The Trials of Claus von Bülow: The Professor — Ep. 3 | MK Confidential

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0:35Autopilot adjusts automatically as you sleep. And it's clinically proven to boost deep sleep by 27%. Better sleep for both of you. No compromise even. Try the pod by 8sleep at 8sleep.com. 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. He 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.

1:23The 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.

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3:15Yours 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 Bülow's case? Well, first of all, my son, I thought was him who called me. My son, Ilan, always was calling me, pretending to be famous people.

3:58He called me pretending to be Michael Jackson. I believed him. And so I thought he was Klaus from Bulo. But then when he told me, everybody thinks I'm guilty, I said, that's my kind of case, I'm gonna 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, you've been sentenced to 30 years. He said, Alan, I'm not going into prison.

4:34I'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. Alan 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 Bulow call a kid from Brooklyn to help him? He was the man who recommended me to be his lawyer. I didn't know Klaus von Bulow 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.

5:21And 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. 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. You're a very strange man. You have no idea. I had told my sonny-in-law was one of the producers of the movie, and of course he knew me very well.

6:07And 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 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 so you like everybody else when you've been looking at it from the outside thought for sure this guy is guilty 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.

7:20And 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 Bambulo case, we all worked together very, very nicely.

8:01I 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.

8:34Well, 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.

9:16Here'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.

9:59Dershowitz 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.

10:42He 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? Oh, of course. I mean, if there was nothing in the notes, he would have, of course, turned them over.

11:20And 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.

11:59And 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?

12:36Well, the notes proved that there was no insulin and that there never was insulin. 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. 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, which I am, and by the way, Dick Q was at that point in his life too. 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.

13:16Remember, criminal defense lawyers don't have to prove anybody's innocence. All they have to do is raise a reasonable doubt.

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14:12Download today. 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, but 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.

14:48This 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 Maria, and there were several, I didn't put down Maria says she saw insulin, no need to put it down. I'd already heard that. Alan 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.

15:34He 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. And 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.

16:15The 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. Once 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.

16:51That'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. 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.

17:33There 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. Do 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.

18:21I 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. So what was the defense's theory about what actually put Sunny into a coma? We asked the professor. She was told she had reactive hypoglycemia glycemia and she shouldn't be drinking sweet drinks.

19:05And 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. She 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.

19:45But 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. Waging that media war was a glamorous, relentless, Hungarian-born force of nature named Andrea Reynolds.

20:22Reynolds 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. Absolutely believe that Klaus Rambula was guilty but that he was too smart to be convicted.

21:00So 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. I don't believe it. The evidence points away from it. The evidence points very strongly to a self-inflicted coma.

21:48That'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. And you say, one thing, Klaus, legally, this was an important victory. Morally, you're on your own. Did that happen?

22:29And 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. Now, 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 lawyer is they all lie to you all the time.

23:14You 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.

23:48I've won like 30 of my 32 or three homicide-related cases. But most of these cases result in convictions and in many of the cases, in justifiable convictions. 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. And 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.

24:30Klaus von Bulow 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. We 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.

25:15We had to persuade them they 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 cue 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. And 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.

25:59They 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. Supreme 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.

26:43It 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. And that was the brilliance of the movie, I thought, that it didn't give you an absolute final resolution.