Von Bülow Affair. The Objective Behind-The-Scenes Account of the Shocking Attempted Murder Case

354 Pages·2014·2.93 MB·English

by  William Wright

The Von Bülow Affair
The Objective Behind-the-Scenes Account of
the Shocking Attempted Murder Case
William Wright
FOR HELEN BRANN
Who proved invaluable as a friend and an agent—
even before she suggested I write this book.
Preface
When I left Newport in March of 1982 and began to write up my four-hundred
pages of notes from the Von Bülow trial, I was astonished at the broadened
perspective given the story by the process of taking the six-week outpouring of
testimony—and arranging chronologically the events leading up to and
following the two murder attempts Von Bülow was accused of committing. The
result was a full-blown drama, one that developed the inherent themes of
treachery, betrayal, intrigue, and retribution.
All of the plot elements were present in the courtroom record. We had the
Meek-Bring-Down-the-Mighty aspect of the maid’s crucial role; the house of
Atreus struggle of the children with the man who raised them; the vulnerability
to those most trusted; the possibility that the rich enjoy a different brand of
justice.
Testimony had also provided abundant background color: opulent settings,
anachronistic privilege, impenetrable social bastions. I had no doubt the trial
alone produced more than enough material for a gripping book.
As I began interviewing the principals in the case, however, I came to realize
that the courtroom revelations represented only a portion of the story. Much of
what occurred prior to the public airing of the scandal had not emerged. Also
undisclosed were ramifications from witness-stand disclosures, ramifications
that were devastating and, in some cases, permanent. I began to see the trial as
an earth-mover dredging deep into a number of lives—leaving some aspects
exposed but ravaging and burying others.
After spending considerable time with the major characters on both sides, I
came to realize that I had been deeply affected by my year-long immersion in
these intense feelings and outsized happenings. As a chronicler of the case I tried
to keep my goal an evenhanded presentation of the story, one that would permit
readers to make up their own minds. That is not to say I didn’t form conclusions,
but I struggled to put them off as long as possible.
1
ON a Saturday in March, 1982, in a small room behind the courtroom of the
Newport, Rhode Island, courthouse, Claus Von Bülow called “gin” to John
Sheehan, one of his lawyers, laid down his cards, rose, and walked to the
window. He glanced down to the street below at the crowd that had grown each
of the three days since the jury had been out deciding if he had twice tried to
murder his wife, Sunny.
As the Newporters spotted Von Bülow at the window, they sent up a cheer
that evolved into a rhythmic “Free Claus, Free Claus!” He smiled and waved,
then returned to the table. His other lawyer, Herald Fahringer, sat reading over
the juror profiles they had assembled at the start of the trial. The jury had been
deliberating for three days and the tension was beginning to show on the
defendant and his counsel. Prolonged deliberations were not a good sign;
uncertain jurors were being made certain, lessening the chances of a hung jury.
In the nearby room that served as a similar retreat for the prosecution team,
Lieutenant John Reise, the Rhode Island state trooper who conducted the
investigation of Von Bülow, sat chatting with Susan McGuirl, the Deputy
Attorney General of Rhode Island. Both had been at the prosecution table
throughout the trial, backing up the prosecutor of the case, Stephen Famiglietti.
Reise was rehashing, perhaps for the fifth time, the significance of the only
development since the jury was sent out: their request for a reading of portions
of the testimony of Sunny’s maid, Maria Schrallhammer.
“She was one of our best witnesses,” Reise said. “If you believe her story,
how could you think that guy was innocent? If you don’t believe it, why would
you want to hear it a second time?”
Famiglietti, who had just come in, threw his briefcase on the table and said,
“They wanted her recipe for eggnog.”
In his chambers behind the bench, Judge Thomas H. Needham sat mulling
over a note he was planning to send into the jury, a water-testing ploy to learn if
they were making progress, needed help, or were deadlocked. His wife, Ursula,
who had come to the courthouse every day since the jury went out, sat reading
near his desk. A sheriff entered to discuss arrangements for convoying the jury
from the courthouse after the verdict.
In a far corner of the courthouse the jurors sat around a large table, two at
each end and four down each side, thrashing over the six weeks of testimony.
While they had not yet taken a formal vote, they knew how each felt. At the
moment, four of them were not convinced that the prosecution’s case removed
all reasonable doubt of Von Bülow’s guilt.
No one pressured the hold-outs. An unspoken strategy had sprung up among
the eight who were convinced of his guilt; they feared that any attempt to lean on
the others might drive them into a vote for acquittal. One of the four undecided
jurors, a woman, spoke of her sleepless struggle with the evidence the previous
night. With mounting emotion she said that she could no longer doubt his guilt.
The other eleven jurors knew what the woman was suffering. Her announcement
made, she suddenly blurted out, “How could he do that to his own daughter’s
mother?” and she burst into tears. Two of the other jurors cried as well.
