Doris Duke Killed Her Interior Designer, And Everyone Knew It – HT
Eduardo Tirella had won a Bronze Star at the Battle of the Bulge, counted Sharon Tate among his close friends, and had just finished his first Hollywood film when he flew into Newport, Rhode Island on October 6th, 1966. The next day he was dead in the road outside the gates of Doris Duke’s estate on Bellevue Avenue.
Four days after that, the Newport Chief of Police declared the matter closed. He called it an unfortunate accident. No charges were filed. The investigation that produced that conclusion rested on an interview with Doris Duke conducted several days after Tirella’s death. The transcript of that interview contains four questions.
Four questions. That is the complete official inquiry into the violent death of a 42-year-old man beneath a two-ton station wagon at the gates of one of the wealthiest private estates in New England. Chief Joseph Rattis of the Newport Police Department announced his finding on October 10th, 1966 96 hours after Eduardo Tirella died.
The language he used was precise, an unfortunate accident. There was no inquest. The Rhode Island state authorities who might have conducted a parallel review were not given the opportunity. Duke had been taken to Newport Hospital on the night of the crash. By the time any official inquiry reached her, her lawyers had traveled up from New York.
Duke’s account as recorded was straightforward. Tirella had been driving. He stopped the car at the estate’s large wrought iron gates and got out to open them by hand. She slid from the passenger seat to the driver’s seat intending to pull the car forward once the gate was open. She released the parking brake, shifted into drive, and hit the accelerator instead of the brake. The car lunged forward.
Tirella was pinned against the gates, dragged across Bellevue Avenue, and crushed against a tree on the other side of the road. That is the version that closed the case. The medical examiner’s report documented Tirella’s injuries. All of them were above his waist.
A man pinned against an iron gate by the front of a vehicle then dragged underneath it and crushed against a tree would be expected to show damage to his lower body. The physical record of what the car did to Eduardo Tirella does not match the sequence of events Doris Duke described to police. The ruling does not address that.
His name was Eduardo Tirella and almost nobody remembers it. He was born into an Italian-American family in New Jersey, one of nine children. He worked as a milliner in New York in his early 20s, moving through social circles that gathered around nightclubs and theater, and he knew Frank Sinatra’s world without being Frank Sinatra.
When the war came, he enlisted. He served in the European theater and fought at the Battle of the Bulge, one of the most brutal engagements of the entire conflict. A German offensive launched in December 1944 through the frozen forests of the Ardennes that killed tens of thousands of American soldiers in a matter of weeks. Tirella survived it.
He was awarded the Bronze Star for his conduct during that campaign. He came home. In the years that followed, he built a second life in design and decoration, and sometime in the late 1950s he entered the orbit of Doris Duke. For the next 7 to 10 years, he served as her art curator and interior designer across five properties: Duke Farms in New Jersey, her estate in Bel Air, Shangri-La in Honolulu, her apartment in New York, and Rough Point in Newport.
He traveled with her, sourced art for her, and shaped the interiors of the houses she lived in. He was good at what he did, and she had kept him for a decade. By the mid-1960s, he was also building something else. His friendships in Hollywood had deepened into professional relationships. Sharon Tate was a close friend.
Richard Burton was someone he knew. In 1966, he got his first major set design credit, a film called Don’t Make Waves, a comedy starring Tony Curtis. The film would be released in 1967. Tirella would not live to see it. He was 42 years old in the fall of 1966. The Hollywood career was not a fantasy he was chasing.
It had already produced work. The next phase of his life had already begun, and what he needed to do was tell Doris Duke that he was leaving her employ to pursue it. This was the part that gave the people who knew both of them pause. Before he flew to Newport in October 1966, friends who knew Duke told him she would not take it well.
The phrasing varies across accounts, but the substance is consistent. They warned him. He knew the risk. He went anyway. If you want to keep following the stories that history decided weren’t worth recording, the people who got erased from the official version, this channel is where those stories go.
Subscribing means you’ll be here for the next one. The four-question ruling that cleared Doris Duke in 96 hours made no mention of the relationship between these two people, the decade they had spent together across five properties, or the specific thing Tirella had come to Newport to say. It treated his death as a mechanical event, a foot on a pedal, a car that leaped forward, an unfortunate outcome.
