On October 7th, 1966, Doris Duke’s rented station wagon struck and killed Eduardo Tirella, her interior designer, at the gates of her Newport, Rhode Island estate. The case was closed as an accident within 96 hours. Tirella’s family later won a negligence verdict, but the damage award was roughly $75,000, a sum Duke could earn in interest in under an hour.
Doris Duke was born into extraordinary wealth. She was the only child of James Buchanan Duke, the tobacco baron who built the American Tobacco Company and later founded Duke Energy. Her father died in 1925, leaving his 12-year-old daughter an inheritance estimated at $100 million. The press called her the richest girl in the world.
Her father’s final instruction shaped her entire life: trust no one. He had shown her death threats and ransom demands from strangers who wanted a piece of the Duke fortune. That warning, reinforced by a mother who resented her daughter’s inheritance, became both a shield and a wound.
Duke’s mother, Nanaline, favored her son from a first marriage and tried to sell Duke Farms, the estate her late husband had built from scratch. Doris, only 14, sued her own mother to stop the sale and won. The court confirmed that Duke Farms, the New York mansion, and Rough Point belonged to Doris directly.
At 22, Doris married James Cromwell, a 38-year-old socialite with political ambitions. She gave him a monthly allowance of $10,000. The marriage produced one child, a daughter named Arden, born prematurely in 1940. The baby lived exactly 24 hours. Doctors told Doris she would likely never conceive again.
The divorce was finalized in 1943. Cromwell received $250,000 for eight years of marriage. Doris’s second husband, Porfirio Rubirosa, was a Dominican diplomat and reputed political enforcer. She allegedly paid his second wife $1 million to agree to an uncontested divorce. The marriage lasted under 13 months.
By the 1960s, Duke was earning roughly $1 million per week in interest alone. She owned Duke Farms in New Jersey, Rough Point in Newport, Shangri-La in Hawaii, and Falcon’s Lair in Beverly Hills. She collected more than 4,500 objects of Islamic art, the largest private collection of its kind in the world.
Eduardo Tirella had worked for Duke for about a decade by 1966. He was a decorated World War II veteran, a Bronze Star recipient, and an accomplished interior designer. He had decided to leave Duke’s employ and move to Los Angeles permanently, where his Hollywood career was gaining momentum. Staff warned him that nobody left Doris Duke without consequences.
On the afternoon of October 7th, 1966, Tirella and Duke argued loudly before getting into the station wagon. Tirella got out to open the estate gates, a routine he had performed many times. Duke said she slid into the driver’s seat, hit the gas instead of the brake, and the car leapt forward. Tirella was beneath the vehicle, dead before the ambulance arrived.
The chief accident investigator identified six details that contradicted Duke’s account. The parking brake could only be released by hand, not by foot. The car struck Tirella once, then accelerated again to run over him. The vehicle ended up across the road, crashed into a fence and tree at significant speed. A 13-year-old newspaper boy heard the sequence: arguing, a crash, a scream, a pause, the motor roaring again, a second crash.
The boy, Bob Walker, saw Duke get out and deliberately block his view of the body. When he offered to call the police, she screamed at him to leave. His father warned him to stay silent, saying Duke was a rotten person with unscrupulous people on her payroll. Walker kept that secret for 55 years.
Newport Police Chief Joseph Radice interviewed Duke in her bedroom two days after the killing. She reclined in bed, flanked by German Shepherds and her lawyers. The case was closed as accidental without an inquest. Radice retired seven months later and purchased two condominiums in Florida, a purchase his $7,000 annual salary could not explain.
The wrongful death lawsuit went to trial five years later. Duke was found negligent, but her attorneys used the damage phase to portray Tirella as a professional failure. A friend described the strategy as the worst kind of character assassination. Tirella’s niece later said, “She killed him twice. She destroyed his body, and then she obliterated his memory.”
Eight days after the killing, Duke donated $25,000 to restore Newport’s Cliff Walk and $10,000 to the hospital that received Tirella’s body. Two years later, she established the Newport Restoration Foundation, which restored 84 colonial-era structures in the city. The chief’s secretary’s daughter said certain Newport circles called the donations “blood money.”
Duke later spent more than $102,000 at a single antique auction buying a highboy. She paid more for a piece of furniture than she paid for the life of the man she killed.
In the 1980s, a new figure entered Duke’s life. Chandi Hefner, a former Hare Krishna devotee, met Duke in Hawaii. Duke came to believe Hefner was the reincarnation of her daughter Arden, the baby who had died in 1940. In 1988, at age 75, Duke formally adopted the 35-year-old Hefner.
