The Trials of Claus von Bülow: The Black Bag — Ep. 2 | MK Confidential

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1:24I 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. Whether Sonny would ever have had a reason to use insulin. Years later, Jack Reese describes the exchange to journalist Bill Curtis. You know, I asked kind of a 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.

2:05I 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. The 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.

2:47Then 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. When 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.

3:33The way he surmised, he hadn't found the black bag, 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. A 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.

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5:41A 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.

6:00How true assault with a tent to murder? How do you play? 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 Sunny 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.

6:42A 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 state house 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 Jerry 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.

7:38This simply is the first time I'd ever been exposed to the media. It was new to me, and I 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.

8:32The town of Newport itself cannot agree. The old families, whose 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.

9:15The 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 just 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.

10:01He 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. Stable Proulx was a clandestine, subtle, and ingenious attempt on the part of her husband, Klaus Van Dulo, to terminate her life, to murder her by secretly injecting her with a drug called insulin. It 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.

10:48I 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. 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.

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12:16RX only. To stay informed about serious side effects, go to roe.co slash safety. The 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? Alexander 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 sonny's maid of 23 years Maria has never once sat in a witness box and when she She climbs into one now in a Newport courtroom in front of the television cameras and a nation leaning in.

13:18She 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. She does not raise her voice. She just tells the jury what she saw.

14:03The 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.

14:48And 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. sunny dead is worth a fortune. The black bag itself is entered into evidence.

15:34It's 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.

16:27You 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?

16:44I don't know. The defense is offered the chance to cross-examine her and turns it down. Klaus's lead lawyer, Harold Price Ferenger, 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.

17:28To account for the insulin, the defense calls a former exercise instructor named Joy O 'Neill, who testifies that Sonny 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 Sonny 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.

18:23In 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 Bülow'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 the Aberclaren in court with them, knowing that that was their intention, that they were going to plant something like a flatbed?

19:16In 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, that after everything, the state may not have convinced all 12 jurors.

20:06A 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 cameras running. It is the morning of March 16th, 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. Outside the courthouse, Sonny's children say what they have believed from the start.

21:01We 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, and 12 ordinary people from Rhode Island looked past the title and the accent and convicted him.

21:46The 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.

22:33The 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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