Whatever his friends understood about the situation before he boarded that plane, the official record of his death did not include it. October 6th, 1966 was a Tuesday. Tirella flew into Newport and Doris Duke met him at the airport. They drove together to Rough Point, her English manor-style estate at the far end of Bellevue Avenue, where the road runs out and the property meets the Atlantic.
He had been to Rough Point many times. He knew the house, the staff, the rhythm of the place. He had worked there. He had shaped what it looked like inside. The purpose of the visit was specific. He had come to collect his belongings and to tell Duke in person that he was leaving her employ. He had a film credit.
He had relationships in Hollywood that were turning into real work. He had made his decision, and he had come to Newport to say so directly, which was the kind of thing you did when you had spent a decade working closely with someone and you understood that a letter would not be enough.
His friends had told him she would not take it well. What happened inside Rough Point on the afternoon of October 6th and the morning and early afternoon of October 7th is not fully documented. The pair had planned to go out together that afternoon to look at an artifact for Duke’s collection, one of the routine errands that had structured their working relationship for years.
What is documented is this: At some point before they got into the rented Dodge Polara station wagon to leave, the staff at Rough Point overheard an argument, loud, lengthy, the kind of argument that carries through walls and down hallways and reaches the people whose job it is to pretend they haven’t heard anything.
The argument was between Duke and Tirella. Duke’s account to police, given several days after Tirella’s death, did not mention it. The car they took was a 1966 Dodge Polara station wagon rented from Avis. Tirella drove. Duke was in the passenger seat. Harold McFarland, Duke’s caretaker, would later tell state investigators that Duke never drove when leaving the estate.
That was not her habit. That was not how it worked when she was in residence. Tirella drove, she rode. The gates at Rough Point are large wrought iron structures set into a stone wall that runs along the Bellevue Avenue frontage of the property. To pass through them from the inside, someone has to get out of the car and open them by hand.
That was the arrangement on the afternoon of October 7th. The car pulled up to the gates. Tirella stopped, left the engine running, and got out to open them. The staff had heard the argument. The official record of his death did not include it. The Polara moved through the grounds toward the gates.
It was late afternoon, a little after 5:00. The light in Newport in October comes in low and flat off the water. The gates were closed. Duke’s account to police was consistent across the statements she gave. Tirella had been driving. He stopped the Polara at the gates, left the engine running with the parking brake engaged and the transmission in park, and got out to open them by hand.
Duke said she moved from the passenger seat to the driver’s seat intending to pull the car forward once the gate was open and wait for Tirella to close it behind them. She released the parking brake and shifted into drive. Then she said instead of putting her foot on the brake, she hit the accelerator. The car leaped forward.
It caught Tirella against the still-opening gates, knocked them over across Bellevue Avenue, and struck a tree on the far side of the road. Tirella was found pinned under the car. He was pronounced dead at the scene. That is the account the ruling accepted. The tire tracks left in the gravel inside the Rough Point gates told a different story about the acceleration.
The depth and length of the grooves were consistent with considerably more force than an accidental depression of the gas pedal would produce. And the medical examiner’s documentation of Tirella’s injuries showed damage above his waist. His legs were largely intact. A man pinned between the front of a two-ton vehicle and a heavy iron gate then dragged underneath it across a road and into a tree would be expected to show severe lower body trauma.
The injuries that were documented are not consistent with that sequence. That is the physical record. It does not reach a verdict. It simply does not match. Bob Walker was 13 years old on October 7th, 1966. He was a paperboy, and one of his delivery stops was Rough Point, bringing Doris Duke her copy of the Newport Daily News.
He was on his bicycle on Bellevue Avenue that afternoon, close enough to the estate gates to hear what was happening on the other side of the wall. What he heard first was two people arguing loudly. He could not make out the specific words, but the argument was unmistakable. Two voices, a man and a woman in serious conflict.
