On the morning of December 21, 1980, four days before Christmas, a young man walked into his mother's small pink marble bathroom at Clarendon Court in Newport and found her lying unconscious on the floor. His mother was Sunny von Bülow, heiress to a natural gas fortune, and she would never wake again.
At the hospital, a doctor testified her body was 17 degrees colder than it should have been. A month later, her son and a hired detective opened a locked closet that belonged to his stepfather and found a black bag with needles inside. Her husband would be convicted of trying to kill her, and three years later acquitted. She would lie in a hospital bed for almost 28 years.
Nearly every telling of this case belongs to the lawyers. The story of Sunny herself begins with a birth in a private railway car. The family always told the story that a baby girl was born in a private railway car rolling toward New York. The car belonged to her father, and the family kept the train, giving the child her first nickname: Choo Choo.
The year is less certain than the train. Some records say 1931, others say 1932. What no one disputes is her name: Martha Sharp Crawford. The nickname that replaced Choo Choo came from her disposition. She was Sunny, and she would be Sunny for the rest of her life.
Her father, George Washington Crawford, was born in 1861 in Pennsylvania. He made a great deal of money in natural gas, building companies to pipe it to industrial cities. By 1931, he was chairman of the board of Columbia Gas and Electric. He married late, in 1927, at the age of 66, taking as his wife a Tennessee girl named Annie Laurie Warmack, who was 27.
George Crawford died in Pittsburgh on April 6, 1935. He was 73. His daughter was not yet four years old. The size of the Crawford fortune has never been settled. One account puts the value of his estate at more than $100 million. The New York Times said she inherited $75 million. Time magazine in 1985 called it a fortune estimated at $35 million.
The only thing the accounts agree on is that it was enormous and that it was hers.
Sunny was raised by her mother and her grandmother, two strong women who built a world around her that was warm, careful, and very closed. There was an apartment at 995 Fifth Avenue, and a country place called Tamarlain in Greenwich, Connecticut. There was a nanny the family called Nana.
Her schools were the schools of her class. She went first to the Chapin School in Manhattan and then away to St. Timothy's School in Maryland. Then came the debut, the season when a girl of her standing was presented to society. The New York Times would later call it an elaborate coming out, dated to 1949.
In the 1950s, in the mountains of Europe, the girl who had been overprotected where men were concerned met a young man with a title and a tennis racket. He was 20 years old, a tennis instructor at a castle in the Austrian Alps, and his name was Prince Alfred von Auersperg. The Irish Times, writing her obituary, called him a penniless 20-year-old.
A great name, a castle in the family, and nothing in the bank. Sunny chose him anyway. They were married on July 20, 1957, his 21st birthday. She was 24 or 25. He brought a princely name. She brought a fortune that the newspapers would one day measure in tens of millions of dollars.
The young couple settled in Europe, in his world rather than hers. The marriage produced children quickly. A daughter, Ala, was born in 1958, and a son, Alexander, a year later. With them came a German woman hired as her maid. Her name was Maria Schrallhammer. She would stay with their mother for more than 20 years.
The marriage was coming apart. Sunny found little common ground with the prince, disliked his big game hunting and flirting, and missed America. In 1965, the marriage ended in divorce. According to the New York Times, the prince received a million dollars and two houses.
Somewhere in the last years of that first marriage, she had met another man in London. He was older than the prince and very clever. He had trained as a lawyer in England. He worked for the richest man in the world. Unlike the prince, he had not been born to the name he used. He had adopted it.
He was born Claus Cecil Borberg in Copenhagen on August 11, 1926, the son of a playwright. His parents divorced when he was four. When he was grown, he dropped his father's name and took his mother's. He became Claus Bülow. Then he added a small aristocratic word in front of it. He became Claus von Bülow.
He went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, at the age of 16, and read law there. He went on to practice as a barrister. Then he went to work for J. Paul Getty, the oil man called the richest man in the world.
Sunny and Claus were married on June 6, 1966, at the Brick Presbyterian Church in New York. He was 39. She was in her mid-30s. On April 15, 1967, their daughter Cosima was born.
In 1970, a house came up for sale on Bellevue Avenue in Newport, where Hollywood had once filmed a society wedding. Sunny bought it at a startlingly low price. Clarendon Court was built in 1904, a white Georgian house with a lawn that ran down toward the Atlantic. In 1956, a film crew from Hollywood came to Newport to shoot a musical comedy called High Society, starring Grace Kelly.
