Doris Duke: The Murder at Rough Point

hello everybody welcome back to a brand new episode of the casual criminalist this one is the duchess of death i think i read about this in a variety piece uh and then i asked callum to put us together a nice script for this episode uh what happens on the casual criminalist is i will i've just been given a script by one of our writers callum i'm gonna read through it maybe i'll add some commentary and uh i'd say we'll have a good time but this you know it's the casual criminals generally we have a bad time so uh let's just jump into it shall we [Music] if certain revelations in the past few years have taught us anything is that money provided you have bags of it you can get away with anything well you sort of can i mean jeffrey epstein ended up going to prison and then he allegedly strong focus on the allegedly there killed himself and uh although i guess all the people who could have brought down let's not talk about this this is what this is about but i'm not sure you can get away with anything anymore and harvey weinstein's in jail he was like the king of producing movies stack enough dollar bills on the scales of justice you could pretty much sway them whichever way you please when you couple that with the fact that many of the wealthiest people around don't have the most well-adjusted personalities then you have a recipe for some truly horrific situations in retrospect it's easy to see that the weinsteins and epstein's wow i love that callum used the exact same examples that i came up with i mean obviously because they're the most relevant examples of the last few years of this world as monsters in old photos their lecherous smiles and wandering hands seem to corroborate all of the terrible allegations against them epstein even pitched his own mad man eugenics theories at dinner parties for christ's sakes he did oh epstein you're just a horrible you were a horrible person they basically wore their swaggering sociopathy on their sleeves but while history has given these two creeps the trashing they deserve others have seemingly managed to keep their gilded legacy intact despite the skeletons piled up in their closets beauty philanthropy and influence can go a long way when when dodging justice well beauty is def i mean harvey weinstein right right with that in mind let me introduce you to billionaire heiress miss doris duke depending on your familiarity with american high society you might know her as a minor icon of the 20th century a celebrated patron of the arts and contributor to dozens of foundations covering everything from civic restoration to asian art history now obviously i'm not an american you can hear that i've never heard of doris duke although maybe she's more known in the us but this is just a wild story i think i found it might have been on my reddit home page was uh the the piece that inspired this uh this this episode of the show dig a little deeper though and you'll find her life story is a chaotic tale of glamour tragedy and if recently resurfaced allegations are to be believed a dash of cold-blooded murder on our way to unpacking the truth behind a complicated legacy we're gonna meet film stars jazz prodigies and celebrity psychics all crawling over each other in a world of jealousy drugs and riches sounds like fun so let's get started let's callum let's get into it okay the fatal event at the center of our story took place in newport rhode island a city steeped in old money heritage harking back to the early colonial days of the usa i had a great quote the other day uh and it was in the u.s a hundred years is old in the uk a one-hour drive is a long drive and i was like it wasn't quite like that but i was like yeah that sums it up really well because yeah we have really old stuff but everything's really short distances it's very very small uk is very very small some of the richest families in the states trace their lineage back to this coastal town where entrepreneurs could once make a killing trading in booze sugar and people oh that got darker which were bought and sold at the ports yes this is a town with some dark patches to its history pasted over with a thick layer of wealth yeah i mean those two things are definitely not mutually exclusive by the mid-20th century the town wasn't quite the same picture of its former affluent glory but it still housed its fair share of the ultra wealthy along glitzy bellevue avenue just a few square feet of floor space here would cost you more than your average joe makes in five years it was at our home here that heiress doris duke laid her head in the mid-1960s at her 10-acre family estate rough point she had inherited the property from her father the energy and tobacco magnate james buchanan and duke who died in 1925 when she was just 12 years old in total young doris was bequeathed about 50 million dollars and that's in what 1920s money so okay calms mentions it here 750 million dollars in today's money that's wild she's 12 years old uh this under the nickname the richest little girl in the world now in her mid-50s with a far larger fortune in her pocket the richest not-so-little girl had retreated to the familiar world of newport after a tumultuous spell on the west coast which was pockmarked with scandal if you're into touring the homes of the rich and famous then you might be glad to hear that rough point is now open to the public each year thousands of tourists roll up at the gates for guided tours which take them through the life and times of newport's favorite socialite this was the woman who pledged millions upon millions to help restore the architecture of the city back to its former glory and today she remains a local hero i i get the feeling we're about to trample all over that but had you been making your way past those same gates at around 5pm on october the 7th 1966 you'd have come across a far more grisly sight than groups of gawking tourists you'd have seen a two-ton station wagon crashing through the tall iron gates and careening across the road dragging the bloody figure of a man underneath it oh my the driver was doris duke and the man who now lay trapped under the rear axle his body mangled beyond any hope of saving was one eduardo tarella a longtime friend of the heiress and a rising star set designer in hollywood the police arrived on the scene of this unfortunate accident to find a young navy nurse and her father already on the scene who had stopped to help when they saw the wreck duke in a flurry of shock and fear ran back to the mansion shouting for help while the responding officer took one look under the car and could tell in an instant the poor eduardo would not be walking this one off okay i don't blame her so far i mean she her story adds up okay so i mean you can't not call for help just because you're like oh yeah well he's definitely dead so i'm just gonna find someone in the morning it makes sense that she ran off an ambulance soon followed and the crew discovered that the car was too heavy for them to raise with their jack so a tow truck company had to be called along to assist with retrieving the battered body it was found that the 42 year old had died instantly from severe injuries to his brain spine and rib cage that is quite the accident this was a tragedy for all involved a talented man had lost his life while his star was on the rise and doris had lost her closest friends and confidants but you might rightly be asking jesus christ how does one accidentally run a station wagon over their best friend yes callum i i'm definitely wondering that i mean it seems like quite an accident what did he have brain spine rib cage injuries that that was a big big accident enza chief of newport police joseph a radiss to help crack the case surely his rigorous investigation we get to the bottom of things he sent two of his investigators to take a statement from duke on sunday