On the morning of December 21, 1980, a woman was found face down on the marble floor of a bathroom in Newport, Rhode Island. Her name was Sunny von Bülow, and she never woke again. Her husband, Klaus, was tried twice for attempting to kill her—convicted once, acquitted once—and an actor later won an Oscar for playing him in a film she never saw. For nearly three decades, someone kept sending fresh flowers to a room where she could not see them.
This is not the story of the trials. It is the story of the one who never stopped visiting her. She had been born Martha Sharp Crawford, the daughter of George Washington Crawford, a man who had built Columbia Gas and Electric from nothing. Her father was 66 when he married her mother, a bride 40 years younger.
The girl arrived early, on a private railroad car heading north from a West Virginia resort, born somewhere between one state and the next. She was named after Martha Norelius, the daughter of a Swedish swimming instructor at the Greenbrier, who had won an Olympic gold medal. The resort staff called her Chuchu at first, then Sunny, for her cheerful disposition. The name stuck for the rest of her life.
Her father died when she was three or four, leaving his only daughter a fortune reported to exceed 75 million dollars. She never had to earn a single dollar, and she would never meet a person who did not know it. She was raised between a Fifth Avenue apartment and an estate in Connecticut called Tamerlane, attended the Chapin School and Saint Timothy’s, and did not go to college. In the world for which she was being prepared, that was not part of the preparation.
She was extraordinarily beautiful, tall, fair-haired, and serene, but the Providence Journal would later describe her with a phrase that said everything: dazzling, but painfully shy. Her shyness was so intense that strangers mistook it for a lack of intelligence. She was presented to society in the 1951 season, and although no party was complete without her, the attention terrified her. She spent the year being watched, unable to start the small talk she had never learned.
At 24, she traveled with her mother to an Alpine resort built for wealthy Americans. There she met Alfred von Auersperg, known as Alfi, a tennis instructor and prince of a mediatized house of the old Austrian Empire—a surname that meant a great deal in Vienna and almost nothing at a bank. They married the following summer at Tamerlane. She was 25, and the day she signed the register, her American name disappeared from the guest lists of two continents.
She was now Princess von Auersperg. The marriage produced two children: Annie-Laurie, called Ala, born in 1958, and Alexander, born in 1959. It lasted eight years. In 1965, she returned to New York alone with the children and divorced.
She kept the title, kept the children, and was 33 years old. Within a year, she remarried. The man was Klaus, born Klaus Cecil Borberg in Copenhagen in 1926. When he was 14, his mother sent him to Britain, where he took her family surname, Bülow, and later added the “von.
” He had studied law at Cambridge, possessed the charm that opened London drawing rooms, and worked as an executive assistant to J. Paul Getty. On June 6, 1966, Sunny married him at the Brick Presbyterian Church on Park Avenue. He quit his job with Getty almost immediately.
A daughter, Cosima, was born the following spring. In 1970, Sunny bought Clarendon Court, the Newport mansion where High Society had been filmed. She paid 250,000 dollars for it and spent more than double that renovating it. Then she did something that says more about her than any photograph.
She had the garden terrain lowered by roughly 17 feet so that, from inside the house, the Atlantic Ocean would sit exactly at the height she wanted to see it. A woman who at 18 could barely hold a conversation had moved the horizon itself. Twice, ten years apart, she married men with titles and money that was hers. Both men lived off her fortune.
Her second marriage made the conditions unusually clear. If the marriage ended in divorce, Klaus would receive nothing. If she died, the will left him 14 million dollars. She had signed it herself.
By 1979, both spouses had begun speaking openly about divorce. Then there was Maria Schrallhammer, the maid who had stayed beside Sunny for 23 years. She had come with her from Austria, through the first marriage, the divorce, the second wedding, the third child, and the move to Newport. Maria knew how her employer sounded when she slept.
On December 27, 1979, at Clarendon Court during Christmas, Sunny began to fade. Her speech slurred, her coordination failed. Her son Alexander helped her to bed. The next morning, Maria heard moaning and went in.
