Martha Sharp Crawford entered the world on September 1, 1932, inside a private railway carriage traveling between Virginia and New York. Her father, George Washington Crawford, had built a fortune in fossil fuels, commanding Colombia Gas and Electric while oil and natural gas flowed from his Pennsylvania properties. When he died three years later, he left his toddler daughter $100 million—roughly $2 billion in today’s value—along with an emotional void no trust fund could fill.
Sunny, as she was known, split her childhood between a Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking Central Park and the Tamilain Estate in Greenwich, Connecticut. A Rolls-Royce and a driver who knew her moods better than any parent carried her between palaces. Vogue crowned her among the world’s best dressed women, and observers drew the inevitable Grace Kelly comparisons that followed her like expensive perfume. Depression stalked her through finishing school hallways and debutante balls, a shadow presence that champagne and shopping sprees could temporarily blur but never vanish.
In 1957, at a Swiss ski resort, Sunny met Prince Alfred Eduard Friedrich Vinzenz Martin Maria von Auersperg, a tennis instructor whose lineage vastly exceeded his bank balance. The Austrian prince traced his bloodline to medieval nobility, but the collapse of the Habsburg Empire had reduced him to trading on his backhand and title with American heiresses seeking European validation. In July 1957, Martha Crawford became Princess von Auersperg, adding two children to the nobility’s ranks: Princess Annie-Laurie and Prince Alexander.
Prince Alfred’s commitment to monogamy proved as unstable as his finances. Affairs proliferated like unpaid bills, including a particularly public dalliance with Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida. By 1965, Sunny had endured enough continental infidelity, securing an amicable divorce that left her with the children and him with whatever remained of his reputation.
Enter Claus Cecil Borberg at a Manhattan dinner party. A Danish charlatan, he had crafted himself a new identity as meticulously as any forger working in basement light. Copenhagen birthed him on August 11, 1926, to playwright Sven Borberg, whose Nazi collaboration earned four years in prison after the Allies sorted through the wreckage. The son escaped to Britain during wartime, appropriating his maternal grandfather’s surname, Bülow, then illegally tacking on the aristocratic “von” for his invented persona.
Working for J. Paul Getty by the 1960s, Claus occupied that nebulous space between secretary and confidant—close enough to power to absorb its mannerisms without wielding any himself. On June 6, 1966, another marriage brought Sunny together with Claus, this time with prenuptial terms that would prove prophetic. Divorce meant Claus received nothing, but her death would deliver $14 million.
Newport’s Clarendon Court became their primary stage: 21 rooms of Georgian grandeur previously featured in high society. Daughter Cosima arrived in 1967, completing their surface perfection while Claus began calculating how long he’d need to maintain the marriage charade.
Alexandra Isles changed the equation. A dark-haired actress who had portrayed the Gothic soap opera’s original Victoria Winters, she understood dramatic timing. By 1979, she had issued her ultimatum: six months for Claus to divorce Sunny and marry her, or their affair would end like a canceled series.
December 27, 1979, dawned with Sunny von Bülow unconscious in her Newport bedroom, while her husband calmly read newspapers downstairs, insisting she merely needed sleep. The previous evening’s eggnog had mixed poorly with Sunny’s hypoglycemia, a condition making alcohol as dangerous as poison. Yet she had consumed several glasses at the family Christmas party. Alexander von Auersperg had helped his stumbling mother to bed, attributing her uncoordination to holiday excess rather than the first act of attempted murder.
At 9:30 the next morning, Maria Schrallhammer raced upstairs. The German maid’s 23 years of service had prepared her for many things, but not the death rattle emanating from her employer’s throat. Sunny lay gray and gasping, her body rejecting consciousness, while Claus rejected Maria’s frantic pleas to summon medical help immediately. Nine hours passed—nine hours of Sunny’s brain starving for glucose—before Claus finally allowed doctors to intervene in what he insisted was merely alcoholic stupor.
