Claus von Bülow: The FULL MK Confidential Series

28:19lieutenant detective jack reese of the rhode island state police and his partner are staking out klaus von bulow they are set up outside the von bulow's place in manhattan when klaus finally comes up on the sidewalk outside the couple's fifth avenue apartment the detective quickly confronts him, questioning him, with no warning and no lawyers around. I didn't want an interview where he had an opportunity to think over what he would say to us. So I thought that the best way to do that was to take him by surprise. He was obviously very nervous. Near the end, the detective slips in one more question, almost an afterthought.

29:00Whether Sonny would ever have had a reason to use insulin. Years later, Jack Reese describes the exchange to journalist Bill Curtis. You know, he asked a kind of ridiculous question. And I said, you don't suppose that your wife were using insulin for any reason? And he said, by God, that's the last thing she would need. That clinched it for the detective. I said to my partner, mark my words, he's going back for that black bag. Within three days, Detective Reese's prediction comes true. Klaus von Bülow drives back up to Newport, Rhode Island to Clarendon Court, the shuttered oceanfront mansion where Sonny collapsed.

29:41The state police follow Klaus, this time with a warrant. Reese rings the bell for a second interview. And while two detectives keep Klaus talking in one room, other cops go through the house. During the search, officers make several observations. On the desk in Klaus's study, one of them notices a scratch pad. Two words are written on it, black box. Then officers come upon Klaus's closet, standing open and unlocked. Inside it, police find a small black metal box, the one Maria had described, the box that held the little black bag. Sometime during the police interview, Klaus excuses himself for a few minutes.

30:24When the detectives look again, the closet has been relocked and the scratch pad is gone. But the bag is not in that box. It has not been for weeks. Sonny's grown son from her first marriage, Alexander, and a locksmith have already carried it out. And by now it is in an evidence room in Providence. Whatever Klaus went upstairs to do, he came back down without it. the way he surmised that he hadn't found the black bag and and he was probably a little concerned that he may have misplaced him the detectives never saw klaus open that closet and they never saw him reach for the bag what they had was a relocked door a now missing notepad and a man who had driven 90 miles to a closed up house in january it is not proof but it's enough for detective Jack Reese.

31:18A year before, all the family had was a maid's bad feeling about a case full of pills. Now the state of Rhode Island has the bag, the needle inside it, and a suspect. I'm Megan Kelly. This is MK Confidential. In July of 1981, a Rhode Island grand jury indicts Klaus von Bülow on two counts of assault with intent to murder, one count for each of the two comas. A week later, he surrenders for arraignment, pleads not guilty, and is released on$100 ,000 bail. When Klaus is arraigned, he gives the only answer he will give in the entire case. You are charged with two counts. Count one, assault with intent to commit murder.

32:06Count two, assault with intent to murder. How do you plead? I'm not guilty. The trial opens in Newport in February of 1982. The state has to prove two separate crimes a year apart. The Christmas Sonny nearly died in 1979 and the Christmas she did not wake up in 1980. Still ready to proceed? Yes, Your Honor. The state is ready to proceed. Been ready to proceed? Yes, we are, Your Honor. Rhode Island has just let television cameras into its courtrooms. So the trial of Klaus von Bülow becomes something the country has never quite seen. A crime story the whole nation can watch, nearly gavel to gavel, like a soap opera.

32:48A maid, a mistress, a fortune, a needle, and an aristocratic, silent defendant the state calls an attempted murderer. Downtown Newport becomes, in the words of one man, who was there, a madhouse. The old colonial statehouse beside the courthouse is turned into a press center. Sketch artists and reporters fight for one of the 80 seats inside. The jury that files in is not made up of Newport's summer people. It is drawn from the year-round town, working Rhode Islanders, mostly Catholic. It's the kind of jury Klaus's own side privately doubts can ever be a jury of his peers. And at the center of it, ramrod straight and immaculate, sits Klaus van Bulo, giving the reporters almost nothing, except now and then a dry line about the spectacle he has become.

33:43It simply is the first time I'd ever been exposed to the media. It was new to me, and I think I belong to the kind of people who like to be in the newspaper the day they are born, the day they get married, and the day they die. I suddenly realized that this was a futile wish. For weeks, The Trial is the best show in the country. The networks carry it. On CNN, more than 300 ,000 viewers routinely tune in. A lot for that time. when actress Alexandra Isles of the hit TV show Dark Shadows takes the stand, the audience climbs past 600 ,000. Newspaper artists sketch Klaus in his dark, well-cut suits, and strangers gather on the courthouse steps, some of them wearing buttons that read, Free Klaus, others just as sure he is exactly what the state says he is, an attempted murderer.

34:37The town of Newport itself cannot agree. The old families, who summer behind the same hedges, are split down the middle over whether the man is a wronged husband or a fortune hunter who finally reached too far, and they say so, at their dinner tables and to any reporter who will write it down. Klaus has pleaded not guilty. He makes one more choice that will shape the whole trial. He will never take the stand. Across the whole trial, the jury, the 12 people deciding his fate, will not hear a single word from the accused. Inside the family, the sides are already fixed. Sonny's two older children brought the case, Ala and Alexander.

35:21The only person in the family standing with Klaus is Kosima, the daughter he and Sonny had together, still just a teenager. There was never a time where I doubted it. And we would always talk openly about what was going on. And just seeing him go through the anguish of it all and seeing him with the lawyers saying, you can investigate anything, I really don't have anything to hide, was enough for me to believe it. Klaus sits through it all with a stillness that unsettles the people around him. He is unfailingly courteous to the reporters in the hallway. Dominic Dunn covers the trial for Vanity Fair magazine, whose readers cannot get enough.

36:06He describes a defendant who seems less like a man fighting for his life than a man watching with mild interest a drama about someone else. The prosecutor is Stephen Famiglietti. And in his opening, he tells the jury exactly what the state means to prove.

36:37It is a large promise, and Famiglietti knows the case is harder than it sounds. No eyewitnesses, no confession, a woman in a coma who cannot testify, and weeks of medical testimony ahead of him. I thought it was an extremely difficult case, and primarily because it was a circumstantial evidence case, meaning that there were no eyewitnesses to the alleged criminal conduct, and there was so much medical testimony. The tougher job for the state is the first coma, the one from which Sonny recovered. To make it a crime and not just a bad night, Famiglietti has to convince the jury that this was a first attempt, a rehearsal for the next Christmas when it worked.

37:24The state's first witness is Sonny's own son, Alexander, who gives the jury the story of the marriage from the inside. My stepfather said that after my younger sister was born, my mother was unable to have sex and that he looked towards other women. Did he mention any other woman, one woman in particular? Alexandra Isles. His sister, Allah, takes the stand and tells the jury why her mother had begun talking about a divorce. She felt he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, that he was blaming her for the fact that he'd been having no success in his professional life. Then comes Maria Schralhammer, son he's made of 23 years.

38:12Maria has never once sat in a witness box. And when she climbs into one now in a Newport courtroom in front of the television cameras and a nation leaning in, she is going to do the one thing no detective and no doctor in this case can do. She is going to look 12 jurors in the eye and tell them plainly what she saw inside that house. She describes the black bag, the vials, and the small bottle of insulin she says she found among the belongings of a woman who had low blood sugar, which can be caused by too much insulin and thus had no use for any more of it. Maria is a small, plain-spoken woman with a heavy German accent, and by common agreement she is the most important witness the state has.

39:03She does not raise her voice. She just tells the jury what she saw. The defense cross-examines her over parts of two days and does not move her a single inch. Then the doctors. Sonny's own physician of nearly three decades, Dr. Richard Stock, tells the jury what he believed had been done to her. It was the surreptitious administration of insulin. One of the country's foremost authorities on insulin, Dr. George Cahill of Harvard, testifies that the second coma bears the mark of an injection, one that no illness in Sonny's own body could produce. The state puts the physical evidence beside him, the used needle from the black bag, which the family's own doctor has found carried insulin at its tip.

