave him the paper route.
And he tells it exactly as I just recited it,
as that he told me beat by beat, and I
contacted all of those individuals and they told me absolutely
as it was early as nineteen seventy three, we heard
the same story, and Bob's told it over the years

(13:02):
too many people. So then I said to him, well,
what you know, are you gonna go to the cops?
He said, already did. I went to the cops yesterday
and he did. He and they and he went to talk.
First he called this lieutenant named Corey Huck, lieutenant who
asked him something that you know you never asked. You know,
you never get judgmental with a whistle blower. In my opinion, Okay,

(13:23):
do you if you find a whistleblower that's willing to,
you know, talk about something that happened, you don't get
judgmental with him, because then you can spook them into
like withdrawing right, You just want to give them as
much string as possible. And so this lieutenant Huck said
to him, are you trying to unburden your soul? Like?
And Bob said, and Bob's a bulldog, so he was

(13:44):
not dissuaded by these I'm not trying to unburden my soul.
And he kind of said it like that, and that's
how he said it to me in the Vanity Fair video.
And then the next day Huck had him meet this lieutenant.
Her name was Jackie Wist detect if wu e s
t pronounced least, and she's the cold case detective for

(14:05):
the day for the Newport Police. So he goes into
an interrogation room and he's there with her for two hours,
and I ultimately got the audio of that, which I
transcribed and part of my investigation of what what went
wrong with this new investigation. And she's very earnest in
the beginning, but it's clear she has no clue what
he's talking about. She never takes him up to rough points,

(14:25):
she never looks at the choreography of where where events
happened the way I did the next day, and she's
she's blowing up Google maps of the area with not
even ledge road on it and asked him to make
color marks on where he was, and she totally is
obviously clueless as to what happened. However, he tells her,
after I read Peter Lance's book, I came forward and

(14:49):
and then he criticizes again in the first sentence or
to Lieutenant Hawk about the burden my soul thing. So
that's there. And but finally, as after this came out
and I pitched to Vanity Fair, my editor David Friend,
one of the great veterans of Vanity Fair, said, uh, really,
are you sure about this, Peter? And I said, listen,
I'm gonna send you some video. As soon as I

(15:10):
said the video, he said, you don't even have to
do a pitch for this. When can you have the story?
You know? Five thousand words, you know? And uh. And
then they took my video and they edited into that
five minute video that you saw, which has their logo
in the upper corner. I also got a drone photographer
named Lowell Blackman to do some nice drone footage of
rough points so you could get a sense of the

(15:30):
proximity of ledged road, which is also available on the
on the Peter Lance dot com. So now the piece
goes into Vanity Fair August fifth, the same day the
Associated Press goes worldwide on their international wire and five
thousand media outlets cover this door stuke case reopen, new
witness comes forward, etcetera, etcetera. So Jackie Weee, this detective

(15:53):
to her credit, initially sent me a letter. I emailed
her prior to the peace going because I wanted to
get their comment. And she was very specific. And again
her letter is on my website, Peter Lance dot com.
And she says, we're not going to ignore this case.
This case is the Duke case has now been reopened.
Uh and uh, we're gonna try and find justice fred

(16:14):
Wardo and his family. Can you help us? And I
immediately told her yes. I was then by then back
in California from Newport, and I said, you just call
me and we'll do it on on online, on zoom.
Whatever you want to do, I'll help you about That
was the that was the fifth of August. On the
twenty of August of the nineties, she sends me an

(16:34):
email and I'm I'm sending her emails back and forth.
What's the latest? What can I do to help? Ah?
Blah blah, And she sends me an email that says, well,
my lieutenant has told me not to talk to the media,
meaning I can't talk to her now. According to her lieutenant,
that's when the fixed was clearly beginning to get in. Now,
was it Huck who got his nose out of joint
because he was upset that Bob criticized him on the

(16:56):
Vanity Fair thing and in the interview, I don't know.
I don't know this Corey huck at all. I've never
met him. I don't know much about him. But I'm
gonna find out more when as I'm gonna do a
new book that's going to explore this. But the point
is by she had not read my book, uh even then,
even by the end of August, and uh, you know
she read the Vanity Fair piece. She never took Bob

(17:18):
up to this up to the place. And then finally
on the on the fifteenth of September, now ten weeks
after she commenced the investigation, Bob writes her heartfelt letter
and he's got the Irish writer's gene. Man, this guy
is really talented. He writes this beautiful letter saying have
I done this for not? Have I come forward? And
all for no reason? I mean, I d wiredo Terrella.

(17:40):
As I quote him in my Vanity Fair piece, he said,
I thought about it all night. I thought about it
for weeks, and then I thought to myself, the truth
needs to come out. The people of Newport need to know,
the world needs to know. This was a beautiful man.
Taken from this earth. Uh in a violent act, and
it needs the truth needs to come out. So what
does Jackie West do when she gets that letter on

(18:02):
September fifty ten weeks in she rushes over to his
house and makes an unannounced visit. When have you ever
heard of a cop making an unannounced visit unless they're
coming to arrest somebody at their house? Right? And then
she says to him, as Bob calls me right after
she said she she asked me, uh at, you know,
how do I know you just didn't make up this
whole thing? You know, after you read Peter's book. Now,

(18:24):
Originally in her letter to me, she said, we find
I find Bob credible. She found him credible. Okay, Now
ten weeks later she's questioning whether he made the whole
thing up. She then told him this is interesting. I
got promoted to sergeant. I'm going off on a three
week vacation and and but when I get back, I'm

(18:45):
gonna be in in the traffic division, which is a
very important job in Newport, which has very narrow streets
and hordes of tourists with big trucks, so traffic is
a big deal. But she said I'm taking all the
cold cases with me. So query if you didn't even
have time, then by then she still had not read
my book. Okay, so if you haven't had read the book,
which is the essence, and I sent her on September two,

(19:08):
chapter and verse. It's all on my website. There's a
link Peter Lance dot com letter to Jackie Wee September
twenty two in which, in red bold, I just did,
like paint by numbers, connect the dots on the sixth
intentional acts that Doris Duke committed that could prove intent
to kill homicide. And I wasn't asking the Newport Police
to use the word murder. I was just saying, would

(19:30):
you be able now to declare that there is probable evidence,
compelling evidence that the death of Eduardo Terrella was proximately
caused by a series of intentional acts committed by Doris Duke.
You don't have to use the word murder because murder
didn't apply. Murders a legal term, and since Doris was dead,

(19:51):
she couldn't be indicted, then no grand jury could hear
this in the case could not be brought. But you know,
why not at least reached that conclusion and set the
record straight and the midst of this incredible evidence. All right,
we're just gonna take a quick break here, a word
from our sponsor. Then we'll be right back with more
from Peter Lance. And we've returned with Peter Lance. Peter,

(20:19):
you hit on a couple of things that I just
really want to drill down into that you've you've already
kind of discussed. I just I need to hear more. Um.
One of the reasons, or the reason perhaps that active
investigations are not discussed by law enforcement is so that
only the person who's responsible in the investigators know the specifics,

