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January 11, 1982
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When: March 16, 1982 (guilty) and then June 10, 1985 (not guilty)
The facts: On December 21, 1980, Newport heiress Martha "Sunny" von Bülow slips into a mysterious and irreversible coma at her Rhode Island home. Her husband, Claus von Bülow, is accused by his stepchildren, Prince Alexander von Auersperg and Princess Ala, and by Sunny's very convincing personal maid, of injecting Sunny with insulin and inducing the coma in order to gain control of his wife's fortune. (Sunny never regains consciousness; she remains in a coma in a New York clinic.) Sunny and Claus's 14-year-old daughter Cosima sides with her father. After a lengthy trial in which the defense seemed to argue that too many sweets and too much alcohol — or maybe an attempted suicide — were responsible for Sunny's fate, von Bülow is convicted on two counts of attempted murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison. He is allowed to remain free on $1 million bond pending an appeal. He then hires Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz to handle the appeal and gets off.
New Yokers take sides:
"At dinner parties in Newport and and on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the story of Sunny and Claus has replaced last year's saga of Hi Tarnower and Jean Harris.... Indeed, while awaiting trial, Claus has attended many a New York dinner party...The case has become, as one of Claus's friends jokingly says, the Dreyfus Affair of the Upper East Side and Newport. People have taken sides, often passionately, and by now alliances are firmly fixed."
"[Claus]
is shocked and incredulous that his stepchildren, whom he claims he thought of as his own and helped raise, have turned against him and will be the star prosecution witnesses at his trial."
"His friends speculate that someone set up von Bulow, that his stepchildren, resentful of the provisions for Claus in Sunny's will and hard-pressed on their current income (reportedly $40,000 a year) are pursuing vendetta."
"Von Bulow is 'far too intelligent to have done such a stupid crime,' said a friend."
Quotations from "Sleeping Beauty" by Lally Weymouth in the January 11, 1982 issue of New York Magazine, before the first trial.
The movie: Glenn Close plays Sunny and Jeremy Irons is Claus in Reversal of Fortune .
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