Sunny was unresponsive. What followed was argued over two trials, several books, and a movie. According to Maria’s testimony, she told Klaus and asked him to call the doctor. The call was not made until around two that afternoon.
The doctor returned the call an hour later. Klaus explained that his wife had been drinking and had been up that morning; she was probably sleeping it off. Maria testified that neither part of that description matched what she had seen. The doctor arrived at six.
By then, Sunny was vomiting and struggling to breathe. In front of him, she stopped breathing and went into cardiac arrest. He resuscitated her. At the hospital, her blood sugar was extraordinarily low, and glucose would not raise it.
On December 28, 1979, Sunny von Bülow woke up. She came back, opened her eyes, and was herself again. The discharge diagnosis was bronchopneumonia and hypoglycemia of undetermined etiology. Translated plainly, it meant: we do not know why this happened.
It was a professional shrug, filed away, closing the question instead of opening it. There was no crime because there was no cause. The doctors advised her to be careful with sweets, not to go too long without eating, to avoid alcohol, and sent her home to the same house and the same marriage. Four months later, in April 1980, it happened again.
She was hospitalized, incoherent and disoriented. The doctors reached the same conclusion: reactive hypoglycemia, cause undetermined. Twice, not once, a woman was torn from her life and brought back, and twice medicine wrote that it could not explain why. Eight months later came the morning on the marble floor in Newport.
When she fell for the last time, it was her two oldest children, Ala, 22, and Alexander, 21, who refused to accept a blank space where there should have been a reason. They had no legal standing, no experience, and no authority. They spent 400,000 dollars of their own money on private investigators—over a million in today’s terms. The investigation produced a black bag containing medications and a used hypodermic syringe that reportedly held traces of insulin.
That syringe would become one of the most scrutinized objects in the United States. In January 1981, they moved their mother to the Harkness Pavilion at Columbia Presbyterian in New York. She had a private room and a guard at the door. Someone had decided, from the beginning and without any of it reaching the newspapers, that she needed to be protected from a person.
In July 1981, Klaus von Bülow was charged. The 1982 trial in Newport was the first American criminal trial broadcast on television from beginning to end. The country watched as a Newport marriage was dismantled. The defense presented Sunny as a fragile, self-destructive woman, a drunk and a pill addict who had drunk herself into a coma.
She lay 300 yards north of the courtroom, behind a guarded door, while they turned her every few hours to keep her skin from deteriorating. During all those weeks, no one called her by the name she was born with. She was Mrs. von Bülow, the victim, the wife of the accused, the estate, the body on the bathroom floor.
On March 16, 1982, the jury found Claus guilty of both charges. He was sentenced to 30 years. And then he became popular. Spectators cheered him outside the courtroom.
Headlines announced that he was gaining admirers. He had been on television for six weeks, and on a screen there can only be one face. He did not spend a single night in prison. His appeal went to Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz.
On April 27, 1984, the Rhode Island Supreme Court overturned the conviction and ordered a new trial. The family did not survive intact. Cosima, 14 when her mother fell into the coma, chose her father. He hadn’t done it, she said, and she never retracted it.
Her grandmother disinherited her for it. The old woman died at Columbia Presbyterian in 1984, in the same hospital where her only daughter lay silent, a few floors apart, and never knew. The 17-year-old was not allowed to attend the funeral. The second trial in 1985 was different.
The medical evidence collapsed. The blood glucose specialist who had told the first jury that only an insulin injection could explain the symptoms admitted, after three hours of cross-examination, that certain prescription drugs could produce the same condition. A forensic toxicologist demonstrated to the jury why the syringe’s residue could not mean what the state claimed. On June 10, 1985, the jury acquitted Klaus von Bülow of all charges.
He said he wanted to be forgotten and live quietly. That August, a Vanity Fair cover appeared showing him in black leather, photographed inside his wife’s New York apartment. His son later described the image as a man mocking them right under their noses. The children were not done.