(20:39):
right we this is an established thing. When I read
through your original Vanity Fair article and then excerpts from
your book, I have a lot of I'm now just
as a reader armed with a lot of that information
from from your investigations. And that's that's why maybe initially
it's not that I'm captical of Bob. It's just that

(21:01):
I imagine that he could be armed with much of
the information from reading the same things I did. And
that's just why I want to know how you personally
vetted him. And you know you're saying that the officer
also vetted him and found him credible. Just what do
you use? What instinct is it? What are what are
the things you used to vet somebody like that? Well,
the reason she found him credible was and and again,

(21:24):
I at least New Rhode Island has a very viable
freedom of information act law called the Access to Public
Records Act. And I was able to get the audio
of that recording of Bob, and I have sense have
gotten the video of it as well. Okay uh and
she uh. But Bob says to her at the very end,
she says, well, who can corroborate this? And he gives

(21:46):
it the names of the two marines, and he gives
it the names of Danny Sullivan and three other newporters
that he told in the early eighties, And to her credit,
within minutes of him leaving, his friends called him up.
So this cop is calling to see if that story
you told us years ago is true? Should I talk
to her? And he said, by all means, talk to her.
So the fact that she was able to corroborate and

(22:08):
I was. I talked to all of them personally, I
interviewed them, I did transcript I recorded the interviews and
I did transcripts of the interviews so that I knew
that that he just hadn't just wing this thing, that
he was not just you know, had read my book.
That the corroboration that made him credible was the fact
that he told the story so much earlier. It's very

(22:29):
similar to a lot of the cases in the Meto
era where women who were mistreated sexually is an understatement
were told friends contemporaneously, and that goes to their credibility, right,
That's part of what we do to assess the truth
and individuals who come forward, particularly if it's years and
decades later. So I was convinced. And these are two

(22:53):
marines and and Danny Sullivan, veteran firefighter. They're all like, hey,
you can take what Bob says to the bank. This
guy does not exaggerate, he's not prone to hyperbole, and
you know he meant this meant a lot to him
coming forward in the first place. So, uh, you know,
I that's why I was satisfied that he was on

(23:13):
the level. And then you know there was his explanation
as I gave you earlier for why he didn't come
forward with his father, made perfect sense. Oh, by the
way I want to add to this. So when he's
he's now eighteen years old, he goes to his father,
is just about to join the Marine Corps, he's now
a man, and he says to him, Dad, come on,
tell me, why did you tell me not to come forward?

(23:35):
And the father says, and he, in retrospect, should have
told him. Then he would have saved them a lot
of angst over the years. He said, son, listen, if
this had gone to trial, you would have been an
important key witness on motive, on on you know, the
the event itself. You would have testified. And I didn't.
I knew what Doris Duke was capable of. I didn't

(23:55):
want you riding your bike along Ocean Drive on doing
your paper route, as as the nights were getting darker
each day, and have you hit from behind by a car.
I wouldn't want to lose my son. His father was
so concerned this bruiser, the six ft five four guy,
former prize fighter and Steve Fitner himself said, has told

(24:16):
his son, I was so worried about you that you
would be killed by Doris Stuke. That's why I did
its son, And so that took a big burden off
of him. But it also gives you an idea of
what people thought about Doris S. Douke in her capabilities
in Newport, Rhode Island in ninety And that's why I
mean that's chilling, because it's undeniably a valid concern, right, Um,

(24:41):
And this I agree with you that that must have been, Um,
that must have been at least, uh, a validating experience
for Bob there because you know, it answered some questions,
gave him some closure about something very un characteristic on
his father's behalf. What are we're talking about specifically, You'll

(25:01):
have to listen to part one, folks, But well, while
we're cogitating on that, I'd like to ask about a
related point here. So in part one, uh, you mentioned
how it was clear from the jump that the forensic
evidence on the ground was not matching what was in

(25:21):
that first official narrative report or conclusion. And I'm really
curious to learn when you were in your recent conversations
after the publication of Vandy Fair article, after the reopening
of the case, Uh, how did law enforcement square these
clearly conflicting conclusions, right, Because you have a solid case

(25:44):
where you you know you've got cooperated stuff. And you
can say, well, that first report does not in any
way match what actually happened. What what was their response?
Did they just stonewall into like the evidence doesn't support
blah blah blah. Yeah. The fact that when the book
first came out in February three, w j R, a

(26:06):
wonderful reporter called r J him h G. I am
for w j R, the NBC affiliate in Providence, did
a four part series and he contacted the police and
they refused to even comment on the findings in the book.
Then in February when the case was reopened, Uh, the
Jackie Whist was very forthcoming with me and I have
I think thirteen emails to her and she has five

(26:27):
or six emails back to me. And and by the
way her emails after I believe Lieutenant Huck. My it's
my opinion that Lieutenant huck obstructed the investigation. He should
have recused himself because if he's telling her, if I'm
not just in the media, but I'm a central fact
witness in this reinvestigation because of what I uncovered, if
he's telling her not to talk to me, that's obstruction.

(26:49):
So he arguably should have recused himself from the chain
of command in my opinion, if they really cared about
the truth. But ultimately we'll get to in a minute
how they ended up concluding that there was no evidence,
not conflicting evidence, no evidence. And all anyone has to
do is read go to Peter Lance dot com. I
even make I'll make it easy. I have links to

(27:11):
the key chapters in the book proving the murder and
the cover up. You can read them and then hopefully
you'll buy the book or listen to the book, et cetera.
But the thing I was going to bring up that
I had forgotten that's really important is one of the
things that Bob brought to this narrative beyond his memory,
was the following. Remember I said, when he confronted Doris Duke,

(27:31):
she was not uh injured in any way, And he said,
particularly said to me, Peter, as a boy scout, I
you know I would have noticed if she was injured.
I would have been more insistent on helping her. So
this is like happens minutes after she's completely unwounded and uninjured,
and then as Bob is peddling away to do the

(27:53):
rest of his ROOTIA two or three other stops. He
hears here's the siren of Edward Angel, the first arriving
officer on the scene. And when Edward Angel was I
interviewed him initially, and then I did further interviews for
the Vanity Fair Peace in August, then even more interviews
because he they finally brought him in to interview him.

(28:14):
Jackie Weist only after she'd gone to Bob's house and
Bob says, if you don't believe me, called talk to
Eddie Angel, you know, like that. So she interviewed Eddie Angel.
I got the audio of that, and I transcribed that
as well. But by that time, on the seventeenth of September,
she was saying things to Eddie Angel like her mind
was already closed, Like pretty hard to prove intent when

(28:35):
everybody's dead. That's a line from Jackie Weist on September,
like more than ten weeks after she opened the case. Now,
if she's an objective finder of fact, why would she
say hard to prove intent if everybody's dead. I'm not dead,
at least not yet. Bob's not dead, Eddie Angel is
not dead. There's all kinds of the other officers I
interviewed her around. The forensic evidence is what it is.