39:52And it puts a number in front of the jury. A blood test drawn the morning Sonny was admitted, showing an insulin level of 216, many times higher than normal, next to a blood sugar that had crashed toward nothing. Then the family's banker, Morris Gurley, the trust officer who ran Sonny's fortune, gives the jury the arithmetic. If Sonny dies, Klaus stands to inherit about$14 million. If they divorce, the prenuptial agreement leaves him with almost nothing. Sonny alive and divorced from Klaus is worth next to nothing to him. Sonny dead is worth a fortune. The black bag itself is entered into evidence.

40:38It's a small pharmacy laid out on a table for the jury to look at, the vials, the syringes, and the used needle the state calls the attempted murder weapon. The medical case runs on for weeks. Doctors for the state and doctors for the defense take the jury down into blood sugar readings and insulin levels and the exact chemistry of a body shutting down, each side certain of the opposite conclusion. It is slow, technical, and fiercely disputed. What the jurors can weigh more plainly is the maid, the money, and the black bag on the table in front of them. Then the state calls the other woman. Alexandra Isles, the mistress, takes the stand, and the prosecutor asks her in front of the cameras whether she still thinks the charges against the man she loved are nonsense.

41:31You still think a speck of nonsense? Don't know. I didn't hear that answer. I don't know. Let me ask you this long last question, Mrs. Isles. Maybe you can answer. Do you still love the defender?

41:48I don't know. The defense is offered the chance to cross-examine her and turns it down. Klaus's lead lawyer, Harold Price Farringer, tells the court he will not put Mrs. Isles through any more questioning, The line going around the courthouse is that a gentleman does not permit the cross-examination of his lover. She steps down. The defense's case is that there was no crime here at all. That Sonny, with her drinking, her aspirin, her sedatives, and her failing blood sugar, had done this to herself. What happened to her was not anyone's fault but her own. And that sad fact will emerge in this case if the truth is to prevail.

42:31To account for the insulin, the defense calls a former exercise instructor named Joy O 'Neill, who testifies that Sunny once told her years earlier that she injected insulin herself to keep her weight down. It is the innocent account the defense has been looking for. Then the prosecution produces the exercise studio's own appointment cards. They show O 'Neill had given Sunny a handful of sessions only, not the hundreds she had just described under oath. Beyond O 'Neill, the defense is thin. Klaus doesn't testify. His lawyers spend most of their case picking at the state's witnesses rather than putting up their own defense and pressing the single argument they have, that a secretive, self-medicating woman who drank and swallowed aspirin by the fistful was the only person who ever did Sonny von Bülow any harm.

43:27In his closing, defense attorney Faringer goes after the way the black bag was found, a private search run by a family that already believed Klaus guilty, with no police in the room and no fingerprints ever lifted. Had fingerprints been taken off of that bag? off of those vials, off of those needles, and Martha von Beulow's fingerprints were on those vials and on those needles, wouldn't that be important to you? It's a fair question, and it is the one the defense will build an entire second trial around. But in this courtroom, the prosecutor answers it and gets the last word. Why would they call a halachsman bringing in the abeclaren in court with them, knowing that that was their intention, that they were going to plant something like a flatbed.

44:20In his summation, Famiglietti reduces the case to one question. Not a menu of innocent explanations, he tells the jurors. One thing, true or false. Did Klaus von Bülow try to murder his wife? The jury goes out. One day passes. Then a second. Outside the courthouse, the two camps sit. Sonny's grown children wait on one side, while Klaus's loyalists and the reporters who have covered every hour of the trial on the other. No one can read the silence coming out of the jury room. A third day. A fourth. The longer it runs, the more the whispers start. That the jury is divided. That the case could end in a hung jury.

45:05That after everything, the state may not have convinced all 12 jurors. A fifth day comes and goes. Then, on the sixth day, a verdict. The courtroom fills fast. Klaus in his usual chair, his daughter Cosima not far away, the camera's running. It is the morning of March 16, 1982. The jury finds that the defendant, Klaus van Buur, guilty. Guilty on both counts. There are audible gasps in the courtroom. Klaus does not move. The cameras catch only a flicker across his face, a small twitch, there and gone. Weeks later, a judge will sentence him to 30 years, 10 for the 1979 coma and 20 for 1980, and lets him stay free on a million-dollar bail while he appeals.

45:59Outside the courthouse, Sonny's children say what they have believed from the start. We feel very strongly that he tried twice to murder our mother. We believe that he deprived her of life as we know it, deprived her of many years of happiness. And that is the story. A cash-poor Danish aristocrat marries a wealthy heiress, lives lavishly on her fortune, falls in love with another woman, and stands to inherit$14 million if his wife dies. Twice at Christmas in the same house, the state says he tried to collect. A maid noticed the bottle that did not belong. The woman's children refused to let it go.

46:43And 12 ordinary people from Rhode Island looked past the title and the accent and convicted him. The system worked. A rich man tried to murder his wife, and he was caught. Case closed. Except it isn't. Because the case does not end here. Not by a long shot. Everything the first jury believed, the maid's memory, the needle, the blood test, the$14 million, is about to be examined again. Only this time by a Harvard law professor and 18 of his best and brightest students. And they are going to find questions no one in that first courtroom even thought to ask. Just over two weeks after the guilty verdict, before Klaus has even been sentenced, the phone rings in the professor's office on April Fool's Day.

47:37The man on the line says he has just been convicted of trying to murder his wife, and he wants the professor to take his case. The professor is certain it is a prank. He almost hangs up the phone. But then? That's next time on MK Confidential. where we speak to the professor directly.

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48:39Save up to$800 on Serta Perfect Sleeper X mattresses and adjustable base sets with a Q4 support system that helps relieve aches and back pain. Visit Serta.com to find a retailer near you. It is April 1st, 1982. April Fool's Day. The phone rings in the office of a Harvard law professor. On the other end is a man the entire country has just watched get convicted of attempted murder, asking the professor to take his case. The Harvard man thinks it's a prank, very nearly hangs up, but he doesn't. Over the next three years, that professor and 18 law students will take the most famous conviction in America and turn it completely inside out.

49:24The professor's name is Alan Dershowitz, a kid from Brooklyn, a graduate of Yale Law with a reputation as the top lawyer of last resort and a friend of mine. So rather than tell you what happened with Alan Dershowitz and his students, we decided to ask him directly. Coming up, Alan breaks it down in his own words. The notes, the needle, the science, and any doubt he still carries. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.

49:58A quick word about this episode. Most of what you're going to hear is a conversation. Yours truly, and Alan Dershowitz, the man who engineered one of the most stunning reversals in American legal history. You will also hear a few moments from the 1990 Oscar-winning film made based on Alan's book, Reversal of Fortune, starring Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close. So let's start at the beginning with your relationship with Klaus. He called you for the first time on April Fool's Day. You did not believe it was actually Klaus von Bülow. So what actually made you take Klaus von Bulo's case. Well, first of all, my son, I thought was him who called me.

50:42My son, Elon, always was calling me, pretending to be famous people. He called me pretending to be Michael Jackson. I believed him. And so I thought he was class from Bulo. But then when he told me, everybody thinks I'm guilty, I said, that's my kind of case. I'm going to do it. And everybody said, there's no way you would win the appeal. There's no way you'd win a retrial. So it was a challenge and I love challenges. And this was not, to him, an ordinary appeal. So what was at stake for Klaus? Allen spoke to that. He said, Allen, this is a capital case. I said, but you haven't been sentenced to death.

51:18You've been sentenced to 30 years. He said, Allen, I'm not going into prison. I'm going to do what a gentleman does. If you don't reverse my conviction, I'm not going to prison. He was going to kill himself. And so we did regard the case as a capital case because I know he meant it. Allen has said that he would never even have been allowed into Newport, into Clarendon Court, with all its glitz and glamour. But Klaus is the ultimate insider. The accent, the title, the Fifth Avenue apartment. So why does Klaus von Bülow call a kid from Brooklyn to help him? He was the man who recommended me to be his lawyer.

