Court story of despair on millionaires’ row

Press, 4 February 1982, Page 6

Court story of despair on millionaires’ row

NZPA-ReuterNewport, Rhode Island A story of despair, alcoholism, and loveless marriage on Newport’s millionaires’ row unfolded as a prominent socialite, Claus von Bulow, went on trial accused of trying to murder his heiress wife. It was a story, according to the Danish financier's lawyers, of a woman worth $3O million whose reckless " drinking and pill-swallowing put her into an “endless sleep” 14 months ago despite her husband’s best efforts. The prosecution told the jury a different story: that von Bulow, aged 55, impatient for a half share in that fortune and in love with a 35-year-old actress, injected his wife Martha, aged 49, with insulin in a “clandestine, ingenious" effort to' kill her. But both prosecution and defence agreed yesterday that money brought no happiness to the von Bulows of Clarendon Court, one of the seashore mansions of the wealthy summer colony of Newport, and of Fifth Avenue, New York. The trial, due to last about two months and attended by

journalists from around the world, began after three weeks of courtroom motions and a jury trip on Monday to Clarendon Court. A defence lawyer, Herald Fahringer, said that Mrs von Bulow spent entire days drinking Scotch and rich egg nog and eating fudge sundaes — all dangerous to a woman with her medical condition of low blood sugar. She was an active alcoholic at the time she fell into the coma the prosecution alleges was brought on by an insulin injection, the lawyer said. She leant heavily on barbiturates, he said, smoked four or five packets of cigarettes a day, and was once taken to hospital after swallowing enough aspirin to kill four people. It was "the one thing in that household you never did,”’ he said — wake up Mrs von Bulow when she was sleeping it off after a heavy night. That, he said, explained von Bulow’s delay in calling doctors on the two occasions when his wife went into a coma at Christmas, 1979, and Christmas, 1980.

Mr Fahringer said that Mrs von Bulow had told her husband in the early 1970 s that she no longer wanted to have sex with him and that he was free to “satisfy his needs” with. whomever he chose.

Von Bulow, a former London barrister and once righthand man of the oil magnate, J. Paul Getty, sat expressionless as Mr Fahringer and the prosecutor, Stephen Famiglietti made opening statements.

Mr Famiglietti argued that von Bulow, when he married Martha in T 966 after her divorce from an Austrian prince, had no substantial wealth and wanted his wife’s money. He said von Bulow helped draw up his wife’s will granting him half her inheritance.

Mr Fahringer said that von Bulow, aware that Martha’s first divorce settlement had cost her one million dollars, insisted on a premarital arrangement whereby he would get nothing should anything happen to her.