(28:58):
You know, it's all available. I would have sent detailed,
uh copious uh copies of my evidence to her. She
really cared, but she was already inclosure mode. But this
is one of the most chilling and telling aspects, and
this will give you an insight into who Doris Duke
really was. So when Eddie Angel gets on the scene,

(29:20):
he finds her in the car, apparently in shock and
with what Bill Waterson, another cop who saw at Newport Hospital,
called steering wheel injuries, meaning she went boo, she self
phone my headphones almost fellow, she self wounded herself. In
other words, this is a time when there's no seat
belts and there are no restraints and no air bags, right,

(29:43):
so she had to bump her nose and cut her
lip intentionally. And then when Eddie Angel got there, he said,
I was a rookie. I was, and he keeps apologizing
for this, and I said, Eddie, anybody would have done
the same thing. He said, I I blurted out, there's
a guy under there. There's somebody under there, at which
point she jumped doubt and she starts walking back and
forth on w Avenue apparently in shock. A young naval

(30:05):
nurse named Judith tom Oh now war to go, who
I tracked down who had just been commissioned an ensign
in the in the Newport at the Newport Naval Base,
who was a nurse. She's with her mother and father
are they're about to go on a site seeing trip
around Ocean Drive. She gets up and Doris runs into
the house, and so she starts following her. She chases

(30:25):
Doris into the house to make sure she's okay. She
Doris goes up to the second floor, calling ed wardo
Eduardo Eduardo as if she's creating this story, like you
know that's gonna fit with this whole thing. If I
was on him, I didn't know what happened. And then
she comes out again, comes back out, and so and
Judas said later than the McCallister, the corrupt doctor who

(30:46):
happened to be my family doctor, who allowed himself to
be hired by Doris Duke that night even though he
was the assistant medical examiner charged with determining the cause
of death, and he hit her away in her room
in Newport Hospital so state investigators could not get to her.
Philip McAlister told Alton Schlegel, a classic crime bulldog reporter

(31:07):
from the New York Daily News, that she was bleeding
profusely from her head had serious injuries. This is what
he tells Alton Schlegel, and Judith Tom Saidoshia a couple
of little things on her lip and you know, maybe
a little bit of you know, bruises up on her nose.
And Bill Waterson said the same thing when he saw
at Newport Hospital. So they were already into this exaggeration now.

(31:29):
But here's the final point I'd like to make as
I you know, you know me, I go on and on.
By now people know that that Eddie Angel, the fact
that Eddie Angel found her in the car apparently wounded,
and Bob only moments earlier saw her out of the
car deliberately not in shock, in cold blood, keeping him,

(31:51):
preventing him from looking under the car, screaming at him
three times to get away. I ran all of this
by Detective James Moss. And Detective James Moss is kind
of a legendary detective from Brooklyn South Homicide now retired,
and he and I actually cleared when we get into
some of my terrorism stuff over the years and my
third book, Triple Cross. We we solved with the help

(32:14):
of an FBI undercover agent and Egyptian name Imed Salem,
we solved the brutal, bloody murder of Mustafa Shallaby, who
was an e mom at a mosque in Brooklyn. There
was an open case for nineteen years, and we solved
it in the year. I did a piece for Playboy
about this. And you know, they used to have articles
and Playboy, you guys have never you know, whatever, it's

(32:37):
an old joke. But wait, they have articles published Silverstein
one time. But so I did a piece for Playboy
on this and and and we saw this case. So
Jimmy Moss became a buddy of mine. Okay, he's just
a wonderful guy. And he came up to Newport with
me in October when I first began investigating this. He

(32:58):
was there for a week. Uh and and I ran
everything by him, my entire investigation. I gave him all
the evidence to analyze to make sure. How is it
that the police didn't talk to any of these witnesses,
I mean they briefly. Eddie Angel interviewed the Tom's the
father who was a Milwaukee cop, and his daughter Jude,
just very briefly. But the next day, when Eduardo's brother

(33:22):
in law went and took the photographs inside the gates
of the tire marks before they cleaned it all up,
he was interviewed by Frank Waltsch and that walts didn't
didn't seem to care about any of that stuff. He
just wanted to know the relationship with Doris Duke. So
they're already into cover up mode. But I said to
Jimmy Moss, what does this mean to you about what's
the significance of the difference between the way Bob Walker

(33:45):
saw Doris Duke moments after the killing of Eduardo and
the way Eddie Angel found her. And he said, the
behavior of this woman of power who dominated over this
kid six ft two, women of great power and influence
who based him from the crime scene, was the behavior
of a pure psycho path. He didn't say sociopath, he

(34:08):
said a pure psychopath. And that's the last paragraph in
that Vanity Fair story I did in August five. So
you know this is you know, all of this is
informed by not just me shooting from the hip. It's
like sixty pages of annotations, and I'm very proud all
of those books that, by the way, I don't even
know how to point now in this thing. Those books

(34:30):
to the left of the homicide cover. The first book
I did on counter terrorism for HarperCollins, over six hundred pages,
called um A Thousand Years for Revenge. I did a
shorter book called Cover Up that led to the indictment
of a former FBI supervisor on four counts of murder
conspiracy in Brooklyn. The case ended abruptly during trial for

(34:53):
complicated reasons, uh triple cross. My third book was focused
on Ali Mohammed the al Qai, a spy who was
the FBI totally knew about for years and just he
ate their lunch for years. And then my last book
is called Deal with the Devil. It's an epic story
of Gregory Scarpa SR, a mad dog killer for the

(35:14):
Colombo crime family who was a top echelon criminal informant
for the Bureau. It's the Whitey Budger story on steroids. Okay.
So all four of those books go in with massive
detail and when you're when you're criticizing the FBI and
the Justice Department, you better be right, Okay. So all
of those books have that massive levels thousands of end

(35:35):
notes of annotation, as does this book. It has sixty
pages end note annotations. So you know, I brought my
body of work over the years, my skill the skill
set I developed doing epic stories like this, which are
all retrospective, aren't they? That they're all nine eleven is
a cold case. I opened my my book Triple Across

(35:57):
by saying that they still haven't tried Collee shake Mohammed
down and get mo Okay, right, we know that Khalee
shake Mohammed was. They call him the mastermind. He was
Romsey Yusef's uncle. Ramsey Yusuf is the guy that I
focused on in my first book, Thousand Years Revenge, in
which I said, for the first time any mainstream journalists
the two attacks on the World Trade Center were absolutely intertwined.

(36:21):
They were al Qaeda operations funded by Bin Laden and
everybody spurned at every you know, the mainstream media forget
it except Dan Rather, to his credit, did two pieces
on the CBS Evening News from Iraq reporting on my
first book, A Thousand Years Revenge in two thousand three,
and then what do you think years later, The Newport

(36:41):
The New York Times, the Paper of Record, The Gray
Lady did a piece on written by a guy named
Ben Wiser, who covers the Southern district of New York,
about how the s d N Y had re had
updated the superseding indictment on Romsey Yusuf to include his uncle,
college Sheik Mohammed and all the nine eleven murders. I

(37:03):
was right, But did anybody say, did anybody mention it? No,
because media institutions like The New York Times are as
adverse to admit that they're wrong as as law enforcement institutions.
It's human nature. Nobody wants some guy like Peter Lance,
who you know, I was a former correspondent for ABC News,
but I've been writing books ever since. You know, I'm

(37:26):
a lone wolf. Now. I don't have a big, you know, pulpit,
a bully pulpit to preach from, as you might if
you work for the Washington Puzz of the New York Time.
Nobody wants to be told they were wrong. But all
of my books are in the same vein retrospective looking
at cold cases. That's what they are, and that's what
this is. That's what homicide at rough point is writ large.