51:57I didn't know Klaus von Bülow, and he didn't know me. But he sought a recommendation from a former Supreme Court justice of the United States, who was then retired. And the justice said, I can't do it. I'm retired. But Dershowitz is a really good appellate lawyer. Hire him. And so actually the justice took notes on the side of the briefs. And I used some of his notes in my argument. it. There's a famous scene in Reversal of Fortune where your character says to him something like, you're very odd, Klaus. And Jeremy Irons playing Klaus responds, you have no idea. No idea. Was he odd? He was odd, but my son Elon wrote that line.

52:44You're a very strange man. You have no idea. I had told my son Elon was one of the producers of the movie, and of course he knew me very well. And I told him about my actual encounter with Klaus and that I said to him, you know, Klaus, I don't understand you. You're I just we are totally different. You seem so so weird and strange. And he said back, yeah, but you don't really have any idea about how strange I am. And then Elon wrote it into you have no idea. And they use that in The Lion King as well. And it became kind of a famous line in motion picture. but it was a very important line in the movie.

53:27So you, like everybody else, when you'd been looking at it from the outside, thought for sure this guy is guilty. Oh, of course. Then you get on the inside, and did you change your mind about his almost certain guilt? Yeah, I changed it first from almost certain guilt to I'm not sure, to finally there was no crime there. There was just no crime. She did it to herself. We found all the evidence that she was self-destructive and she was drinking and eating things she wasn't supposed to drink and eat. And then we were able to prove scientifically that there was never any insulin and the government's entire theory collapsed.

54:08And at that point, I was fairly confident that we'd win the appeal. So you decide to assemble a dream team of lawyers and lawyers in training from Harvard Law School, where you have been a professor at that point for years and ultimately for 50 years. It was it was a dream team. Right. Am I right that some of the people helping you have household names today? Oh, yeah. You know, it was a real dream team, unlike the OJ case, which was a nightmare team. Everybody fought with each other in the OJ case because they were trying to become the one who got credit for the result. In the von Bülow case, we all worked together very, very nicely.

54:49I worked with Susan Estridge. I worked with some other professors. And then, of course, I assembled a group of great students, not only from the law school, but from the medical school as well, because this was very much a scientific case, a medical case. I had been teaching for years the issue of law and science, how students, if they want to become really great criminal lawyers, have to really immerse themselves in science and technology and medicine. And this was the perfect case to illustrate that. All right. So you've got your dream team assembled. What was the room actually like? Because you broke them out into teams.

55:22Well, I had a very large Harvard house back in the day with a basketball court in the backyard. and a big yard and about, I don't know, 10 rooms. And I would divide the team into rooms. This was the insulin room. This was the room for search and seizure. This was the case where they found the case. So everybody was divided into a team. And I was kind of the general. And I would go from room to room asking them about their progress. But the principle Dershowitz says pulled him in was bigger than one wealthy man's freedom. In his telling years ago, it was about how this case had been built in the first place.

56:04Here's Alan talking with journalist Bill Curtis in 1997. They had paid for private prosecutors and private investigators and had circumvented the strictures of the Constitution, had done things that private people could do, but that public police and prosecutors could never do, withheld evidence, possibly planted evidence. and it sounded intriguing to me. But there is an obvious contradiction. Dershowitz says a wealthy family had effectively built a private prosecution. Klaus von Bülow was also wealthy and now buying the best defense money could buy. Harvard students, expert witnesses and one of the country's top appellate lawyers.

56:47Dershowitz said years ago, that's not a defense of the system. It is an indictment of it. If Klaus von Bülow had been a poor butler, charged with putting his wife into two comas, he would be in jail today. There is no question in my mind that it took a lot of money paid to scientific experts, particularly, to be able to get justice in this case. This is a terrible commentary on the American system of justice. You knew early on that this case could turn on the notes of a man named Richard Q. Right. Who is Richard Q? And why were you so sure that his notes were going to be so important? Because I knew Dick Q.

57:30He was a friend of mine. I actually supported him when he ran for district attorney against Bob Morgan, who ultimately became a close friend of mine years later. But at the time, I supported Richard Q. I liked him and I knew he was a good lawyer. So I knew he was going to take very, very careful notes of what was said to him by the children and by others. And And I had a strong suspicion that these notes would show that there was no insulin. He didn't want to turn those notes over to you. So as a lawyer, did your spidey sense go up as soon as he refused? Of course. I mean, if there was nothing in the notes, he would have, of course, turned them over.

58:08And once he said, I'm not turning over those notes, they're lawyer-client privilege. They weren't lawyer-client privilege. And we were entitled to those notes. And under the Sixth Amendment, we're entitled to all exculpatory evidence. And the court so ruled when we got the notes, we said, Eureka, you know, we now have we now have the proof we needed. And so, you know, it was a combination of using law and using science together. And, you know, one reason why I was a successful teacher is because I brought the courtroom into the classroom. And one reason I was a successful litigator is I brought the classroom into the courtroom.

58:47And the von Bülow case was a perfect example of both. I taught the case in class. I got student input from brilliant, brilliant Harvard students who gave me advice about how to handle it and do things. And I take the advice of students and we were able to use the classroom and bring it into the courtroom. but q had told you that there wasn't a scrap of paper in his possession that was exculpatory so he didn't have to turn these notes over then finally he was ordered to turn them over to you and did your jaw drop when you read them explain what was so explosive about what was in those notes well the notes proved that there was no insulin and that there never was insulin how Well, they had descriptions of what was found every time the maid looked into the little case.

59:36And there was no mention of anything even resembling insulin. Now, you know, I can't really blame Dick Q. I think he honestly believed because he believed that Bob Mueller was guilty. He honestly believed that it wasn't exculpatory. But to a defense attorney, I am. And by the way, Dick Q was at that point in his life, too. He had been a prosecutor. he would realize that even if you don't think it's exculpatory, you can use it in a way that raises doubts. Remember, criminal defense lawyers don't have to prove anybody's innocence. All they have to do is raise a reasonable doubt. So in other words, if the children had genuinely believed that they found insulin in this bag and that it was used by Klaus to inject Sunny, causing her coma, one would think they would have mentioned that in their sit down with Q.

1:00:24But that's not what happened. Of course, that's exactly what we discovered. And the Court of Appeals agreed with us. The Supreme Court of Rhode Island agreed with us and said, you know, turn over the material. I don't know whether at the time they told them to turn over the material. They knew how explosive the material was. But as soon as we saw it, we realized that this was, you know, our ticket. This was his get out of jail free card. Q has always said that proves nothing. Here he is. What things I put in my notes of the original interview really have nothing to do with it. If Alex and Ella had told me, as I'm sure they did, when preliminarily I interviewed them that this insulin was found, the fact that in my notes of the first interview with Marianne, there were several, I didn't put down.

1:01:13Maria says she saw insulin. No need to put it down. I'd already heard that. Allen has said that looking at the state's evidence, the blood, the needle, the bag, he too would have voted to convict. So we asked him to explain how he got from there to ultimately believing Klaus may have been innocent. He started with the needle, whose tip the prosecution said was encrusted with insulin. They had a needle, which they said had insulin on it. And we were able to show that if that needle had been injected into a human body, the body would act as a swab and the insulin would not be encrusted on the bottom, but it would be encrusted near the top.

1:01:56And we were able to prove that the insulin was at the very bottom, showing that that needle had never been injected into any human being, but that it had been dipped into insulin in order to create the impression that this was an insulin-coated needle that Klaus von Bülow had injected his wife with. The jury was very impressed with that demonstration. Alan, what was the 216 insulin reading? Do you remember that? It sent a man to prison. What was actually wrong with that number, 216 insulin? Well, there were three readings, and they suppressed the most exculpatory reading and just allowed the two readings, both of which were consistent with guilt.

