Was Doris Duke a Murderer?

Doris Duke’s life would envy any script Hollywood could produce—in fact, she’s been the subject of many magazine articles, books, and made-for-tv movies. She grew up sheltered and overprotected by her parents, inheriting a vast fortune before she was a teenager and finally breaking free in her 20s to explore the world. Along the way, she met many friends and some who would eventually become enemies. She curated gorgeous homes all over the United States and was proud of her dedication to the performing arts and curated collection of artwork. Oh, and she may have committed murder and possibly been murdered herself as those around her fought over her estate.

Doris Duke was born into an extreme amount of wealth. Her grandfather, Washington Duke, helped establish a thriving tobacco business in North Carolina with other farmers following the Civil War.  When he died, the business was passed on to his son, James Buchanan, who formed the American Tobacco Company in 1890. James also founded the Duke Power Company. He married a woman named Nanaline Holt Inman, who was a widow with one son, in 1907. She was 42 when she gave birth to Doris, and family and friends always believed she favored her son, Walker Inman, over her daughter.

According to an article that ran in Vanity Fair, James Duke adored his daughter. After her birth, she resided with her parents in the expensive home on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Doris was shy, tall, awkward, and studious. She was homeschooled until the age of 10, and her father repeatedly told her to be cautious about those around her, because she could never really know if someone loved her because of her wealth.  

An Heiress at an Early Age

James Duke died of pneumonia in 1925, when Doris was only 12, and he left the majority of his estate to her. She is said to have inherited an estimated $100 million in trusts. Her mother Nanaline only received a modest trust fund. When Doris was 14, she had to sue her mother to stop her from selling Duke Farms, an estate the family owned in New Jersey, which included a mansion, indoor pool, tennis courts, and artificial lakes. During this lawsuit, she also received the house on Fifth Avenue and a Vanderbilt mansion called Rough Point in Newport. According to some reports, Doris wanted to attend college, but her mother wouldn’t allow it. Instead, she took Doris, who by then stood over six feet tall, on a tour of Europe and presented her as a debutante in London.

The First Marriage

Doris inherited the first $10 million dollars of her trust when she turned 21. When she was 22, she married an aspiring politician named James Cromwell, who was 16 years her senior. For their honeymoon, they went on a two-year trip through the Middle East and Asia. During this time, Doris amassed an extensive collection of art. Their honeymoon ended with a stop in Hawaii, and Doris and James purchased a piece of land with the vision of building a show-stopping, retreat-style home called Shangri-La, after the mythical land where no one grows old. Doris worked closely with architect Marion Sims Wyeth and took an active role in developing the plans for the home. She commissioned local Hawaiian artisans and designers, and craftsmen from India, Morocco, Syria, and Iran.

Cromwell wanted Doris to support his political aspirations, but the media focused on the wealthy heiress more than her husband. When he was appointed as Minister to Canada, Doris went back to Hawaii. They eventually divorced in 1943. She fought Cromwell on his demands for a divorce settlement of $7 million dollars. She had received another $10 million of her inheritance in 1937 and again in 1942. They battled it out in court for five years, finally settling for an undisclosed amount.

Duke Focuses on Her Career

In 1945, Doris worked as a foreign correspondent for the International News Service, reporting from different cities throughout Europe. After World War II, she worked briefly for Harper’s Bazaar in Paris. This is where she met Porfirio Rubirosa, the former son-in-law of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. They had an instant physical attraction to one another. Before they got married in 1947, her fortune was so large that the United States government helped draw up a prenuptial agreement. Before that, Rubirosa had no idea exactly how wealthy Doris was. The marriage only lasted a year, but friends said Doris never got over him. She was heartbroken when he died in a car crash in 1965.

Doris continued her world travels, collecting numerous pieces of art for her various homes. She had a permanent staff of 200 people to help care for her five homes—a Park avenue penthouse, a 2,000 acre-farm in New Jersey, a mansion in Beverly Hills, Shangri-La in Hawaii, and a home in Newport Rhode Island. She was also good with money and helped grow her father’s fortune at least four times of what it was originally worth.