afternoon following the accident because apparently if your lawyers are good enough you can mangle a man with your car and then just go chill in bed for a couple of days everything will be fine yeah they don't want to touch her they're probably scared of her and a team of lawyers i mean this is like the same i guess it's the same today you know it was in a bed at rough point that the detectives found her surrounded by her two beloved german shepherds and the rest of her attack dogs a team of top lawyers yes they were able to ask her just four questions about the event getting a brief outline of what happened on that fateful evening she told them they only got four questions the lawyers were like listen police you can only ask four questions we tell you what to do the police just like okay i guess so weird she told them that she and tarella had been heading out to dinner in his rented car meaning one of them needed to hop out and open the gate to the estate then they then went to unlock the chain in a strangely unnecessary maneuver which duke claimed they're done 100 times before she hopped over to the driver's seat took off the parking brake put the car into drive and accelerated it's unclear if the previous 100 times tarella had swung over the gates and hopped through the passenger side window like a slick action movie cop but this time it didn't go off quite so smoothly she's got a team of lawyers i feel like you could come up with a better excuse it's like oh no no we accelerate we always accelerated the car at speed towards each other it was what we did come on lawyers do better although i'm gonna guess they do quite well since she was unfamiliar with the potentially malfunctioning car doris you could accidentally lurch forward like a greyhound out of the trap and send the vehicle careering towards eduardo who was crushed against the gate and subsequently dragged beneath the chassis didn't they say they'd done it oh okay they said they've done it a hundred times before but then maybe this was a new rented car or something either way i mean if i was the police i'd be like yeah maybe i'll buy it but uh let's you know let's ask someone else just in case chief radise heard the report from his men and signed off with a sounds legit case closed but his signature methodology of leaving every stone unturned didn't fly too well with the press who wanted all of the juicy details of this high society tragedy and the state d.a wasn't quite satisfied with the half-page report either damn right i'm glad someone followed up on this guy who was just seemingly just didn't want to do his job great great one chief nice so a further interrogation took place several days later during which duke gave a more in-depth account of events with enough ammunition to shut up the naysayers the case was closed for real wrapped up neatly with a bow on top nowadays the information displays at rough point make only a brief mention of the unfortunate accident of october the 7th 1966 a footnote in the story of an otherwise dazzling pioneering 20th century woman and everyone lived happily ever after except for eduardo he was crushed under a car with brain spinal and something else injuries ribcage yeah he didn't it wasn't so happy ever after for him anyway so i'm sure you're not willing to call it quits and accept this version of events and something tells me callum that by the huge stack of paper i've got here there's a bit more to it than this we know there is that's not spoiling anything uh where's your detective's intuition and uncanny eye for detail you've noticed that you're listening to a true crime show and not a true tragic accident show you're probably pondering some of the more unscrupulous details like how was the investigation closed within just a few days and how you in all your years on earth have been easily able to avoid running over your best mate except maybe in a game of grand theft auto or two yeah that's right i love playing grand theft auto i sometimes play it with my friends online and i'm the worst teammate i'm the worst like we'll do missions together and i'll just get bored and be like hey grant i'm just gonna run you over i'm just gonna i think you can't kill each other or something so i just always get his car and just drive it into the sea because i don't know it's boring otherwise i'd definitely be killing my friends in grand theft auto if i could anyway that is off topic let's get back to it we need to know more was this genuinely a mistake perhaps triggered by booze stress or stupidity or could doris actually meant to run down eduardo oh it's getting dark it's a question which has been fiercely contested in hushed whispers for decades so i'm going to let you have the final say for yourself to help you do so let's dive a little deeper into the character of the richest little girl in the world doris's background well it was privileged obviously she inherited like the equivalent of 750 million dollars when she was 12. and then made more so she was she was definitely like modern-day billionaire for real uh being born the daughter of a billionaire industrialist has its perks yes you get to go to all of the best parties travel the world rub shoulders with all the top creatives of your day for many that's the defining image of doris duke a beautiful glamorous wealthy socialite to exemplify the sexual liberation of the 20th century woman on paper she fits the role perfectly tall beautiful filthy rich she enjoyed the attention of the best photographers and the most eligible bachelors on the scene it's even rumored that she and marlon brando were together for a night or two oh scandalous 19. where was this 1929 30 scandals how exciting to others she was primarily a savvy businessman who managed to multiply her inheritance threefold okay so she definitely became a modern-day equivalent billionaire she plowed millions of it into noble charitable pursuits as well her cv was pretty impressive throughout her 20s and 30s she did more than most could ever fit into a lifetime competitive surfing in hawaii writing for harper's bazaar in paris training under top names in jazz reporting from bombed out cities during world war ii this was no dainty rich girl she was definitely a rich girl that's for sure though all of that stuff just i mean maybe i'm just jealous it'd be great to be super rich as a kid you get to do all of this cool stuff although i don't know maybe it just makes you a broken adult because you're like i'm already rich what's the point of trying at the age of 22 she married her first husband james cromwell an aspiring politician and fellow old money aristocrat their marriage was marked by tragedy five years in with the death of their daughter premature and they divorced three years later fast forward another three years and duke was married to porfirio rubirosa maybe a diplomat from the dominican republic and a renowned playboy who famously possessed what scientists now refer to as big dick energy bde i had no idea what this is it came up in i think a script the other day that i was reading and i was like what the hell's big dick energy and i had to google it and i found out oh this is actually a thing cool it was a legend i think it's to do like i'd say if you've got swagger you've got swagger if you've got big dick energy it was alleged that duke paid off roberos's second wife with a million dollars in cash just so she would agree to agree to a quick and painless divorce seemingly eager to make sure the second marriage worked out our future amateur stunt driver gal of dark uh continued to splurge an insane amount of cash on her new beloved the next time your birthday is rolling around casually mention to your partner that doris once gave porfirio an entire staple full of polo ponies for him to play his favorite sport and converted a b-25 bomber to get around in that is insane so she gave him a private plane in the 19 