rePost::Twins, Doris Duke Heirs: The Poorest Rich Kids in the World | Culture News | Rolling Stone

By SABRINA RUBIN ERDELY
AUGUST 12, 2013 5:25 PM ET
The black Chevy Tahoe picked up speed as it careened down the curving Wyoming mountain road, the two frightened children inside clutching their seats, certain that they wouldn’t make it alive to the school bus at the bottom of the hill. It was only 7:30 in the morning, but their stepmother at the wheel already had liquor on her breath. The kids had seen her this way before; two years earlier they’d been in the car when she was pulled over for a DUI. This morning, she seemed even more wasted.
“Slow down! Please! Please!” 12-year-old Georgia begged from the passenger seat. In the back, her twin brother, Patterson, sat frozen in horror.
“Shut the fuck up!” their stepmother, Daralee Inman, snarled. Her right hand shot out to smack Georgia’s face, while her left clutched a glass filled with Trix cereal, leaving no hands on the steering wheel. Pine trees whizzed by to their right, a cliff to their left. “Did I ever get you into a motherfucking wreck?” Daralee demanded, as faster and faster they descended the steep road that served as the family’s half-mile-long driveway. “Did I ever get you into a motherfucking wreck?”
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The kids reached for their seat belts, too late, as the Tahoe hit a bump, tipped toward the cliff – “God take my soul! Forgive me all my sins!” Georgia cried out – and then veered left and slammed into a tree. The exploding air bags felt like a punch, the windshield like cement. The twins struggled free of the car. Dazed, they began limping back up the mountainside, their stepmother staggering close behind.
As they crested the hill, their house finally came into view: a 10,000-square-foot log-and-stone cabin of preposterous proportions, filled with expensive antiques, valuable artwork and, stashed behind the steel door of a walk-in vault, sacks of gold Krugerrands, bars of silver and gold, jewelry, and millions of dollars’ worth of collectible firearms. This wasn’t some no-name clan of backwoods hillbillies, Georgia and Patterson Inman were among the wealthiest kids in America: When they turn 21, the family claims, the twins will inherit a trust fund worth $1 billion. They and their father were the last living heirs to the vast Industrial Age fortune of the Duke family, tobacco tycoons who once controlled the American cigarette market, established Duke University and, through the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, continue to give away hundreds of millions of dollars.
The twins’ father, Walker Inman, 57, lumbered from the mansion, his tattooed sleeves visible under a black T-shirt, drinking his morning rum, bellowing, “What the fuck did you do to my children?” Morbidly obese after a lifetime of debauchery and heroin addiction, he looked past his keening kids to glare at his fifth wife. “Honey,” Walker rumbled, “we’re going for a ride.” He grabbed Daralee, hopped into his red Dodge truck and took off in a spray of gravel toward the wreckage down the mountain – then promptly lost control of the vehicle, which rolled onto the driver’s side and skidded to a stop.
Inside the house, the twins called 911. The dispatcher at the police station couldn’t make out what the hysterical children were saying, but local troopers knew exactly where they were needed, and quickly left for the remote Inman property, which Walker had dubbed “Outlaw Acres.” Later on, in the presence of the Inmans’ high-priced attorney, an officer would confront Daralee with the fact that she’d been driving with a blood-alcohol content of .05 – violating her probation – with her stepkids in the car, and Walker would admit he’d been drinking and driving too. And yet no charges would be levied that November 2009 morning; the Lincoln County Sheriff’s department would simply close the case. As ambulances and police cars came screaming up the hill, past the demolition derby of wrecked cars to where Georgia and Patterson sobbed in the grand arched entryway to their palace, it was just another day at the Inmans’, home to the poorest rich kids in the world.
Raised by two drug addicts with virtually unlimited wealth, Georgia and Patterson survived a gilded childhood that was also a horror story of Dickensian neglect and abuse. They were globe-trotting trust-fund babies who snorkeled in Fiji, owned a pet lion cub and considered it normal to bring loose diamonds to elementary school for show and tell. And yet they also spent their childhoods inhaling freebase fumes, locked in cellars and deadbolted into their bedrooms at night in the secluded Wyoming mountains and on their ancestral South Carolina plantation. While their father spent millions on drug binges and extravagances, the children lived like terrified prisoners, kept at bay by a revolving door of some four dozen nannies and caregivers, underfed, undereducated, scarcely noticed except as objects of wrath.
via Inman Twins, Doris Duke Heirs: The Poorest Rich Kids in the World | Culture News | Rolling Stone.