The Trials of Claus von Bülow: The Coma at Clarendon Court — Ep. 1 | MK Confidential

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1:06Clarendon Court is one of the grandest houses on one of the grandest streets in America. The mansion's wrought iron gates form the backdrop of Grace Kelly's final movie before she retires to become the Princess of Monaco. A beautiful, wealthy, high-class woman marrying into aristocracy, a kind of modern fairy tale. In 1980, the Newport, Rhode Island mansion belongs to a real-life, beautiful, wealthy, high-class woman and her aristocrat husband. But behind those wrought iron gates and gold inlaid doors, the real tale is grim. It is the morning of December 21st. The winter sun shines on the sandstone walls of Clarendon Court, an oceanfront property exposed to the bitter wind off the water.

1:55Inside, a 49-year-old woman lies unconscious on the cold marble floor of her bathroom. She liked to sleep in a cold room, and the night before, she had asked for her windows to be left open to the Atlantic. With the wind chill well below zero, the room turned frigid. By morning, she has gone ice cold to the touch. Her body temperature falls into the low 80s. Her heart stops. The paramedics bring her back, but only part of the way. Martha Von Bulow, the woman everyone calls Sunny, falls into a coma. She will never regain consciousness. This would be a private tragedy if not for an eerie wrinkle.

2:37This exact scene has happened before. One year earlier, almost to the day, in the same house, in the same wing, the same woman was found unconscious on the same floor. That time, a doctor reached her in time. That time she woke up. One woman, two Christmases, two comas, and in between them, a husband, a devoted maid, a locked closet, and a small black bag that the state of Rhode Island will one day hold up in a courtroom and call the weapon. The man at the center of it is Sonny's husband, a Danish-born aristocrat named Klaus von Bülow. Twice a jury will be asked whether he tried to murder his wife.

3:23Twice the jury will be shown nearly the same evidence. This is the story of a case that ended and then ended again. 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. A cyber scammer can pull your records, use AI to forge a transfer document, file it with your county, and on paper, they're the new legal owner of your property.

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4:47That's HomeTitleLock.com, promo code Megan, or use the link in our description. To understand how two medical emergencies, one year apart, become allegations of attempted murder. We have to start with the marriage. From the beginning, it is a match of opposites. Klaus von Bülow is not born an aristocrat. He is not even born a Bülow. He comes into the world as Klaus Borberg in Copenhagen in the summer of 1926. His father, Svend Borberg, is a Danish playwright and drama critic, a clever, cultured man whose sympathy for Nazi Germany will destroy his life and reputation. He admires the Germans, and he goes on admiring them after they occupied Denmark in 1940.

5:35He dines, as his son will one day put it, with the wrong people. In Klaus's own words, years later, his father, quote, gave a good name to a bad cause. When the war ends, the reckoning comes. Sven Borberg is tried as a Nazi collaborator and convicted. The conviction is later overturned on appeal, but the name Borberg, once perfectly respectable, has become an embarrassment. So Klaus escapes it. He takes the name of his mother's father, Fritz Bulo, a former Danish minister of justice, a name that stands for precisely the respectability his father's name has lost. Then there's the Vaughn. It comes later, and how it got there has fascinated people ever since.

6:22To much of the press, it is an embellishment, a whisper of old German nobility attached to a borrowed name by a man assembling himself for the world. Klaus tells it differently. He says the Bulos are entitled to the Vaughan by blood, and that it was Sonny who wanted her second husband to carry one. Sonny's former in-laws, the von Auerzbergs, say he has no right to it at all. What no one disputes is the effect. By the time he reaches the drawing rooms of London and New York, the aristocrat is, at least in part, a work of his own composition. He studies law at Cambridge, goes to work as an aide to J.

7:05Paul Getty, then the richest man in the world. He is tall, polished, quick with a dry, cutting wit, the ideal plus one for a dinner party. In society, they call the Copenhagen native the Great Dane. Years later, on trial, Klaus would itemize the ingredients of his own mystique with the detachment of a collector. I think there are certain aspects, like the aura of the name Newport. My wife's first marriage gives it a certain cutis. My work in years past for Mr. Getty gives it a certain interest. One of the lawyers who would eventually represent him, Alan Dershowitz, describes the two men inside Klaus.

7:47It's almost as if there are two Klaus von Willow's and he presses a button when he walks into a room. There's the public austere Klaus von Willow, which he sits there, as his current woman friend put it, as if he were a mortician with an umbrella up his back. And then there's the warm Klaus von Willow, very caring. Sunny is the money. She's born Martha Sharp Crawford in 1931, the only child of a utilities magnet who dies when she is only four years old and leaves her something on the order of$75 million, a staggering fortune in any era, and especially in the years this story takes place, an inheritance that would be worth nearly$2 billion by today's standards.