Sunny paid $250,000 for the house. She did not simply move in. She remade it, spending about $600,000 restoring it. She had the lawn behind the house dug down 17 feet to improve her ocean view. She built a swimming pool for $150,000 so she could avoid the crowded Bailey's Beach Club.
Across Bellevue Avenue stood another house. It belonged to her mother. Annie Laurie Atkins' Newport place was called Champs Sole. The two women lived facing each other across the avenue.
Around 1968, a society columnist named Eugenia Sheppard got Sunny to say something about herself. It is the only quotation in her own words that anyone has found in print. "I really like to go to just one party a week," she said. "Seeing the same people every night, I run out of conversation."
Everyone who described her later said the same thing in other words. Friends called her charming but shy and delicate like a princess. The writer Dominick Dunne said she really did not like the social life, although she was totally associated with it.
Behind the beauty and the jewels stood a household. There was Maria Schrallhammer, the lady's maid, who by 1982 had been with her for 23 years. There was the cook, Irene Sylvia. There was the butler, Robert Bastro. There was a waitress named Eileen Scanell. There were two golden retrievers.
In 1967, a doctor wrote that the illness was more an ego, self-esteem problem than anything else, and that the patient felt trapped, useless, and impotent. The patient was Sunny von Bülow. The same medical records from 1967 noted what the doctor called the incredible history of taking 24 laxatives a day for 20 years.
Her family doctor saw a different woman. Dr. Richard Stock had looked after Sunny for 25 years. Asked whether he had ever seen signs of alcoholism in her, he gave a one-word answer: "Never." He testified that over roughly a thousand days, Claus von Bülow had ordered 240 Seconal tablets and 300 Valiums ostensibly for Sunny.
In the spring of 1978, her husband met a younger woman. Alexandra Isles had been born a countess in Sweden. For two years in the 1960s, she had been an actress on a television serial called Dark Shadows. According to the Rhode Island Supreme Court, she met Claus von Bülow in April of 1978. By March of 1979, their relationship had become intimate. In the spring of 1979, she gave him six months in which he was both to obtain a divorce and be married to her.
On the evening of December 26, 1979, Sunny became so weak and unsteady that her son had to help her up to bed. The next morning, at about 9, Maria heard moaning from Sunny's bedroom. She went in. She tried to wake her. Sunny would not wake.
"I took her hand," Maria said, "and I said, 'Madame, wake up.' And there was no response."
By her account, she asked Claus von Bülow to call a doctor, and he refused to do so at that time. He did call a doctor at approximately 2:00 that afternoon. When Claus called the doctor, he described Sunny as having an alcohol problem and said she had been drinking the night before.
Then at about 6:00 in the evening, there was a second call, a frantic call for help. The doctor came to Clarendon Court. When he arrived, Sunny vomited, began gasping for breath, stopped breathing, and went into cardiac arrest. He brought her back. Without emergency treatment, she would have died within 10 to 15 minutes.
At the hospital, the doctors ran tests. Alcohol and barbiturates came back negative. There were no needle marks. Her blood sugar was unusually low. An insulin test was ordered, but not until midnight, and it came back at 72 microunits.
Claus gave the doctor his explanation. He said that Sunny had drunk 12 large eggnogs the night before. He also asked the doctor to recommend a psychiatrist for her, offering a reason why she might be under strain. Her daughter, he said, had just left for Europe to be married against her wishes.
She recovered. She was discharged from Newport Hospital on January 2, 1980. The diagnosis was a list that explained very little: bronchopneumonia, cardiorespiratory arrest due to massive aspiration of gastric contents, and hypoglycemia of undetermined cause.
In February of 1980, by her own testimony, Maria Schrallhammer found a small black bag tucked inside a larger one in the closet off Claus von Bülow's bedroom. What she said she saw was three vials. One held pills, one held a powder, one held a liquid.
Then came Thanksgiving. By Maria's testimony, she found the black bag again. This time, it was inside a white canvas bag on a chair in Claus von Bülow's bedroom. The black bag, by her account, now held something it had not held before: two or three needles, a syringe, and a small bottle labeled insulin. Sunny von Bülow was not diabetic.
She called Sunny's son. Alexander would later testify that she showed him the bag. He remembered it in his testimony as three words: "What for insulin?"
In early December of 1980, Sunny was taken to Lennox Hill Hospital in New York with an overdose of aspirin. Time magazine put the number of tablets at about 65. Other accounts say at least 73. The defense would call it a suicide attempt.
On the evening of December 20, 1980, the chauffeur drove the family into town to see a film. When they came home, the family settled in the library. Claus asked Sunny whether she needed anything. She asked him to bring her some soup, which he did. About an hour later, Alexander noticed something wrong. His mother was showing the same weakness, the same lack of coordination he had seen in her the previous December. He carried her to her bedroom.
