How the World Became Obsessed with a Socialite’s Mysterious Coma — and Her Suspect Husband Won His Innocence

Pinterest Sunny von Bulow In the annals of drama among the rich, high-society set, few scandals top the allegation that Claus von Bulow tried to murder his heiress wife, Sunny, exactly 36 years ago, with a fatal injection of insulin as she slept. Sunny von Bulow was found unconscious on the floor of her bathroom at their seaside mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, on Dec. 21, 1980. Nearly 28 years later, at age 76, she died in a nursing home on New York City’s Upper East Side on Dec. 6, 2008, having never emerged from an irreversible coma. In between, Claus, a dashing, philandering, finely-tailored Danish aristocrat, engaged in a high-stakes defense that fueled two sensational trials and a 1990 feature film, Reversal of Fortune, that depicted the couple’s thorny marriage and the attempted murder case that was brought against him. In 1982 Claus was convicted but, after an appeal and retrial, found not guilty three years later. “It was a case that had everything: wealth, class, sex, secrecy, mystery and gossip,” says Alan M. Dershowitz, the defense attorney and emeritus Harvard law professor who helped win Claus his appeal and then successfully argued for his innocence. It’s a story that once again is aiming for a spot in the cultural zeitgeist. A scripted true-crime series, The von Bulow Affair, based on playwright William Wright’s book of the same title, is in development at NBC-owned Universal Cable Productions. “The story of the von Bulows will go down in history as one of the most sensational scandals in American high society,” Dawn Olmstead, UCP’s executive vice president for development, said in announcing the project in March. “We look forward to delving deeper into this true crime story that still leaves us cold today.” Two Suspicious Incidents The von Bulow story straddles the social circles of Newport and New York and turns on the misfortunes of Sunny, so nicknamed because of her cheerful disposition. Sunny was a rich, blonde fixture of those overlapping worlds when she mysteriously fell into a vegetative state. Born Martha Sharp Crawford on Sept. 1, 1932, Sunny received an estimated $75 million inheritance from her father, George Crawford, a Pittsburgh energy magnate, who died in 1935. At 24 she married an Austrian tennis pro, Prince Alfred von Auersperg, and they had two children, daughter Ala and son Alexander, before divorcing in 1965. The next year she met and married Claus, a Danish businessman and senior aide to oil billionaire J. Paul Getty. (Claus’ father was a noted critic and playwright who had been accused, and later exonerated, of collaborating with the Nazis in WWII.) Born Claus Borberg, he adopted his mother’s maiden name and added the aristocratic “von” while studying at Cambridge. The couple’s residences included a Fifth Avenue co-op overlooking Central Park and Clarendon Court, the Newport mansion that had been the setting for the 1956 musical High Society, which starred Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Grace Kelly, a beauty to whom Sunny had been compared, according […]

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