1:02:34Once we were able to get at all the readings, we were able to show that they were inconsistent readings. Again, that doesn't prove his innocence. That just raises a reasonable doubt. And that's what we have to do. Of what the level of insulin was inside of Sonny von Buell. That's right. And remember, everybody has some level of almost every chemical. So it's always a matter of how much and a matter of degree. Dershowitz's team did not stop there. They tested the laboratory itself, sending in needles containing different substances to see whether the lab could reliably identify insulin. What we did is we sent them several needles.

1:03:13One had insulin, one had saline solution, one had barbiturates, one had combinations. And we wanted to see what the test results would be. And they came back. And many of them came back saying insulin when there was no insulin. So there were false positives. There was a second story about Sonny herself, the first jury, never really heard. Not Sonny the victim, but Sonny the patient. In the film that was based on Dershowitz's book, Reversal of Fortune, that other Sonny narrates the whole case from inside her coma. On December 27th, 1979, I lay in bed all day. Whether I was asleep or in a coma, later became a subject of dispute.

1:04:02Do you believe that she injected herself with insulin or that there was no insulin in Sonny at all? There was no insulin, but I have to tell you, Truman Capote told me that he gave her insulin and told her how to inject it as a kind of weight loss or something. I don't know. But I never knew whether to believe Truman Capote. He invited me to his home. He showed me a book he had given her. And he told me that he taught her how to self-inject. We know she injected herself with B12 vitamins, but he told me that she also injected herself with insulin. But we had no proof of that. We never found any evidence that there was ever any insulin beyond the normal that's found in her body.

1:04:47So what was the defense's theory about what actually put Sonny into a coma? We asked the professor. She was told she had reactive hypoglycemia and she shouldn't be drinking sweet drinks. And on Christmas Eve, she was having one after the other of these very, very sweet Christmas drinks. And we were convinced that she put herself into a coma. Remember, this was her second coma. She had one a year earlier and then they found her, even though she had been in a coma and told that she shouldn't smoke and she had oxygen around her. They found her smoking cigarettes right near the oxygen. She was self-destructed.

1:05:29She was an extraordinarily unhappy woman. And I don't blame her. If I were married to Klaus von Bülow, I'd be a very unhappy woman, too. He was a runaround, and he had mistresses and weird tastes. But she was very, very unhappy. He obviously married her for money, not for love. Not the first time that's ever happened. But he was not a good husband. And she was very depressed and very, perhaps even suicidal. We're not sure about that. Again, we don't have to prove anything. It's the government that has the burden of proving everything. There was also a very public front to this case. The trial was televised, and a reversal in a courtroom might not be enough to change the public's mind.

1:06:12Waging that media war was a glamorous, relentless, Hungarian-born force of nature named Andrea Reynolds. Reynolds worked the press like a switchboard. She phoned reporters who covered the trial in a way she didn't like, and when that failed, she went over their heads to their editors. While Dershowitz was in a library dismantling the evidence, Andrea Reynolds ran a whole other campaign out in the open. Not a lawyer, but a fixer and a general. Access, energy, total belief. A woman who refused to let a guilty verdict be the last word. Allen has accused the children of a, quote, benevolent frame-up, we asked him to explain.

1:06:53Absolutely believed that Klaus Rumpilu was guilty, but that he was too smart to be convicted. So they tampered with the evidence, and they allowed evidence to be submitted to the jury, which was not authentic, and we were able to disprove that scientifically. There is a catch, he concedes. You can frame a guilty man. A frame-up would not mean Klaus von Bülow was innocent, which is why the blunt question still has to be asked. But sitting here today, thinking back to your comment at the top of the interview, you don't believe that Klaus von Bülow committed this crime. I don't. Is it possible? It is.

1:07:38I don't believe it. The evidence points away from it. The evidence points very strongly to a self-inflicted coma. That's the balance of evidence. So even if this were a civil case, not a criminal case, I would say that you couldn't prove even civil liability by a preponderance of the evidence. The preponderance favors innocence. That doesn't mean he's innocent. That means the evidence isn't there to convict. I don't know whether he's guilty. And that's true of many of my clients. When all was said and done, there's a scene where you pull Klaus aside after you've gotten his convictions overturned.

1:08:17And you say... One thing, Klaus. Legally, this was an important victory. Morally, you're on your own. Did that happen? And if so, why did you say that to him? I did. Because he wanted me to go on television and proclaim my absolute certainty in his innocence, and I couldn't do that. I mean, there were many, many possible theories. One possible theory that a lot of people who knew them told me, it's just a possible theory, is that she went into a coma. He saw her and he could easily have called the ambulance and he didn't because he was perfectly happy to have her die. Now, that would be morally horrible, but legally not culpable.

1:09:02Now, I didn't know what happened. I almost never know what happens with my clients because the first thing you know as a criminal defense lawyers, they all lie to you all the time. You know, my first meeting with most of my defendants, the first meeting they say, oh, I didn't do anything. I'm perfectly innocent and I should win the Nobel Prize. Second meeting, they take the Nobel Prize off the table. I didn't do anything. Third meeting, well, I did a lot of bad things, but I didn't do this. The fourth meeting is I did this, but they can't prove it. So, you know, you have to know when you're dealing with these people and when you're a criminal defense lawyer you're dealing 90 percent with guilty people that's why the conviction rate is so high you know i've been very very lucky i've won like 30 of my 32 or three homicide homicide related cases um but most of these cases result in in convictions and in many of the cases in justifiable convictions and but the criminal defense lawyer has to do everything in their power, ethically and morally, to bring about a reversal or an acquittal of the best possible deal you can.

1:10:09And a lot of people don't understand that. And they think my job is to be his rabbi, his priest, his minister, his mother. No, I'm his defense lawyer. That's all I do. But the family has never wavered on their belief about Klaus's guilt. Here is Sonny's son from her first marriage, Alexander. Klaus von Bülow only succeeded in depriving our mother of meaningful life, and now he's gotten away with it. In 1983, Dershowitz stood in front of the Rhode Island Supreme Court in the first appellate argument that state ever put on live television and asked five justices to do the most unpopular thing they could, erase a conviction the public strongly supported.

1:10:52We argued it in front of the Supreme Court of Rhode Island, which was a very tough court. And people told me that we would never win in front of that court. Years after the trial, Dershowitz says he and his team realized the legal violation alone would not be enough to get a reversal. We had to persuade them there had really been a miscarriage of justice, not merely a violation of the Constitution. In April of 1984, the court gave its answer. Both counts reversed on two grounds. First, those Q notes. The family's lawyer could not hand pieces of his file to the state police and attorney general and then hide the rest from Klaus's defense team behind assertions of privilege.

1:11:41And second, the black bag. At the end of our previous episode, Sonny's son Alexander, Q, and a locksmith go to Clarendon Court. The locksmith opens Klaus's locked closet and inside is Klaus's black bag. They simply take it. The contents of that bag are then tested by the von Auerzberg's family doctor, and he finds insulin. The bag and its contents are then given by the family to the Rhode Island State Police. The state police send all the bag's contents to a lab for testing without getting a warrant. That gave the defense an opening. Dershowitz had built the whole appeal on state law, Rhode Island's own constitution, which put the reversal beyond the reach of the U.S.

1:12:29Supreme Court. The only question left was whether prosecutors would seek a retrial. Because a reversal is not an acquittal. It doesn't send you home for good. It sends you back to the starting line. Klaus von Bülow was not a free man in the spring of 1984. He was an unconvicted one. And the state of Rhode Island still believed he was a would-be murderer and still intended to try him again. Dershowitz says the greatest compliment he's received about this case actually came from the movie Reversal of Fortune, on which his own son was a producer. What I loved about the movie, which my son helped to produce, was when we went to see it a few times in the theater, people would walk out arguing with each other as to whether he did it or not.

