Martha “Sunny” Crawford was born into a level of wealth that isolated her from the world from the very beginning. Her father, George Crawford, was an industrial titan who founded Columbia Gas & Electric. When he died in 1935, three-year-old Sunny became the sole heir to a fortune estimated at $100 million in Depression-era dollars.
Her mother, Annie Laurie, was deeply anxious in the wake of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. She kept Sunny in a gilded cage, moving her between mansions in armored limousines and private train cars. The girl was surrounded by nannies and guards whose job was to keep the world away.
She was painfully shy, and her mother’s nickname for her, “Sunny,” became a bitter irony. She grew into a stunningly beautiful but deeply insecure young woman who craved a protector.
In 1957, at age 24, she married Prince Alfred von Auersperg, an Austrian nobleman. He was charming, athletic, and broke. Sunny’s fortune funded his lifestyle of skiing, drinking, and affairs.
She was miserable in Europe, retreating to her bedroom and depending on prescription pills to manage her anxiety. By 1965, she had enough strength to divorce him and return to New York with their two children, Annie and Alexander.
A year later, at a London dinner party, she met Claus von Bülow. He was a polished, sharp-featured man who worked as an executive assistant to J. Paul Getty, the richest man in the world.
He was cultured, witty, and attentive. He made Sunny feel safe. They married in 1966 and had a daughter, Cosima.
They bought Clarendon Court, a magnificent mansion on the cliffs of Newport, Rhode Island.
The marriage soured quickly. Claus resented living on his wife’s allowance. Sunny, passive and anxious, retreated further into her bedroom.
Claus grew contemptuous of her. He began an affair with Alexandra Isles, a soap opera actress. By the spring of 1979, Isles issued an ultimatum: leave Sunny and marry her.
Claus was trapped. A divorce would leave him with a modest settlement, far too little to maintain his lavish lifestyle. If Sunny died, he would inherit millions and control of the estate.
On December 26, 1979, the family gathered at Clarendon Court for the holidays. Sunny felt unwell and retired to her room. That evening, she slipped into a coma.
Claus was strangely calm, delaying the call for help. At the hospital, doctors found her blood sugar at dangerously low levels. She had no history of diabetes.
They attributed the episode to a mysterious metabolic reaction and sent her home.
Sunny was terrified after that. She told a friend over lunch, “I think he’s trying to kill me.” Her friend dismissed it as drama.
Sunny stayed in the house with the man she suspected of poisoning her.
Her devoted German maid, Maria Schrallhammer, began watching Claus. She found a small black bag in his closet containing pills, a syringe, and a vial of liquid. She told Sunny’s daughter, Annie, but they felt powerless to act on a suspicion.
On December 20, 1980, the family gathered again for Christmas. Sunny had a cold and drank eggnog. Claus was unusually attentive, offering her drinks and urging her to bed early.
That night, the door to the master suite was locked. The next morning, Maria found Sunny unconscious on the bathroom floor. The window was wide open, and the room was freezing.
Claus refused to call a doctor, saying, “Let her sleep. She’s just tired.”
Hours passed before help was called. By then, the lack of glucose had devastated Sunny’s brain. She was alive, but she would never wake up.
Annie and Alexander searched the closet and found the black bag. Laboratory tests showed the syringe was coated with dried insulin residue. Sunny was not diabetic.
The insulin was external. Someone had injected it.
The children did not call the police. They hired a private investigator and former prosecutor to build an airtight case. In July 1981, Claus von Bülow was charged with two counts of attempted murder.
The first trial began in Newport in early 1982. The prosecution’s case was powerful. Maria Schrallhammer testified about Claus’s cold indifference as his wife lay dying.
Alexandra Isles testified about her ultimatum, which coincided with the first coma. Medical experts testified that Sunny’s blood showed massive amounts of insulin with almost no C-peptide, a substance produced naturally by the body. The only explanation was an injection.
Claus did not testify. He sat in silence, smirking at testimony he found absurd. The jury deliberated for six days and returned a guilty verdict on both counts.
Claus was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
But he was released on bail pending appeal. He hired Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor known for taking impossible cases. Dershowitz’s strategy was ruthless.
First, he argued that the black bag had been seized illegally by the children, who were acting as agents of the state. The evidence, he said, violated the Fourth Amendment. Second, he put the victim on trial.
The defense painted Sunny as a secret alcoholic and pill addict, a miserable woman who may have injected herself with insulin to lose weight or to stage a suicide attempt. They found witnesses to support this narrative. In 1984, the Rhode Island Supreme Court overturned the conviction.
Claus was granted a new trial.
The second trial took place in Providence in 1985. The atmosphere was different. The defense’s medical experts countered the prosecution’s.
The narrative had shifted. Sunny was no longer a sleeping princess; she was a disturbed woman who may have engineered her own destruction. The jury found Claus von Bülow not guilty.
Claus left the courtroom a free man. He faced a civil suit from Annie and Alexander, but he settled. He agreed to divorce Sunny, relinquish all claims to her fortune, and never speak to the press about the case.
In exchange, he kept the money he would have received in a simple divorce and preserved Cosima’s inheritance.
He moved to London, where he lived comfortably in a Knightsbridge apartment. He wrote art reviews, attended the opera, and dined at the best restaurants. He posed for a notorious Vanity Fair photo in black leather, smirking at the camera.
He lived to be 92, dying in 2019, never admitting guilt.
Sunny lay in a coma for 28 years. She was kept in a private room at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and later in a nursing facility on the Upper East Side. Her skin stayed smooth, her hair remained golden.
She looked like a sleeping beauty frozen in time. Her children visited constantly, reading to her and celebrating her birthdays in silence.
Cosima, the daughter caught in the middle, sided with her father. She was disinherited by her grandmother and estranged from her half-siblings for decades. The family was torn apart.
On December 6, 2008, Sunny von Bülow died. She was 76 years old. She had spent nearly 40 percent of her life unconscious.
Her funeral was private. She was buried in Southampton.
Clarendon Court still stands on the cliffs of Newport, beautiful and cold. The story of Sunny von Bülow is not just a crime story. It is a tragedy about a woman who had everything and lost it all in a single moment of silence.
The real weapon was not the insulin in the syringe. It was the indifference of a world that looked away.