For almost 28 years, she lay in a bed in New York and never moved. A nurse turned her, washed her, and brushed the hair of a woman who could not feel the brush. She had been one of the richest women in America. She was born on a private railway carriage, and she inherited $100 million before she could walk. She had been a princess by marriage, a queen of Newport society, a face the columns adored. Then one December night, she lay down on a marble bathroom floor and never woke up again. Her husband was convicted of putting her there. Then a second jury set him free. This is the story of Sunny von Bülow, the woman the world argued over while she could not say a single word.
The fortune that made Sunny von Bülow is the same thing that destroyed her. She was born on September 1, 1931, reportedly aboard her father’s private railway carriage as it passed through Manassas, Virginia. As a small child, they called her Choo Choo for the circumstances of her birth. Later the name softened into Sunny for a disposition that was gentle and mild. Her father was George Crawford, a utilities magnate and former chairman of the Columbia Gas and Electric Company. He had built a fortune out of the pipes and wires that were electrifying America. When he died, Sunny was about three years old. What she inherited from him was not a memory, but a number, and the number was $100 million.
In 1935, the country was in the depths of the Great Depression. A working family might live on $1,000 a year and count themselves fortunate. And a little girl who could not yet read was worth $100 million. Her mother, Annie Laurie, was herself the daughter of the founder of the International Shoe Company. The money did not come from one direction. It came from all sides, and Sunny was the small still point it all flowed toward.
Sunny grew up shy. Friends described a girl who was quiet in rooms full of loud people, generous, a little withdrawn, more comfortable listening than performing. By the time she was a young woman, tall and blonde and lovely, she had become one of the most eligible heiresses in the western world. The first man to reach her came with a title older than the country that made her rich.
At a Swiss resort, she fell for her sports instructor. It happened that the instructor was an Austrian prince with an old title and no money. His name was Prince Alfred von Auersperg, and everyone called him Alfie. He came from a distinguished Austrian princely family, but the empire that had made his house great had collapsed after the First World War. What Alfie had left was the title, the manners, the charm, and the good looks. They married on July 20, 1957, and with that marriage, the American heiress became an Austrian princess.
They had two children. A daughter, Annie Laurie, nicknamed Ala, was born in 1958. A son, Prince Alexander, followed in 1959. By 1965, after about eight years, Sunny and Alfie were divorced. At the time of that divorce, her net worth was reported to be over $75 million. A woman could lose a husband, a title, and a marriage, and still walk away worth more than most corporations.
There is a detail from Alfie’s later life that casts a long shadow over everything that follows. In 1983, Prince Alfred von Auersperg was in a car accident in Austria. He fell into an irreversible coma. He lingered in that state for about nine years and died in 1992. Sunny’s first husband and Sunny herself would both end their lives the same way, silent and unreachable, breathing in a bed while the world went on without them.
The second man was no prince, but he was polished, witty, and had served one of the richest men on earth. His name by the time Sunny met him was Claus von Bülow, though he had not been born with it. He had come into the world in Copenhagen on August 11, 1926, as Klaus Cecil Borberg. His father was a Danish playwright who had been accused during the German occupation of Denmark of collaborating with the Nazis. Klaus chose to leave that shadowed name behind. He took instead his mother’s noble surname, Bülow.
He was brilliant by every account. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, at the age of 16 and took a degree in law. He trained under a celebrated British barrister, then went to work for J. Paul Getty, the oil billionaire, and became one of his chief assistants. Claus learned the habits and appetites of the very rich and moved through their world with an ease that looked entirely natural. He was charming, cultured, and cold in a way that some people found magnetic and others found deeply unsettling.
Sunny, unhappily married to Alfie, met Claus at a dinner party in London. What followed was a secret liaison of about two years, and then a marriage. Sunny and Claus were wed on June 6, 1966, at the Brick Presbyterian Church in New York City. A year later, in April of 1967, they had a daughter, Cosima. Sunny now had three children, two by a prince and one by the man who had served an oil king.
For a while, the life they built together was as close to perfect as money can make a life look. In Manhattan, a great apartment on Fifth Avenue, 14 rooms high above the city filled with art and antiques. In Rhode Island, Clarendon Court, a mansion on the cliffs of Newport, the summer capital of American aristocracy. The couple moved between two of the most exclusive addresses in the world, carried on a fortune that had begun at $100 million and had been compounding quietly for decades.
By the end of the 1970s, the perfect couple were sleeping in separate silences. Both of them had begun to say the word divorce. By 1979, both Sunny and Claus were speaking openly about the possibility of ending it. Claus had taken a mistress. Her name was Alexandra Isles, an actress who worked in soap operas, and the affair had run for about two years. The public saw a distinguished couple at the galas and the openings. What was actually happening was that the husband was in love with another woman and the wife knew.