Then the arguing stopped. There was a pause of a few seconds. Then he heard the roar of a motor. Then a crash. Then a man screaming. Then a slight skidding sound and the motor decelerating. Then a pause in the screaming. Then the man beginning to scream again. Then the roar of the motor a second time. Then the man scream changing.
Walker described it as turning to horror. The word becoming no drawn out and then a second crash. And then silence. Walker came around to where he could see what had happened. The Polara had come through the gates and crossed Bellevue Avenue and hit a tree. Duke emerged from the car. Walker said she positioned herself in a way that blocked his view of what was on the ground.
He asked her if she needed help. He asked if she wanted him to call the police. She told him to leave. Three times she told him to leave. He left. He went home and told his father what he had seen and heard. His father told him to stay away from it. Walker did not go to the police. He told the story to friends and fellow Marines over the years.
The earliest account he gave to others dates to 1973, but he did not go to the authorities for 55 years. In 2021, he read Peter Lance’s book about the case. He recognized the details. He went to the Newport Police Department and gave a statement to Detective Jacque West, the cold case investigator assigned to review the matter.
West interviewed him for 2 hours. She found him credible. The Newport Police Department reviewed the case for 5 months and then closed it again holding to the original finding. Two accounts of the same event now exist in the record. In one, a car leaped forward accidentally and a man was pinned against a gate.
In the other, a motor roared, a man screamed, the motor roared again, and a second crash followed the first. The injuries on Tirella’s body align more closely with the second account than the first. Newport closed the case anyway. If you’ve heard of Eduardo Tirella before today, or if this is the first time his name has appeared in anything you’ve read or watched, either way, that gap is worth something. Leave it in the comments.
The Newport Police Department opened and closed its investigation into the death of Eduardo Tirella in 96 hours. From the afternoon of October 7th, 1966, when Tirella was pronounced dead on Bellevue Avenue to the morning of October 10th, when Chief Joseph Radice declared the matter an unfortunate accident and announced that no charges would be filed, 4 days.
On the night of October 7th, Duke was taken to Newport Hospital. Rhode Island state investigators from the Registry of Motor Vehicles, who would normally conduct their own review of a fatal vehicle incident, did not reach her that night. While she was at the hospital, her lawyers were traveling from New York.
By the time any official questioning of Duke took place, her legal representation was in place and the initial scene work was finished. The formal interview with Duke happened several days after Tirella’s death, not on the night of it. The transcript of that interview, conducted by a Newport Police Lieutenant, contains the following exchange.
The Lieutenant asked Duke to describe what happened. She described the sequence she had given in her initial statement. Tirella driving, stopping at the gates, getting out, her moving to the driver’s seat, the car leaping forward. The Lieutenant asked if she had any prior experience driving that particular vehicle. She said she had not.
The Lieutenant asked whether Tirella had said anything to her before getting out of the car. She said he had not. The Lieutenant asked if she could estimate how fast the car was moving when it struck him. She said she could not. Four questions. That is the transcript. No follow-up on the physical evidence.
No questions about the argument the staff had overheard. No questions about the nature of their relationship or the conversation that had brought Tirella to Newport. No questions about the tire tracks in the gravel, which the accident investigator had already examined. The interview ended. Chief Radice reviewed it and closed the case.
No inquest was held. The official responsible for determining cause of death in Newport in 1966 was the County Medical Examiner Dr. Philip C. McAllister. His legal obligation was straightforward. Examine the body, document the injuries, establish the cause of death, and report his findings to the authorities conducting the investigation.
He arrived at the scene on the night of October 7th. He examined Tirella. He pronounced him dead. Shortly after pronouncing Eduardo Tirella dead, Dr. McAllister accepted a position as Doris Duke’s personal physician. Under the rules that govern the doctor-patient relationship, anything Duke subsequently said to McAllister was protected.
The official whose findings should have formed the foundation of the criminal investigation had placed himself within hours of the death in a professional relationship with the only person who could have been charged. McAllister’s transition from County Medical Examiner at the scene to Duke’s private doctor did not happen weeks later after the case was closed.
It happened on the night of October 7th, before the investigation had concluded, before the four questions had been asked, before Chief Radice had written the word accident anywhere in an official document. The ruling that followed was declared on October 10th. Unfortunate accident, no charges, no inquest. The four-question transcript was not the only document that required management.
