AppleNews+ lists my VF piece HOMICIDE AT ROUGH POINT as Best True Crime story in 2020. The new book it’s based on is at the top of amazon’s list of Coming Books in True Crime

January 29th 2021 Peter Lance As of this morning HOMICIDE AT ROUGH POINT, the new book based on, my investigative piece for Vanity Fair on Doris Duke’s murder of gay designer Eduardo Tirella, is among the top books on amazon’s list of COMING BOOKS IN TRUE CRIME. This happened after AppleNews+ yesterday, cited it as The Best of True Crime in 2020. 

This is a pdf of the story as it appeared in VF’s July/August issue. Eduardo’s murder happened on October 7th, 1966, just eight months before I started my journalism career as a cub reporter for The Newport Daily News. As it turned out, Doris Duke, the fabulously wealthy heiress to The American Tobacco Company, Alcoa Aluminum and Duke Power (now Duke Energy) had killed her longtime designer and art curator, in an automobile crash outside the gates of Rough Point, her 10-acre estate on Bellevue Avenue, known to Newporters as “Millionaire’s Row.”

The local Police Chief at the time, Joseph Radice, quickly declared it “an unfortunate accident,” but after a two year investigation in which I interviewed dozens of surviving police officers and witnesses to the death, I proved that it was a murder, covered-up at the highest levels of the Newport Police Department. In fact, in order to clear Doris, the police actually fabricated what was described at the time as a 3-page transcript of an interrogation, which never took place. That, transcript which has never been seen outside official channels is prima facie evidence of the cover-up and for the first time it will be published in HOMICIDE AT ROUGH POINT, my new book on the incident.

It’s both an expanded drill down on the VF piece and a memoir of growing up in Newport, one of the most amazing small cities on earth. The hardcover of HOMICIDE AT ROUGH POINT can now be pre-ordered on amazon for publication in four editions on February 23rd. Since the VF piece dropped in mid July, it’s been consistently in the Top 20 on Amazon’s Top 100 Hot New Releases in Law Enforcement Biographies.

The story first broke in a 14 page 8,000 word piece in Vanity Fair. These are a few of the links to the coverage:
The U.K. Daily Mail OUT Magazine Passport Magazine and BostonSpirit, the leading LGBTQ+ magazine in New England.

LISTEN TO the audio narration 

If you PREVIEW The Introduction and Preface to the 430 page book with more than 100 images and 915 annotations it’s sure to draw you in to this film-noir mystery.