You go back to the station and type it out.” The town’s police chief Joseph Radice soon pulled up. Mather tried to ask Duke some questions, but she wouldn’t answer. Other cops soon appeared, including another patrolman, Norman Mather. Passersby called the authorities, and a nearby patrolman, Edward Angel, arrived on the scene almost immediately. Police determined Eduardo Tirella’s death an accident, even though evidence pointed to homicide. Tirella stopped about 12 feet short, put the car into park, climbed out and walked over to open the locked gate.ĭuke slid into the driver’s seat, released the parking brake, put the car into drive and hit the gas, sending the car hurtling into Tirella, through the gate, across the street and ultimately crashing into a tree. The car ambled down the driveway, approaching the immense iron gate leading to the road outside the estate.
They hopped into the Dodge station wagon, with Tirella behind the wheel and Duke in the passenger seat. Late the next afternoon, the staff overheard Duke and Tirella having a heated argument, Lance says.Ī few minutes later at around 5 p.m., the pair headed out to a meeting. Tirella arrived at Rough Point the night before the crash, telling friends he wanted to break the news of his departure to Duke in person. He had been getting more work in Hollywood films and was determined to leave Duke behind and move to the West Coast. Bettmann Archiveīut by 1966, he’d had enough. Soon after Duke’s station wagon killed Tirella and hit a tree, local authorities helped the heiress cover up her crime, according to author Lance. A handsome gay man in his 40s, Tirella was a designer and had for a decade served as Duke’s artistic advisor, refurbishing her houses and appraising antiques. One person who could tolerate working for her was Tirella. One Thanksgiving when the farm manager at her New Jersey compound suggested buying fresh turkeys for the staff, Duke insisted on frozen birds instead because they were 30 cents cheaper. She insisted that her servants pay for any glassware they broke. “She was notoriously paranoid, stingy, hyper-jealous in her rages, incredibly troubled, driven by booze and barbiturates.”ĭoris’ tightfisted ways were legendary. “She was a living Cruella de Vil,” the author says. But, by many accounts, Doris Duke did not run a gracious home. The Gilded Age mansion would later become the favorite of Doris’ many residences. His Newport estate, known as Rough Point, also went to her. When he died in 1925, his fortune (estimated at more than a billion in today’s dollars) passed to 12-year-old Doris. When I was a cub reporter, the town was buzzing with this rumor.”ĭuke was the daughter of James Duke, the founder of the American Tobacco Company. “One of the biggest legends in town was always that Doris Duke got away with murder. “Newport is this strange kind of a place where everyone is connected to everyone else,” he says. He says the Duke case always gnawed at him. Lance began his journalism career at the local newspaper, The Newport Daily News, in the 1960s. Lance grew up in Newport, a seaside town that in the 19th century became a summer destination for some of the country’s wealthiest families, including the Vanderbilts and Astors. When Doris Duke was 12, her father passed away, bequeathing her more than a billion in today’s dollars. “Absolutely she intended to kill him,” says Peter Lance, whose book, “ Homicide at Rough Point” (Tenacity Media Books), is out now. The October 7, 1966, crash has always been dismissed as an “unfortunate accident.” But now, a new book claims the incident was much darker than that.
And they soon discovered that the woman who had killed him was no ordinary local but, in fact, Doris Duke, the fabulously wealthy tobacco heiress and socialite once dubbed “the richest girl in the world.” They found the victim, Eduardo Tirella, under the vehicle’s back wheels, bloody and mangled.
Returning to the station wagon, the police took another look. When the woman came back down the stairs, she made a startling admission. “She walked rapidly through the house,” a witness told police. The woman stumbled to her feet and into a house across the street - a grand 30-room mansion along one of America’s most exclusive avenues - as she continued to search for her friend. They discovered a disoriented middle-aged woman “bleeding from the mouth” and yelling for “someone named Ed.” Locals and the police were on the scene quickly. The 1966 Dodge station wagon roared across the street in Newport, Rhode Island, smashing through a fence before coming to a stop against a tree, its front almost completely caved in. $1B Doris Duke fortune managed by a once-bankrupt lawyerĭuke heirs ‘forced to play Russian roulette’ĭuke heirs claim stepmom sold off family heirlooms Doris Duke twins lose bid to sue over ‘junkie’ dad who blew their billions
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