i don't know early 20th century and i don't know how many i don't know how polo works like i said i wasn't mega rich when i was a kid um but that's it's got to be like a bunch of horses right i'm going to say 11 because that's many people are on a football team in england i don't know how many people are on american football team but even that wasn't enough to keep them it could be 11. it could be more i didn't even know i don't know anything about football i don't know why i use that as an analogy i apologize english people are probably like simon everyone knows there's 12 people on a football team i don't i also don't care but even that wasn't enough to keep them together and the couple eventually divorced on bad terms in 1948 keep this in mind you're about to see a bit of a pattern develop doris splashes the cash for someone close to her but still can't seem to keep them around forever it seems like the resulting abandonment issues became a central issue in her life which not even a billion dollar bank balance could fix yeah money doesn't buy you friends everyone knows this even people without money know this it's like it's like a mega trope and it's true so lonely i wish i could buy friends just joking let's move on middle age duke castro and tyrella the next phase in a unhappy love life is when things really started to unravel for doris at a jazz bar on the sun-soaked isles of hawaii she sat one evening listening to a band called three bees and the queen the young lad at the piano caught her eye partly for his virtuosic skill is how you say that word i'm not sure someone who's a virtuoso i don't even know there was a a word to describe someone i just thought you'd say being a virtuoso anyway and partly for his boyish good looks this was joey castro a prodigious pianist and band leader in his early 20s she used their shared love of tickling the ivories to get a foot in the door approaching him after the show to request some private lessons it didn't take long for them to become a couple and the 15-year age gap never phased either of them i'm sure the money was also like the two were soon shacked up together in a los angeles hotel and things seem to be going pretty well for a while afterwards doris and joey whose modern day celebrity couple name would presumably be dojo i like it settled into a nice life in california spending their days making music and sweet sweet music number one to do things by half doris bought another luxury estate at her collection this was to be their love nest for the next decade or so a canyon side villa somewhat ominously named falcon lair before setter that isn't i mean ominous but also epic i wish my house was called falcon lair but i suppose you can just name your house what you want when i get a house i'm gonna call it falcon lair although now it's associated with murder i guess no that was on that was on the west east coast cool so falcon lair is still an option for future house before settling in for good dorris added some personal touches putting ostrich feathers on the roof what installing napoleon's original war room this is amazing it's so good to be a billionaire you just do what you want why do you have feathers on your roof why not i'm mad rich just do what i want don't they blow away yeah yeah we've got a whole ostrich farm they just keep shipping new feathers why not oh she changed the kitchen curtains as well you know the usual the only one of those i can relate to is the kitchen curtains they even fitted out the house with practice and studio space inside which was to be the base of their very own recording company that sounds positively tame callum after the installing napoleon's original war room so they bought napoleon's war room moved it to california installed in a house if i'm understanding that correctly that is absolutely wild but when you have billions to blow however you please it can be hard to stay focused so it'd be a while before the little business venture got off the ground this is the problem like if you're already mad rich you're like yeah i'm gonna start a recording company this will be great and then you just don't because you don't need money because you're already mad rich so you just don't do do much it's a blessing and a curse i guess for the rest of the 1950s dojo hosted some of the hottest parties in l.a where jazz icons and film stars gathered duke ellington was even said to have come round to jam with them a few times don't know who duke ellington is i assume he's famous my pop culture knowledge is quite weak especially from whenever this was the 1950s i don't know uh it was during this time that dora's made the acquaintance of a certain young up-and-comer named eduardo torrella he had been making some small appearances in films and trying to build a career in set design and freelance interior designing he must have taken one look at the dusty ostrich feathers lining doris's living room and thought jesus christ i cannot let this woman make her own decisions and the two became friends with eduardo becoming doris's go-to guy for any and all aesthetic matters the downward spiral but not all was well in falcon's lair the celebrity couple which called it home was spiraling into a lifestyle of routine alcoholism and barbiturate abuse with increasingly violent domestics erupting between them it's thought that doris was becoming jealous of her younger lover's growing renown as a top musician and that he himself was just a volatile guy all round in 1963 with the couple now deep in their spiral of self-destruction they had their biggest fight yet while staying at another duke family estate you know your family's rich when you have multiple estates it's not like you have one estate you're not just regular billionaires you have multiple family estates i like it and just like that the rich girl who had spent so much time around actors was now playing a starring role in her very own slasher flick what she grabbed a butcher's knife and swung it to her partner slashing him down the arm yes ladies and gentlemen of the jury that's you guys there's a shining character reference for you doris duke knife fighter episodes like this paint the life of the beloved philanthropist in a very different light which is why you won't find much mention of them in her biographies or news articles these are the hidden details which she would have liked expunged from her legacy and it seems like for the most part she succeeded like i don't know who this person is i don't know negative or positive about her but at least according to callum's research everyone kind of likes her still or did until well we'll get into it let's uh let's carry on but thankfully the lawsuit records remained joey castro left falcon lair on the first day of 1964 and filed a suit for the scarring on his arm what he hadn't reckoned with though is how damn persistent a billionaire's lawyers can be like every rich megalomaniac worth her salt doris even had some x-fbi muscle on her payroll to deploy whenever the legal heat was on also if i was in doris's position that absolutely slashed someone's arm and they threatened to sue me i'd be like i don't want any paperwork here's a large check please be quiet and go away and i mean she can write a really large check so it's going to go away you're going to be fine we will happily cheer when batman uses his piles of cash to operate outside the law but unfortunately real-life billionaire beatdowns are usually far more litigious and no and nowhere near as well intended castro was hounded by these shady characters and pressured into dropping the case and then ended up reconciling with doris before the year was out he reconciled after she stabbed him with a knife dude come on why the hell would you go back after all of that you ask callum i should read these ahead because that is exactly what i just asked well done well remember that recording company they had