(37:48):
You know this well said and this. Uh, this leads
us to another part of our conversation before we go
there as a follow up to the point you just
made about the fallibility of humans. And you know, nobody
wakes up super excited to admit that they got something wrong.
I have to ask, because I'm sure a lot of
audience members are thinking the same thing. Have you at

(38:11):
any point Peter found any evidence of remorse on Doris
Duke's part between the time nineteen sixty six and her
demise in the nineties, Like even once was she like
I feel bad that he's dead. No. In fact, as
I mentioned in the last hour, I found an individual,
former R a f tail gunner during World War Two,

(38:32):
an Irishman who became a big game hunter, and he
became her lover months later, and he was inseparable with
her from June of sixty seven, the summer after when
I started on the daily news, all the way through
October and later as he he wanted to get away
from her. He actually said I was starting to be
afraid of her. This is this is an alpha male

(38:54):
if there ever was one, this individual, And he said
to me one night in pillow talk, I just said, so,
what about this story all the thing, and she said,
cold bloodedly he got what was coming to him. Nobody.
Two times me and I explained a little bit about
what that the significance of what that may have been
on the last broadcast, she never expressed any remorse. The
Newport Restoration Foundation, Uh, they they at least admit that

(39:18):
the death of Eduardo was a quote tragic accident. They
keep calling it a tragic accident. But no one in
an official Newport the city manager, Joe Nicholson, UH, the
city council who had the ability to order Nicholson to
do an independent investigation, and basically just kind of rolled over,
the police department Chief Gary Silva, Corey huck and then

(39:41):
ultimately Jackie Weee, this cold case detective who basically folded
after a five month investigation, claiming there is no evidence.
Now we I think I put forth in almost two
hours of your program, compelling evidence, and people can read
it in Homicide at rough point. You can go to
Peter Lance dot com look at the key chapters, read
it for yourself at sixty pages of annotations. I even

(40:04):
have a link to that. I have have pictures of
the key graphic evidence in the book and just people
can judge for themselves whether or not there is not
compelling evidence that Doris Duke killed Eduardo Terrella with intent,
And yet they just have slammed the door shut again
and not just equivocally. Well, we couldn't really tell if

(40:25):
there was, you know, conflicting evidence and said they said,
there's no evidence that was Jackie West pronunciamento, which the
city kind of walked back a couple of different times.
But they're still embracing the unfortunate accident theory, which was
corruptly arrived at in nineteen sixty six and within ninety
six hours of of Eduardo's death. And I talked about

(40:46):
that in the last hour, the fabricated transcript, that the
police went so far as to create three page transcript
of an interrogation that never took place, provably prima facia,
as we say in the law, on its face, prove
a bowl as a fake to get the case closed.
That's how far they went out of their way to
protect doors student. Well, and also like this, you talked

(41:07):
about the civil case. I guess it was with a
Dwardo's family trying to essentially just recoup what his earnings
would have been and how she continuously low balled them
and low balled them, and then it ultimately was compelled
to pay something just kind of absurd, seventy five thousand dollars,
which was less I'm sorry to terw up, but it
was less than the Chippendale High Boy that she bought

(41:28):
at Park Burnet for a hundred and twenty nine thousand
months before trial, the highest price for a piece of
furniture ever paid seventy five thousand dollars. And when his
when the lawyers took their cut for the for the family,
each brother and sister got five thousand, six hundred and
twenty dollars at a time she was making, when she
was making one million dollars a week in interest on

(41:50):
her fortune. Well, it's an interesting point that you bring
that up. I mean, it's almost like she looked at
him as a piece of furniture. She did not look
at him as a human being, and she did not
regard his family as human beings um and probably looked
at it as paying anything above that, you know, paltry amount,
would have been some sign of admission of guilt. Right. Well,

(42:10):
I think also that what she did was this is
very interesting and I did not realize this until I
went back and you know, started to put the book together,
and I had much more perspective on the timeline. Why
did she drag out the case for five years? So
they filed for one point to five million this wrongful
death case, and what wrongful death is means if a

(42:31):
person dies and you're his heirs, and that person has
an earning capacity for the rest of their life, if
they're a blue collar worker, it's relatively limited. But Edwardo's
last year of earnings was like the equivalent of three
eight thousand dollars in contemporary dollars. Is Hollywood design career
was exploding, he was catching fire. So arguably he had

(42:52):
another twenty years to live. He had potentially millions of
dollars of earning capacity right well, first of all, they
kept dragging it out, in my opinion, because she began
restoring colonial houses in Newport, Rhode Island, which saved Newport
from bankruptcy. After President Nixon in nineteen seventy three essentially
gutted the Newport Naval Base. They closed Quantit Naval Air

(43:14):
Station across narragans At Bay, and the entire cruiser destroyer
Force Atlantic fleet crue des Land was moved to three
separate bases in the south. Now, how prepared would we
have been if there was a blow up with the
Soviets over that. You know, Newport's a lot closer to
Europe than than you know, Florida, Right, But that was
what happened with Nixon. So Doris comes in and what

(43:37):
I call a murderous quid pro quo and rescues the
town's economy. So five years later, by the time trial
happened in Providence, the state capital, she's getting these edicts
and decrees in the state Senate talking about her like
she walks on water. Oh Ms, Duke, thank you so
much for your philanthropy. Further, I can't prove this because

(43:58):
I don't have the transcript because it was selectively removed
from Rhode Island judicial archives. But did they play the
gay card? And why it was a gay man in
nineteen sixty six and one of the reasons the lgbt
Q plus community has really gotten behind this book. I've
had like five major pieces and The Advocate and To
and Out magazine, which is which are published by Pride Media.

(44:21):
Diane Anderson Minshaw, this incredible CEO has really been supportive
of this book and my work. If you were a
gay man in nineteen sixty six, you were half a man.
And that's not me talking, that's just the reality of
what it was like back then, prior to the lgbt
Q plus you know rights movement, right, So we don't know.

(44:43):
But so the idea of is Donna Lomire, his beloved
niece said, and I quote this in the Vanity Fair piece,
and in the book, she killed him twice, she destroyed
his body, and then she eviscerated his memory, his reputation.
And one of the things I'm proudest of in this
whole endeavor is, weeks after the Vanity Fair piece came

(45:04):
out her Wikipedia entry, go to Doris Duke Wikipedia and
it had not been changed for years, and I found
out and I didn't do it. I wouldn't even know
how to do it. Okay, you can't do it if
it's like self interested. In Wikipedia, they change. They have
an entire section on EDWARDA. Terrella's death now in Doris
Duke's uh Wikipedia entry, and it's all sourced to my

(45:26):
Vanity Fair story. So I'm very proud of that. If
we can argue fairly. I think we agree that Wikipedia
is kind of the Encyclopedia Britannica of our time. People
widely go to it. I mean it may be flawed,
but you know, people go to Wikipedia and look for
things and it's pretty well annotated. Uh. Then I'm very
proud that at least that part of history has changed.