Sergeant Fred Newton was the Newport Police Department’s Chief Accident Investigator. He arrived at the scene on Bellevue Avenue on the afternoon of October 7th and worked the crash site. There is a photograph of him there taken by Ed Quigley showing Newton at the lower right of the frame examining the area outside the gates where the Polara had come through.
According to accounts later obtained by Peter Lance, Newton had reached his conclusions about the sequence of events within hours of arriving at the scene. His conclusions did not match the account Duke had given. Newton was ordered by Chief Radice to remove those conclusions from his official report. What that required of a working police officer, to have solved a case and then to excise the solution from the record on the instruction of a superior, is the kind of thing that does not appear in a personnel file.
Newton complied. The official report reflected what Chief Radice needed it to reflect. Lance’s investigation also uncovered a second interview document in the case file, a three-page transcript of an alleged interrogation conducted at Rough Point on October 11th, the day after Radice closed the case and then briefly reopened it following criticism from the Rhode Island Attorney General, who had questioned the speed of the original ruling.
This document was more detailed than the four-question transcript and looked on its face like a serious piece of investigative work. Lance’s findings suggest it was constructed rather than recorded, drafted in coordination with Duke’s Rhode Island attorney Aram Arabian, and then signed but without an actual interrogation having taken place.
Chief Radice, according to Lance’s research, had family connections to organized crime, a claim sourced through Lance’s investigation and not independently verified by law enforcement. What is documented is that Rhode Island State Police had conducted raids on gambling operations in Newport without informing the Newport Police Department, which said something about the relationship between the two agencies.
When Peter Lance began his reinvestigation in 2018, one of the first things he needed was the autopsy report, the primary forensic document, the official record of what Eduardo Tirella’s body showed. Lance searched the Rhode Island Medical Examiner’s Office. The report was not filed where it should have been. It had been misfiled in the basement of the Rhode Island Medical Examiner’s Office under the name Tirella Edmond.
Eight days after Chief Radice declared the death of Eduardo Tirella an unfortunate accident, Doris Duke wrote a check for $25,000 to the city of Newport for the restoration of Cliff Walk. Cliff Walk is the pedestrian path that runs along the ocean edge of the Bellevue Avenue properties, including the boundary of Rough Point.
For years before October 1966, it had been a source of friction between Duke and the city. Her dogs had gotten out onto the path and attacked tourists. The city had pressured her on the matter repeatedly. She had resisted. Eight days after the ruling, she donated $25,000 to restore it.
She also gave $10,000 to Newport Hospital, the facility where she had been taken on the night of October 7th, where the Rhode Island state investigators had been unable to reach her while her lawyers traveled from New York. Five months after Chief Radice had declared the case closed, Radice retired. In 1968, 2 years after Tirella’s death, Duke established the Newport Restoration Foundation.
Its stated mission was the preservation of colonial era buildings in Newport that were at risk of demolition from urban renewal projects. Over the years that followed, the foundation restored more than 80 of those buildings. It changed the character of Newport’s older neighborhoods in ways that are still visible today.
Streets that might have lost their 18th century architecture to mid-century development retained it. Buildings that would have been torn down were stabilized, restored, and returned to use. The foundation attracted visitors, researchers, and eventually a tourism economy built substantially around the city’s preserved architectural heritage.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis served as its vice president. She publicly championed the foundation’s mission and lent it a visibility that extended well beyond Newport’s existing social circles. The foundation’s reputation was from early in its history considerable. It was founded two years after the ruling in the same city by the same woman.
In 1999, Duke’s estate deeded Rough Point to the Newport Restoration Foundation. The house opened to the public as a museum in 2000. It operates today under the foundation’s management. Visitors come to see the art collection, the architecture, the furnishings Duke assembled over decades of travel and acquisition.
Tours are conducted regularly through the warmer months. To reach the house from Bellevue Avenue, visitors pass through the gates. They are the same gates. The wrought iron gates at the Bellevue Avenue entrance to Rough Point are the gates that were standing on the afternoon of October 7th, 1966 when the Dodge Polara came through them.
