VON BULOW, CLAUS 1926-

MAN ACCUSED OF MURDER

A Privileged Life

Claus von Bulow began life as Claus Cecil Borberg in Copenhagen, Denmark. His father was a playwright, and his mother was a descendant of a prominent and wealthy German family, the von Bulows. His parents were divorced when he was four, and Claus was raised by his mother. Claus, who took his mother's name as his surname, entered Cambridge University at the age of sixteen and graduated after World War II with a degree in law. Von Bulow apprenticed with British barrister (an English attorney) Quintin Hogg. He later worked for billionaire J. Paul Getty, rising to become one of Getty's chief assistants. In 1966 he married Sunny von Auersperg after her divorce from Prince Alfred Eduard Friedrich Vincenz Martin Maria von Auersperg. In 1967 they had a daughter, Cosima, who was their only child. This idyllic existence continued until after Cosima's birth, when Sunny apparently became no longer interested in sex. As a result, von Bulow sought affection elsewhere. In 1978 he began an affair with a soap-opera actress named Alexandra Isles who insisted in mid 1979 that he divorce his wife and marry her. The events that followed led to what at the time was known as the trial of the decade.

The Comas

Sunny von Bulow nearly died on 27 December 1979. Her husband's actions during the time that Sunny was unconcious and apparently in a coma made Sunny's maid and loyal friend, Maria Schrallhammer, suspicious. When Maria could not wake Sunny, normally a light sleeper, Claus shrugged it off as a case of his wife imbibing too much alcohol the night before. Claus initially refused to call a doctor or Sunny's mother as the maid requested. Later that day, Maria saw Claus rushing to the telephone to call the doctor, who got to the house just in time to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation and save Sunny's life. During 1980 Sunny had several more episodes of illness that the maid found to be suspicious, but none turned out to be serious. Sunny was eventually diagnosed as suffering from severe reactive hypoglycemia, a condition that causes low blood sugar after eating sugary substances. During this period the maid also stumbled across a mysterious black bag that contained insulin, Valium paste, and a powder that turned out to be secobarbital, a barbiturate. Just before Christmas 1980, the von Bulows traveled to the family home, but Claus instructed the maid to stay in New York because she might get tired and catch the flu. The maid once again saw the black bag but said nothing of her suspicions that Claus was poisoning Sunny. After arriving at the estate and having something to eat, Sunny appeared to be weak and was assisted into bed by her son from her first marriage, Alex. The next morning Sunny was found on the floor in the bathroom and an ambulance was called. A few minutes after arriving at the hospital she went into cardiac arrest and needed to be revived. She never awoke from the coma. Tests at the hospital showed that Sunny had an extremely high concentration of insulin in her blood. Her children by her first marriage, Alex and Ala, now suspected Claus of having attempted to kill their mother in order to inherit her fortune and be free to see other women. They obtained the black bag, which contained an insulinencrusted needle, and went to the authorities.

Trials and Tribulations

On 6 July 1981 von Bulow was indicted by a grand jury and charged with two counts of assault with intent to commit murder for the two times his wife had lapsed into a coma. On 16 March 1982 a jury found him guilty of both counts, mainly because of the testimony of the maid as well as the doctor who almost literally wrote the book on blood sugar and insulin's effect on it. On 7 May 1982 he was sentenced to thirty years in prison but posted a __BODY__ million bail, pending an appeal. After the defense, led by well-known attorney and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, and the prosecution each filed their one-hundred-page briefs, the state supreme court reversed the convictions based upon new or undisclosed evidence that might tend to show von Bulow's innocence. The court also declared that the police should have obtained a search warrant prior to sending pills from the black bag to the state police lab for testing. On 5 January 1985 the state of Rhode Island announced that it would try von Bulow once again. His second trial began on 25 April 1985 and lasted until 10 June. Based in large part upon new evidence that the insulin found on the needle could not have been residue from an injection (the human skin acts as a swab and wipes a needle clean as it is withdrawn from the body) and evidence that a bottle of insulin was not initially found in the black bag as the first jury had been told, von Bulow was acquitted on both counts of attempted murder.