planned doris finally pulled the trigger on it setting up clover records in both of their names oh and she bought him a brand new 100 grand mercedes and promised to leave him an inheritance after her death too oh okay so she's trying the whole buying your friends thing again oh yeah no that doesn't work we discussed this it almost is a little heartbreaking to think of the desperation behind the move so starved for authentic human connections the isolated heiress was even willing to bribe people with a big payoff if they stuck around until after she was dead and gone but that kind of cynical connection can never really last throwing money at the problem seemed to work for a short while but by 1965 the couple were raging at each other again doris heard from our friends that joey had been around town in the company of younger women while her own looks began to fade due to the effects of booze and drugs yes don't do drugs kids as the relationship fell apart and her control over life unraveled she started to spend a lot more time with her now most trusted friend eduardo tirelia so this was the uh the guy who was the set designer the up and comer who uh he didn't like her ostrich feathers on the roof or wherever they were so um yeah he was her rock during this most difficult time in her life although he couldn't hold her together all by himself the news that her former lover the dominican diplomat uh robert ribarosa that died in a car crash didn't help in fact it finally seemed to send doris over the edge in the spring of 1966 all these simmering resentments and anxieties between doris and joey boiled over one of the management execs at clover records got a late night call from doris and rushed over to falcon lair what he found was total domestic devastation joey had trashed the drawing completely and stood urinating out of a window while doris lay in bed with a broken jaw oh wow okay so i mean we knew this guy was temperamental is that how it was described uh it seems he broke her jaw what is that is not good i mean i know she stabbed him with a knife but that this this is not these are not good people definitely knock at people allegedly whatever she may or may not have done we can all agree that she 100 did not deserve that castro's temper had been set ablaze when doris decided to cut him off refusing to put any more money into the record company and with that tragic end to the longest and fiercest romantic affair of her life doris was defeated resigning herself to the idea that money couldn't buy love finally and people just couldn't be trusted she retreated a rough point the house where she had been presented as a debutant 35 years prior now with a lifetime of regrets to look back on she must have sat in those empty halls and ruminated on how despite all of the promise she felt in those early days as an invincible teenage billionaire despite all of the amazing things she'd done in her life that had all gone horribly wrong if you've been paying attention to the dates you'll know what comes next i have to say caleb i haven't but uh i'm sure you're going to tell me i'm a casual podcast i'm a casual show maker it's 1966 and we're back in front of that smashed gate with a dodge station wagon crumpled against a tree and sirens wailing in the distance the context of how doris ended up at this point now paints things in a very different light this wasn't just some charitable sweetheart and lovable party-goer it was a woman with some violent marks on her record who might have been reaching the end of her rope but still it's surely silly to imagine that eduardo would bear the brunt of this breakdown he was still a close friend the person who she trusted throughout all of those years in an abusive relationship the last person she was willing to invest any faith in why murder a friend who had just traveled for hours to go to dinner with you before we get into that let's talk about the man himself it's only fair he was a talented and popular guy who deserves more than just to be a footnote in the story of his own death yeah this is always depressing when it's like if you're killed by a famous person that's all you're ever known for that's all you're ever remembered for uh i don't know i do a podcast where uh we we look at historical stories and often we'll come across like someone who did something in the 1700s that you know they peed out of a window and it was and it made peeing out of windows illegal and that's the only only thing that person will ever be remembered for that's it their whole life that's it it's uh it's kind of depressing but also i mean everyone dies and everyone's ultimately forgotten this got even darker than it already is a lot of biographies of doris duker relegated him to that position as a footnote even though he had a life even though his life had enough material for a whole book of its own known as eddie to his friends tyrella had started his career performing in nightclubs down in new jersey alongside the likes of frank sinatra who ate at his family home a few times during world war ii he enlisted a fight in europe and won commendations for his service during the endgame stages of the war particularly the battle of the bulge but as both a war hero and a promising performer he returned to america to begin the rest of his life then as a gay man in mid-20th century america he did pretty much the most sensible thing that a gay man in mid-20th century america could do he made the move to la this was where eduardo came into his own landing interior design gigs and small film roles to fund a comfortable lifestyle with his partner the sculptor and wardrobe designer edmund carra their parties were as legendary as any duke and castro ever threw making them big names on the hollywood scene i somehow doubt that i mean this duke and duke and castro were like billionaires i mean this guy maybe he does well for himself but he's an interior designer he's he's probably not a billionaire gonna go gonna go there and guess says i mean bill millions of pounds on each party buys you some pretty rad parties for over a decade tarella split his time between the east and west coast even as his film career began to flourish but by the mid-1960s the call of california was growing stronger and stronger he had landed some of his first big credited gigs acting opposite charles bronson for a brief scene in the sandpiper and all set for another big money production job on don't make waves featuring his good friend sharon tate who would later go on to befriend duke herself before ending up a victim of the manson family california is a wild place folks and i'm sure the manson family met maybe they've just been done so much that people don't want to hear about that again but obviously the charles manson murders we could definitely cover here at the casual criminalist if i mean let me know and we can do it uh i feel maybe it's just overdone but here was the issue for a decade now tarella had been designing duke's rooms helping planner parties appraising the antiques she used to wow her guests all for mates rates which undersold his talents pretty severely and now as her once unknown friend was burgeoning into the hollywood heavyweight he seemed destined to become she felt she was in danger of losing him to the west coast world which had laid her so low her fears turned out to be true see the very reason that terella has hired the dodge station wagon which ended his life was to empty out his apartment he planned to take his things to his family home for storage before heading back to sunny california for good while he was at it he was going to break the news to doris duke doing one last job for her for old time's sake his partner edmund advised him against it that all heard the stories about how the woman had cut up castro's arm so did he really expect her to take the news quietly i don't know i wouldn't expect her to murder me