Newport police investigate homicide of 85-year-old woman in hotel room

An 85-year-old woman was supposed to hear bad news about her son. Instead, Newport police walked into room 132 at the Harbor Base Inn on Coddington Highway and found Terry Costello dead, turning a death notification into a homicide case that now hinges on who was in that room, when she was last alive, and how the scene became a killing.

Officers went to the motel at about 10:10 a.m. on Monday, May 18, 2026, after Bristol Police Department officials asked them to deliver notice that Bernard Costello, 66, had jumped from the Mount Hope Bridge. The Harbor Base Inn, a 47-room motel at 372 Coddington Highway in Newport, was the place where that grim message was meant to be delivered. Instead, police found Terry Costello dead inside.

Newport police later said the case was being investigated as a homicide and that the investigation remained active. Investigators also said the death was not considered random, a detail that quickly focused attention on the family connection at the center of the case. Reporting said officers observed upper-body stab wounds on Terry Costello, and the Rhode Island state medical examiner was conducting an autopsy.

That sequence has made the case especially disturbing. Bernard Costello’s fatal jump from the Mount Hope Bridge, which spans Mount Hope Bay between Bristol and Portsmouth, appears to sit alongside the death of his mother in the same narrow window of time. What investigators still need to sort out is the order of events: whether Terry Costello was attacked before Bernard Costello died, whether the deaths happened nearly at the same time, and how the confrontation unfolded inside the room.

The setting adds another layer to the case. The Harbor Base Inn is the kind of roadside property where police often handle routine calls tied to travelers, not a homicide that appears tied to a family tragedy. Newport police have not publicly laid out a motive, and the medical examiner’s findings will be central to pinning down the cause and manner of Terry Costello’s death.

The Mount Hope Bridge has long carried its own dark history. A 2019 Providence Journal report said there were 27 suicide deaths on Rhode Island’s three major bridges from Jan. 1, 2010 through Nov. 20, 2018, including 12 on the Mount Hope Bridge. Two studies commissioned by the Rhode Island Turnpike and Bridge Authority later found safety barriers on the bridge would be too costly and not feasible. For now, the unanswered question is the one that matters most: how a death notification at a Newport motel became a homicide investigation before the day was over.