Newport Hospital’s tests revealed the smoking gun. Blood sugar was dangerously low, but insulin levels were at 214, nearly double the lethal threshold that would kill a non-diabetic. Intravenous dextrose sparked Sunny back to life, though her blood sugar paradoxically dropped further, a reaction occurring only when massive insulin doses circulate through the system. She awakened with zero memory of the incident, but Maria filed every detail in her mind’s evidence locker, particularly Claus’s inexplicable delay and casual demeanor during the crisis.
In February 1980, Maria made her most disturbing discovery while organizing closets in the Manhattan apartment. A black leather bag hidden among Claus’s belongings held glass vials, prescription bottles, syringes, and, most alarmingly, a container clearly marked insulin—medication for a disease Sunny had never been diagnosed with. The maid shared her discovery with Alexander and Annie-Laurie. The three formed an unlikely detective agency monitoring the bag’s movements between Newport and New York.
April delivered another medical crisis. Sunny was hospitalized again with hypoglycemic symptoms, though doctors found no explanation beyond her known blood sugar condition. Alexandra Isles’s deadline ticked closer—six months transforming into three, then two. Pressure mounted like a syringe plunger pressing poison into veins.
December 21, 1980, arrived with grim symmetry. Another Christmas gathering at Clarendon Court, where Sunny displayed familiar symptoms: confusion, poor coordination, slurred speech. Family members guided her to bed again, but morning brought no recovery. Only Sunny sprawled across cold marble bathroom tiles in an irreversible coma.
Tests confirmed what the family already suspected: astronomical insulin levels inconsistent with any natural medical condition, consistent only with injection. The second attempt had succeeded where the first failed. Sunny’s brain, too damaged from prolonged hypoglycemia, would never emerge from the vegetative state. Maria confronted the reality that her nine-hour vigil the previous year had merely delayed the inevitable—that Claus had simply refined his technique for the second attempt.
Alexander and Annie-Laurie hired former New York County District Attorney Richard Kuh, whose $400,000 investigation would transform family suspicions into criminal charges. The black bag’s contents would be tested, witnesses interviewed, and a narrative constructed that painted Claus as a methodical would-be murderer who viewed his wife as an obstacle to wealth and remarriage.
America’s first televised murder trial opened February 2, 1982, in Newport Superior Court, transforming Rhode Island into ground zero for a scandal mixing insulin with inheritance. Crowds assembled before dawn, seeking the 80 available seats, treating the proceedings like Broadway theater featuring real blood and actual billionaires.
Prosecutor Stephen Famiglietti outlined a simple narrative: Claus von Bülow had twice attempted to murder his wife using insulin injections, motivated by $14 million and a mistress’s ultimatum. Maria Schrallhammer commanded the witness stand, a graying German maid whose accented testimony about finding Madame near death while Mr. von Bülow refused to call doctors proved devastating. She described the black bag discovery with precision—each detail, the insulin vial, the syringes, the inexplicable presence of diabetic medication for a non-diabetic woman—building the prosecution’s case.
Alexandra Isles followed with soap opera timing, revealing how Claus had confessed to watching Sunny slip deeper into the first coma before finally summoning help. The actress confirmed their affair and her marriage ultimatum, providing the motive that transformed medical mystery into attempted murder. Harvard’s Dr. George Cahill testified with 90% certainty that insulin caused the second coma, while Dr. Robert Bradley pushed further, claiming 100% certainty on the first incident.
Defense attorney Harold Price Fahringer painted Sunny as self-destructive, an alcoholic pill popper whose comas resulted from her own excesses rather than her husband’s plotting. Celebrity depositions from Truman Capote and Joanne Carson claimed intravenous drug use was commonplace in the von Bülow household, though gossip carried less weight than medical evidence. The syringe from Claus’s bag tested positive for insulin at its tip—physical evidence that seemed to corroborate Maria’s testimony and the medical experts’ conclusions.
Six days of deliberation produced the verdict. On March 16, 1982, the jury found Claus guilty on both counts of assault with intent to murder, each word falling like a judge’s gavel in the packed courtroom. Judge Thomas Needham imposed consecutive sentences: 10 years for the first attempt, 20 for the second, though Claus remained free on bail pending appeal.
Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz took the case, assembling law students like a legal SWAT team to dismantle the conviction through procedural warfare. The appeal brief exposed fundamental flaws. Sunny’s family had seized the black bag legally, but prosecutors analyzing its contents without a warrant violated Fourth Amendment protections. Investigator Richard Kuh’s notes had been withheld from the defense, potentially concealing exculpatory evidence that might have changed the trial’s outcome.
On April 27, 1984, the Rhode Island Supreme Court reversed both convictions in a 61-page decision ordering a complete retrial. The state would get another chance to prove Claus’s guilt, but this time he would be defended by Thomas Puccio, the former federal prosecutor who had sent corrupt congressmen to prison. Evidence would be restricted, witnesses cross-examined differently, and medical testimony challenged by experts who had found alarming flaws in the insulin testing.
The second trial would either confirm Claus von Bülow as a calculated killer or expose the first verdict as a catastrophic rush to judgment based on flawed science and family vendetta.
Providence Superior Court hosted the retrial beginning April 25, 1985, with Thomas Puccio dismantling the prosecution’s case like a surgeon reversing another doctor’s botched operation. Eight distinguished medical experts testified for the defense, including Cornell’s neurology chairman and the former U.S. Toxicology Association president. Forensic specialists discovered the insulin tests were fundamentally compromised. British researchers had found that barbiturates and Valium could trigger false positive insulin results. Puccio’s team confirmed this by submitting blind samples that tested positive despite containing no insulin.
The syringe evidence crumbled under scrutiny. Insulin encrusted on the needle’s tip rather than its base defied physics, since penetrating skin would wipe the tip clean like a squeegee. Amobarbital traces on the needle should have left telltale bruising on Sunny’s body, yet examining physicians found zero injection marks during their careful inspection. Three weeks before her final coma, Sunny had been hospitalized after consuming 73 aspirin tablets—a suicide attempt that reframed her medical history entirely.
Puccio savaged the prosecution witnesses. Maria became a biased servant protecting her fairy tale princess from the shadowy interloper, while Alexandra Isles delivered just another melodramatic performance.
On June 10, 1985, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty on both counts after 14 hours of deliberation. The courtroom erupted in applause while one spectator collapsed from emotional overload. Claus emerged victorious but hardly vindicated. Alexander and Annie-Laurie immediately filed a $56 million civil suit, determined to achieve through money what criminal law couldn’t deliver.
December 1987 settlement terms read like an exile treaty. Claus would divorce his comatose wife, abandon all inheritance claims, maintain perpetual silence about the case, and leave America forever. His daughter Cosima, who had supported him throughout both trials, regained her place in her grandmother’s $100 million will—loyalty’s expensive reward.
London became Claus’s final refuge. A small Knightsbridge flat replaced Newport mansions, while he reinvented himself as a theater critic, attending opening nights instead of trials. “This was a tragedy satisfying all Aristotle’s definitions,” he would tell rare interviewers. “Everyone is wounded—some fatally.” That was his only public commentary on the affair.
Sunny existed in medical purgatory for 28 years at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, fed through tubes while fresh flowers and family photographs decorated her unchanging room. On December 6, 2008, her mechanical existence finally ended—nearly three decades after that bathroom floor collapse, her body surrendering what her brain had abandoned long ago.
Alan Dershowitz’s book became an Oscar-winning film starring Jeremy Irons, art transforming tragedy into entertainment while the real participants remained forever altered. Alexander and Annie-Laurie channeled their trauma into advocacy, establishing victims’ rights organizations and coma research foundations bearing their mother’s name.
Claus survived until May 25, 2019, dying at 92 in the London flat where he had spent three decades of court-ordered silence. The question that riveted America—did he or didn’t he—accompanied him to the grave, though Dershowitz himself had grown nearly certain of his client’s innocence.
Sunny von Bülow’s story remains high society’s darkest fairy tale: a princess who pricked her finger on a syringe and slept for 28 years while the world argued whether her prince had wielded the needle or merely watched her fall.