8:31She is shy, private, and happiest out of the spotlight. The writer Dominic Dunn knew her for years before she was found on that bathroom floor. Sonny von Bülow was one of America's great heiresses. She was a very beautiful woman. I had been to Sonny von Bülow's coming out party when she was a debutante. In 1957, Sonny marries an Austrian prince, Alfred von Auerzberg, and has two children, Allah and Alexander. By the mid-60s, thanks in part to his infidelities and her homesickness, that marriage is over. She brings her children to America, and in 1966, marries Klaus. A year later, they have their own daughter, Cosima.

9:15And away from the gowns and the society columns, Sonny's days have an ordinary, regular routine to them. She wakes late, near 11, and spends the first hour of every morning on the telephone with her mother. She shops, she lunches, she changes into lounging clothes and watches television. She keeps to herself. And at night, she sleeps surrounded by her dogs, a pair of Labradors up on the bed. The family lives on Sonny's money. Everyone in Newport understands the arithmetic, which no one mentions until it is admitted inside a courtroom. Clarendon Court, the oceanfront mansion, which they call a cottage, is hers.

9:58The 14-room apartment on Fifth Avenue is hers. The staff, the cars, the season in Newport, the whole life among princes and industrialists, all of it is hers. Klaus draws a comfortable income, about$120 ,000 a year, but it comes out of a trust she sets up for him, which is another way of saying it is an allowance. Among the old families, quietly, he is regarded as a kept man. And there is between them a prenuptial agreement with terms that will one day prove enormously important. If Klaus and Sonny divorce, Klaus walks away with almost nothing. If Sonny dies, well, that is another matter entirely.

10:42But if Sonny was dead, then he would have title to a house in Rhode Island, their wonderful apartment in Manhattan, and a great deal of money. Sonny's stepfather, the big game hunter, Russell Aitken, does not hide his contempt. He tells Dominic Dunn, on the record, Klaus is a Cambridge-educated con man with legal training, amoral, greedy as a wolverine, and cold-blooded as a snake. And I apologize, Aitken adds, to the snake. One friend puts it to Dunn this way, The problem with Klaus is that he does not dwell in the palace of truth. He's a fake. Klaus is a Trump loi, a trick of the eye, something painted to look like what it is not.

11:30One person sees this marriage from the inside every day. Her name is Maria Schralhammer, and she is Sonny's personal maid, a small, graying German woman who speaks in heavily accented English and has been at Sonny's side for 23 years. She is fiercely loyal to Sonny. So protective is she of Sonny's privacy that she will refuse to tell even Klaus's own lawyers that Sonny once had a facelift because she had promised Sonny she would never tell. If anyone sees the marriage up close, it's Maria. I'm not going to answer the question because I promised Mrs. Von Bulo. By the late 1970s, the Von Bulo marriage is cold.

12:14Separate bedrooms, separate routines, and Sonny is not well. Her doctors diagnose reactive hypoglycemia. Her blood sugar can crash on its own, and when it does, she turns confused and unsteady and slurred, the way a person does when they've had far too much to drink. She keeps herself going on sweets and aspirin and sedatives like Valium and Seconil, and on alcohol her body can barely handle. It is a real and documented illness, and it will also one day give the defense a natural explanation for everything that happens to her. And there is another woman. By the late 70s, Klaus is having an affair with Alexandra Isles.

12:58She is not just, as the papers will call her, a soap opera actress, though she does play one on the gothic serial Dark Shadows. Alexandra is royalty, the daughter of a countess, schooled alongside Sonny herself. The family would learn of the affair and testify to how they found out. Klaus told them. I then asked him about Alexandra Isles specifically. He told me that there had been a relationship. And Isles, by most accounts, was pressing Klaus to make a choice. I said, would six months be suitable? he asked me to marry him. That is the pressure Klaus is under by 1980. A marriage that has gone cold and a mistress who wants a decision.

13:45Leaving Sonny for another woman would mean leaving the life her money pays for. Leaving Sonny dead would not. Plenty of men have affairs and unhappy marriages and never harm anyone. That alone proves nothing. But it is the shape of a situation that investigators years later will recognize as motive. In the fight against Alzheimer's, now matters more than ever. Because now we have treatments. Treatments that could change everything. But now is no time to stop. Now we've got momentum. So now we use it. Now we seize the moment. Now we turn the tide. Now we make a difference and make some noise. Now is the time to get up, get out, and join the movement.