(45:46):
But the Newport, Rhode Island government, the city manager, Joe Nicholson,
the police chief Gary Silver, Lieutenant Corey Huck and detective
now promoted to sergeant Jackie Wist absolutely abandoned the truth
in this case. Let's pause for a moment for a
word from our sponsors. Will be right back, and we've returned.

(46:12):
This leads us to uh, something we talked a little
bit about off air, But I'm sure a lot of
our folks tuning in today or wondering, in this case
specifically or in some of the other cases that you
have covered, have you ever felt that you were in
physical danger? I mean, I know there's a lot of

(46:33):
litigious folks out there, but did you ever you know,
when you were getting followed by uh agents from the
FBI or maybe shadowy members of the criminal underworld. Did
you ever have one of those moments where you genuinely thought, holy,
these folks might come for me. In order to wage
a war, there are two central elements. Right, you need operations,

(46:57):
You need people blowing things up on the ground. And
then you need intelligence. Right, you need spies. No successful
war from the time of Sun Sue has ever been
fought without both. Right, intelligence is crucial. So my first
book recounts the story of Ramsey Yusuf, this genius bomb
maker who was the nephew of College Shaik Mohammed, who

(47:18):
not only created the original nine eleven excuse me, the
bombing of the trade center in nine but also uh
you know, as the architect of the nine eleven attacks
which he designed in the Philippines that we're about to
be executed as early as nineteen. But they had a
fire in their bomb factory. He and Khalige Shake fled
to Islamabad and he was arrested Yusuf. They picked up

(47:39):
his his partner Abdula Kim Murad, who was going to
be the original pilot, trained in four U S flight schools,
and he was rendered back to New York with Romsey
and Uh. So the plot was thwarted at that point,
but it was clearly bankrolled by bin Laden and as
I said, I proved this in the book, and it
was later vindicated by the super eating indictment of Usef

(48:01):
and K. S m by the Southern District of New York. Okay,
when my third book came out on the cover, we
had Patrick Fitzgerald we focused on. And Patrick Fitzgerald at
the time was probably one of the most powerful FEDS
in the Justice Department. When he was in the Southern
District of New York, he was the head of ironically
both organized crime and Terrorism unit. He was a very

(48:25):
close friend of James Comey when Comey was FBI Director,
I mean with when Comey was U S Attorney for
the Southern District, he appointed had got Patrick Fitzgerald appointed
U S Attorney in Chicago, where he went on to
indict Lagoyevic, you know, the governor. And he also was
the the special council in the CIA League case, the

(48:45):
Valerie Plane case. Okay, uh and where Scooter Libby was
convicted and then later part you know in that whole thing. Well,
Patrick Fitzgerald, after this book came out, afterwards published that
thick book there Triple Cross. This thick was published is
already out. Patrick Fitzgerald began writing a series of single
space threat letters to HarperCollins. He over a twenty month period,

(49:09):
he wrote four separate letters in which he said, not
only do I want this book pulped, the existing copies
of the book that are out there destroyed. I want
HarperCollins never to publish the trade paperback edition, which is
traditionally a year later. And so HarperCollins initially rejected him.
And then it's owned by Rupert Murdoch, by the way,

(49:29):
but it's one of the media entities that Murdoch has
never put his fingerprints on politically. HarperCollins at the time
it was the largest English language publisher in the world,
and I never got any intervention to slant things one
way or the other. Was it was a great place
to do four books for so anyway, the initial lawyer
for HarperCollins at the time, Mark Jackson, uh sent a

(49:50):
letter to Fitzgerald flatly refusing this, saying this is an
important work of investigative journalism and basically sorry, Mr Fitzgerald,
you know, And then he got when when Rupert Murdoch
bought Dow Jones, Mark Jackson went to be the general
counsel for Dow Jones, which publishes the Wall Street Journal. Okay, well,
now the new person that took over for him, who

(50:11):
was less sure of herself, was chilled when Patrick Fitzgerald
sent another letter which he facts from office of US
Attorney Chicago. How is that not a chill? How does
that not set a chill of the spine of a
new general counsel for a major publisher is just trying
to get her sea legs in her work. So she
decides to open an outside investigation, and they hire a

(50:34):
law firm in Chicago, Generan Block, a very expensive white
shoe firm, and they proceed to have like a I
don't know, year and a half month investigation in which
they made me prove every single fact in the book,
reprove it after the book had already been vetted for
found fit for a publication. That slowed me down? What
did it do? It took me out of play. It

(50:55):
kept me from doing my job to get my next book.
The first two books took two years from start to finish.
The last book took two years from uh well, the
last book actually after this, the third one took six
years because I two years out, I was taken out
of play. Finally I got I basically after several heads

(51:17):
It's HarperCollins had left. I convinced the current head two
I was gonna go public if they didn't publish the paperback,
and I asked them to let me do twenty six
pages in the new paperback on this whole Fitzgerald escapade.
Just before the book came out in the in the
summer of I guess twenty eleven or something like that, okay, uh,
I wrote a huff post in which I challenged Patrick Fitzgerald,

(51:41):
if you have an ounce of evidence that you've been
liabeled in any way, shape or form, come at me, brother,
bring it. And he just scuttled into the dark, this guy,
But think of who he was. So when I was
in New York that the triple cross, the second book
cover up, prompted this indictment of this US, this former
BI supervisor Lynda Vechio, on four counts of murder conspiracy

(52:04):
by the Brooklyn d A. When I was in New York,
they wanted they they subpoened me. Both the defense and
the prosecution subpoened me. They wanted my sources. And I'll
go to jail before I'll give up a source. So basically,
HarperCollins Attorneys at the time, we're wood shedding me in
New York for two weeks. They had all my evidence
in a conference room that had guarded by security guards

(52:24):
and everything, you know, and I was taking them through
the whole choreography of all my work so they could
prepare a motion to quash the indictment, which they did eventually, right,
But while I was in New York during that period,
I was followed by two former members of the FBI
New York office who called them. They had a group
called the Friends of Lynda Vechio. The day Lynn da

(52:45):
Vechio got indicted in Brooklyn and he's out walks the
purp Walk outside as he's leaving court, he is surrounded
by like maybe twenty five agents, big guys, all in
blue suits with red or white shirts, red or blue ties,
and they're like pushing the press out of the way
like they're soccer hool against Okay, Literally this happened, and

(53:05):
I was there, and I was like, hey, hey, you know,
I was trying to get to the answer a question
that night. Uh an FBI agent, a former agent who
was a big supporter of my earlier work. He actually
shoved a matchbook in my pocket that day as he
was passing me. He showed and I looked at it
and it said Midnight Special. And I was a diner.
This guy lived on the Upper East Side. So I

