High-society trial revealed family’s private misery

Press, 18 March 1982, Page 9

High-society trial revealed family’s private misery

NZPA-Reuter Newport. Rhode Island The case that breathed scandal into high society in Newport, Rhode Island, began on a cool, damp evening last spring with a policeman's rap on a mansion door. , The officer, Jack Reise, a lean, cheery man, was shown into the library by a servant. He had come to tell Claus von Bulow that inquiries were being made into his wife's coma of four months and that some suspicion was attached to him. “That has taken me back," von Bulow said and coolly sipped a glass of soft drink. Months after the policeman's seemingly innocuous and polite inquiry von Bulow was defending himself against charges that he attempted to murder his wife with a scheme that would fit comfortably into an Agatha Christie novel.

Yesterday the saga of the von Bulows of Clarendon Court, one of the expansive mansions that straddle the Atlantic cliffs in Newport, ended with von Bulow's conviction on two charges of assault with intent to commit murder.

He faces a maximum of 20 years in prison on each charge. Von Bulow, a former practising lawyer in London and close aide of the late oil magnate. J. Paul Getty, was accused of a "cunning, ingenious" plot to murder his wife Martha, aged 50, with injections of insulin. She was thinking of divorce, according to the prosecution, and he could not bear the thought of losing the

“splendid, lavish" lifestyle she. had provided for him. From her death, the prosecution said, he would gain SUSI4.S million of her SUS7S million fortune and the freedom to marry his mistress, Alexandra Islfis, aged 36, a former soap-opera actress from New York. For 60 days, von Bulow, aged 55, sat in the Newport Superior Court overlooking the town square and watched his stepchildren, the family servants, and his mistress brought forward to testify against him. The tall, balding von Bu-< low, elegant in both appearance and manner, never spoke in his own defence but insisted through his Manhattan lawyer, Herald Fahringer, that his wife caused her own disaster.

She cannot say. Mrs von Bulow, once known as Sunny, lies on satin sheets in a New York hospital room in a coma that began 15 months ago and is not expected to end.

Her money affords her nothing now except $U5275,000 a year worth of medical attention. A television camera was allowed into court for her husband's trial and the networks provided the country with glimpses each night of the private lives of the very rich in their society.

The von Bulows, it emerged. rarely walked anywhere. They had Charles, the chauffeur. He would take Mrs von Bulow on her shopping trips to Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman in New York. When Mrs von Bulow bought Clarendon Court in 1970. four years

after the marriage, she found the lawn blocked her view of the Atlantic so she had it lowered. There, one summer, they threw a lawn party straight out of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s' “The Great Gasby” — the women all in white Edwardian dresses, the men in elegant straw hats and white flannels. For 10 years, they lived a leisurely shuttle between Newport’s Millionaires’ Row and a palatial Fifth Avenue apartment in New York. But the trial showed that , as Fitzgerald wrote, the rich may be different but they are not always happy. There was always valium in the von Bulow home, both for husband and wife. There was friction because Mrs von Bulow wanted her husband at home, not jetting around the world for Getty. He once said he felt like a kept man. And, according to the defence, there was deep, selfdestructive despair. Mrs von Bulow, it contended, was an alcoholic and drug abuser who felt “trapped, useless, and impotent” and who brought on both the comas her husband was accused of causing at Christmas 1979 and 1980. Maria Schrallhammer, Mrs von Bulow's maid of 23 years, gave an account of that first coma that chilled the court. In a German accent, she charged that von Bulow lay awake beside his “ice-cold, unconscious” wife and refused to call a doctor for nine hours. The defence said Mrs von Bulow was simply “sleeping it off." The doctor who was eventually called said she was within minutes of dying. The maid said she kept close watch on von Bulow after that. Two months later, she said, she found in his closet a black bag full of hypodermic needles and drugs in paste, liquid, and pill form. She and Annie-Laurie (Ala) Kneissl, Mrs von Bulow’s daughter by her first marriage to an Austrian prince, testified that they kept track of the bag for a year, taking notes on its contents that were produced in court. Two days before Mrs von Bulow was found lying face down on a bathroom floor in her final coma, the maid said she saw a bottle of‘insulin packed in the luggage von Bulow was taking for a week-end with his wife in Newport.

Prince Alex von Auersperg. the stepson yon Bulow raised for 14 years, told how he, his sister, and the maid

hired a private investigator. The prince also described a late-night search of von Bulow's bedroom in which, he said, the black bag was recovered. Miss Isles was brought into court under subpoena to tell of von Bulow's repeated marriage proposals, and of a six-month deadline she once gave him to get a divorce. Eminent medical experts testified that insulin alone could have caused Mrs von Bulow's comas, not her excesses or her low blood suger condition of reactive hypoglycemia which made her fondness for sweets dangerous. '

Mr Fahringer presented a defence of mystery witnesses and bombshell surprises.

He brought on a highly strung exercise treacher. Joy O’Neill, to say that Mrs von Bulow once recommended “a shot of insulin" as a diet aid.

Robert Huggins, a hospital technician, said the heiress confessed to him after the first alleged murder attempt: “I tried to kill myself.” Von Bulow, as the defence portrayed him. was a caring husband who would have “borne all the wrath of hell" rather than harm his wife. He tried to save her and failed. When the jury retired after a final attempt by the prosecution to rebut the defence witnesses, it had heard 52 witnesses for the prosecution and 12 for the defence. For von Bulow, a confirmed chain-smoker by the trial's end, they were long hours of waiting. “He is a nervous wreck." said one friend. "You try to talk to him and he keeps talking about the history of Danish-German relations in the nineteenth century." His trial was a crowdpuller that easily outdrew the Agatha Christie thriller playing at the cinema opposite* the court. Cheerful housewives renounced their television soap operas for the one going on in court and began lining up at 5 a.m. for seats. As the trial neared its end. television crews and journalists from across the United States and Europe were streaming in by every plane and train. The media interviewed each other and filmed each other filming each other. One television station was allowed briefly to take a second camera into court so it could get a shot of the TV camera already there.