The relationship deteriorated within two years. Staff reported Duke’s health declining under Hefner’s management. Duke told people her food was being poisoned and that someone was drugging her. A physician recorded claims that Hefner had been injecting Duke with heparin, and that tests of Duke’s sherry had found traces of warfarin, a blood thinner also used as rat poison.
Duke ordered Hefner out of Shangri-La in 1991. In her final will, she wrote that she should not have adopted Hefner, and that Hefner’s primary motive was financial gain. After Duke’s death, the estate settled with Hefner for $65 million. The woman Duke tried to disinherit became the largest single financial beneficiary outside the charitable foundation.
In November 1988, the same month she adopted Hefner, Duke posted $5 million in bail for Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines, who faced federal racketeering charges. Marcos traveled to New York aboard Duke’s private jet. She was acquitted in 1990. The $5 million, with decades of accrued interest, has never been repaid.
The last man to control Doris Duke’s life was Bernard Lafferty, an Irish butler who was functionally illiterate and a secret alcoholic. He was introduced to Duke in 1987 by Chandi Hefner, a connection Hefner would live to regret. Lafferty gradually edged out everyone else in Duke’s household.
By April 1993, Lafferty held sole executorship of the $1.2 billion estate, a $5 million executor’s fee, and $500,000 per year for life. He also held medical authority over a woman whose neurologist found she could not reliably locate her own elbow. The woman whose father told her to trust no one had placed her entire fortune in the hands of a man who could barely write his own name.
Duke’s final 18 months were a medical catastrophe. In 1992, she underwent a facelift, fell out of bed two days later, and broke her hip. In January 1993, she had bilateral knee replacement surgery. She was taking more than 15 psychotropic medications simultaneously, along with daily wine and laxatives.
In this confused, heavily medicated state, she signed unrestricted financial authority to Lafferty in March 1993. She signed her final will naming him sole executor on April 5th, while still lying in a hospital bed. In July, she suffered a severe stroke and spent nearly two months in intensive care.
By October 1993, Doris Duke weighed approximately 92 pounds. She stood 5 feet 11 inches tall. On October 7th, the 27th anniversary of Eduardo Tirella’s death, she told her doctor she did not want to go on living if her health could not improve. He ordered no resuscitation.
On October 26th, her doctor stopped her feedings and oxygen. The next day, Lafferty grabbed a package of medication that arrived at the house and announced, “Miss Duke is going to die tonight.” He authorized a $500,000 gift to Duke’s plastic surgeon and a $56,582 gift to himself. The surgeon phoned a mortuary to arrange for a hearse, a full day before Duke died.
At 4:00 in the afternoon on October 27th, a morphine drip was started at 5 mg per hour. By 7:30, it had reached 15 mg per hour. A nurse later alleged that Lafferty and a co-executor asked the doctor, “How long to die?” and the doctor replied, “Less than one hour.”
At 4:00 in the morning on October 28th, the morphine was increased to 25 mg per hour. At 5:15, nurses administered a 100 mg Demerol injection. At 5:48, Doris Duke stopped breathing. Her body was cremated less than 24 hours after death.
A former Manhattan prosecutor appointed by the court concluded that the doctor had purposely cut Duke’s nutrition and hastened her death with a morphine overdose. The Los Angeles Police Department opened an inquiry, but no criminal charges were ever filed. The nurse’s credibility was damaged when she was convicted of stealing jewelry from other employers.
Lafferty sent the cook to buy an $1,800 makeup case for the ashes. He flew the case to Duke Farms aboard a $25 million Boeing 737, placing it in the seat where Doris had always sat.
The probate of the estate became the largest and most contested will battle in New York history. Lafferty spent $60,000 on Armani clothing, bought a $54,000 Cadillac, purchased a $2.5 million mansion in Bel Air, and borrowed $825,000 from the co-executor bank at zero interest. In May 1995, a judge ordered his removal as chief executor, citing his alcoholism, illiteracy, and cavalier attitude to money.
Bernard Lafferty died on November 4th, 1993, one week after Doris Duke. The estate paid over $10 million in legal fees. The law firm that drafted Duke’s final will billed the estate $13.5 million by March 1995 alone.
Doris Duke’s ashes were scattered in waters off Honolulu by the butler who controlled her final months. Her fortune, estimated at $5.3 billion at its peak, was built on tobacco and hydroelectric power. She inherited $100 million at age 12, survived two disastrous marriages, buried her only child, killed a man, and watched the police close the case in 96 hours.
She was never charged.