(53:27):
get to the diner and he said, listen, Peter, I'm
telling you I can't protect you on this one. Brother.
You know, you know, this guy risked. He actually went
down to New Jersey and interviewed when I interviewed a
a former member of the Fire Department who was a
member of the mosque that were all these terrorists hung
out and and like you know, had literally got the

(53:49):
plans of the World Trade Center prior to the bombing
from the Fire Department. So I had to give this
guy an opportunity response. So this guy, this FBI agent,
I don't want to name him, but he's legendary, wrote
a best selling book. He said, I'm not letting you
get down there alone, and so he took me down.
I met him up in Harlem. Heetta Mercedes. He had
a bill O'Reilly no spin Zone hat, and we went

(54:10):
down there an interview. This this individual who was an
Egyptian working in the in the f d n Y
who got the plans of the of the Trade Center bombing,
and he was on the arm. We had a video
of him on the arm of blind Shake Omar Abdal Rochman,
who is the Pope of Radical Islam. Okay convicted in
a plot to blow up the bridges and tunnels into Manhattan,

(54:32):
who Patrick Fitzgerald prosecuted. Okay, So I'm I'm you know, literally,
you know, going to see this guy and this this
FBI agent had my back anyway, but that when I
was in New York during that whole period and they're
preparing me for this motion to question and this murder trial,
I'm being followed by these two guys so I nicknamed

(54:53):
Pat and Mike. They were constantly on me all the time.
It was more like, hey, we're in your we're on
your six you know, don't get too uppity, you know
what I mean. But I didn't feel threatened per se.
But that's how ham handed these guys are and what
they can do when they want to suppress the truth.
I've never heard a story like that, Peter, never of

(55:16):
somebody actually being tailed by uh BY agents like that.
First tired there's an incident I like, I can't wait
to send it. I wrote a ten hour dramatic scripted
series all about this that I'm hoping to get made
at some point. And I have a scene there where

(55:36):
there's a young lawyer. There were these two lawyers for HarperCollins,
you know, and one was an old, waspy kind of
guy with wellesley lockjaw, and then another one was a
young half Jewish, half Italian kid, and he was in
the beginning, he was like, come on, Land's get to
the chase. Cut to the chase. Stop talking, you talk forever.
And I one day I kind of pinned him against
the wall in this conference room. I said, listen, while

(55:58):
you were watching Barney drinking out of a purple cup,
I was covering the war in El Salvador. Dude, okay,
so give me a break for a minute. Okay, just chill.
And then that guy came over. That guy became one
of my biggest supporters. So one night I went he said,
I've never been down to ground zero. He had never gone,
you know, like you know, So one night I took
him down and they were following me, and they just

(56:19):
came up behind the car and I just jumped in
front of their car and it said, come on, just
you know. And then they, of course they took off,
like what was I gonna do? They could have they
could have done a doristuke on me for all I knew.
But the point is that you have you have to
stand up to these guys and and and the problem
with the FBI, and I'll be brief. I know we're
going way a field here, but the problem of these

(56:41):
federal agencies when it comes to journalism, they they they
they know that they have the power. Right, We're actually
the journalists have the power. But what they do is
they convinced even papers like the New York Times, which
has a bureau which has a somebody in residence at
the Southern District that's where this individual's office was, that
read my book the first time and said there's nothing new,

(57:03):
only to write the article about the superseding indictment. And
the FBI is punitive. They go, if you, if you
don't write the kind of story we want the next
time we have an exclusive, you're not gonna get it.
And so they get intimidated. You see what I mean that,
oh you're not I'm gonna lose out and and and
they divide and conquer, which is how all bullies operate.

(57:23):
They divide and conquer. And whether when when journalists should
stick together and go, no, we're not gonna be intimidated
by that, you know, And so that that is almost
more in sidious insidious because it's kind of like self,
you're being chilled, but you're chilling yourself from coming forward,
do you know what I mean? And that is uh,

(57:43):
that's a that's an issue that I've observed over many decades.
So these are legitimate. These are like journalistic war stories,
and they're invaluable because we have this part of the
reason we want to make this a two part of folks.
We have a lot of folks in the audience today
who themselves are budding or hopefully going to be budding

(58:06):
investigative journalists or hoping to follow in a path like
yours in the future. So they have a couple of
questions that I think Matt Nolan I can kind of
predict here. And one of the first there's a two
part questions. One of the first is going to be
what are your emmys for? That's gonna be the fan question.
And then the second question is going to be What

(58:29):
sort of advice do you have for anyone listening now
who like you, wants to have a career speaking truth
to power. All right, well, the first of the three
these are three national Emmys. I actually was this the
Station Award for w ABC Local. Um, so what happened
with me is I went to Columbia Graduate School of Journalism,

(58:50):
which is this remarkable, you know, one year master's program.
It was back then a hundred of the greatest, uh
brightest young people in the world, half of whom we're
from foreign countries. And you go there for a year,
and uh, it's just it's just a chance to get
to New York City, really, and so basically I then
went to w n e T, the public TV flagship

(59:14):
in New York as a producer, and I won a
couple of local Emmy's there. And then I went to
w ABC Local, which many people call eye witless news.
It was pretty light, you know, in those days, but
they allowed me to do some some pretty compelling investigative reporting.
And Fordham so we had this thing called the Help Center,

(59:34):
which is kind of a consumer ombudsman enterprise, and we
had Fordham University law students, uh, at Fordham Law was
right across from Lincoln Center from ABC, and so oh
there was a great professor named Sheila Burnbaum, and she
said to me, you know, Peter, you're gonna be doing
this kind of work your whole career. You should get
a law degree. And I go, well, thank you, that's good,

(59:55):
thank you for that advice. She's now, I'm telling you
you're gonna come up. You're gonna get sued for Live.
But it's just the name through the beast and truth
is an absolute defense. But you need to prepare yourself.
I said, well, okay, she says. So I took the
l s AT and I just barely got into Fordham
Law School. And then the first year I went to
night school and I almost flunked out. I got like
a seventy two average because I was working all day

(01:00:15):
long and I was exhausted. So I quit and I
went to n y U that summer and then I
finished in three I finished it four hum in three years.
I got my j D, went back to ABC where
I worked on and I did an investigation of an
Arson ring in Chicago as a producer and that was
the second Emmy that I did. And then I became
a correspondent. I got an offer from Dan Rather to

(01:00:38):
go to work on Sixty Minutes as a producer, and
I basically used that to say to my buss On Weston,
hey man, I'm gonna I'm gonna ankle this joint if
you don't give me a shot, and if I'm terrible
on camera, we'll drop Tom Jarrell into it, or somebody
you know like that. We'll drop a legit voice, you know,
into the thing. And so he said, all right. So
I did this piece on unnecessary surgery in a southern

(01:01:00):
in hospital and we got sued for fifty two million
dollars one in Emmy one and Emmy it shut the
hospital down. I was totally right, because why truth is
an absolute defense. And I'll get to that in a
minute of my advice to the to the young guns
out there. And so we have this trial in the
Ozark Mountains in federal courts. We had to change the
venue from the town Boone County because they would have

