00:06:56.200It comes later, and how it got there has fascinated people ever since.
00:07:00.020To much of the press, it is an embellishment, a whisper of old German nobility attached to a borrowed name by a man assembling himself for the world.
00:12:01.440Klaus is a Trump loi, a trick of the eye, something painted to look like what it is not.0.98
00:12:08.340One person sees this marriage from the inside every day.
00:12:11.600Her name is Maria Schrollhammer, and she is Sonny's personal maid, a small, graying German woman who speaks in heavily accented English and has been at Sonny's side for 23 years.
00:12:28.240So protective is she of Sonny's privacy that she will refuse to tell even Klaus's own lawyers that Sonny once had a facelift because she had promised Sonny she would never tell.
00:12:40.140If anyone sees the marriage up close, it's Maria.
00:12:43.580I'm not going to answer the question because I promised Mrs. Vombulo.
00:12:47.520By the late 1970s, the Vombulo marriage is cold.
00:12:52.240Separate bedrooms, separate routines, and Sunny is not well.
00:22:18.240And this time, there is no letter, no relief, no narrow escape.
00:22:25.000There are only questions about what happened in that house the night before.
00:22:30.320Sonny's family does not accept this as bad luck.
00:22:34.420In the New York hospital where she is moved, a neurologist tells Alexander and Allah
00:22:38.880that in his judgment, their mother's coma was caused by injected insulin.
00:22:43.380And that winter of 1980 into 1981, their stepfather, Klaus, is on the phone with the two of them almost every day, urging them to agree to take Sonny off the machines, appealing by more than one account to their emotions and their finances.
00:23:02.120The calls only stop when Sonny is taken off the respirator and keeps breathing on her own.
00:23:43.120Before anyone accuses anyone, he says,
00:23:45.460they should do this quietly and properly and hire a professional.
00:23:49.320So they hire Richard Q, a former district attorney of Manhattan.
00:23:54.780His job is not to go to the police, not yet, and not to go to the press.
00:24:00.980His job is to build the case the family believes is there, statement by statement.
00:24:06.840They felt there was the need for somebody who knew something about criminal justice and who could conduct some further investigation and do it discreetly.
00:24:18.020They wanted no publicity unless or until ultimately there was proof of Klaus's guilt.
00:24:26.040Q sits down first with Alexandra and Ala, and then with Maria, and Maria tells him about that bag, the bottles, the syringes, the insulin with no patient.
00:24:40.080Everything the family's suspicion has fastened onto keeps leading back to the same place, the small black case Klaus carries between the houses, and that Maria last saw inside a locked closet at Clarendon Court.
00:24:54.500To prove anything, someone is going to have to open that closet.
00:24:58.300Alex said he'd go up and look for the bag.
00:25:01.640And we had a private investigator, a very skilled one, with whom I'd worked, Eddie Lambert.
00:25:06.540And I said, no, we'd send Eddie with him, really to protect Alex in case anything untoward happened.
00:26:37.860The detective talks to his partner and decides to set a trap for Klaus.
00:26:43.360The police already have the black bag with a pharmacy inside.
00:26:47.020They have the used needle and they have a husband who may still believe both are locked away inside Clarendon Court.
00:26:54.340So Detective Jack Reese and his partner drive to the von Bülow's place in Manhattan and park outside the apartment and wait for Klaus, just watching for their chance.
00:27:06.100Reese sits in his car, ready to confront Klaus,
00:30:57.240A week later, he surrenders for arraignment, pleads not guilty, and is released on $100,000 bail.
00:31:04.380When Klaus is arraigned, he gives the only answer he will give in the entire case.
00:31:09.840You are charged with two counts. Count one, assault and attempted murder. Count two, assault and attempted murder. How do you play it? I'm not guilty.
00:31:22.120The trial opens in Newport in February of 1982. The state has to prove two separate crimes a year apart. The Christmas Sunny nearly died in 1979 and the Christmas she did not wake up in 1980.
00:31:43.320Rhode Island has just let television cameras into its courtrooms,
00:31:47.160so the trial of Klaus von Bülow becomes something the country has never quite seen.
00:31:52.120A crime story the whole nation can watch, nearly gavel to gavel, like a soap opera.
00:31:57.400A maid, a mistress, a fortune, a needle, and an aristocratic, silent defendant,
00:32:05.960The state calls an attempted murderer.
00:32:09.140Downtown Newport becomes, in the words of one man who was there, a madhouse.
00:32:14.060The old colonial statehouse beside the courthouse is turned into a press center.
00:32:18.320Sketch artists and reporters fight for one of the 80 seats inside.0.81
00:32:22.320The jury that files in is not made up of Newport's summer people.