1:13:17And that was the brilliance of the movie, I thought, that it didn't give you an absolute final resolution. It lets you decide what you think. So the case that ended restarts. The trial moves from Newport to Providence. Bambulo's defense changes hands. And a reversal, remember, is not the same as proving a man innocent. That distinction runs through this whole story. This time, though, the Dream Team will not just play defense. This time, they will try to prove there was never a crime at all. That's next time on MK Confidential.

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1:14:48It is the spring of 1985. In a hospital bed in New York, a woman named Sunny Von Bulow has been unconscious for more than four years, and she is never going to wake up. 90 miles away in Rhode Island, the man a jury once said put her in that coma is preparing to stand trial for a second time. Sunny's children speak as she cannot. She's serving a life sentence. She'll never open her eyes again or recognize anybody. She'll never talk to her children. She'll never see her grandchildren. Three years ago, a Rhode Island jury found Klaus von Bülow guilty of trying to murder his wife. A year ago, a higher court threw out that verdict.

1:15:32Klaus, now free on bail, his first conviction erased, wants one thing and says so to anyone with a camera. Here he talks to Kiro Eyewitness News. I admit to great fatigue and suffering during the last three years, and there are moments when I just wish it would go away. So there's a dichotomy, but I want to get exonerated. Exonerated is the word he keeps using. Not released on a technicality, but rather cleared by a jury out loud. Now Klaus is back where he started, facing the same two counts of attempted murder. but with a new direction for the defense, courtesy of the Dershowitz team, in a new courthouse in Providence with a jury that has never heard the case.

1:16:21If this jury convicts, the appeal that freed him will have bought him nothing, and he will likely spend the rest of his life in prison. This time, the defense will not just argue that the state cannot prove its case, but that there was never any crime at all. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential. For the retrial, Klaus von Bülow has a new lead lawyer, and he is nothing like the elegant defendant he represents. His name is Thomas Puccio. He made his reputation as a federal prosecutor who ran the FBI sting operation Abscam, in which agents posed as wealthy Arab businessmen to expose political corruption and put multiple congressmen in prison.

1:17:08He is not a society lawyer. He is blunt and combative, a street fighter. Puccio takes over the courtroom and Alan Dershowitz, who won the appeal, moves into the background. Puccio's plan is the opposite of the first trial, the one that had been about money, a mistress, and an oceanfront mansion. Puccio strips all of it away and tries the case as a single question of medicine. What actually put Sonny von Bülow into a coma? And as before, Klaus von Bülow will not take the stand. But moving into the background is not the same as stepping away. Years later, Dershowitz would describe just how much of the second trial ran on the work he and his students had already done.

1:17:59The whole retrial was based on our work. In fact, my two main research assistants from the law school, Joanne Crispy, and a guy from the medical school, they sat with the trial lawyer and fed him all the information. So I was very centrally involved in the trial. I spoke to the legal team every single day. And out of the courtroom, another figure is fighting for Klaus von Bülow and fighting the loudest. Her name is Andrea Reynolds. She's Hungarian-born and glamorous and still married to her television producer husband. Andrea has known Klaus and Sonny socially for years, but she and Klaus did not become lovers until after his first trial had ended.

1:18:46That timing matters. The mistress the state built its motive around at the first trial was a different woman, the actress Alexandra Isles. Reynolds entered the story only afterward, so the companion the cameras now catch at Klaus's side was never part of the love and money case Rhode Island prosecutors once put to a jury. Andrea Reynolds does not do subtle. She courts the reporters covering the case, dines with them, drives them around and calls their editors when the coverage displeases her. Barred from the courtroom, she watches the live feed from inside the CNN truck and slowly takes over the booth until the network finally asks her to leave.

1:19:28It is Reynolds who decides Klaus needs a warmer face for the retrial. At the cold, aristocratic figure the first jury saw was half the reason they convicted him. She runs the campaign to clear his name like a military operation. Andrea's own husband, watching all of it from the outside, offers the driest verdict of the whole affair. If Klaus has to marry Andrea, he will wish he had been convicted. On April 7th, Von Bulo, his daughter Cosima, and his girlfriend Andrea Reynolds arrived at the Biltmore Hotel. The next day, when Von Bulo showed up at the courthouse for the first day of jury selection, a small army of print and broadcast journalists from around the world surrounded him as he made his way into the building.

1:20:14It takes nine days just to seat a jury, eight women and four men, and Judge Corinne Grand orders them sequestered, kept together in a hotel, cut off from the outside for the length of the trial. Before a word of testimony, they are loaded onto a bus and driven to Newport, Rhode Island to walk through Clarendon Court itself, the oceanfront mansion where both comas happened. The press follows, filming the entire thing, rising above the grounds in bucket trucks while helicopters circle overhead. And Klaus, who has not set foot in the house in more than four years, steps onto the grounds, sees the dogs he used to walk, and for a moment, his composure breaks.

1:21:01He weeps briefly, then he collects himself and goes inside with the jury. To see what Puccio is up against, remember what convinced the first jury. The state's medical case rested on a simple, powerful chain. When Sonny was admitted for her comas, her blood sugar was dangerously low. And after her final coma, the lab reported an enormous amount of insulin in her blood. Low sugar, high insulin, which the state said could only mean insulin from outside her body, from a needle. To get there in the first trial, the prosecution had called Dr. George Cahill of Harvard, the man other doctors called the expert's expert on blood sugar.

1:21:49Cahill told the jury that only injected insulin could explain what the lab found. Doctor, do you have an opinion based upon your review of the records and based upon your experience in your training and based upon a reasonable degree of medical certainty as to whether or not the insulin was endogenous or exogenous? Like all the data that I've looked at, it would be exogenous. And when the defense suggested Sonny's barbiturates and drinking might have caused a coma on their own, Cahill did not give an inch. Asked whether barbiturates can cause a coma, he answered, they certainly can, but not with a blood sugar of 29, sir.

1:22:28It was clean. It was confident. And the first time around, it helped produce a sentence of 30 years in prison for Klaus von Bülow. Puccio's team goes after that chain one link at a time, starting with the image everyone carried out of the first trial, the small black bag from Vombulo's closet and the used needle inside. It looked like a murder weapon, but one of the young lawyers Dershowitz recruited, a Harvard law graduate named Joanne Crispy, says the bag was never really the heart of the case. Here she is with journalist Bill Curtis on American Justice. Well, a lot of people, you know, outside the case, think of the encrusted needles in the black bag, or the black bag itself as the smoking gun.

1:23:19The black bag was not the smoking gun in this case. The smoking gun in this case was the 216 insulin level in Sonny von Bühle's blood. 216. That's the number on which this entire case rests. An insulin reading so high, the state's doctors said it could only mean insulin from outside her body, from a needle. Hold on to that 216 number, though, because the defense will. When Dershowitz, Crispy, and the team pull the laboratory's own records, they find something the first jury never heard. The lab had run that same blood sample for insulin more than once and had gotten wildly different answers. One reading came back at 216.

1:24:06Another came back at zero. A third at 350. One sample tested again and again three vastly different results. To the defense, a number that cannot be reproduced is not evidence of anything and should never have gone to a jury as the truth. Then there is the needle itself. Its tip encrusted with insulin. The prosecution in trial one said that residue tied the weapon to the crime. The defense now says the residue tells the opposite story. Dershowitz would later illustrate the argument on television with a glass of soda. We did it with a turkey skewer and a glass of milk, but you can do it with anything.

1:24:51If you stick something in a liquid, like my finger in this glass of soda, and you just let it dry, you see the liquid goes to the very tip and is encrusted in that way. And that's the way the insulin was found on the needle in this case. If, on the other hand, what you were to do was to take a needle and inject it, the liquid would spread all throughout. A needle pushed through skin wipes clean as it goes in, the defense argues. A needle dipped in insulin and left dry collects it at the very tip. To the defense, the incrustation is not proof the needle was used on Sunny. It's a sign the needle was dipped, staged to look like a weapon.

