Episode 142: The Mysterious Death of Sunny von Bülow
An American heiress and socialite and the only child of George Crawford, the founder of the Columbia Gas and Electric Company, and his wife Annie-Laurie Warmack, the daughter of the founder of the International Shoe Company, Martha Sharp was born on September 1st, 1932, in her father’s personal railway carriage in Manassas, Virginia as George and Annie-Laurie were headed up to New York. She earned the nickname “Choo Choo” after being born on a train before being called Sunny because of her bright, bubbly and positive personality.
George died when she was just 3-years-old and she inherited $100 million. Sunny grew into a beautiful blonde-haired young woman who was the life of the party and highly sought after. She was also smart and did well in school, but chose not to go to college and went traveling in Europe with her mother instead. At a Swiss resort, Sunny fell in love with her tennis instructor, Alfred Eduard Friedrich Vincenz Martin Maria Auersperg, and the two married on July 20th, 1957, when Sunny was 24-years-old. Alfred came from a family of Austrian royalty that had lost most of their wealth after the collapse of the Austrian Empire. Sunny and Alfred had two children together: Princess Annie-Laurie "Ala" Auersperg, born in 1958, and Prince Alexander Georg Auersperg, born a year later in 1959. She also went on to hire a maid named Maria Schrallhammer, who was essentially her right hand for anything she needed, and would be loyal to her for many more years.
The couple divorced in 1965 after Alfred had an affair with Italian film star Gina Lollobrigida. At this time, Sunny’s net worth was over $75 million. At a dinner party, Sunny met a man named Claus von Bülow who she was very intrigued by, and they married on June 6th, 1966.
Claus was born Claus Cecil Barber in Copenhagen, Denmark, on August 11th, 1926. He was sent to Britain to live with his mother during World War I, where he took his maternal family's name, Bülow, and later added “von.” After World War II, Claus’ father, Svend Borberg, was accused of being a Nazi collaborator and sentenced to four years in prison, but he was released on appeal after just 18 months. After graduating from Trinity College in Cambridge, he was hired as an administrative assistant to controversial oil tycoon J. Paul Getty and he remained close with the family.
Claus and Sunny spent their time at their 12-room luxury apartment on 5th Avenue in New York City as well as their 10-acre estate in Newport, Rhode Island. A year after the couple was married, Sunny gave birth to their daughter, Cosima von Bülow.
By 1979, there had been a lot of stressors and tensions in their marriage, and both Sunny and Claus spoke openly about getting a divorce.
On December 26th, 1979, the family had come together to celebrate Christmas in their Newport, Rhode Island mansion. Sunny was found unresponsive and was quickly rushed to the hospital. She had slipped into a coma but was able to be brought back and revived, and after multiple days of testing and scans, doctors determined that the cause of her episode and subsequent coma was because of low blood sugar. They diagnosed her with hypoglycemia and sent her home with instructions on not going too long without eating and to not overindulge on sweets.
Sunny had another hospital stay in April of 1980 after she had appeared incoherent and disoriented, which doctors said was related to reactive hypoglycemia. She was sent home on a strict diet that required her to limit her sugar intake and avoid alcohol.
On the evening of December 21st, 1980, while celebrating Christmas with her family at their mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, Sunny appeared confused, had a noticeable lack of muscle coordination and her speech was slurred. Her son Alex helped her into bed for the night. The next morning, she was found on the bathroom floor unconscious. Sunny was rushed to the hospital, but doctors determined that she had such severe brain damage that it was likely she would remain in a persistent vegetative state. Her symptoms initially presented as a drug overdose, but blood work showed that it was related to hypoglycemia.
Sunny’s two oldest children became suspicious that her brain injury was the result of foul play at the hands of Claus, and they hired Richard H. Kuh, the former New York County District Attorney, to investigate the possibility that Claus had attempted to murder their mother. Rhode Island prosecutors presented the case to a grand jury, and in July of 1981, Claus was charged with two counts of attempted murder. The trial began in February of 1982, and this was the first trial to be fully televised.
Maria Schrallhammer, Sunny’s maid at the Newport mansion, personal trainers, and multiple doctors on Sunny’s care team were all part of those who testified in court. Prosecutors brought forth a black bag that had been found in the mansion with drugs and a used syringe that contained traces of insulin. Maria testified that Claus had refused to let her call for help when she first saw that Sunny was unresponsive during the incident in 1979. She said she heard Sunny moaning behind a locked door and that Claus refused to call a doctor because he kept insisting that Sunny was just sleeping, and finally called for help after hours of Maria begging. Maria also said that she was the one who found the syringes full of drugs in the black bag, and that she also found yellow paste and white powder in a closet in Claus’ study. It was found that the paste was a form of Valium and the powder was Seconal, which was also called secobarbital and was used to treat insomnia. Maria also said that on another occasion when looking inside the bag, she found a bottle labeled “insulin.”