(01:01:21):
lynched us first rather than tried us. You know, it's
like one of those situations. So we're in Fayetteville, where
the university is, where they at least read you there
your rights before they lench you. So anyway, so the
trial goes on. There was a Reagan appointed judge, and
we would have won an appeal because every little ruling
was against us. But basically we you know, we won
the case right. And the jury was out for like

(01:01:42):
half an hour. So we're back in the hotel, in
the hotel in town, celebrating, having a little champagne, and
our our lead council was Buddy Sutton, who's the dean
of the law school, and little rock Man glided. It
was like Tommy Lee Jones in a white suit. He
was class act. He was He was the primary hunsel.
So we're in the hotel and the phone rings and
it was ruined. Our ledge, the legendary president of ABC

(01:02:07):
News and Sports, the man who came up with the
line the thrill of victory the agony of defeat. Okay,
he took over ABC News. He used to wear Safari
jackets and and smoked Churchill cigars and he had a
chauffeur driven jag. He was larger than life, but he
created ABC News as we as it later became a
great news entity. He got Barbara Walters, he got uh,

(01:02:29):
you know, you know, David Brinkley to come over. You
know Peter Jennings. First they had the troika of three reporters,
and then the great Peter Jennings got rest his soul
World News tonight. So Rude Oiledge is on the phone.
And whenever Ruin Oledge called, he had a red phone
in every control room and it was never good news.
He would always give notes, you know, like and so
he I get on the phone and Ruined says, Peter,

(01:02:51):
you know you've got some promise my wife. My my
wife thinks you you got promised, like, oh, really, thank you.
You've just gotten married to a beautiful young woman. And
I said well, but he said, hey, uh man, you
gotta you gotta learn this job because you're really terrible
on camera. So we're gonna put you on nightline and
you're gonna learn this job. And I said, oh, man, well,
thank you. Run because he let everybody call him run.

(01:03:11):
And then he said to me, and this is how
he ended the call. If you had lost this case,
your next job in broadcasting would have been on the
window at Burger King. And he hung up. Okay, And
I was like okay. But then I went to Nightline.
I made my bones, and then I went to world
News tonight at my own investigative unit. Bill Lord, the

(01:03:32):
head of Nightline, came to the big show, the Jennings Show,
and I, you know, I did some compelling investigative reporting
for X number of years. There. I met my now
ex wife, Donna, who was this brilliant computer graphic designer,
and we had our first child and we had some
issues medically, so we I came to Hollywood too, in
order to like make the same kind of money of

(01:03:53):
our combined salaries UH gave us before without selling Heroin,
you know what I mean. I wanted to do some
kind of work and I always loved Hollywood. So I
got to Michael Mann, the great Michael Man. He was.
He already had Miami Vice as a hit, and then
he was doing this new show called Crime Story. I
covered the teamsters. I knew that, and so I got.
I snuck onto the Universal lot one day, came out

(01:04:15):
to l A and I got and he gave me.
He said, you have five minutes to blow me back
against the wall. And he laid back and with his
protect Philip, and I just threw every proper nown of
my life at the guy. At the end, he goes, Okay, okay,
I'll give you a story option teleplay. I said, what's that.
He said, well, we'll pay you for the whole thing,
but if we don't like your story, well that's it.
Your career is over. I said, I'll take it. So

(01:04:35):
he fortunately hired me on staff and I had a
fifteen year career. But getting to young people who want
to do this, Okay, before maybe ten years ago, I
would have advised people starting print journalism because it's a
great discipline. There is no print journalism is has been

(01:04:56):
gutted essentially at the local level because local journalism you know,
uh they say politics are all local journalism is local. Okay.
The skill that you need to to to to write
under pressure, covering event under daily deadline pressure, whether you're
covering an accident or a trial or anything, is a skill.
And you have your reporter's notebook and you learn how

(01:05:19):
to do it under pressure, and you know, you write
the story and you file it and the next day
it starts all over again. Okay. So that is a
fantastic discipline, local print journalism, but it's not always available
now because of like the Newport Daily News is owned
by Ganet and you know, and it's like got half
the staff that it used to have and it's not
anywhere near as strong in terms of standing up to

(01:05:40):
official authority as the Daily News when I work there.
So what I would say the to do if you're
interested in doing this, set up a set up a website.
Have a website. I if you've got a Peter Lance
dot com, I use a I use a word press
site that that kind of is the same kind of
journalistic front page is the Arizona Republic and a bunch

(01:06:02):
of newspapers used. It's because I see myself still in
that vein as a print reporter. But I have a website.
And after Trump got elected are actually right after you
got elected, I set up another website called Investigating Trump
dot com that was a pass through site where I
just curated all the best reporting, uh and you know,

(01:06:23):
and and essentially I had to quit when I started
doing this investigation of Duke because it was like owning
an end you could never leave, you know, every day
there'd been more reporting, so I pretty much stopped it.
But that was what I did there because there neither
of these sites were commercial. No ads is that I
just would take the piece from the New York Times,
and then I would have in the first paragraph i'd

(01:06:46):
connected back to the original piece, and it always, you know,
tweet about the piece, and the reporters would were grateful
that they would get the extra coverage. Well, anyway, what
I would say to people right now, get a website,
start reporting whatever your interest is, true crime, politics, whatever
it is. But this is the most important thing you
can do. Because the President Trump, you know, caused so

(01:07:10):
much doubt in the public mind, called us the enemy
of the people because there is this notion of fake news,
because there's this terrible fracture in everybody's sense of reality
about what is real and what isn't. You have to
be scrupulous in your annotations, Okay, And when you do

(01:07:30):
a story, if you go back and you look at
Peter Lance dot com and I have a lot of
my huffing to post stories there, you'll see links in
all those stories to other entities. Because we stand on
the shoulders of giants, and you have to You want
to give credit where credit is due, right, You want
to like say, okay, well I got this lead from

(01:07:51):
so and so in the New York Times. The Washington Post.
But then I've advanced that lead. If you do that,
if you have a well designed website and your brief
unlike me because I'm old, you know, and I talked forever,
but if you're the kind of young person that admires brevity,
I'm not talking about TikTok brevity, but I'm talking about,
you know, like a typical story in the Daily Beast.

(01:08:13):
You do that, and you you can make a name
for yourself. And what if you're even if it's in
the local town, you can win a Pulitzer Prize Now
for a website, Okay, you know what I mean for
local reporting. You could do it. You could hit hit,
you know, and then you can go on to an
amazing career where people will actually pay you a salary
if you want. But there's nothing as thrilling. I always

(01:08:36):
said this to my kids. You know, there's the worst
tension in the world is having a rock push down
on you as you're climbing up a cliff. It's harder
to push the rock up the cliff. But there's a
lot of freedom in that, you know. So at a
certain point in my career I stopped doing hard news.
I didn't want to take an assignment from the desk

(01:08:56):
because I just go off and do that. The benefit
it is it's six o'clock you file the story, and
it's miller time you go to the bar or whatever.
But investigative reporting you have to come up with the story,
and they take longer to do, but there's so much
more rewarding and potentially have life changing, um you know results.