1:25:39And the team goes one step further. They put the testing itself to the test. Labs are just people. And scientists are just people. And people make mistakes all the time. So we decided, first of all, to test the lab. What we did is we sent them several needles. One had insulin. One had saline solution. One had barbiturates. One had combinations. And we wanted to see what the test results would be. And they came back. And many of them came back saying insulin when there was no insulin. So there were false positives. Then the defense calls a witness who had testified for the prosecution the first time around.

1:26:22Dr. Janice Galitis, the Newport physician who saved Sunny's life during her first coma back in 1979. This time, Galitis tells the jury that in his own judgment, that first coma was not caused by insulin at all, but by Sonny's airway closing and her aspirating while unconscious. And the doctor testifies to something even more damaging, that before the first trial, he had given the prosecutors that very opinion and that they told him not to volunteer it on the stand. If even one of Sonny's two comas was not an insulin injection, the state's elegant chain begins to come apart. This second jury also never hears the prosecution's clearest motive.

1:27:10At the first trial, the state told a story of love and money. First and foremost, a mistress pressing Klaus to marry her. More on that in a minute. Klaus's other alleged motive? The roughly$14 million, equivalent to about$48 million today, He stood to inherit under Sonny's will versus what he would get if he divorced her. This time, Judge Grand bars the family's banker, Morris Gurley, from telling the jury about the money at all. Her ruling is narrow, and at the time, it is one of the most criticized decisions of the trial. Grand finds there is no foundation connecting financial gain to the specific acts the state alleges, that, in her words, there is not a suggestion anywhere that financial gain drove the defendant to do what the state says he did.

1:28:03To let a jury hear the$14 million anyway, she reasons, would invite them to convict on a motive rather than on evidence. And because Klaus again does not testify, the prosecution never gets another opportunity to introduce the inheritance evidence in rebuttal. The motive that anchored the whole first trial, the idea that Sonny's fortune gave Klaus a reason to want her dead, is a story this second jury simply never hears. And now the jury hears about the Q notes. In our last episode, Alan Dershowitz pried loose the interview notes that the family's own lawyer, the former Manhattan prosecutor Richard Q, had kept from the defense for years by claiming they were privileged.

1:28:50At this trial, those notes finally come out in open court. The defense argues that in the earliest interviews taken within days of Sonny's coma, the insulin that would become the center of this entire case went unmentioned. and that the account changed over time, hardening into the version eventually presented to the first jury. Q has always answered that omission means nothing, that he simply did not write down everything he was told. This jury gets to weigh both. To Dershowitz, the notes were the entire case. The notes proved that there was no insulin and that there never was insulin. And look, I don't...

1:29:35How? They had descriptions of what was found every time the maid looked into the little case, and there was no mention of anything even resembling insulin. The prosecution's other pillar was the mistress, Alexandra Isles, the soap opera actress the state had cast as Von Bulo's reason to kill in the first trial. She has fled the United States rather than face a second trial, purportedly to visit her mother in Ireland, telling a former lover of hers that she has no intention of returning to testify. For most of the second trial, Sonny's children remain remote figures, staying out of sight. But upon hearing this news, that their stepfather's former mistress is not coming back to testify, Alexander and Ala step forward in a blaze of publicity.

1:30:26At a New York news conference, they appeal for Alexandra Isles to return and testify, and they speak as they have all along for the mother who cannot speak for herself. Klaus von Hulow, as a defender, is entitled to a fair trial. But as a victim, so is our mother. Our mother has been deprived, in effect, of her life. Please don't let our mother be deprived of justice. Alexandra Isles realizes that her greatest star turn is upon her. She ends her months of European seclusion and returns to Rhode Island to take the stand against her former lover. Even when Alexandra was starring on the TV show Dark Shadows, she never made such a dramatic entrance.

1:31:13Demurely yet firmly, she takes the stand at the second trial and describes a 1980 phone call in which Klaus von Bülow confides in her that he stood by and watched as his wife slipped deep into a coma. He watched her, knowing that she was in a bad way all day, and watched her and watched her, and finally, when she was on the point of dying, he said that he couldn't go through with it, and he called and saved her life. It is testimony that cuts both ways. In the same account, Klaus watches his wife sink toward death and does nothing, and then at the last moment calls the help that saves Sonny's life.

1:32:00The prosecution hears a near confession. The defense hears the opposite. A man who could have a woman who tried to kill herself die and instead rescues her. But Puccio is not satisfied with turning Alexandra's account into a rescue. On cross-examination, he turns it back on her. Well, you're saying that you wrote a letter saying that you wanted a cocaine relationship. Can you ever have been in love? I doubt it, but you do some crazy things. Iles concedes that even after the first trial, she had written to Klaus asking to continue the relationship. That's Puccio's point. A woman who truly believed this man had tried to murder his wife would not have kept writing to him, wanting to be with him, asking him back.

1:32:50After weeks of experts and lab reports and blood chemistry, the lawyers sum up. Puccio zeroes in on the heart of the prosecution's case, the maid. He turns the jury back to Maria Schralhammer, Sonny's devoted maid of 23 years and the state's star witness in both trials. Puccio argues that if Maria had really seen what she later swore she saw, she would not have stayed quiet about it. If, in fact, she saw, as she says she did, a lot of it said insulin, needles, and syringes, bells would have gone off. Bells would have gone off, and the whole world would have known at that very moment. The prosecutor, Mark DeSisto, gives the jury the other picture, the one the state has believed from the start.

1:33:43He loads his needle and syringe with insulin. He goes to his wife and you see the intent. What's he thinking? And he finds a spot. And now he's pressing the plunger in. And what is he thinking? As that insulin is released into her body, what is he thinking? Can you see it? He's pressing the plunger down and the insulin is going in and it's releasing all the tension. He's going to be renalizing her knees. He doesn't have to find a jury. He can see it. The case goes to the jury, and the waiting begins. These 12 people have now been sequestered for roughly eight weeks, kept together in a Providence Holiday Inn, apart from husbands and wives and children, the entire time.

1:34:27By now, the trial has disrupted not only their lives, but the lives of the people waiting for them back at home. We've been married 36 years, and I don't think we've ever been separated in five days. So it's been a long while. On June 10th, 1985, after roughly eight weeks of testimony and four days of deliberation, the jury comes back into courtroom number eight in Providence, Rhode Island, and the clerk reads the two charges. That's the power on the charge. The defendant committed to the crime of assault and detention. How do you find guilty or not guilty? Not guilty.

1:35:08I actually count you on the charge of the defendant committee on December 21st, 19th, the crime of assault, and such a matter. How do you find guilty or not guilty? Not guilty.

1:35:23Not guilty on both counts. Andrea Reynolds, the woman who spent three years fighting to free him, begins to cry. Klaus von Bülow convicted three years earlier and sentenced to 30 years in prison, walks out of the courthouse a free man. That evening, Klaus sits down with Newswatch 10 for his first interview since the acquittal. When he is asked what he thinks actually happened to his wife, his answer is not triumphant. I don't know. I know that I'm totally convinced by the medical picture. I know I didn't do anything. An acquittal is not the same as innocence. A jury has found only that the state did not prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt.

1:36:12It has not found that no one harmed Sonny von Bülow, and it answers none of the questions at the center of this case. Dennis Roberts, the Rhode Island attorney general who prosecuted the first trial makes this distinction. It's important, I think, for our viewers to note that being found not guilty because there is a reasonable doubt is a long way from being found innocent. The trial judge, Corinne Grand, will say privately that in her view, it was not even a close case, that Klaus simply did not try to kill Sonny. Sonny's children see it the other way around. The day of the verdict, they step up to a bank of microphones.

