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. 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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. 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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, 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? 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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? 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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. 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 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. 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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. 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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, 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 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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. 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. 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. 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 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 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. 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, 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. 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. 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 whatever you want. You've got three minutes. They're yours. Just go wild with it where we can't wait to hear from you. And if you do not like to use your phone in that way, maybe you like to use your phone as an email device, you know that thing with electronic communications. You can also send us links. That way, you can send us stories, any thoughts maybe won't fit into that three minute voicemail. Send us everything you've got. We cannot wait to read it. Miss We read everything we receive. Our email address is conspiracy at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff they don't want you to know is a production of I heart Radio. 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