A 56 million dollar civil lawsuit was filed on behalf of her mother. Before Christmas 1987, a settlement was reached. Klaus renounced all rights to his wife’s fortune, gave up the trust income, agreed to divorce the woman who could not be told she was getting a divorce, agreed to leave the United States, and agreed never to profit from the story. In return, Cosima was reinstated in her grandmother’s will.
Her share was approximately 30 million dollars. Then the selling began. Clarendon Court sold for 4. 2 million.
The Fifth Avenue apartment sold for 6. 25 million. The paintings, furniture, and porcelain were auctioned over two days for 4. 5 million.
Sunny was alive through all of it, 90 blocks north, breathing on her own. In 1985, the year they lost, Ala and Alexander founded an organization. They called it the Sunny von Bülow National Victim Advocacy Center and opened it in Fort Worth, Texas. Their goal was not to reopen their mother’s case.
It was about everyone else’s. They had come to believe that it was fundamentally unfair for crime victims to be excluded and revictimized by the very system meant to help them. They had watched four years of courts debating their mother’s body, her marriage, and her medicine cabinet on national television, and she had no standing, no voice, no representation of her own. The law does not give the victim a seat at the table; it assigns them a role.
Two young people accepted the defeat and created the place that had been denied to her. The organization still exists today as the National Center for Victims of Crime in Washington. It is more than four decades old. Then, in 1986, they founded a second thing.
Prince Alfred von Auersperg, their father, had been in a car accident in Austria in 1983. He, too, never regained consciousness, and died in 1992 after nine years in an irreversible coma. Starting in 1983, Ala and Alexander had a mother in a coma in New York and a father in a coma in Austria. Two parents, two continents, neither ever coming back.
In the midst of that, they founded the Sunny von Bülow Coma and Head Trauma Research Foundation. It still exists today as the Brain Trauma Foundation, and its work influenced the way head injuries are treated in hospitals that have never heard of Newport. Sunny remained in the Harkness Pavilion for 18 years. In 1998, she was moved to a private care facility on the Upper East Side.
The doctors said she never showed any sign of brain activity. She was fed through a tube. There was nothing to be done, and no one involved was under any illusion about it. And yet, there were fresh flowers in that room, week after week, through seven presidential elections and the end of a century.
The room alone cost around 1,500 dollars a day, with another 200,000 to 300,000 a year for private nurses. According to one account, for all those years, someone went twice a week to style her hair and put on her makeup. There was no medical reason for it. It changed no outcomes.
A woman who could not see herself in a mirror had her hair done on a Tuesday in a room she would never leave, by someone she could never thank. They were not waiting for her to wake up; they were not naive. The doctors had been clear. They kept bringing flowers because the alternative was to treat her as something already over.
They had watched a court do exactly that for four years in front of the whole country. They were never going to let it happen behind that door. Sunny von Bülow died on December 6, 2008, at a care facility on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. She was 76.
It had been 27 years, 11 months, and 15 days since the morning on the bathroom floor. Her three children issued a statement together that day. Annie Laurie, Alexander, and Christina—the two from the first marriage and the daughter from the second—had not always agreed. For years, one of them had not even been allowed to attend her own grandmother’s funeral.
But that afternoon, all three names appeared under the same six words: “We were blessed to have had an extraordinarily loving and caring mother. ” It is the only sentence in the whole story that all three children signed together. Her memorial service was held on January 14, 2009, at the Brick Presbyterian Church in New York, the same church where she had married Klaus von Bülow 43 years earlier. He was not there.
He had lived quietly in London, writing book and theater reviews under his own name, and died in May 2019 at 92. Her tombstone, in a cemetery in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, just a few miles from the marble floors and the two foundations created in her name, does not say Princess von Auersperg or Mrs. von Bülow. It says Martha Sharp Crawford.
The name of the railroad car. The name from before all of that. Of all the names given to her by love, the law, or a title acquired through someone else’s poverty, it was the only one that had cost no one anything.
It took nearly thirty years, but in the end, someone gave it back to her.