1:36:54We are disappointed with the jury's verdict, but we know that this jury was not permitted to hear all of the evidence that was admitted at the first trial. At the start of the second trial, the jury had toured the darkened halls of Clarendon Court, walking the layout of the alleged crime scenes. While that jury is out deliberating, Sonny's children, Ala and Alexander, invite journalist Dominic Dunn, who had known Sonny since she was a debutante and has covered the whole affair, to spend the night at Clarendon Court. He finds Sonny's bedroom kept exactly as it was the night of the second coma. He finds the twin beds pushed together and made up with Sonny's porto sheets.

1:37:35An old photograph of Klaus looking almost noble in a silver frame on his side of the bed. And in a closet beside her evening gowns, the Christmas presents from 1980, still wrapped, the festive paper gone faded and limp. One from Sonny's oldest friend, one from her dead mother. On Klaus's bedside table, there is a handsome box. Dominic Dunn opens it. Inside are cartridge shells, and underneath the shells, a used syringe. Dunn thinks about that box for a long time afterward. Twelve strangers saw Clarendon Court for an afternoon as evidence. A reporter sees what it has truly become. The night of the verdict, Klaus von Bülow can go anywhere he likes.

1:38:30He's a free man, acquitted of the crime that made him famous. Ninety miles away, in a room on the tenth floor of a New York hospital, his wife Sunny lies exactly as she has since that second Christmas in 1980. Her hair washed and set twice a week, and she will stay that way for the next 23 years, like a doll, primped and perfectly coiffed, well-looked after, and all but dead, confined to a life of no mobility nor consciousness. She is the silent center of a case the jury just decided, without deciding anything about how she, in fact, got there. Next time, Sonny's children have one more arrow in their quiver, and Klaus von Bülow begins his next life an ocean away.

1:39:26I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.

1:39:48That's one daily GLP-1 pill for big results. Now on Rowe. Go to row.co slash listen to see if you qualify. Rx only. Go to row.co slash safety for serious... It's almost labor day, so fill the longer nights with perfect sleep night after night. Save up to$800 on Serta Perfect Sleeper X mattresses and adjustable base sets with a Q4 support system that helps relieve aches and back pain. Visit Serta.com to find a retailer near you. June 1985. On the 10th floor of the Harkness Pavilion inside Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, a woman lies in a private room she will never leave on her own.

1:40:32She's not on a respirator. She breathes without help. A tube feeds her through her nose. Private nurses watch her around the clock. And twice a week, someone washes and sets her hair. There are scented flowers on the table and music playing softly in the room. Her name is Martha Von Bulo. Everyone who loves her calls her Sunny. And she has not spoken a word since the winter of 1980. 90 miles away in Providence, a jury has just told the world that the man accused of putting her in that bed is not guilty. The Kloss von Bülow trial is finally over and he is not guilty. Von Bülow was tried twice in a soap opera setting for the attempted murder of his wealthy wife.

1:41:17The first jury found him guilty, but he won a new trial and this time he was cleared. How do you find guilty or not guilty? Not guilty. So ended the second trial of Klaus von Bülow, accused of trying to murder his wife, longer but not as dramatic as the first trial three years ago. Tonight, Klaus von Bülow can go anywhere he likes. Sunny cannot turn her head. The murder trials are the part of this story that ends relatively quickly. Hers is the part that does not. Her two children, from her first marriage, Alexander and Ala von Auerzberg, turn their grief into something that will outlast the case.

1:41:58In 1985, they helped found a national organization for the victims of crime, and they name it for their mother, the Sonny von Bulow National Victim Advocacy Center. In time, it drops her name, but it grows into one of the largest victims' rights groups in America, known today as the National Center for Victims of Crime. That becomes the legacy of Sonny von Bülow. That and the belief that whatever a Rhode Island jury says, someone put her there, condemned her to unconscious bed rest for the rest of her life. But Klaus does not walk away scot-free. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential. Klaus von Bülow's acquittal ends the state's case.

1:42:43It does not end his stepchildren's. Alexander and Allah cannot put him on trial for the crime again, so they do the one thing the law still allows. They sue him in federal court in Manhattan in a civil case. The number they seek is enormous,$56 million, and the claim behind it is the one the prosecution made twice, that he tried to kill their mother for her money. The man who has just cleared his name in a criminal court now has to defend it again in a civil one. His appellate lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, laid out the stakes back in 1986. Yeah, we see each other all the time. We talk about his ongoing case.

1:43:23He's being sued by his stepchildren for$56 million. The case is not over. And indeed, the American public still remains undecided. One of the reasons I wrote this book is Klaus von Duhlo not only wanted to be acquitted, he wanted to be vindicated. In time, the civil case settles. And the settlement reads like a verdict of its own. Under its reported terms, Klaus gives up every claim to Sonny's fortune and agrees to divorce his wife, who will never know she has been divorced. In exchange, the lawsuit against him is dropped. He keeps his freedom. He gives up the money the state always said was his motive.

1:44:03One person is caught between the two sides of the family. Cosima, the only child of Klaus and Sonny, who stood by her father through both trials, and it cost her. Sonny's mother, Cosima's grandmother, Annie Laurie Aitken, cuts Cosima out of her will, an estate valued between$50 and more than$110 million. Cosima lost a share worth about$25 million. The exact figure was never the point. The rift was about a daughter's loyalty to a man the rest of the family believed had tried to kill her mother. The estrangement is real, and for years it holds. Through both trials, Cosima and her half-sister Allah are not on speaking terms.

1:44:50On the last day of the second trial, Dominic Dunn watches the two of them pass in a courthouse corridor, the first time the two women have laid eyes on each other in three years, and neither one says a word. Later, Allah tells him, she's gotten so beautiful. My mother would be very proud of her. The affection is still there. The rupture is over money and loyalty and a father the rest of the family cannot forgive. What finally closes the rift is not a scene of forgiveness. It's a legal document. In December 1987, the same settlement that ends the$56 million lawsuit against Klaus reinstates Cosima's inheritance.

1:45:35The grandmother who had cut Cosima out was dead and her will stood. Ala and Alexander say they have no quarrel with Cosima at this point and they agreed to restore her to the one-third share their grandmother had first intended all three of them to have. The thing that had split the three of them, Klaus's treatment of Sunny and her money is no longer a concern. The deeper reconciliation comes the way everything in this family finally does, through Sonny. Whatever the three of them feel about Klaus, they are bound to the silent woman in the hospital bed. And over the years, all three keep coming back to her room.

1:46:17When she dies in 2008, after 28 years in that bed, her children come together to bury her. Cosima would also spend years caring for her own father, financing and following him when he moves out of the country. She stays close to Klaus for the rest of his life. So what becomes of Klaus von Bülow? Free and stripped of the fortune that made him who he wanted to be, he does not retreat. He gives interviews. He goes to parties. He lets the notoriety settle over him and carries it almost with relish. The image that fixes him in the public mind comes from the trial itself. All through the second trial, while a jury is weighing whether or not he tried to murder his wife, Klaus spends his weekends back in New York.

1:47:09There, his lover and public relations strategist, Andrea Reynolds, has moved into Sonny's own 14-room apartment on Fifth Avenue. There, in rooms still full of Sonny's things, the couple entertains. Dominic Dunn, who travels in the same circles, sees what goes on inside. He described it in an interview with the Television Academy Foundation. She had moved into Sonny Van Bulo's apartment on Fifth Avenue, one of the most beautiful apartments, and they gave a lunch party. this is during a murder trial with butlers with white gloves and all this kind of stuff well I mean that's right up my alley I have to tell you I mean and Helmut Newton the great photographer a wonderful man a genius I think and a great friend of mine he photographed Klaus and Andrea in black leather I don't know if you remember those famous photographs during the trial.

1:48:13The audacity is the point. While on trial for trying to murder his wife, Klaus hosts a lunch party in her apartment with white-gloved butlers serving the guests, then poses in black leather for one of the world's most famous photographers. And when the acquittal comes, society does not shut its doors to him. In fact, it opens them. Klaus and Andrea make one of their first appearances at a party given by Lady Jean Campbell, a Duke's daughter and a former wife of Norman Mailer. They take a box at the Metropolitan Opera on Monday nights, the house's old society night, where white tie is still the custom, and the same families fill the same boxes they always have.