Outside on the steps of the Colony House, the eighteenth-century statehouse
that had been converted into a press headquarters, a reporter asked a woman who
was wearing a T-shirt on which Von Bülow’s photo was captioned with the one
word Innocent, what made her so sure. She replied cheerfully, “He has the most
beautiful eyes!” A man carrying a Free Claus placard said, “It’s him against all
of them; he’s the underdog.”
Inside the press headquarters, 140 media people—print and television
journalists and cameramen—stepped around the snarl of cables, phone wires,
and work tables, watched basketball on the TV monitors, typed filler stories on
the Free Claus groundswell, and even interviewed each other to fill home office
demands for something, anything, on the Von Bülow trial. From her table at the
far end of the vast room, New York Daily News reporter Theo Wilson, who had
covered every major American trial of the past quarter century, from Dr. Sam
Shepherd to Jack Ruby to Patty Hearst to Mrs. Harris, looked around the room
and told a kibitzer that she had never seen a trial receive so much press coverage.
Copies of the day’s New York Post and Daily News strewn around the press
tables carried stories of a Missouri woman who was indicted for murdering her
seventh husband with insulin injection. This jolted the many who had been
drawn to the Newport case by the all but unheard of method of murder Von
Bülow was alleged to have attempted.
At the Providence Journal table, the four reporters who had worked on the
trial since its beginning sat playing a variation of Scrabble they had invented and
named Von Scrabble: every word formed had to relate to the case. Someone had
laid down the word “Valium”; the next player was persuading the others that the
word “money” he was hanging from the “m” of “Valium” was not too general
and was certainly central to this case.
At one of the network tables circled around the courtroom monitor, CBS’s Liz
Trotta chatted with Richard Kuh, the lawyer hired by the victim’s family to start
the investigation of Von Bülow. When the CBS phone rang, Kuh slipped away
and headed up Touro Street to visit the 1759 Touro Synagogue, the oldest
synagogue in America.
Like many of those in town for the trial, he had been meaning to visit the
lovely old building for two months but had been unable to move the short
distance, not a hundred yards from the courthouse, into an area unrelated to
Claus Von Bülow.
In bars along Thames Street and out on the recently fashioned tourist wharves,
the mood was pro-Claus. The opinions were based on the he’s-too-smart-to-
have-bungled-so-badly defense, with overtones of the lone-individual-
persecuted-by-powerful-interests theme. Occasionally someone would essay a
more specific rationale, like a bartender at the White Horse Tavern who said, “It
all boils down to greed; the kids want the money and he wants the money,”
oblivious to the trust officer’s testimony two weeks earlier, which removed any
financial motive on the part of the stepchildren.
Up on Bellevue Avenue one of the summer colony’s reigning hostesses
entertained eight for lunch in her epic mansion; from the first sip of sherry to the
last demitasse, nothing was discussed but the Von Bülow affair. And the mood
here was anti-Von Bülow to a near lynch-party degree. When someone said that
all of Newport was convinced he was guilty, a young woman only recently
returned from an unsuccessful European marriage said, “What about the Pells
and the Winslows? I understand they think Claus is innocent.”
“That’s right,” snapped the hostess, “they think so, as do about three others,
but the other two hundred of us know he’s guilty!”
Still farther down Bellevue Avenue sat Clarendon Court, the mansion whose
rare majesty had made it very much a character in the Von Bülow drama. Little
about the shuttered and gloomy house suggested its having been the setting,
eighteen months earlier, of one of the most stunning parties in Newport’s party-
rich history; a lawn fête in which a hundred of Newport’s most entrenched
summer colonists, dressed by request all in white, strolled the magnificent lawn,
sipping champagne, listening to an orchestra play Dixieland and musical
comedy, and watching three croquet matches that had been set up more as
tableaux than sport, while a fog rolled off the sea and gently brushed the refined
panorama.
The house is all but concealed from the avenue by a high stone wall; it is one
of the few mansions on the sea cliff completely invisible from the public Cliff
Walk (which has at its entrance a bronze plaque expressing appreciation for the
restoration efforts of Claus Von Bülow). The neighboring Astors and
Vanderbilts felt no need for such obsessive and expensive privacy, which seems
to have been created in anticipation of the kind of public scrutiny now focused
on this house.
Down Bellevue Avenue a few hundred yards, Prince Alexander von
Auersperg headed his blue Fiat Spider convertible though the gates of the
exquisitely manicured estate of his grandmother, Annie Laurie Aitken, and drove
the fifty minutes it takes to reach his apartment over a clothing store on the edge
of the Brown University campus in Providence where he was an undergraduate.
He was only in the apartment a few minutes when the phone rang. It was his
sister Ala calling from Bermuda, where she had flown with her husband to shed
a bad cold. No word yet, Alexander told her; he would phone as soon as he
heard. Ala asked if anyone knew where she was; she was concerned that
reporters could make her flying off to Bermuda sound extravagant and callous.
