Homicide at Rough Point

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And then this book that I wrote, Homicide at Rough Point, that led a new unknown living witness of the actual murder to come forward and for the Newport police to reopen the case.

After my book came out, I was considered author and residence at the Brenton Hotel in Newport, Rhode Island.

I didn't even bother reading it, but people told me about it and I read your book finally and I just thought about coming forward for all night and then for days and everybody told me, don't bother Bob. You know, like let it lie, let it rest.

I even make I'll make it easy. I have links to the key chapters in the book proving the murder and the cover up you can read them and then hopefully you'll buy the book or listen to the book etc.

So now the piece goes into Vanity Fair August 5th. The same day the Associated Press goes worldwide on their international wire and 5000 media outlets cover this Doris Duke case reopened, new witness comes forward, etc, etc.

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I'd always kind of wanted to get into it and I never had the skill or the time to do it my life got in the way you know.

I just decided to start and there was a Facebook group a dedicated still is Facebook group called If You Grow Up in Newport Rhode Island share some memories had then had 10,500 members and every three or four months a guy named Larry Bettencourt a member of the group who now has his own group with like post crash photos of the of the Eduardo Torella crime scene death scene.

I started mining that group I kind of came out and saying hey I'm Peter Lance I'm a new porter like I'm trying to find out and because it was a legend still to this day it's a legend every time people have friends from out of town and they take them around the ocean drive past Bellevue Avenue they wax eloquent about this incident that doors do get away with murder.

I have a foot slipping and hitting the wrong pedal maybe that happens once but the idea that there's the pause and then there's more acceleration I think is in no small part damning and you made a fantastic point that that I found pretty disturbing which was about how not just contemporary reports and law enforcement but even later biographers seem to consciously downplay or ignore this death and the there's there's this really disquieting thing you point out which was that very shortly after the death Doris Duke begins making massive amounts of donations to the city of Newport and just to openly connect the dots for our audience here I feel like I'm asking an obvious question but Peter what makes these donations so suspicious.

hardcover, paperback, Kindle, e-book and Audible

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You can also check out his book, Homicide at Rough Point, which is available now anywhere you get books from Amazon, etc. And find out more about this story.

"

And then this book that I wrote, Homicide at Rough Point, that led a new unknown living witness of the actual murder to come forward and for the Newport police to reopen the case.

After my book came out, I was considered author and residence at the Brenton Hotel in Newport, Rhode Island.

I didn't even bother reading it, but people told me about it and I read your book finally and I just thought about coming forward for all night and then for days and everybody told me, don't bother Bob. You know, like let it lie, let it rest.

So Bob tells me this and I said, well, why are you telling me this now? He said because I read your book and I knew about your Vanity Fair thing.

I even make I'll make it easy. I have links to the key chapters in the book proving the murder and the cover up you can read them and then hopefully you'll buy the book or listen to the book etc.

"

I published the book and what happened was last summer I had a wonderful opportunity with the Brenton Hotel this beautiful new hotel on Newport's waterfront that had me come in as what they called author in residence for a month and they would put copies of my books in all their Tony rooms they have 50 some rooms and a couple of nights a week I would come to their beautiful cocktail lounge called the living room and I would discuss the book and people would come down from their rooms and then Newporters who had bought the book and wanted it signed would show up so on a rainy afternoon on July 3rd I was doing that and all of a sudden this heavy set guy with a walrus mustache was kind of looking at me ominously my cousin Sheila Tyler who is like my right arm and she's like pointing to him like I was talking to some doctors from Philadelphia who was staying and she kept going like you gotta talk to this guy this guy's got some information I said okay so finally Bob came up to me and he handed me this email and it said why didn't you get back to me and I looked at it and it was dated the day I started writing the book and he had written to me saying I was the paper boy because I was writing the book and also because there was another paper boy that I found that was not really the paper boy for a rough point but he covered Bellevue Avenue and was on his way there that night and I interviewed him and I just kind of put the two together in my head so anyway after I apologized to Bob I took him to the bar he's been sober for more than 30 years and he held me spellbound okay for three hours when you're in this kind of business you have to pretend you're the poser I knew the second gunman on the grassy knoll you know guys in prison constantly write to me and so you have to develop a sixth sense for you know a s*** detector if you will since we're on a podcast I'll use that term of legal term of art you know I have a law degree from Fordham but you know the s*** detector and so Bob was so amazing because I had him tell the story to me five times and every single time he was absolutely dead on precise and I was at a point myself and with my iPhone I basically shot him from five different angles he had been well we'll get to that in the next hour but you know the details of what he learned and what I learned but as a result of Bob he had read my book just like six weeks earlier and what I put in the book about Fred Newton's Up on the Hood Theory of the Crash dovetailed precisely with his memory of events that night to me and they reopened the case and that became the major international news the Associated Press covered it I did a second Vanity Fair piece on August 5th and then everything just blew up and stay tuned.