that's for sure i mean like okay we're friends she's probably not going to be pleased but she's probably not going to stab me or you know destroy me with her car doing the sensible thing he decided to consult a psychic oh god here we go dr jacques honduras was the go-to guy when rich hollywood folk i feel like we should say doctor with uh very much in quotes guy go-to guy when rich hollywood folk wanted to blow their cash on spiritualist blabber and he strongly advised torella not to go to rough point well in this case it was good advice wasn't it the so-called doctor probably flaunted that prediction after his client's untimely death but he probably gave ominous warnings to a dozen people each day you know broken clocks and all that indeed it wasn't anything to do with being spiritual or him having some sort of weird other plainly knowledge it was just a guess also had probably heard about the stabbing thing so he's not some sort of magical wizard anyway there's no such thing as magical wizards anyway eduardo had known doris for a long time and he was closer to her than anyone at that point so he thought himself exempt from her crazy outbursts at any rate he told the psychic that he needed a quick fix of cash for some dental work so he could still kill two birds with one stone and make a quick buck while he was there it was the sort of basic job that he had done for the ars a thousand times before as duke's one-time neighbor hal tinney tells it the two were on the way to inspect a pricey relic at some local antique dealer's shop the piece was a bust said to contain a bone of the catholic martyrs and ursula hidden inside since that's not the kind of thing they mass-produced at ikea duke had called upon her personal antique expert to accompany her for the viewing maybe because she was crazy about ancient magic christian bones or maybe just to buy some company for a few hours the things rich people buy at any rate you might have noticed the first discrepancy in her story if you cast your mind back you'll remember that doris had claimed they were on their way to dinner i do remember this not appraising antiques surely their little treasure hunting trip would be something she'd remember to mention when she recounted the events to police but hey it's hardly a smoking gun maybe they were just planning on swinging by swinging by mcdonald's on the way to the shop who knows was this was what 1960s or something mcdonald's was probably around i don't think she she probably ate there although warren buffett's a billionaire and he eats mcdonald's every day where the i to mcdonald's i love mcdonald's i mean i try not to not because of any like snobbery i just try to eat healthier i try i try unsuccessfully where things do start to get very murky though is in the days which followed the accident with eddie's broken body in the morgue and duke holed up in bed beside behind a wall of lawyers it became less of a game of he said she said and more just she said doris the benefits of being a billionaire with a wall of lawyers you can ask four questions doris was oh doris was the only witness to the event after all and nobody had any real reason to suspect foul play did they not have like crime scene investigators back then he'll be like you know i've seen csi they'll figure it out i mean i wouldn't expect like modern csi but surely there were people to look at this stuff you've already seen how the police chief joseph radice seems to have been keen to wrap up the case with as little fuss as possible but we do need to take a closer look at how and why you see very recently the daughter of raddus secretary at the time said that her mother was convinced that the police chief had accepted some hush money to make it all go away as quickly as possible her own granddaughter even suspected the same thing going so far as to confront him about it the chief denied to do with a laugh and a smile up until his death in 1997 oh his own family want to like over his legacy oh well i mean good in this case was it his daughter no it was the i was the daughter of his secretary so it wasn't his family sorry they're probably keeping quiet but there's one crucial piece of evidence which elevates these accusations above all the other gossip which inevitably gets tossed up around a case like this remember how the district attorney was reluctant to let radice close to the case on the back of a four question interview with the only suspects while the plucky police chief would be damned if any two-bit law school boy was going to force him to do his job properly police work is hard and he had hobbies to attend to he does sound like a terrible police officer it's like come on get it together it's alleged that he and his investigators had colluded with the head of doris duke's lawyers one arum arabians but the whole matter to bed as quickly as possible oh no this isn't good a story shared by an associate of arabian the chief knew the best way to make it all go away was to make a second interrogation report and the best way to produce one with absolute minimal effort was to totally fake it guys come on we could we could do better that's right what should have taken a pair of detectives half a day presumably took one underpaid typist just a couple of hours they drafted a three-page transcript detailing an interview that most likely never even took place how can we tell the suspect didn't even say her birthday correctly when they asked her something which was amended with a pen by duke before before she and her lawyers signed off on the document several days later this is so bad so essentially they drafted a document said hey doris this is what happens right she's like yeah yeah my birthday's wrong but that's right where do i sign problem solved her lawyers probably even signed it for i don't know this is crazy after drawing a line under this unsavory chapter and the city's history and preserving the dignity of the elite lady involved things worked out pretty well for the crack team of slapped ash detectives chief radish served another seven months on the force before settling into a suspiciously comfortable retirement in florida oh no and one of the original investigating officers took his place despite being nowhere near the next in line oh well so yeah they just totally got bought that's depressing and so all went quiet if doris had accidentally killed her friend she wouldn't face any comeuppance and her reputation would remain as untarnished as possible and if she had in fact brutally murdered him this prospect could only ever be discussed in hushed whispers around town eventually the idea of it faded to the status of urban legend and so we these are impressive lawyers i mean she's a billionaire so she gets the best but i mean that aram guy he made murder allegedly i guess we're gonna find out totally go away not even go away so she doesn't go to prison but basically turn it into an urban legend i mean she seems like a horrible person because she murdered her friend and stabs people but that aram guy wow legendary lawyer and so we find ourselves going around in circles a death a quick cover-up a dead end a death a quick cover-up a dead end that's exactly the endless loop anyone interested in the case would have ended up in over the past five decades the official account was enshrined in the history books and any other versions were regulated to old wives tales and internet forums where people discuss how biggie and two back secretly lived together in the bahamas they don't if you believe this stuff you're crazy ugh conspiracy theorists uh if you're watching this on youtube you can smash that disline button things remain this way for years right up until 2016 when investigative journalist peter lance started asking all the right questions this i think is the vanity fair thing that i read about that inspired me to tell callum to make a podcast about it crack