The Trials of Claus von Bülow: Science on Trial — Ep. 4 | MK Confidential

0:00If you're a parent and want to help set up your child for success, then IXL is right for your family. As an effective and affordable online learning program, IXL covers math, language arts, science, and social studies using interactive practice problems for kids from pre-K to 12th grade. Listeners can get an exclusive 20 % off IXL membership when they sign up today at IXL.com slash 20. Visit IXL.com slash 20 to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price. What's going on? I'm Arch Manning, Viori athlete and college quarterback. Whether I'm running, training, traveling, or just unwinding at home, I love doing it in my core shorts from Viori.

0:37With a breathable boxer brief liner, they're quick to dry, super versatile, and stand up to even my most intense training sessions. Plus, they come in three inseams and a ton of colors. Ready to try a pair? Go to Viori.com slash arch and get 20 % off at checkout. I think you're going to love them as much as I do. That's V-U-R-I dot com slash A-R-C-H and get 20 % off your first order. Exclusions apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions. Not only will you receive 20 % off your first purchase, but enjoy free shipping on any U.S. orders over$75 and free returns. Have a great day. It is the spring of 1985.

1:04In 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. Sonny'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.

1:46Klaus, 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. 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.

2:36If 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. AI can clone your voice, forge your signature, even create fake documents that fool experts. And criminals are using these tools right now to potentially steal from you. How? It's called title fraud. Your property records are public by law. Your name, your address, even your signature, It's all sitting in a database anyone can access.

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4:04So you can make sure you're not already a victim. That's HomeTitleLock.com promo code Megan, or use the link in our description. 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 Ab Scam, in which agents posed as wealthy Arab businessmen to expose political corruption and put multiple congressmen in prison. He 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.

4:49Puccio'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 Bulow into a coma? And as before, or 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. The whole retrial was based on our work. In fact, my two main research assistants from the law school, Joanne Crispy and a guy from from the medical school, they sat with the trial lawyer and fed him all the information.

5:43So 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. That 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.

6:25So 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. It is Reynolds who decides Klaus needs a warmer face for the retrial, that the cold, aristocratic figure the first jury saw was half the reason they convicted him.

7:07She 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 Bülow, his daughter Cosima, and his girlfriend Andrea Reynolds arrived at the Biltmore Hotel. The next day, when Bob 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. It 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.

7:56Before 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. He 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.

8:41The state's medical case rested on a simple, powerful chain. When Sunny 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. Cahill 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?

9:36Like 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. It 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 Vambulo's closet and the used needle inside.

10:19It 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. The black bag was not the smoking gun in this case. The smoking gun in this case was the 216 insulin level in Sonny von Buehler'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.

11:12Hold on to that 216 number, though, because the defense will. When Dershowitz, Crispy, and the team pulled 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. Another 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.

11:58The 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. If 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.

12:44A 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. And 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.

13:37And they came back. And many of them came back saying insulin when there was no insulin. So they were false positive. If you're a parent and want to help set up your child for success, then IXL is a right for your family. As an effective and affordable online learning program, IXL covers math, language arts, science, and social studies using interactive practice problems for kids from pre-K to 12th grade. Listeners can get an exclusive 20 % off IXL membership when they sign up today at ixl.com slash 20. Visit ixl.com slash 20 to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price.

14:15What's going on? I'm Arch Manning, Viore athlete and college quarterback. Whether I'm running, training, traveling, or just unlining at home, I love doing it in my core shorts from Viore. With a breathable boxer brief liner, they're quick to dry, super versatile, and stand up to even my most intense training sessions. Plus, they come in three inseams and a ton of colors. Ready to try pair? Go to viore.com slash arch and get 20 % off at checkout. I think you're going to love them as much as I do. That's V-U-R-I dot com slash A-R-C-H and get 20 % off your first order. Exclusions apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions.

14:40Not only will you receive 20 % off your first purchase, but enjoy free shipping on any U.S. orders over$75 and free returns. Have a great day. Then the defense calls a witness who had testified for the prosecution the first time around. Dr. Janice Galitis, the Newport physician who saved Sunny's life during her first coma back in 1979. This time, Galetus 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.

15:24If 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. At 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.

16:10Her ruling is narrow, and at the time, it is one of the most criticized decisions of the trial. Grant 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. To 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.

17:03And 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. At 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.

17:50This 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... How? 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.

18:38For 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 Allah step forward in a blaze of publicity. At 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.

19:21Alexandra 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. Demurely 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.

20:16It 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. The 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 operation. Can you not have been in love? I doubt it, but you do some crazy things.

21:01Iles 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. After 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.

21:49If in fact she saw, as she says she did, a bottle of it said insulin, needles and syringes, bells would have gone off. Bells would have gone off and the whole world would have gone at that very moment. The prosecutor, Mark DeSisto, gives the jury the other picture, the one the state has believed from the start. He loads his needle and syringe with insulin. He goes to his wife and you see the intent. What's he thinking? And he finds the 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.

22:34He's going to be renalaging her knees. He doesn't have to find the jury. Can you 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. By 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, what, five days, so it's been a long while. On June 10, 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.

23:23I should count on the charge of the defendant committed on December 27, 1979, the crime of assault and tension. How do you find guilty or not guilty? Not guilty.

23:37I should count on the charge of the defendant committed on December 21, 19, the crime of assault, and such a myth. How do you find guilty or not guilty? Not guilty.

23:51Not 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.

24:41It has not found that no one harmed Sonny von Bulow, 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.

25:22We 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.

26:04An 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.

26:59He's a free man, acquitted of the crime that made him famous. 90 miles away, in a room on the 10th 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.

27:55I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.

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