The fortune belonged to Sunny. It had been hers before Claus, and under the arrangements of her wealth, it would remain hers. A divorce would not make Claus a poor man, but it would return him to the ordinary world of the merely comfortable. Prosecutors would later argue that Claus wanted his freedom and Alexandra Isles and the money all at once, and that a divorce could give him only two of the three.
The gracious hostess of Clarendon Court was in private a woman in real and growing distress. The people closest to her described a life that had come to lean heavily on alcohol and on prescription drugs. Doctors had found that she suffered from low blood sugar, a condition called reactive hypoglycemia. She was warned to control it by diet, to avoid fasting, to avoid overloading on sugar, and above all to avoid alcohol.
About three weeks before the end, Sunny was admitted to a hospital. The medical record from that admission indicated that she had swallowed an enormous number of aspirin tablets. The sources give the figure as at least 65, and in another account at least 73, taken over a short span of time. That is not a quantity anyone takes by accident. The defense would present it as evidence of a woman in a private darkness.
Friends from her glittering social circle, including the writer Truman Capote and Joanne Carson, the former wife of the most famous man on American television, would later testify to Sunny’s heavy use of alcohol and pills. The truth of her suffering was known to her famous friends the whole time. It only became something anyone would say out loud once she could no longer hear it.
At Christmas of 1979, Sunny was found unresponsive at Clarendon Court. She was rushed to the hospital and slipped into a coma. After days of testing and care, she was revived. The doctors concluded the coma was the result of her hypoglycemia, aggravated most likely by the drinking and the pills. No foul play was suspected. No police were called.
There was a second warning a few months later. In April of 1980, Sunny was hospitalized again, appearing incoherent and disoriented. Once more, the doctors landed on the same explanation. Reactive hypoglycemia. The same advice, the same going home. Only later, only after the final catastrophe, would the same events be read in an entirely different light.
On the evening of December 21, 1980, Sunny began to show the signs everyone had learned to fear. She was confused. Her coordination failed her. The family did what the previous year had taught them to do. They helped her to bed. In the morning, she was on the floor of her bathroom unconscious. This time, the darkness she had gone into was one she would never climb back out of.
She was rushed to the hospital. The doctors worked, but the injury this time was of a different order entirely. Her brain had been without what it needed for too long, and the damage was catastrophic and permanent. Sunny von Bülow had entered what the doctors call a persistent vegetative state. Her body would live. Her eyes would sometimes open, but the person was gone, and she was never coming back.
In the shock and grief that followed, one thought took hold in the minds of Sunny’s two eldest children. The marriage had been dying. Their stepfather had a mistress. Their mother had a fortune. And now their mother would never wake up. They did not think it was the blood sugar. They thought it was murder.
The maid was Maria Schrallhammer, and she had been devoted to Sunny for years. After the final coma, she noticed that a certain closet in the Newport house, a closet that had always been kept open, had recently been locked. The children acted on it. They hired a private investigator named Edwin Lambert, and they brought in a formidable ally, Richard Kuh, a former district attorney of New York County.
The family and their investigator went to Clarendon Court with a locksmith to get into the closet that Claus had locked. Inside, the sources say, they found a missing black bag. In it was said to be a collection of drugs and a used hypodermic needle. On that needle, testing would report there were traces of insulin.
Insulin is a substance the body makes on its own. Injected from the outside in a large enough dose, it can drive blood sugar down catastrophically into coma, and it is fiendishly hard to tell an injected overdose from the body’s own failure. It is close to a perfect weapon, one that mimics the very condition Sunny was known to suffer from. To the children, the needle in the locked closet was the smoking gun.
The matter went to the authorities. Rhode Island prosecutors took the evidence to a grand jury, and in July of 1981, Claus von Bülow was formally charged with two counts of assault with intent to murder. Two counts because the state now believed there had been two attempts. The coma of 1979 that she survived and the coma of 1980 that she did not.
The first trial began in February of 1982 in Newport, and it became a national spectacle. The state built its case out of many pieces. There was the financial motive laid out plainly. There was the testimony of the household, the maids and the chauffeurs and the doctors. Above all, there was Maria Schrallhammer, whose account of the black bag made her one of the most important witnesses the prosecution had.
Alexandra Isles took the stand, and her testimony was among the most damaging moments of the entire case. By her account, Claus had once described a night when Sunny had been drinking heavily, had swallowed a sedative, and had drifted into danger. He told Isles that he had watched his wife lie unconscious through the day, knowing she was in a bad way, and only at the very end, when she was near death, had he called the doctor who saved her life.
