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. 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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. 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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. 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. 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, 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, 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. We have much more to get into, so for now we're gonna stop. If you want to contact us, you know how to do it. We're on Twitter and face spoken YouTube at Conspiracy Stuff, on Instagram at Conspiracy Stuff Show. You can call our phone number. You can indeed just dial one eight three three st d w y t K. You'll get a message letting you know you're in the right place. 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