The next morning was Sunday, December 21. At about 11:00, by Alexander's testimony, he saw his stepfather walking back to the house from the direction of the ocean. Alexander asked him whether his mother was up yet. Claus appeared surprised. The two men went up to Sunny's room together. Alexander walked into the bathroom first. His mother was lying on the floor, unconscious.
Paramedics took her to Newport Hospital. She arrived at 11:45. Her body temperature on arrival was 81.6 degrees, 17 degrees below normal. Her blood sugar was 29. The doctors poured glucose into her, and by 2:00 that afternoon her blood sugar had climbed to 261. A sample of her blood was sent to a laboratory in California which measured the insulin in it at 216 microunits per milliliter.
Dr. Meier told the jury what had struck him. Low blood sugar and high insulin, he said. The two do not go together. Asked why he had not called for a test that could tell the difference between insulin the body makes and insulin from outside it, Dr. Meier gave an answer that the defense would never let anyone forget: "I forgot."
Her heart went on beating. Her lungs went on breathing. But the damage was done. She was in what the doctors would come to call a persistent vegetative state. She would never wake again.
On December 22, while his mother was moved to Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, Alexander went looking for the black bag and found the closet locked. In early January of 1981, Alexander and his sister Ala went to see a lawyer. Richard Kuh was a former district attorney of Manhattan. On January 23, 1981, a month after the bathroom floor, Alexander went back to Clarendon Court with a private investigator and a locksmith.
Using keys taken from Claus von Bülow's desk, the locksmith opened the closet. Inside was a metal box. Inside the box was a small black bag. In the bag they found a vial of pills, a vial of light blue liquid, two packets of ampules, a syringe, and three hypodermic needles. One of the needles was out of its seal.
The family took samples to their own doctor, Richard Stock, who sent them to BioScience, the same laboratory that had measured the insulin in her blood. The results came back. The private laboratory reported insulin in the needle washing. It also reported amobarbital, a barbiturate, and diazepam, the drug sold as Valium.
On July 6, 1981, a Newport County grand jury charged Claus von Bülow with two counts of assault with intent to murder his wife. One count for each coma. On July 13, he pleaded not guilty and was released on a bond of $100,000.
The trial began in Newport County Superior Court in the first weeks of 1982. It was one of the first trials to allow a video camera in the courtroom. The witnesses came one after another. Maria Schrallhammer told the jury about the first Christmas and the black bag. Alexander von Auersperg told them about carrying his mother up to bed and finding her on the bathroom floor.
The most important medical witness for the prosecution was Dr. George Cahill, a diabetes specialist from Harvard. He told the jury that the sole cause of both comas was the external injection of insulin. Then Alexandra Isles took the stand. In front of the jury and the cameras, she told the story of her relationship with the defendant, the meeting in 1978, the intimacy by the following spring, and the six months she had given him.
The defense told the jury that Sunny had harmed herself with drink, with sugar, with barbiturates. There was one thing the jury did not see. The notes that Richard Kuh had made of his work for the family were withheld from the defense. The judge ruled that they were protected as communications between a lawyer and his clients.
On March 16, 1982, the jury returned a verdict of guilty on both counts. The sentence was 30 years in prison in all. He did not go to prison. He was released on bail of $1 million while he appealed.
Alan Dershowitz taught law at Harvard, and he took on the appeal. He believed the ruling on the notes was wrong. On April 27, 1984, the Rhode Island Supreme Court gave its decision. The court found that the state's chemical analysis of the contents of the black bag was a significant expansion of the private search, and there were no exceptions to the warrant requirement. The defendant's conviction must be reversed.
The court also found that the trial judge had been clearly wrong to rule that the Kuh documents were protected by the attorney-client privilege. The conviction was vacated and the case was sent back for a new trial on both counts.
The second trial opened in Providence in the spring of 1985. The judge was a woman named Corinne Grande. Klaus von Bülow had a new trial lawyer, Thomas Puccio. The jury would be sequestered for about seven weeks.
The real battle in Providence was medical, and it was fought by doctors. The prosecution's case went like this: a blood sugar of 29 together with an insulin reading of 216 meant insulin from outside the body. Dr. Robert Bradley of the Joslin Clinic told the jury he was 100 percent certain about the first coma and 99 percent certain about the second.