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15:07The first collapse comes at Christmas 1979 at Clarendon Court. Sunny fades over a long day, and Maria, who has cared for her for two decades, can see her lady sinking. I went to her, and I saw that her right arm was hanging out of the bed. And I took her arm and the arm was ice cold. She hardly could breathe anymore and I thought she would stop any minute now. I got very scared she would die and first I asked Mr. Von Bühler to help me to put her up and he said he couldn't help me. So I just picked her up and I was holding her in my arms until the doctor came. Here's the chronology that will trouble everyone later.

15:56By Maria's account, she urges Klaus for hours. He first telephones the doctor only in the early afternoon and leaves a message. When the doctor calls him back, Klaus tells him only that Sonny is sleeping off a night of drinking and is told to keep watching her. Not until around 6 that evening, when her breathing turns to a rattle, does Klaus let the doctor be called for real. The local physician who answers, Dr. Janice Galitis, arrives at the same moment as the ambulance. Galitis clears Sonny's throat with his fingers, strikes her chest, and does CPR until Sonny's heart restarts. He saves her life by a matter of minutes.

16:36Within a day, Sonny is awake and recovering. And then Klaus does something a little strange. Weeks later, on January 22, 1980, he sits down and writes the doctor a careful letter. His mother-in-law feels he was slow to get help. So Klaus lays out the timeline his own way and then asks the doctor two direct questions. Have I stated everything fairly? And was I to blame? Two weeks later, Galetus writes back that the collapse was unpredictable and that by recognizing the change in Sunny's condition and calling him, Klaus saved her life. To investigators who read it later, this looks like a man collecting protection on paper the way other men collect receipts.

17:21In February 1980, Maria is cleaning a closet in the Fifth Avenue apartment when she comes across a soft traveling case that Klaus carries back and forth to Newport each week. It is open. Inside it is a smaller case, black vinyl, about six inches long with a zipper around it. Maria opens it. Inside is a little pharmacy, pills and vials. She calls in Sunny's daughter, Ala, and the two women take careful notes. Prescriptions from a Madison Avenue pharmacy, one bottle made out to a Leslie Baxter, another one made out to Klaus von Bülow at an address that does not exist. Maria gets a little of the powder and liquid to Sunny's doctor of nearly 30 years, Dr.

18:08Richard Stock. He identifies them, Valium and a barbiturate, Secobarbital. In April, Sonny is hospitalized again, weak and disoriented. The doctors point once more to her blood sugar. Then on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, Maria goes back into the black bag. This time, next to the familiar vials, there is something new. A small bottle labeled insulin. And syringes. Neither Klaus nor Sonny is diabetic. Maria takes the bottle to Sonny's son, Alexander. There was a bottle of insulin added, a syringe and needles. I called Alexander insulin for what insulin? Insulin is the reason this bag matters. To the investigators who eventually build the case, it looks almost ideal for a killer.

19:02A large enough insulin dose can drive a person's blood sugar into a fatal coma. and once it has done its work, it is very hard to prove after the fact that an injection ever happened. For now, it is a bottle that has no business in this house, sitting in the private bag of a man whose wife has already suffered one unexplained collapse that nearly killed her. The insulin is not the only alarm that winter. In early December, Sunny takes so much aspirin, she says for a sinus headache, that she is hospitalized for about a week with aspirin poisoning. Around the same time, there is a night when Klaus knocks on Maria's door and tells her not to get excited, but that something has happened.

19:44Maria will later say she entered the room and found Sonny in bed full with blood, with a wound at the back of her head and blood on the pillow and the carpet. Klaus says Sonny got dizzy and fell. Depending on who's telling it, this is either a woman being harmed inside her own home or a fragile, sick woman leaning on pills and drink coming apart on her own. Then, almost a year to the day later, comes the second coma. December 20th, 1980. The family is together at Clarendon Court. Over dinner, Sunny insists on an ice cream sundae with caramel sauce, exactly the kind of sugar her doctors have told her to avoid.

20:28Afterward, they go out to the movies to see Dolly Parton in 9 to 5 and then come home. Klaus goes off to his study. Sunny stays up with Alexander and Cosima. As the evening wears on, Sunny's speech starts to slur and thicken. She can't quite hold a conversation. Her son helps her up to her bedroom and gets her into bed. Then Alexander goes back out to meet friends at a bar. When he leaves, his mother is unwell but talking. The next morning, she does not come down. Sonny is a late sleeper, but after 11 o 'clock, Klaus goes up to check on her. He comes back down a few minutes later and motions to Alexander, who follows him upstairs.

