The Suspicious Death of Eduardo Tirella (Rhode Island)

On October 7, 1966, the wealthy heiress Doris Duke hit and killed her friend Eduardo Tirella while behind the wheel of a rented car. Whether his death was an accident or an intentional act of murder, is still up for debate nearly 60 years later.

2021 Reopened Investigation

It was 7 o’clock in the evening on September 17, 2021 and Newport Police Department Cold Case Detective Jacque Wuest had just hit record on an interview. Detective Wuest had been assigned to review a closed case from more than five decades earlier: a motor vehicle-versus-pedestrian collision that resulted in the death of 42-year old Eduardo Tirella.

Newport Police Officer Edward Angel had been the first law enforcement official to arrive at the scene just outside of an estate on Bellevue Avenue that day, October 7, 1966. It was early evening, a little after 5 p.m. when the call came in. He was a rookie street cop with just about a year on the job. In the 2021 interview with Detective Wuest, the now retired Officer Angel said that his training and experience so far had not prepared him for what he encountered.

“I observed a car off the road, on the sidewalk, up against a tree. I get out of my car, approach the vehicle, the driver of the car, who I had no idea who it was, was sitting in the car, behind the wheel, bleeding from, I think the forehead, if I remember right. Some facial cut,” the retired officer explained.

“And she was upset, and she was crying, ‘My friend, my friend. I don’t know where my friend is.’ And I looked in the backseat, passenger side, looked around and then I get down on my hands and knees and I could see he was under the car, rolled up,” Edward continued. “I reached in, there didn’t appear to be any signs of life…there wasn’t a lot of blood as I remember it.”

Officer Angel said what he did next, he regrets. It was his inexperience showing. He told the driver that her friend was under the car. That statement put her into shock, he remembers. Officer Angel asked a passerby with medical training to look after the driver as he called the incident into the station.

The woman with medical training was Judith Thomb, a Navy Ensign, who had come upon the scene with her father, Lewis Thomb, before Officer Angel got there. He admitted that his recollections were spotty. Afterall, this was 55 years ago.

Detective Wuest tried to jog Edward’s memory with a few original reports and diagrams with his name on them. She reads a few lines of an incident report outloud, including an excerpt from a statement he apparently took from Judith’s father Lewis.

Det. Wuest read, “‘I stopped to help the woman who was bleeding from the mouth. She kept yelling for someone named Ed. She then went up the driveway into the house and shortly thereafter came out saying that she had run over him.’”

Edward said he didn’t remember taking the statement. All that stuck out in his mind from the scene itself so many years later was the woman at the wheel, bleeding from her face, and the victim pinned beneath the car, who he later learned was “Ed”, or Eduardo Tirella, who the woman had been calling out for.

After the victim and driver had been taken away in ambulances, Officer Angel took statements and then measured and noted what he saw at the scene. Tiremarks and the position of the involved vehicle indicated it had come from inside the gates of a nearby estate and crossed Bellevue before hopping a sidewalk and ripping through an iron rail fence. It came to a rest at the base of a tree on the west side of Bellevue Avenue.

The iron gates of the nearby estate were damaged and parts were strewn across the road. Those were collected and bagged as evidence, along with pieces of glass found in the driveway of the estate.

In Edward’s diagram from 1966, which Det. Wuest references in the 2021 interview, he noted that the gates of the estate swung outward into the road and that he believed the point of impact with the victim was in the middle of Bellevue Avenue. This was based on residue – what he thought to be human skin tissue – that he witnessed on the ground.

But Edward explained to Det. Wuest that the next day, Newport PD Sergeant Fred Newton called him back to the scene to fix something in his diagram. Sergeant Newton showed Officer Angel that the gates of the estate were supposed to open inward, not out as he’d noted in the diagram. They had only been forced outward by the impact of the vehicle. The Sergeant then shared his theory of the incident with the rookie Officer.

Sergeant Newton believed that the victim, Eduardo Tirella, had driven the car – a rented Dodge Polara station wagon – up to the gates and then got out of the driver’s seat to open them. Sergeant Newton suggested that the woman in passenger seat slid over to take the wheel, and when she did, she either accidentally or intentionally stepped on gas and hit the victim, causing him to roll up on the hood as she drove through the gates onto Bellevue Avenue, where he fell off the hood in the location where Officer Angel had seen evidence of skin tissue in the road. The car then continued forward until coming to a stop up against a tree, with Eduardo beneath it.

Satisfied with the hypothesis offered by his superior, Officer Angel signed off on a corrected version of his report, noting that the gates of the estate opened in toward the property.

“That was his theory,” Edward continued, “And whether it was an accident or intentional, it’s always been a bone of contention.”

A bone of contention, indeed, but this theory by Sergeant Newton would not be part of the official conclusion of the case. Soon after, Newport Police Chief Joseph Radice took over the investigation. Within days, the case was closed. Chief Radice labeled Eduardo Tirella’s death as nothing more than “an unfortunate accident.”

But in all the years since he made that call, many have doubted its basis in truth. Rumors still linger like a dense fog over Bellevue Avenue, whispering that the driver, Doris Duke, got away with murder.

Eduardo Tirella’s story continues on Dark Downeast. Press play to hear the full episode wherever you get your podcasts.