The state also called a distinguished endocrinologist from Harvard. He testified that in his judgment, her brain damage had been caused by insulin injected from the outside. The jury believed the state’s story. Claus von Bülow was convicted on both counts of assault with intent to murder. On May 7, 1982, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
But Claus von Bülow was granted $1 million in bail while he appealed. He had access to something most convicted people can only dream of. He had a fortune within reach and a famous case. He could buy the finest appeal that money could arrange.
The lawyer he hired was Alan Dershowitz, a professor at Harvard Law School and one of the most brilliant appellate minds in the country. Dershowitz aimed his attack at the evidence itself, and above all at how it had been gathered. The black bag and the needle had been found not by the police, but by the victim’s family and their private investigator, and they had been tested without a search warrant. Richard Kuh, the family’s lawyer, had taken notes that the defense had never been allowed to see.
In 1984, the Rhode Island Supreme Court agreed. It reversed both convictions. The guilty verdict, the 30-year sentence, all of it was wiped away, and Claus von Bülow would be tried again.
The second trial in 1985 was a different fight entirely. The defense called a battery of world-renowned professors of medicine, endocrinology, and toxicology. One after another, they testified that Sunny’s comas had not been caused by injected insulin at all. They pointed instead to the combination of ingested drugs, alcohol, and her own chronic illness.
They took apart the needle. A toxicologist explained that the needle had insulin on the outside, but not on the inside. If that needle had actually been pushed through human flesh to inject someone, the flesh would have wiped the outside clean. Insulin on the outside meant the needle had been dipped, not injected.
On June 10, 1985, the jury acquitted Claus von Bülow on both counts. He walked out a free man. An acquittal is not the same as innocence. It is a finding that the state did not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he did it. Somewhere between the two verdicts is the truth of what happened to Sunny in that bathroom, and we will never reach it.
The criminal case was finished, but the fight was not. Only about ten days after Claus was acquitted, in July of 1985, Sunny’s two eldest children filed a civil lawsuit against him on their silent mother’s behalf. They sued him for $56 million.
Back in 1981, before the first trial, the split had cut straight through the three children. Ala and Alexander were certain Claus was guilty. But Cosima, the daughter Sunny had had with Claus, believed in her father’s innocence and stood by him. For choosing that side, Cosima was punished by her own family. Her grandmother, Sunny’s mother, Annie Laurie Atkin, disinherited her, cutting her out of the will entirely. The grandmother died in 1984 with that punishment still in place.
The whole tangle was finally cut on December 24, 1987, seven years almost to the day after Sunny fell for the last time. The civil suit was settled out of court. Claus von Bülow agreed to divorce Sunny. He agreed to give up every claim to her fortune, then estimated at between $25 million and $40 million, and he agreed to leave the United States. In exchange, the lawsuit was dropped and Cosima was restored to her grandmother’s will, receiving $30 million as her one-third share of the estate.
Sunny von Bülow lay in a bed and knew none of it. She was moved eventually to a nursing home in New York City. She remained in that persistent vegetative state for almost 28 years. She outlived the trials, the settlement, the fame of the case, and the film they made of it. She finally died on December 6, 2008. Claus von Bülow, acquitted, free, and living quietly in London, outlived her by more than a decade, dying there in 2019 at the age of 92.
The film was called Reversal of Fortune. It came out in 1990, built on the book Alan Dershowitz had written about the case. Glenn Close played Sunny. Jeremy Irons played Claus von Bülow. For that performance, Jeremy Irons won the Academy Award for best actor. A real woman lay in a real bed in New York, unable to move or speak, while in Hollywood, an actor stood on a stage and accepted the highest honor in his profession for playing the man accused of putting her there.
The case seeped into the culture until it became a kind of shorthand. The phrase “a Sunny von Bülow coma” entered the language as a way to describe a long and mysterious unconsciousness. Two beloved characters in a children’s book series were quietly named for her and for Claus. She had become, in the end, not a person, but a reference.
Her children tried to make something else of it. Ala and Alexander took their grief and built institutions out of it, founding an advocacy center in their mother’s name that grew into a national organization for the victims of crime, and a foundation for research into coma and head trauma. They gave her silence a purpose.
When Sunny von Bülow was finally buried, the stone over her grave did not carry the famous name. It did not say von Bülow. It said Martha Sharp Crawford. The name of the girl who existed before the prince, before Claus, before the fortune became a target and the marriage became a courtroom. Underneath $100 million, underneath the title and the mansions and the trials, there had always been a person, and in the end, the grave gave her back her own name.