Doris’s love affairs weren’t the only scandalous part of her life. While she was living in Beverly Hills in her late 30s, she met a striking set designer and actor named Eduardo Tirella. He became a close companion of Doris’s, but they were not romantically involved because he was gay. For seven years, he’d worked alongside her, traveling with her to London, Paris, Italy, helping curate her art collection, decorating her homes, and designing her gardens. When she had an altercation with a younger musician she’d been dating, Tirella accompanied Doris back to her estate Rough Point in Newport, Rhode Island.

Doris had inherited Rough Point from her father. The red sandstone and granite mansion was built in the late 1800s and offered panoramic views of the Atlantic Ocean. It was originally built for Frederick William Vanderbilt. Armed guards and security guards were said to patrol the grounds, and residents recollect when two camels Doris had purchased also roamed the property.

But Tirella had been making plans to return to Hollywood and get back to work as a set designer. It appears that right after he shared his plans with her, he had a tragic accident. On October 7, 1966, Doris told police she’d been sitting on the passenger side of a late-model Dodge Polara station wagon that Tirella was driving. When they reached the front gates of the estate, Tirella got out of the car to open them and Doris slid into the driver’s seat.

Doris then claimed she wasn’t sure how it had happened, but the car had leapt forward, crushing Tirella against the iron gates, then dragging him across the avenue and pinning him under the car when it struck a tree. He died on the scene from his injuries.

Within just a few days, the case was closed by the local authorities. Interestingly enough, on October 15, 1966, the Newport Daily News ran an article titled “Doris Duke Gives $25,000 to Restore Cliff Walk.” She had directed her foundation to pledge a tax-deductible donation to a local restoration project that was estimated to cost over a million dollars. In 1968, she established the Newport Restoration Foundation, which bought and restored an entire neighborhood of 70 colonial-era houses, then rented them to town residents. Jacqueline Onassis served as the vice president of the foundation.

In February 2021, journalist Peter Lance published a book called “Homicide at Rough Point”. His work of nonfiction delved into the life of Eduardo Tirella, his relationship with Doris Duke, and what he found after poring over hundreds of pages of police reports, crime-scene photos and autopsy findings.

The author concluded Doris had disengaged the parking brake by end when Eduardo got out of the car to open the gates, shifted the car into drive, and slammed her foot down hard on the gas. Tirella would have been thrown onto the hood of the station wagon, where he screamed at Doris, and she tapped the brakes, catapaulting him onto Bellvue Avenue outside of her home. He would have still been alive at that point. But then, Doris appeared to hit the gas again, driving over Tirella and dragging him across the street to his death.

Peter Lance concluded that Doris Duke began donating money to the various institutions in Newport after Tirella died as a way to stay in favor with the local authorities, and encourage them to close the case. She hired the Assistant County Medical Examiner at the time to be her personal physician. In an article that ran in Vanity Fair after Doris Duke’s death, some of her friends were quoted as saying they believed Tirella’s death was an accident. But the same article also gave several examples of how Doris would lash out at people when she believed they had crossed her. She was shrewd, financially savvy, and like most wealthy people, not above using her influence to get authorities to look the other way in a case such as this one.

In 1967, Eduardo Tirella’s siblings filed a civil lawsuit against Doris Duke, requesting compensation in the amount of $1.2 million. The reason behind the dollar amount was that Tirella died before he had at least two decades worth of earnings potential. In the year prior to his death, he’d made approximately $43,000—the equivalent of $355,000 today. In 1971, after a 10-day trial, each of Tirella’s siblings was awarded little more than $5,000 after legal fees.

This is an excerpt of Episode 103 of the Missing in the Carolinas Podcast, “The Mysterious Life and Death of Doris Duke.” You can listen to the full episode here.