Doris Duke Estate
Harry Demopoulos is a trustee of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, founded upon the death of the billionaire tobacco heiress. When Duke died in 1993 at the age of 80, legal documents revealed she had previously assigned Demopoulos - a longtime friend - co-executor of her estate. However, a controversial change to her will near her death put her vast fortune in the control of her Irish-born butler, Bernard Lafferty, whom Demopoulos described in a subsequent lawsuit as "an illiterate, unstable and even dangerous person."
But the real bombshell came when the litigants produced an affidavit from Tammy Payette, 28, a nurse who had attended to Duke in her final weeks. Payette maintained that Kivowitz (one of Duke's doctors) and Lafferty had conspired to murder Duke through the use of "massive sedation", including morphine and Demerol." This lawsuit resulted in Lafferty's being discharged.
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