The defense's case went like this. Nine medical experts testified for Claus von Bülow. Dr. Leo Dal Cortivo, a toxicologist, testified that the encrustations on the needle do not prove that the needle was injected. Dr. Harold Lebovitz told the jury that Sunny was exquisitely sensitive to her own insulin. Dr. Arthur Rubenstein said of the laboratory figures, "I personally would have no confidence in any of those values."
Puccio himself cross-examined Maria Schrallhammer about her first conversations with Richard Kuh. She conceded that she had not mentioned insulin to him at first. "That could be," she said. "That could very well be since I was not concerned so much about the insulin."
On June 10, 1985, the verdict was read at 23 minutes past 11 in the morning. On the first count, the morning of December 27, 1979, they found Klaus von Bülow not guilty. On the second count, the morning of December 21, 1980, they found him not guilty.
He wept. "I'm very relieved," he said, "and above all, I'm grateful to my attorneys. It's been five years of worry."
Her children spoke too. "Klaus von Bülow," Alexander said, "only succeeded in depriving our mother of meaningful life and getting away with it." Ala said less. "Good guys don't win," she said.
In July of 1985, a month after the acquittal, Alexander and Ala sued their stepfather in federal court in Manhattan for $56 million. The suit accused Claus von Bülow of trying to kill their mother and of neglecting her proper medical care.
On December 15, 1987, they reached a settlement. Claus von Bülow gave up the $25 million he would have inherited when his wife died and the income of about $120,000 a year he had been receiving from a trust. He agreed to divorce her. He agreed to leave all the couple's homes. He gave up all movie and literary rights to the story. He agreed not to discuss the case publicly.
Under the settlement, Cosima would be restored to the will of her grandmother and would inherit one-third of an estate that United Press International put at $100 million. The divorce became final in 1988. Claus von Bülow moved to London.
The houses were sold that same year. Clarendon Court, bought for $250,000 in 1970, went for $4.2 million. The Fifth Avenue apartment sold for $6.4 million. The art and antiques were sold at auction for $11.5 million.
There were always fresh flowers in her room, the New York Times would later write, and photographs of her children and grandchildren sat on a table by the bed. For the first years, the room was at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center. Later, she was moved to the Mary Manning Walsh Nursing Home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
She was fed through a tube in her stomach. Private nurses looked after her around the clock. The Associated Press called her an ever-sleeping beauty. Her care in the first year, 1981, cost $375,000. By the early 1990s, the room charges alone came to about $1,500 a day.
Her children turned what had happened to their mother into something else. At the end of 1985, Ala and Alexander founded a center in Fort Worth, Texas to help the victims of crime and named it for her. It is now the National Center for Victims of Crime.
In 1986, Alan Dershowitz published a book about the case called Reversal of Fortune. In 1990, it became a film. Jeremy Irons played Claus von Bülow. Glenn Close played Sunny. The film gave her a voice she never had in life, letting her narrate the story from inside the coma.
On March 25, 1991, Jeremy Irons won the Academy Award for best actor for the role.
Sunny von Bülow died at the Mary Manning Walsh home on December 6, 2008. She was 76 by most accounts. One magazine did the arithmetic of how long she had slept. It came to 27 years, 11 months, and 15 days from the morning she was found on the bathroom floor.
Her children released a statement. "We were blessed to have an extraordinarily loving and caring mother," it said.
The memorial service was held on January 14, 2009, at the Brick Presbyterian Church on East 92nd Street in New York, the church where she had married Claus von Bülow 43 years before. She was buried in Rhode Island in the churchyard of St. Mary's Episcopal Church at Portsmouth, near her mother. The stone bears the name she was born with: Martha Sharp Crawford.
Klaus von Bülow outlived her by 10 years. He died at his home in London on May 25, 2019, at the age of 92.
Clarendon Court was sold again in September of 2021 for $30 million, a record for Rhode Island. On June 11, 2024, at Christie's, her daughter Ala sold her mother's Van Cleef & Arpels necklace, the carved hexagonal emerald with its rubies and diamonds made around 1965. It sold for $289,800.
She had lived 48 or 49 years awake and almost 28 more without waking. More than a third of her life was spent in a hospital bed. She did not know her grandchildren, nine of them, whose photographs stood by her bed. She gave no sign of hearing either verdict. She did not read a line of the books or see the actress who played her.
Of everything said about her in all those years, the truest thing may still be the few words she gave a society columnist around 1968. "Seeing the same people every night," she said, "I run out of conversation."
Whatever happened in that small pink marble bathroom four days before Christmas, the law has said what it could, and it could not say that. What remains is the room and the woman on its floor, and a maid on another morning holding her hand and saying the only words that anyone ever needed to say to her. "Madame, wake up."