Claus von Bülow (born 11 August 1926 in Copenhagen, Denmark) is a British socialite of German and Danish ancestry.[1] He was accused of the attempted murder of his wife Sunny von Bülow (née Martha Sharp Crawford) by administering an insulin overdose in 1980 but his conviction in the first trial was reversed and he was found not guilty in both his retrials.[2]
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Born as Claus Cecil Borberg, von Bülow's father was Danish playwright Svend Borberg. His mother Jonna belonged to the old Danish-German noble family Bülow, originally from Mecklenburg. He was the maternal grandson of Fritz Bülow, Minister of Justice from 1910–13 and President of the first Chamber of the Danish Parliament in 1920–22.
Von Bülow graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, and worked as personal assistant to J. Paul Getty after having practiced law in London in the 1950s. Getty wrote that von Bülow showed "remarkable forbearance and good nature" as Getty's occasional whipping boy. Von Bülow remained with Getty until 1968. On June 6, 1966, von Bülow married Sunny, the American ex-wife of Prince Alfred of Auersperg. Sunny had a son and a daughter from her first marriage; together, she and von Bülow had a daughter, Cosima Iona von Bülow, in 1967.
In 1982, von Bülow was tried for the attempted murder of Sunny. The main evidence was that Sunny had low blood sugar, common in many conditions, but a blood test showed a high insulin level. The test was not repeated.[3] The needle was used against von Bulow in court, with the prosecution alleging that he used it and a vial of insulin to try and kill his wife. The discovery of these items became the focal point of Von Bülow's appeal.
At the trial in Newport, von Bülow was found guilty and sentenced to 30 years in prison; he appealed, hiring Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz to represent him. Dershowitz's campaign to acquit von Bülow was assisted by Jim Cramer, who was then a Harvard Law School student. Dershowitz and his team focused on the discovery of the bag containing the syringes and insulin. Sunny's family had hired a private investigator to look in to the coma. The private investigator, Eddie Lambert (an associate of the Von Bülows' lawyer Richard Kuh), was told by several family members and a maid that Claus had recently been locking a closet in the Newport home that previously was always kept open. Lambert and Kuh hired a locksmith to drive to the mansion, with the intention of picking the closet lock to find what the closet contained. They had lied to the locksmith and told him that one of them owned the house. When the three arrived, the locksmith insisted they try again to find the key, and after some searching, Kuh found a key in Claus' desk that fit the closet. At this point, according to the three men in original interviews, the locksmith was paid for the trip and left before the closet was actually opened, though the men would later recant that version and insist that the locksmith was present when they entered the closet. It was in the closet that the main evidence against Claus Von Bülow was found. In 1984 the conviction was reversed based on the fact that the main evidence was gained illegally, by someone who may have stood to gain from Claus' conviction. in 1985, after a second trial, von Bülow was found not guilty on all charges. [4]
At the second trial the defense called eight medical experts, all university professors, who testified that Sunny's two comas were not caused by insulin, but by a combination of ingested (not injected) drugs, alcohol, and chronic health conditions. The experts were John Caronna (chairman of neurology, Cornell); Leo Dal Cortivo (former president, U.S. Toxicology Association); Ralph DeFronzo (medicine, Yale); Kurt Dubowski (forensic pathology, University of Oklahoma); Daniel Foster (medicine, University of Texas); Daniel Furst (medicine, University of Iowa); Harold Lebovitz (director of clinical research, State University of New York); Vincent Marks (clinical biochemistry, Surrey, vice-president Royal College of Pathologists and president, Association of Clinical Biochemistry); and Arthur Rubinstein (medicine, University of Chicago).
Other experts testified that the hypodermic needle tainted with insulin on the outside (but not inside) would have been dipped in insulin but not injected; injecting it in flesh would have wiped it clean. Evidence also showed that Sunny's hospital admission three weeks before the final coma showed she had ingested at least 73 aspirin tablets, a quantity that could only have been self-administered, and which indicated her state of mind.[5]
Sunny's family remained convinced of Claus's guilt. For having sided with her father, Cosima von Bülow was disinherited by her maternal grandmother, Annie Laurie (Crawford) Aitken. Von Bülow's two stepchildren from Sunny's previous marriage sued him for $56 million. As a result, von Bülow renounced his claim to Sunny's $75 million personal fortune in exchange for Cosima's reinstatement as joint heiress to the Crawford fortune. Sunny von Bülow continued to live almost 28 more years in a vegetative state until dying at a New York nursing home on 6 December 2008. She was 77 years old.
As of 2010, Claus von Bülow lives in South Kensington, London, where he writes art and theatre reviews.