investigator peter lance is a native of newport ah the town where this all went down he began his career with a job at the local paper less than a year after the accident at rough point he was intimately familiar with bellevue avenue since the prestigious high school he attended was just off of it in the early days of his work life he was exposed to the duality in the legacy of his town's most famous daughter on the one hand she had set up the beloved newport restoration foundation which pumped millions of dollars into the redevelopment of the town on the other hand there was always the shadow of the horrible evening hanging over the mansion a chapter in the town's history that nobody really cared to reopen let's just hide it under the rug shall we it seems that the town like its police chief was in a state of cash-induced amnesia purchased by the huge bank balance of doris's estate her campaign of local splurging began just a little more than a week after the accident with a donation to the hospital where she had been received on that fateful night and another to restore the cliffside walkway behind the mansions a favorite local tourist spot even to this day the foundations she set up continue to shower riches upon the town of newport no wonder they just want this hidden because it makes her look like a bad horrible murderer rather than the philanthropist that they like to imagine she is allegedly in the end the spirit of silence won out in the conflicted soul of peter lance ii but the shadow over rough point never really lifted from his mind for four hugely successful decades in journalism and media followed during which he raked through the murky world of counter-terrorism in the post-9 11 era before he would return to the story the very start of it all this world-class investigator became the first to fully unpick the many troubling details which have been swept under the ostrich feather rug with those ostrich feathers thankfully for narrative purposes lance has the roman nose slick back hair a macho swagger of a classic film noir investigator picture him in black and white driving down bellevue avenue in atrobian suspenders with a monologue about exposing the seedy underbelly of this rotten town rolling on in the background actually scratch all of that he started this investigation on facebook why does modern tech have to ruin everything okay so the pitcher instead sat in his dining room in a coffee stained vest and boxes chatting with members of the newport room among the facebook groups after probably blocking half a dozen people adamant that rough point is the spaceship hq of the illuminati yes it is facebook and honestly the internet in general he managed to contact some people with close connections to the case children of estate staff who'd told of heated arguments preceding the events the aforementioned police secretary's daughter who was convinced bribes were involved it seemed that there was still a healthy newport truther community out there in this case the conspiracy theory is kind of right though the truthers are onto something unfortunately though all of this amounts to just hearsay without some proper paper evidence and most of the key documentation around the incident had mysteriously evaporated over the years well one because time rolls on and you know people don't keep paperwork although i guess with police investigations like looking into murders and stuff from the 60s or whatever it was so yeah they probably hold on to that there's like big warehouses full of this junk but in a twist lifted straight out of the screenwriter's handbook a mysterious package arrived on lance's desk one day in late 2019 it was a dossier containing the original police report sent to him by an unnamed government official who caught windows probing with the help of this mysterious assailant things now started to gain traction it was in this dossier that lance recognized the mistake in the second interview which supported the idea of a slap dash cover-up this would have been open for anyone to see until the files disappeared from the police records but it wasn't until now that someone was really committed to following the breadcrumbs yeah what so decades of years later a journalist has to do the job that the police guy should have done in the first place come on the next step was to find some other documents to compare with the police reports and lance found them in the most unlikely of places in a stroke of journalistic genius he dug down deep into the archives of the rental company from uh from whom the victim had borrowed the car wow they kept those records as part of their insurance procedures they'd collected a statement from miss duke which he obviously wasn't as concerned about as the official police reports i mean who looks at those things anyway i'm just amazed that a car rental company from back in the day still had that record it's incredible in his vanity fair expose lance quotes the 173 report as saying that she ran back to the house looking for eduardo because of course that's the most logical thing to do when you see your friend mashed between your garden gate and front bumper go check if he popped off to the kitchen for a glass of water yeah i mean it just reeks of something not being right the sightseeing navy nurse who was on the scene at the time remembered things very differently in her police statement she said that a hysterical duke could run around her house shouting but she'd ran over her friend which seems like a much more reasonable response indeed lance was actually able to locate the very same nurse whose name is judith uh wartgo after all of these years she left the story behind after the event and went on to have a long career as a paramedic she would have attended a thousand such car wrecks over the years but the memories of that very first one never left her she was able to specifically recall that duke herself only had some very minor injuries from the crash in contrast dr philip mcallister the medical examiner had treated the heiress at the hospital reported she suffered major bleeding from cuts to the head made all the more suspicious by the fact that he acted as doris's very own personal doctor from the moment she entered the hospital he even turned away the preliminary investigators from her private room where she spent a few hours recuperating that doesn't sound unreasonable though she's super rich so of course she gets her own doctor and also he can turn away the police like she's recovering from a terrible car accident she he does what she says it's no surprise again she's very very rich unsurprisingly mcallister was an ardent defender of the tragic accident theory but there's no word on whether he went to live it up with a police chief in florida afterwards well i'm guessing he was probably really well paid i mean whether you want to call that a bribe or not we could call it a bribe allegedly with his investigation building up ahead of steam peter lance returned to newport for real this time and drew upon connections old and new to paint a picture of the night's events he knew he was onto something big there were too many missing pieces which had conveniently disappeared too many silent figures encouraging him onwards from behind the scenes surely his own personal noir film wasn't going to be a flop oh let's hope not spoiler alert it's not however it all hinged on finding something more concrete none of what had been unearthed so far actually pointed to murder conspiracy concealment corruption yes yes and yes but there was nothing yet to prove that doris had hit the gas that evening with the intent to crush her friend to death cynics could easily argue that she was just another rich girl dodging responsibility for her own stupidity yeah honestly i mean if that's what the evidence you got so far yeah i mean maybe in criminal law you've got to prove beyond all reasonable doubts