hardcover, paperback, Kindle, e-book and Audible

The first one Homicide at Rough Point written by Peter Lance that's July 16th 2020 that's the original one second piece is titled The Door Stoop Cold Case Reopens Colin the only known eyewitness speaks for the first time again August 5th Peter Lance in Vanity Fair I'm sorry for jumping in but they're both on PeterLance.com it's P-E-T-E-R-L-A-N-C-E.com

I'm convinced that the police department in Newport circling the squad cars as many police departments do just do not want to admit fault they don't and this is true of the books I've done on the FBI I've done four major books on the FBI in the road to 9-11 where the negligence begets gross negligence and then that goes to cover up because they're embarrassed and they don't want the outside world to realize that they may have screwed up and that's just kind of a human instinct maybe but that's the way it is and you always get it's under investigation you know like right and so you get these honest that's why I want to shout out to these wonderful retired men who fully cooperated with me and told me the pieces of the truth that they knew so that I could put it together I call it a mosaic William Casey adapted Bob Woodward's book Vale the secret awards of the CIA for HBO a few years ago never got made but William Casey then the CIA director he said that human intelligence spies on the ground SIGINT signals intelligent e-land electronic intelligence spy satellites and you take all these little pieces of broken glass and you put them together and you step back and you get a snapshot of the truth as best you can get it and that's what investigative reporting is that's what intelligence work is about man

my book has 60 pages of annotations 438 pages 915 end notes and this new witness that came forward who dovetail in the midst of all of that they concluded there was quote no evidence to change the original verdict no evidence not conflicting evidence or what no evidence literally

"

You can also check out his book, Homicide at Rough Point, which is available now anywhere you get books from Amazon, etc. And find out more about this story.

"

And then this book that I wrote, Homicide at Rough Point, that led a new unknown living witness of the actual murder to come forward and for the Newport police to reopen the case.

After my book came out, I was considered author and residence at the Brenton Hotel in Newport, Rhode Island.

So Bob tells me this and I said, well, why are you telling me this now? He said because I read your book and I knew about your Vanity Fair thing.

He said after I read Peter Lance's book, I came forward and then he criticizes again in the first sentence or two, Lieutenant Huck about the burden my soul think.

I even make I'll make it easy. I have links to the key chapters in the book proving the murder and the cover up you can read them and then hopefully you'll buy the book or listen to the book etc.

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I commenced writing the book 12 hour days for 6 months and the book was published in February in 4 editions by the way hardcover, paperback, Kindle, e-book and Audible

the book was published in February in 4 editions by the way hardcover, paperback, Kindle, e-book and Audible

the first one Homicide at Rough Point written by Peter Lance that's July 16th 2020 that's the original one

if you've been to Newport at all there's a beautiful pedestrian walkway it's one of the top tourist attractions in New England and for years Doris had tried to block it off with chain link fences she'd been in litigation with the city of Newport because she was so paranoid she had vicious dogs in her state that were constantly mauling people okay so within I don't know how many days I think eight days after this event she gave the equivalent of several hundred thousand dollars to restore the cliff walk so I call it a murderous quid pro quo she basically bought her way out of murder charges

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You can also check out his book, Homicide at Rough Point, which is available now anywhere you get books from Amazon, etc. And find out more about this story.

You can also find out more about Peter's work at PeterLance.com.