(01:09:17):
I'll tell you. I know we gotta leave, but I'll
tell you this one thing. Recently, I put together a
power point presentation for when I went to Newport on
the tenth of December from my last big book signing,
and because the Newport cops just folded the case so summarily,
I wanted to add a little bit in the in
the power point key I used key point because I'm
an Apple guy, and I wanted to add a little

(01:09:39):
bit of background on you know, where I had done
where I came from my background. And I found a
story that I had done for World News Tonight on
near mid air collisions. And this was in four and
President Reagan had fired all the pat Co nine thousand
air traffic controllers who tried to unionize, and we were

(01:09:59):
getting reply or it's anecdotally and a bunch of other
news that there were near mid air collisions left and right,
and the definition of a near mid air collision when
two planes come within five hundred feet, okay, and they were.
And so the Reagan administration was had a guy, Admiral
Engen to the head of the f A, come on
David Brinkley and say the number of near mid air
collisions has been cut in half since we took over,

(01:10:20):
and they came up with this two d and eighty
whatever statistic. Okay, so we ABC. Let me spend three
weeks on this story an eternity and I had a
young assistant named Randy Pryor, and we basically got foy
at all of the near mid air collision reports from
all the regional centers of the f A, and we

(01:10:40):
proved that the number was actually doubled. And during the broadcast,
I'm in the control room because that's what we would do,
you know, when you had a piece on my my
now ex wife Donna is down there doing the you know,
computer graphics, and they get a phone call and literally
the f when have you seen this happen in government lately?
They actually did that. They were wrong during the broadcast,

(01:11:02):
and they readjusted the graphic at the end, and Jennings
announced it at the end that was not the most
important thing that happened. What the most important thing that
happened is I reported on a thing called tea cast,
uh like a collision avoidance system that was a pilot
program and a couple of planes that were at the time.
And as a result of this piece that I did,

(01:11:22):
the the Senate Oversight Committee pushed to get tea casts
installed in all the airlines. And about twenty five years
went by, you know, and I'm like driving along one
day and I hear on CBS News that the number
of near mid air collisions has dropped to like zero
because of tea casts. You know, It's an example of

(01:11:42):
what happens when journalism is on an issue precisely, and
they captured the imagination of the public. The public puts
pressure on people in power, and change happens. I don't
think we can leave on a stronger point than that.
I want to make sure people. I mean said it
many times on this episode already. Peter Lance dot com.

(01:12:04):
The book is Homicide at rough Point. You can find
that on Amazon. I'm sure, that's the best fastest way
for anybody to get that. There's a link on my
website to it, but it's in hardcover, trade paper, Kindle
e book, and audible. Yeah, and uh, Mr Peter Lance
did his own voice for his writing, so check that
out if you've enjoyed listening to him on this episode.

(01:12:25):
I know you've got other stuff coming up, and you know,
I would just say, if you're interested, please go to
Peter Lance dot com. You will see because there's upcoming
stuff that I don't want to spoil really here, but
there's really interesting upcoming things from Peter Man. Just we
can't thank you enough for your time. It's been a
pleasure you guys that just went by like that to me.

(01:12:46):
I don't know what's gonna sound like to your listeners,
but I I'd love to do some other stuff with
you on all this, you know, the road to nine
eleven stuff, because it remains uh still like people really
don't understand and you know, they're all kinds of conspiracy
theories around the nine eleven attacks, seven World Trade. There's
a lot of interesting stuff that you know, you can

(01:13:07):
prove that happened. And but I would love to explore
that with you. And also I sent a mad a
copy of my One of my two novels is called
A Stranger four or five six. It has to do
with serial killing, and I developed an expertise in that area.
I did a film executive produced a film called The
Riverman for A and E several years ago that was

(01:13:30):
all about how Ted Bundy, this is a true story,
helped to find the Green River Killer on his death
on death row of these two cops, Bob Keppel from
the State of Washington went down there and basically solved
the Bundy murders in Washington on the on the eve
of his execution, and so he did a movie about that.

(01:13:52):
So that got me into the whole serial killer world.
And I'm very critical of the vaunted FBI and the
behavioral analysis United KUA to go the silence of the
Lamb Suite, because you know, they've they've lost a lot
of they've missed a lot of cases because of profiling,
which is bedrock. Everybody thinks, oh, profiling, that's the basic Well,

(01:14:13):
guess what. They don't want to get caught their human beings,
and they change their m os and their profiles from
time to time. And if you have that, if you're
excluding evidence, then that's what happened. Don't keep it all away, Peter.
There's These are all conversations we need to have. Yes,
so so yes, as as you said, Matt, thank you
so much. Peter Lance. The website is Peter Lance dot com.

(01:14:37):
We've talked in depth about the Doris Duke case, but
make no mistake, folks, there's much much more to the story.
This is an ongoing story at this point. Uh, Peter,
you have a second book that you are working on.
I don't know how you find the time in the day,
but we have enormous respect for what you were doing.

(01:14:57):
And thank you as well for the clarion call, the
words of inspiration for the journalists in the audience with
us today. We can't wait to hear more and we
know that you will agree. So thank you once again.
It's been a pleasure, guys, Thank you so much. Well, Uh,
it's Christmas Eve, it is this is our Christmas Eve episode, Matt,

(01:15:22):
I got so wrapped up in our conversation. Yeah, Hey,
all your future reporters out there and current ones and
everybody else listening. Hey, guess what Merry Christmas? Yeah, I
said it. Also happy holidays that too, Yeah, yeah, and
happy Friday if you're not in the holiday thing. Uh.

(01:15:43):
We we wanted to thank everybody for the gift that
you gave us over here on the show. And uh,
you might be thinking I didn't get you guys anything,
you did. You give us your time and it means
the world to us. We really can't over emphasize that.
At We want to hear from you. We want to

(01:16:05):
hear for any budding journalists out there. We want to
hear some of the stories you're working on. We want
to hear the ways in which you are speaking truth
to power. We try to be easy to find online.
Just hit us up on Facebook, hit us up on Twitter, Instagram.
You can find us pretty easily. And if you say, hey,
I listened to all your episodes about the scary rise

(01:16:26):
of the surveillance state via social media, I don't sip
those social meds, then you can call us directly. You
can talk to us. Yeah, that's right, nobody's monitoring those
phone calls. Just kidding. Yes they do, but it's okay.
They won't monitor this one. When you call us, our
number is one eight three three st d w y

(01:16:46):
T k when you call in, give yourself a really
cool nickname. Let us know if we can use your
message on the air and your voice and just say
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go wild with it where we can't wait to hear
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your phone in that way, maybe you like to use
your phone as an email device, you know that thing

(01:17:09):
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you can send us stories, any thoughts maybe won't fit
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We cannot wait to read it. Miss We read everything
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(01:17:48):
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Doris Duke Case, with Peter Lance: Part 2