In Manhattan, the victim’s personal maid, Maria Schrallhammer, whose
suspicions initiated the effort against Von Bülow, sat writing a letter in Ala’s
East 77th Street apartment, where she was now employed—a letter to a friend in
Germany whom she hoped to visit when the trial was over. Maria wrote of her
role in bringing the authorities down on the man she was convinced had twice
tried to murder her mistress.
A few blocks north on Fifth Avenue, across from the Metropolitan Museum,
Annie Laurie Aitken, a handsome woman in her eighties, sat chatting with a
friend in her vast apartment, which a prominent decorator had called “the most
beautiful in the city.” Housebound because of bad health, she had not testified at
the trial or attended it—indeed, her friends wondered if she would live through
it. Instead she followed the courtroom action on videotapes Richard Kuh
obtained for her.
She had been talking to her visitor about her only child. “You know,” she
said, “I think Claus has tried putting all his failings on Sunny. He claims she was
bored and depressed. The truth is she had many enthusiasms—her children, her
homes, reading, travel, flowers, exercise. Claus wasn’t interested in anything,
except maybe parties. He never …” She stopped herself. “But I don’t have to
waste your time telling you what I think of him. You can imagine.” She looked
out the window at the gray sky, then said, “This never should have happened to
Sunny.”
Across Manhattan in the garbage-strewn streets of upper Broadway, Sunny
Crawford Von Bülow, the subject of the Newport spectacular that had all but
upstaged her, lay comatose in her private room on the tenth floor of the soot-
darkened Harkness Pavilion, part of the Columbia Presbyterian medical
complex. Curled in the fetal position, her skin was waxy and livid, the once
blond hair now completely gray.
The heiress of a $75 million fortune made small, sucking noises and restlessly
shifted her body while one leg twitched constantly. Despite the movement, a
nurse sitting in the room rose to turn the patient as she did every two hours to
prevent the formation of pressure sores. Later that day the nurse would give her
a sponge bath, paying particular attention to the areas around the tube implanted
in the throat, as well as the waste-removing catheter and the feeding tube in the
mouth; all are prone to infection.
As the nurse rearranged the bedding and smoothed back Mrs. Von Bülow’s
hair, the patient’s eyes opened suddenly and rotated wildly in their sockets,
creating the impression she was reacting to a visual simulus. This was unlikely;
doctors believed her to be blind. On a table next to her bed sat a vase of roses—
Morris Gurley, Mrs. Von Bülow’s bank officer, who arranged for daily flowers,
had left instructions that they be highly scented, in case she had retained the
sense of smell.
Next to the flowers three framed photographs faced the bed. One was of
Sunny Von Bülow’s son and daughter by her first marriage, Alexander and Ala
von Auersperg; the second was of Claus Von Bülow and their daughter Cosima.
The third picture was of Mrs. Von Bülow’s favorite yellow labrador, Pan.
Outside the door to the room a guard sat reading a newspaper. Since a reporter
slipped into the room and wrote about it two months earlier, the family had paid
for round-the-clock guards in addition to full-time private nurses and daily visits
from the family doctor. The cost for the room and all this attention was over a
half million dollars a year.
Doctors believe Mrs. Von Bülow will never emerge from her condition. There
is no reason to think she can smell the flowers or see the photograph of her
husband or know that he is being prosecuted for attempting to murder her.
Neither will she know that in three more days the twelve jurors will find him
guilty of putting her into this irreversible state—the passage from life to death
which for most people is a few moments, but for Sunny had already lasted two
years and could last many more.
2
FOR a time the Von Bülow affair appeared to be a death struggle between two
European factions—one Danish, the other Austrian—for an American fortune.
Little was known about the fortune except that it was worth struggling over.
Newspapers reported that Sunny was the only child of a utilities magnate named
George Crawford, who spent most of his adult life around Pittsburgh. Crawford,
it turns out, was very good at finding natural gas and getting it into people’s
homes.
He was born in 1861 in Emlenton, Pennsylvania, where he went to public
school, then took a business course at the Eastman Business College in
Poughkeepsie, New York. At the age of nineteen he went to work in the western
Pennsylvania gas fields. For a time he joined his father and brother in an oil-
hardware business, and subsequently, with his sister’s husband, formed a
company, Crawford and Treat, which was to thrive for years as a highly
successful oil and gas operation.
Basically, the vast wealth that Crawford accumulated over his lifetime came
from the ground. He was adept at every phase of the burgeoning gas business—
from exploration and the most elementary operations to the future corporate
complexities of the amalgamating independents.
Each time Crawford’s firm merged with a rival firm he would emerge as the
new company’s board chairman and principal officer. He became head of the
final result of the corporate mating, the Columbia Gas and Electric Company,
which covered much of the Midwest and, at the time of Crawford’s death in
1935, was valued at $700,000,000.
In addition to the corporation-building that was central to his life, Crawford
also speculated with success in oil and gas exploration—first in Illinois, moving
west to the Oklahoma Territory, then on to Texas, where in 1909 he joined a