DAUGHTER JUMPS OFF THE SAME BRIDGE HER STEP FATHER JUMPED OFF WHEN HE KILLED HER MOTHER!

The daughter of a newspaper heiress jumped off the Tappan Zee Bridge nearly 16 years after her stepfather leaped from the span after beating her mother to death at their Bronxville estate, sources said.
Witnesses saw Anne Petrillo, 38, abandon her car on the Rockland County-bound side of the bridge, remove her clothes and jump into the Hudson River around 8 p.m. Thursday, sources said.

State police led the search for the woman, but the effort was called off Friday when conditions became too dangerous.

"The currents were ripping," said Dan Goswick, captain of the Piermont Fire Department.

Petrillo left a note in her BMW SUV that she left parked on the bridge, but investigators would not comment on what she wrote, the Journal News reported.

Petrillo was 22 when her mother, Anne Scripps Douglas, was beaten to death with a hammer by her husband in the daughter's bedroom at the family's Bronxville home on New Year's Eve 1993.

Scott Douglas, Petrillo's stepfather, then drove his 1982 BMW to the Tappan Zee, got out and jumped into the Hudson.

Police divers searched the frigid waters for days to no avail, prompting speculation the 38-year-old former house painter, whose wife was threatening divorce, had faked his death.

Nearly three months later, on March 30, 1994, Douglas' badly decomposed body washed up in the Bronx.

Anne Scripps Douglas, who was smashed at least five times in the head and face as she lay on a bed, lingered six days in a coma before dying.

The case focused nationwide attention on domestic violence among the affluent.

The chilling story of what went on behind closed doors in the Douglas home was dramatized in a 1997 television movie "Our Mother's Murder."

In interviews about the movie, Petrillo and her sister, Alexandra, agreed the dramatized abuse against their mother was mild compared to what happened.

But, said Alexandra, "Annie and I thought somebody else's life might be saved" if they saw the film and got out of a bad relationship.

Douglas was the great-great-granddaughter of Detroit News founder James Scripps.