do i think we're quite there yet what was needed was a hard forensic counter-narrative finally forensics csi getting on the case or more likely the journalists doing the job of csi many decades later because that's where we are and with a few strokes of luck he was able to find one the real course of events it begins with the gate warped and blown out from the impact of the car after asking some questions about town lance acquired a previously unseen photographic negative which lay tucked away in the basement archive of a local family for years as it turned out he had known the photographer ed quigley who worked alongside him during those formative years at the local newspaper quigley's family held on to much of his work weather for nostalgia austerity the sibia toned image was taken from just outside the inside gate and showed some officers and observers milling about the scene as the tow truck hoisted up the back of the dodge visible to the left of the frame were the shattered pieces of the lower gate with struts bent outwards now this wasn't exactly a bombshell in itself but it ran directly counter to another piece of evidence which was presumably pinned up on lance's investigative cork board the autopsy report for torella this key piece of evidence hadn't evaporated like the rest but it was filed under the mistaken first name edmund anyway remember the doctor who duke bought out as soon as he made it through the front door of a e yes we do well or amy i think that's the british word callum's also british i think americans call it er we call it a e for accident and emergency well he was the one in charge of determining the cause of death and reporting it to the public but it seems he failed to draw the attention to the fact that terrella's legs were actually in good shape ribs skull spine pretty rough as expected but the damage to his lower half was mostly superficial well i mean these were questioning like what did he just jump up like really high when that car was coming uh so why then was only the lower gate blasted out yeah okay makes sense if eduardo had really been pinned against it as duke claimed his thighs and shins would be in splinters agreed the picture also offered another avenue of investigation once again lifted straight out of the hollywood plot device stock there was a familiar face in the frame kneeling down on the right side his head turned to the side was one detective sergeant fred newton who lance had previously written about during his tenure at the local paper this was a trusted face for lance a sort of proper no-nonsense policeman who couldn't be bought but sadly the sergeant wasn't available for interview having passed away in the late 90s however if lance could find at least someone connected to the good cop maybe you could get some information from a policeman who had never sold their soul to the duke payroll this cover-up goes deep pursuing this avenue was how he made the acquaintance of edward angel the man who we met a little while ago at the scene of the crash back when he was a rookie beat cop oh that was a while ago yeah i remember being the first policeman to arrive on the scene angel had first-hand access to some facts that never made it into the official reports he went to sergeant newton with his findings and with him pieced together a version of events entirely independent of duke's narrative which the rest of the department was taking as gospel yeah i mean she is the only witness in all of that but she's also the alleged perpetrator of the crime do some forensics come on these findings were pretty grisly white smears of blood and patches of skin running across bellevue avenue gorilla glistening under the light of the evening sun that much was to be expected the man was mashed by a two-ton car after all but what later surprised angel was that he had assumed based on his analysis of the splatter patterns that the victim had actually been a passer-by walking down the street because that's where the first impact seemed to have taken place there was a blood trail starting outside the grounds of the mansion from a large splatter in the middle of the road well that seems completely contrary to what old doris described doesn't it since he was a fresh graduate of the police academy and it was sergeant newton's responsibility to train up the new recruits angel went to check his answers with the teacher the older wiser cop took a look at the sketch of the scene and said no that's not right not as wrong as the official account but not right either together they returned to the scene where newton developed his gruesome theory on what really happened that night in fact the lack of any blood in the entrance way showed that eduardo wasn't crushed there at all the damage to the gate and car suggested he instead rolled up onto the bonnet as the car careered into the gate then as he was thrown from the breaking vehicle he hit the ground and lay in the middle of the road in that moment the vehicle had stopped and doris had a choice to make as she looked at her injured friend wincing in the headlights she had the power over life oh no she's going to run him over again isn't she she had the power over life or death ultimately she chose the latter she hit the gas intentionally steering over eduardo and dragging his mangled body for a full 40 feet without any mercy oh god it seemed that her maniacal separation anxiety malicious possessiveness or both had driven doris to committing a gruesome and deliberate killing straight-up murder right there isn't it allegedly after hearing that peter lance must have been gobs-backed from beyond the grave sergeant newton had brought all of the threads of the investigation together with an evidence-based theory that had lain smothered under secrecy and corruption for decades all of their shared suspicions about the case and cover-up seem vindicated and it was time to go public now it's worth mentioning at this point that the expose which lance wrote is still extremely fresh having only hit the pages of vanity fair in july of this year 2020. in the coming years there's likely to be waves of scrutiny poured on both the event and the independent investigation as of now none of these murderous allegations have been officially proven in court the closest was a wrongful death suit filed by the torella family five years after the event which showed negligence and stupidity but not malicious intent saying that as things stand at the moment the physical evidence unearthed by lance seems pretty conclusive indents left by the spinning tires and the gravel were observed by both state dmv investigators and members of the victim's family the rubber marks on the road showed the car turning and accelerating the blood patterns discovered by the sergeant and rookie corroborated the autopsy's revelation that the victim was never actually pinned against the gate honestly with these later on you can read something that will refute this and find equally believable i mean maybe maybe not but it often happens let's see we'll have to sit tight on this one but right now i'm like she did it right allegedly the quigley's even came through with a further print of a picture which had been suspiciously expunged from the newspaper archives but preserved in their own weirdly meticulous family archives it proved the renegade cop right the first blood stain appeared in the middle of the road probably with an eye to protecting himself from a hefty libel case lance took his findings to a forensic engineering consultancy firm collision and injury dynamics before blowing the lid off the case a senior partner at the firm signed off on the incriminating version of events and their conclusion read it's clear that he went up on the hood fell off and got run over mid-street this was a multi-sequence event in which the driver made a number of affirmative decisions in the course of the incident the