They have been repaired and maintained. They function as the public entrance to a museum. Hundreds of people walk through them each year. In 2021, after Lance’s book drew renewed attention to the circumstances of Turella’s death, the Newport Restoration Foundation’s exhibit about the incident was scrutinized by Turella’s surviving family.
His niece, Donna Lomax, identified errors in how the foundation was presenting the events of October 7th, 1966. She pressed the foundation to correct them. The foundation modified the exhibit. Eduardo Tirella is referenced inside the institution built on the ground where he died, managed by the organization Duke endowed, in an exhibit that required his family to intervene before it reflected his death accurately.
In 1971, 5 years after Eduardo Tirella’s death, his family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Doris Duke. They sought $1,250,000 in damages. The case went to trial in Rhode Island Superior Court. Duke’s legal team mounted a vigorous defense. The civil standard of proof is lower than the criminal standard, and negligence, not intent, is what a wrongful death suit requires a plaintiff to establish.
The court found Duke negligent in Tirella’s death. The initial award the jury returned was subsequently reduced through post-trial legal proceedings. Duke’s attorneys argued successfully for a reduction, and the final amount after that process concluded was divided among Tirella’s eight surviving siblings. Those siblings had waited 5 years for the civil system to produce an answer.
Their brother had spent a decade working for one of the wealthiest women in the United States. He had curated her art collection, shaped the interiors of her houses, and managed the aesthetic dimensions of a life conducted across five properties. He was awarded the Bronze Star at the Battle of the Bulge.
He finished a Hollywood film. He was 42 years old when he died in the road outside her gates. The court that found her negligent determined that each of his eight siblings should receive $5,620. Donna Lomax, Tirella’s niece, spoke about that number when Peter Lance interviewed her during his investigation.
She said each family member of Eduardo Tirella got $5,620. In order to get a number that small, her lawyer had to destroy his reputation. The total paid to the Tirella family by Doris Duke, as ordered by the court that found her negligent in his death, was $44,960. At the time of her own death in 1993, Doris Duke’s estate was valued at approximately $1.3 billion.
Rough Point opened to the public as a museum in 2000. The Newport Restoration Foundation, which Duke established in 1968, and which she endowed substantially before her death, manages the property. The house has been maintained largely as Duke left it. The art collection, the furnishings, the room she used.
A standard tour moves visitors through the principal rooms of the ground floor, past the paintings she acquired, the ceramics, the textiles, the decorative objects sourced from decades of travel across North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Docents describe her collecting habits, her design sensibilities, her philanthropic work.
The house is presented as the record of a particular kind of American life, idiosyncratic and extraordinarily resourced. Tours run regularly through the warmer months. Visitors come from across the country. To enter from Bellevue Avenue, they pass through the gates.
In October 2021, 55 years after Eduardo Tirella’s death, the Newport Police Department closed its review of the case for the second time. Detective Jacque Weast, who had spent 5 months conducting the review, and who had found Bob Walker credible, concluded that there was no new evidence that would change the previous finding.
The department’s position, endorsed by the city manager, was that the original ruling stood, unfortunate accident. No further review warranted. When Doris Duke died in October 1993 at the age of 80, her obituary ran in the New York Times. It covered her life at length, her inheritance, her philanthropy, her marriages, her art collection, her estates.
Eduardo Tirella was mentioned once in a single sentence as a companion who had died in a car accident at her Newport home. After Lance’s book drew attention to the exhibit at Rough Point that addressed the events of October 7th, 1966, Tirella’s niece, Donna Lomax, identified inaccuracies in how the foundation was presenting what had happened.
She contacted the foundation. She pressed them on the specifics. The foundation reviewed the exhibit and made modifications. The exhibit about Eduardo Tirella’s death now exists inside the museum built on the ground where he died, managed by the institution his employer created, modified after his family intervened to correct it.
The gates are the same gates. If the pattern of the story, a person erased from the record of the life they served, is one you want to keep following, the next video is already waiting. Donna Lomax, Eduardo Tirella’s niece, described what happened to her uncle this way, she killed him twice. She destroyed his body and then she eviscerated his memory.