1:49:00Klaus and Andrea turn up at Mortimer's, the restaurant where Manhattan goes to be seen. Not everyone will have him. At one dinner, a magazine editor says she will walk out if she is seated at his table. But most of the charm circle takes him back. Dominic Dunn would write that Vambulo's dark and spacious place in social history has been assured. It is Reynolds who has stage-managed this whole comeback. She's the one who decided that the cold, aristocratic figure the first jury saw needed softening, and she remade his public image for the retrial. She calls their courtship a ballet of seduction and says he needs a witness to account for his every move.

1:49:45But the romance does not last. Within a few years of the verdict, Reynolds and Klaus quietly part ways. She goes on to marry an English aristocrat, the Honorable Sean Plunkett. Klaus does not stay in New York to be talked about. Dominic Dunn watches Klaus return to society and remains convinced the jury got it wrong. Here he is again with the Television Academy Foundation. In your opinion, guilty? Oh, yes. I felt so. And he hates me a lot, the way I wrote about him. So Klaus moves to London, the city where he first made his name, and settles back into its dinner parties and its opera boxes, as though the last five years had been a long, unpleasant weekend.

1:50:31He takes a job reviewing plays for a Catholic newspaper. He never again mounts a public campaign to prove his innocence, and by all appearances, he never needs to. He has his verdict, and he is received in the drawing rooms of London again, if not on the scale Sonny's money once paid for. He lives out his years quietly and comfortably on Cosima's support. He follows the advice of his lawyer, Alan Dershowitz. the same advice alan's given every client who wins a case the public desperately wants them to lose alan told me this when we spoke i gave advice the same advice i gave oj simpson when we won both cases i said disappear nobody wants to see your face they hate your guts go away and klaus took my advice went to england stayed out of the public light through it all klaus's reinvention and interviews and parties, Sonny von Bulow does not change at all other than to age.

1:51:33While Klaus dines out first in New York and then in London, his wife lies in the same hospital bed and the argument over what she was and what was done to her carries on above her head and she cannot say a word. Her care costs a fortune, more than half a million dollars a year. Dr. Richard Stock, who has been her physician for nearly 30 years, comes to see her several times a week. Her room is kept as for a wife being welcomed home. Her own nightgowns, her own skin creams, music in the air, and her children keep watch. Alexander and Ala visit their mother often. When Ala's own daughter is small, she brings the little girl, named Sunny, for her grandmother, into the room so that Sunny might somehow know she has a granddaughter.

1:52:25They talk to her. They touch her. They tell her about their lives. The years pass, far more of them than anyone imagined. In 1998, at age 67, Sunny is moved to a Manhattan nursing home. Her hair still set, her nightgowns still her own, fresh flowers still by the bed. And on December 6, 2008, Sunny dies there without ever having woken up. She is 76. Her children release a short statement calling her a woman of grace and dignity and the most loving mother imaginable. A woman lost 28 years of her life. Whoever decided to hurt Sunny Von Bulo that day in 1980, this can't possibly have been the desired outcome.

1:53:14As for the public relations around her case, long before Sonny died, the case had already split into competing stories. Alan Dershowitz wrote the defense account in a book called Reversal of Fortune. Reporters like Dominic Dunn wrote the skeptical ones, among them Dunn's own Fatal Charm. And then came the version most people would remember, a Hollywood movie. The film, also called Reversal of Fortune, arrives in 1990. It does the one thing neither trial could. It gives Sunny a voice. The filmmakers let her narrate the story from inside the coma that silenced her. This was my body. On December 27, 1979, I lay in bed all day.

1:54:05whether I was asleep or in a coma, later became a subject of dispute. Jeremy Irons plays Klaus and wins the Academy Award for it. He almost turned down the part. He explained why to the Hudson Union Society in 2009. When the movie Reversal of Fortune was offered to me, I thought it was a very tasteless idea because most of the family was still alive and had been through a very difficult, awful time. And I thought to have a film made about that is sort of a nightmare. So I passed on it a few times. And then my friend Glenn Close persuaded me, she said, quite rightly, if I didn't do it, someone else would.

1:54:51Irons would go on to win the Oscar for Best Actor in a leading role in 1991. This is great. Thank you, my co-stars, Ron Silver and Glenn, for finally persuading me to do it. And lastly, if I may cut the call of a telephone to London, where my wife is trying to keep awake in a hotel bedroom, I wish you were here to help me carry this, because you helped me win it. Thank you all. The movie becomes the definitive version of the Von Bulow case. It makes Sonny famous all over again and dramatizes the doubt at the heart of everything, conveniently avoiding some of the more troubling facts for Klaus, like his quick return to the Newport home three days after Detective Reese asks him about insulin.

1:55:47What the movie fails to do is settle the doubt. No film could possibly answer what two juries could not. Those two juries did not judge the same case. The first heard the state's motive, the mistress, and the$14 million Klaus stood to inherit. The second jury heard none of that. The judge in the second trial barred testimony from the family banker about the will, citing a lack of foundation. She said there was insufficient evidence that Klaus's potential financial gain, quote, impelled him to allegedly harm Sonny. The move was widely criticized at the time. The second jury did hear a medical defense.

1:56:28The first jury never did. That the science behind the insulin reading was not reliable. That one of Sonny's comas may not have involved insulin at all. And that the needle with insulin found in the infamous black bag looked like it had been dipped in insulin, not used to inject an actual person. One jury convicted Klaus von Bülow. a higher court, threw out that conviction. A second jury acquitted him, and that verdict was final. Two juries, two opposite conclusions, and in the end, only the acquittal stood. Both were asked the same question. Did Klaus von Bülow try to kill his wife? Beneath that question, a harder one.

1:57:14Was either coma caused intentionally at all? Alan Dershowitz has never claimed to know the answer. The evidence points very strongly to a self-inflicted coma. That's the balance of evidence. Even if this were a civil case, not a criminal case, I would say that you couldn't prove even civil liability by a preponderance of the evidence. The preponderance favors innocence. That doesn't mean he's innocent. That means the evidence isn't there to convict. I don't know whether he's guilty. Sonny von Bulow knew. She was in the room both times. The one witness who knew everything was unable to tell any of it.

1:57:57Frozen instead in an unreachable state. This is all you can know. All you can be told. When you get where I am, you will know the rest. More than a century ago, an American writer published a story called The Lady or the Tiger. In the tale, a barbaric king decides guilt or innocence through a public spectacle. An accused person must choose between two identical doors. Behind one waits a tiger that would kill him. Behind the other, a woman he must immediately marry. When the king discovers that his daughter is secretly in love with a young man on the royal court, He sends the man into the arena to choose between a tiger and a beautiful woman his daughter deeply resents.

1:58:49The princess learns which door is which. From inside the arena, her lover looks to her for guidance. She signals toward the door on the right, and he opens it without hesitation. The story ends without showing what lies beyond that open door. Did the princess save the man she loved, knowing he would marry another woman, or did jealousy cause her to send him to the tiger? The writer never tells us. Was it the lady or the tiger? The reader is left to decide. The von Bülow case has its own two doors. Behind one is the defense's version, an unhappy, self-destructive woman whose medical crises became a murder case through fear, unreliable memory, and flawed science.

1:59:39Behind the prosecution's door, a husband who twice tried to kill his wife and whose money built a defense powerful enough to escape a second conviction. The two juries in this case opened two different doors, but neither could say what actually happened inside Clarendon Court. The answer stayed forever with Sonny and Klaus, who died in London in 2019. Of course, we all have our opinions. I have mine. What do you think happened to Sonny von Bulow? Send me an email at megan at megankelly.com. We'll be back Monday evening with another case, this one out of the nation's capital. For MK Confidential, I'm Megan Kelly.

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