evidence leads me to conclude that the event did not occur as described by doris duke it was all there for anyone to see but not a single piece of this features in the original police report from that day all you'll find are the two paltry interviews that treat duke like a puppy who couldn't possibly do any harm to anyone even though she previously stabbed someone like the boyfriend and seemed to do all sorts of terrible things allegedly as it turns out she may have been more like her famously vicious german shepherds and so lance went on to publish his findings in the extended vanity fair piece earlier this year all still just as allegations 44 years after the crime and cover-up one intrepid reporter's investigation was able to pull the veil of glitz and glamour off one of america's most famous elites revealing a rotten reality underneath maybe allegedly in is that the end of the story though or did the police kick down 107 year old doris's door to shake out the truth once and for all well no unfortunately even if it's all completely true we're about three decades too late for justice doris duke passed away on october 9 1993. on the same day her butler bought a brand new louis vuitton bag to hold her ashes which were then cast out into the pacific from the beach of hawaii estate another estate in an obituary for the new york times she was referred to as the heiress whose great wealth couldn't buy happiness well that's very true her unmasked legacy provides that money can buy a whole lot of other things indeed not least of all a get out of jail card for the most heinous crime there is allegedly wrap up and there you have it the story of how eduardo torrella met his end how his narcissistic employer likely came to be his brutal killer and how the world kept on turning as if nothing had happened at all if it all left you with a bad taste in your mouth from the lack of justice in the world i'm afraid afraid i have only two poultry pieces of consolation for you well i'm looking forward to them callum because i feel like after this one we need them the first is a closer look at the wrongful death suit which tyrell's relatives brought against duke in the early 1970s the file had of course disappeared from the rhode island archives by the time peterlance got there of course but we still know a lot of the details and the eventual outcome as i mentioned duke was proven to have caused the death of eduardo torella accidentally meaning that the family was surely due a hefty chunk of compensation right i hope so but i get the feeling it's not going to be the case right no only poor people have to pay their dues as lance heard from the niece of the victim their family was willing to settle for a payment of two hundred thousand dollars about 1.2 million dollars today but vindictive doris was having none of it in the end she negotiated down to 75 000 which equated to about five grand for each family member involved i told you the consolation was pretty paltry you did callum i still expected better and that's kind of the end of it today oh no sorry there's a little bit more there's a little bit more the last part of the story is a mini mystery surrounding doris's death in the late 1980s she had taken on the service of an irish butler named bernard lafferty for her new jersey farm estate another estate seriously by this point her youth was resistant memory and under the advice of lavity she decided to undergo a facelift and elective knee replacement surgery the string of operations through the early 90s took a real toll on the irs under the constant influence of a cocktail of medications and without any children to carry on a legacy she wrote a new will promising everything she owned to dear old bernard for seeing her through those unhappy twilight years oh no that's wilder you're a butler and you're about to become a billionaire after the inca dried on paper duke's health began to did he kill her allegedly duke's health began to deteriorate further agatha christie taught us all to watch alpha butlers it's surely not they're the most murderous tribe of miscreants on earth and serious suspicions arose when lafayette decided not to bother calling an ambulance while his employer was choking on a piece of food regardless he continued to care for her and sora offered to the great beyond later that year when her system finally succumbed to the strain of the morphine that she needed to get by within a day he had her ashes stuffed in that louis vuitton bag without an autopsy lafferty went on to settle into a new life of luxury at the home which doris once poured all of her hopes for a happy future into falcon lair wow the butler got all the money in the end i mean he didn't kill her surely it's the butler but uh wow and that's the end really this time of the ballad of doris duke a sad story all round filled with jealousy frustration and violence and more awful people than you'd ever care to meet in the lifetime agreed all of these people whether it's doris herself the police chief the journalist is a legend well done but like all the people involved in the original story i mean other than the guy who was killed they'll seem kind of like pretty pretty horrible people all of that unhappiness came to a head on that fateful night at rough point thanks to the efforts of one restless reporter we now finally have a window into the possible truth of the matter it goes to show that the perfect crime does exist in fact it's just a regular shoddy brutal crime with enough cash piled on top of it to make it go away for the rest of your life it's not much of a moral takeaway but hey-ho that's not what we're here for on the casual criminalist you know most the time or a lot of the time they just get away with it i'll leave we with the words from the woman herself with a quote seemingly custom made for your irritating teenage cousin to post on facebook oh god papa used to say you help a man who is in trouble and he will be a true friend but i'm afraid that papa was wrong i would have done anything or paid a fortune for one real friend who i could trust you had one doris you ran him over very nice ending there khaled that's very nice you have included some dismembered dismembered appendices for me so that's how many of these are there three of these let's do them number one doris's reputation around newport wasn't totally unblemished even before the horrible death on her doorstep like everyone's favorite eevee evil tv billionaire mr burns she was in the habit of releasing the hounds a pair of german shepherds had a habit of attacking tourists who were walking down the cliffside path to a mansion oh my number two these as these murder allegations were kept hush-hush for decades you'll find plenty of shining portraits of the ares online her newport restoration society is one of the biggest upholders of the sanitized celebrated doris duke narrative for example on their website they allude that duke and castro's relationship ended acrimoniously making no man making no mention of the mad slashing meltdown yeah and he later broke her jaw number three if you're wondering how falcon lair got its name i wasn't but now i am it wasn't because it once housed a bird-themed bond villain that's a shame it was actually built and christened by italian heartthrob rudolph valentino who named it after a historical drama his wife was planning the hooded falcon so this has been another episode of the casual criminalist if you enjoyed it well please do leave me a review if you're listening to this as a podcast leave me a like if you're watching it on youtube if you have suggestions well let me know in the comments and thank you for listening or watching [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: The Casual Criminalist

Views: 374,178

Keywords: true crime

Id: z5CrzRPb6TM

Length: 58min 46sec (3526 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 27 2021