Martha Sharp Crawford entered the world in 1932 aboard a railway car traveling between White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, and New York, an unconventional beginning that earned her the nickname Choochu. She was born into extraordinary wealth. Her father, George Crawford, founded Columbia Gas and Electric, and her maternal grandfather, Robert Warburton, built the International Shoe Company. When her father died in 1936, the four-year-old inherited an astonishing $75 million.
She grew up in a Fifth Avenue mansion, attended the exclusive Chapin School, and spent summers at the family estate in Greenwich, Connecticut. By the 1950s, she was one of Manhattan’s most celebrated debutantes, known for her beauty and grace, a fixture of high society who seemed to live a charmed existence. In 1957, she married Prince Alfred von Auersperg, a charming but financially struggling Austrian aristocrat. The union appeared to be a fairy tale, merging her American fortune with European nobility.
But Alfred was restless, given to big-game safaris in Africa and a wandering eye that found company with glamorous women, including Italian film stars. Despite his infidelities, the marriage produced two children, Princess Annie Laurie and Prince Alexander, and Sunny devoted herself to motherhood. By 1964, after seven years of turmoil, she ended the marriage. Alfred retreated further into his adventures, and a devastating car accident later left him in a vegetative state until his death, a grim premonition of what Sunny herself would endure.
Her second marriage, in 1966, was to Claus von Bülow, a Danish-born aristocrat whose father had been a Nazi collaborator and whose reputation carried the weight of that association. Claus adopted his maternal grandfather’s surname to distance himself from it, and on the surface, the marriage seemed perfect. The couple lived in extraordinary luxury, dividing their time between a Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking Central Park and Clarendon Court, a Georgian mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, where they entertained the elite. Sunny remained an icon of elegance, celebrated for her fashion and frequently named among the best-dressed women in America.
Behind closed doors, the marriage was crumbling. Claus was unfaithful, most notably with Alexandra Isles, a socialite and actress best known for her role on the soap opera Dark Shadows. Isles demanded that Claus leave Sunny and marry her, an ultimatum that deepened the fractures in the marriage. Sunny was acutely aware that her fortune, which funded Claus’s lavish lifestyle, had enabled his betrayals.
The humiliation and resentment drove her to alcohol and prescription pills. By 1979, the couple had been sleeping in separate bedrooms for years. At Claus’s insistence, they resumed sharing a room, but the gesture was superficial. Those close to Sunny staged an intervention, and she appeared to reduce her drinking, but her physical and emotional health remained precarious.
On Christmas night in 1979, Sunny and her son Alexander were at the Newport mansion. She drank homemade eggnog, and within moments, her behavior became alarming. She grew disoriented, her speech slurred, her movements unsteady. The maid, Maria, pleaded to call a doctor, but Claus insisted Sunny was merely drunk and would recover with rest.
By the time a doctor was summoned, her condition had deteriorated dangerously. Her blood sugar had plummeted, and alarmingly high levels of insulin were detected in her system. Sunny had never used insulin. She was stabilized, but the episode raised unsettling questions.
A year later, in December 1980, tragedy struck again. Sunny was found unresponsive in her bathroom, her head resting under the toilet, her legs stretched toward the bathtub, her nightgown bunched up. A fur throw had been draped over her, and the bathroom windows were inexplicably open, letting the icy December air chill the room. It was Claus who discovered her, and his reaction was eerily calm.
He informed Alexander of her condition with little emotion. Sunny’s body temperature had fallen to 81 degrees, her heart rate to 31 beats per minute. Medical analysis later revealed she had been in that state for hours before help was called. Her insulin levels were once again alarmingly high.
The scene appeared theatrical, as if staged, and the delay in seeking help contradicted the timeline Claus presented. For many, the parallels between the two episodes, both marked by unexplained insulin spikes and suspicious delays, pointed to something far darker than accident. The public reaction was swift. The case dominated headlines, and society gossip gave way to serious speculation about whether Claus had plotted to inherit his wife’s fortune.
Sunny was seen by many as a victim of betrayal, trapped in a gilded cage. In 1981, Claus was charged with attempted murder, accused of injecting Sunny with insulin to hasten her death and secure her $1 million inheritance. The prosecution’s case rested on a small black bag retrieved from Claus’s possessions, containing needles, insulin, and various drugs. Medical experts testified that the high insulin levels in Sunny’s system were unlikely to have been self-administered.
Claus was convicted and sentenced to thirty years in prison. He refused to accept the verdict and enlisted the help of Alan Dershowitz, the celebrity lawyer who would later defend O. J. Simpson and Jeffrey Epstein.
Dershowitz focused not on Claus’s innocence but on procedural flaws in the trial. The black bag, he argued, had been removed from Claus’s home without a warrant, a violation of the Fourth Amendment, and its chain of custody had been compromised. In 1985, the conviction was overturned and a retrial ordered. The black bag was excluded as evidence, and the defense argued that Sunny’s comas resulted from her health problems, alcohol, and prescription drugs rather than insulin injections.
The jury found Claus not guilty. The acquittal did little to repair his reputation, and lingering suspicion followed him. By 1987, the legal battle reached its end. Facing a $56 million civil lawsuit filed by Sunny’s children from her first marriage, Claus agreed to a settlement.
He renounced all claims to Sunny’s fortune, agreed to divorce her, relinquished the $120,000 annual trust fund she had established for him, and permanently left the United States. The settlement was not an admission of guilt but a pragmatic act, ensuring that his daughter with Sunny, Cosima, would not be disinherited. Cosima stood by her father throughout the ordeal and was eventually reinstated as an heir to her grandmother’s estate. Claus spent his later years in London, living modestly on the wealth his daughter inherited.
He died in 2019 at the age of ninety-two. Sunny herself lay in a coma for twenty-eight years. Her caregivers tended to her with devotion, styling her hair and manicuring her nails, preserving the elegance she had once embodied. The media called her the Sleeping Beauty of Newport.
She died in 2008 at the age of seventy-six. Her passing closed a chapter marked by unanswered questions and lingering doubt. The Von Bülow case remains one of the most controversial legal battles in high society, a story of wealth, betrayal, and mystery without resolution.
Whether Sunny’s fate was a tragic accident born of her declining health or a calculated plan by a husband who stood to gain millions remains a question that has never been settled.