21:13They find her on the marble floor of the bathroom, unconscious. Her head near the base of the toilet, her lips swollen and bleeding, the sink tap still running. Klaus puts a finger under her nose and says she is still breathing and goes to call for help. Alexander touches his mother's neck, feels that she is ice cold, and covers her with a fur throw. The first responders would never forget the scene. Soon as I walked in the room, Nelpy Sider, she was in trouble. There was no blood anywhere in the bathroom. Six minutes later, the ambulance arrives and takes her, with Klaus riding along, to the Newport Hospital emergency room.

21:55Sunny's body temperature is 81 degrees, her pulse barely there. A few minutes after she arrives, her heart stops and it takes two doctors to bring her back. From Newport, she is moved to a specialist hospital in Boston, and the scans come back with the answer, no one wants. What the responders remembered was the husband. Mr. Von Bulo looked at this person, who he identified as his wife, with ice-cold blue eyes, and there was absolutely no feeling. He just sat there. The doctors can restart Sonny's heart. They cannot bring back the woman her children knew. She's alive and breathing and gone. And this time, there is no letter, no relief, no narrow escape.

22:48There are only questions about what happened in that house the night before. Sonny's family does not accept this as bad luck. In the New York hospital where she is moved, a neurologist tells Alexander and Allah that in his judgment, their mother's coma was caused by injected insulin. And that winter of 1980 into 1981, their stepfather, Klaus, is on the phone with the two of them almost every day, urging them to agree to take Sonny off the machines, appealing by more than one account to their emotions and their finances. The calls only stop when Sonny is taken off the respirator and keeps breathing on her own.

23:31So the children decide to act. It is Alexander who says out loud what the others are thinking. Their half-sister, Cosima, is a teenager, and she is living under the same roof as the man they now suspect of trying to murder her mother. Can they leave Cosima there? My mother is a very trusting person. I think nobody really could believe that somebody could be plotting to kill you while at the same time they're being nice to you and telling you they love you. The family's banker, Morris Gurley, urges caution. Before anyone accuses anyone, he says, they should do this quietly and properly and hire a professional.

24:12So they hire Richard Q, a former district attorney of Manhattan. His job is not to go to the police, not yet, and not to go to the press. His job is to build the case the family believes is there, statement by statement. They felt there was the need for somebody who knew something about criminal justice and who could conduct some further investigation and do it discreetly. They wanted no publicity unless or until ultimately there was proof of Klaus's guilt. Q sits down first with Alexandra and Ala, and then with Maria, and Maria tells him about that bag, the bottles, the syringes, the insulin with no patient.

25:02Everything the family's suspicion has fastened onto keeps leading back to the same place, the small black case Klaus carries between the houses and that Maria last saw inside a locked closet at Clarendon Court. To prove anything, someone is going to have to open that closet. Alex said he'd go up and look for the bag. And we had a private investigator, a very skilled one, with whom I'd worked, Eddie Lambert. And I said, no, we'd send Eddie with him, really to protect Alex in case anything untoward happened. On a January day in 1981, they do it. Alexander, the investigator, and a locksmith drive to the shuttered mansion, and the locksmith opens the locked closet.

25:51Inside is the bag. In their haste, they take no photographs and lift no fingerprints, a detail the defense will one day make a great deal of. But for now, they simply take the black bag. We knew that there was a pouch and a metal box in my stepfather's closet containing a needle, which then turned out to have insulin and amobarbital on it. There were several other things that had led to suspicions. everything put together made us believe that we had to go to the police. The family's own doctor tests the bag, finds insulin on the used needle, and tells them plainly, either you take this to the police or I will.

26:30And so the case passes to the Rhode Island State Police and to a detective named Jack Reese, who starts over from the beginning. When he interviews Alexander, one thing lands hard, the young man's honesty about the limits of what he actually saw. If he was so determined to build a case against his stepfather, it would have been very easy for him to say, I saw the insulin. He did not. To me, that led to his credibility. The detective talks to his partner and decides to set a trap for Klaus. The police already have the black bag with a pharmacy inside. They have the used needle and they have a husband who may still believe both are locked away inside Clarendon Court.

27:17So Detective Jack Reese and his partner drive to the von Bulow's place in Manhattan and park outside the apartment and wait for Klaus, just watching for their chance. Reese sits in his car, ready to confront Klaus, to ask him a question, to push him, and then watch and see what he does next. What will Klaus do when he thinks no one is watching? That's next time on MK Confidential.

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