Prosecution claimed that Claus would gain $21 million from his wife’s will once she died, and that when she died he would then be free to marry his mistress, an actress named Alexandra Motlke Isles. They had been having an affair since 1978, but Alexandra testified against Claus at the trial, telling the jury that she had been pressuring Claus to leave Sunny. It was also brought into testimony that a divorce would have completely voided the $14 million that Claus would have inherited under Sunny’s will and left him with an annual income of $120,000 from a trust that she had established before their marriage. Claus admitted that divorce had been discussed, both in private and rather publicly, but he said the issue had not been the affair because Sunny didn’t mind as long as he was being discreet.
While Sunny struggled with alcohol use and likely abused medications for sleeping and diet, Harvard endocrinologist George Cahill testified that he was convinced that her brain damage was the result of injected insulin as opposed to a drug overdose.
Based largely on the evidence of the black bag and needle with insulin as well as circumstantial evidence through witness testimony, Claus von Bülow was convicted for the attempted murder of his wife. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison, 10 for the incident in 1979 when Sunny was able to be revived and 20 for the 1980 incident. Claus maintained his innocence and was freed on $1 million bail after his sentencing.
Claus appealed the conviction and hired Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who was assisted by Harvard Law student Jim Cramer.
At this second trial in Providence, Rhode Island in April of 1985, Alan Dershowitz and his other attorneys produced evidence of Sunny von Bülow's excessive drug use, and had more than ten of her friends testify about her drug use. One of her friends, Truman Capote, had stated “Sunny was an expert at injections.” There were parts of witness testimony that had to be excluded as hypothetical or hearsay, but other expert witness testimony called into question whether it was truly accurate that the syringe found in the black bag actually contained insulin.
The defense also called in nine medical experts, all world-renowned university professors, who testified that the two comas were not caused by insulin, but by a combination of ingested (not injected) drugs and alcohol on top of Sunny’s chronic health conditions. Other experts testified that the hypodermic needle tainted with insulin on the outside but not the inside would have been dipped in insulin but not injected, as injecting it in flesh would have wiped it clean. Evidence also showed that Sunny’s hospital admission three weeks before she slipped into a coma on December 22nd showed that she had ingested at least 73 and up to 100 aspirin tablets. This called into question her state of mind at the time as this dose could have only been self-inflicted.
Harvard endocrinologist George Cahill, who testified at the first trial, recanted his testimony and said that he felt that insulin was the most reasonable explanation for Sunny’s coma, but stated that “neither he nor anyone else could ever be 100 percent certain of the cause of the comas." Claus was acquitted on June 10th, 1985.
Sunny's family remained convinced that Claus had tried to murder her, but Cosima, Claus and Sunny’s daughter, had remained by Claus’ side and advocated for his innocence. In 1981, Sunny's mother, Annie-Laurie Aitken, disinherited Cosima and denied her her share of the estate when her second husband passed away, which occurred three years later on May 4th, 1984. In July of 1985, just weeks after Claus von Bülow was acquitted at his second trial, Ala and Alexander filed a $56 million civil lawsuit against him on Sunny’s behalf. Ala stated “We know and he knows that he tried to murder our mother.”
This case was settled out of court on December 24th, 1987, when Claus agreed to divorce Sunny and give up all claims to her fortune, which was estimated between $25 million and $40 million. He also agreed to leave the country and move back to London, and he forfeited the right to speak publicly about the case or profit from it in exchange for Cosima being reinstated into the will.
After the trials, Ala and Alexander founded the Sunny von Bülow National Victim Advocacy Center in Fort Worth, Texas, now the National Center for Victims of Crime in Washington, D.C., and the Sunny von Bülow Coma and Head Trauma Research Foundation in New York.
Sunny remained in a persistent vegetative state for almost 28 years until she died at the age of 76 from a heart attack on December 6th, 2008, at Mary Manning Walsh Nursing Home in New York City. Her memorial service, given by her three children, was held on January 14th, 2009, at the Brick Presbyterian Church in New York.
Claus himself passed away in London at the age of 92 on May 31st, 2019. He kept his word and never spoke of Sunny or did interviews about the case, and he only spoke of her publicly once when he gave a brief statement after her death.
Image sources:
bostonherald.com - “Martha Crawford von Bulow, famed heiress, dies at 76”