00:32:27.100It is drawn from the year-round town, working Rhode Islanders, mostly Catholic.
00:32:32.860It's the kind of jury Klaus's own side privately doubts can ever be a jury of his peers.
00:32:39.880And at the center of it, ramrod straight and immaculate, sits Klaus von Bülow,
00:32:45.920giving the reporters almost nothing, except now and then a dry line about the spectacle he has become.
00:32:53.640This simply is the first time I'd ever been exposed to the media.
00:32:57.440It was new to me, and I think I belong to the kind of people who like to be in the newspaper the day they are born, the day they get married, and the day they die.
00:33:07.000I suddenly realized that this was a futile wish.
00:33:11.540For weeks, The Trial is the best show in the country.
00:33:17.040On CNN, more than 300,000 viewers routinely tune in, a lot for that time.
00:33:21.500when actress Alexandra Isles of the hit TV show Dark Shadows takes the stand, the audience climbs
00:33:28.560past 600,000. Newspaper artists sketch Klaus in his dark, well-cut suits, and strangers gather
00:33:36.580on the courthouse steps, some of them wearing buttons that read, Free Klaus, others just as
00:33:42.200sure he is exactly what the state says he is, an attempted murderer. The town of Newport itself
00:33:48.900cannot agree. The old families who summer behind the same hedges are split down the middle over
00:33:54.940whether the man is a wronged husband or a fortune hunter who finally reached too far, and they say
00:34:01.500so, at their dinner tables and to any reporter who will write it down. Klaus has pleaded not guilty.
00:34:08.920He makes one more choice that will shape the whole trial. He will never take the stand.
00:34:15.500Across the whole trial, the jury, the 12 people deciding his fate,
00:34:19.240will not hear a single word from the accused.
00:34:23.240Inside the family, the sides are already fixed.
00:34:26.640Sonny's two older children brought the case, Ala and Alexander.
00:34:30.740The only person in the family standing with Klaus is Kosima,
00:34:34.800the daughter he and Sonny had together, still just a teenager.
00:34:38.600There was never a time where I doubted it.
00:34:40.960And we would always talk openly about what was going on.
00:34:47.640And just seeing him go through the anguish of it all and seeing him with the lawyers saying,
00:34:54.580you can investigate anything, I really don't have anything to hide, was enough for me to believe it.
00:34:59.920Klaus sits through it all with a stillness that unsettles the people around him.
00:35:05.380He is unfailingly courteous to the reporters in the hallway.
00:35:09.580Dominic Dunn covers the trial for Vanity Fair magazine, whose readers cannot get enough.
00:35:16.440He describes a defendant who seems less like a man fighting for his life than a man watching with mild interest a drama about someone else.
00:35:26.640The prosecutor is Stephen Famiglietti.
00:35:30.200And in his opening, he tells the jury exactly what the state means to prove.
00:35:34.380The stable pool was a clandestine, subtle, and ingenious attempt on the part of her husband, Klaus Van Dulo, to terminate her life, to murder her, by secretly injecting her with a drug called insulin.
00:35:49.580It is a large promise, and Famiglietti knows the case is harder than it sounds.
00:35:55.180No eyewitnesses, no confession, a woman in a coma who cannot testify, and weeks of medical testimony ahead of him.
00:36:03.400I thought it was an extremely difficult case, and primarily because it was a circumstantial evidence case, meaning that there were no eyewitnesses to the alleged criminal conduct, and there was so much medical testimony.
00:36:17.140The tougher job for the state is the first coma, the one from which Sonny recovered.
00:36:23.140To make it a crime and not just a bad night, Famiglietti has to convince the jury that this was a first attempt, a rehearsal for the next Christmas when it worked.
00:36:34.620The state's first witness is Sonny's own son, Alexander, who gives the jury the story of the marriage from the inside.
00:36:42.440My stepfather said that after my younger sister was born, my mother was unable to have sex, and that he looked towards other women.
00:36:54.540Did he mention any other woman, one woman in particular?
00:37:00.720His sister, Allah, takes the stand and tells the jury why her mother had begun talking about a divorce.
00:37:07.060She felt he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, that he was blaming her for the fact that he'd been having no success in his professional life.
00:37:16.700Then comes Maria Schralhammer, son he's made of 23 years.
00:37:22.200Maria has never once sat in a witness box.
00:37:25.120And when she climbs into one now in a Newport courtroom in front of the television cameras and a nation leaning in,
00:37:31.880She describes the black bag, the vials, and the small bottle of insulin she says she found
00:37:53.200among the belongings of a woman who had low blood sugar, which can be caused by too much
00:37:59.340insulin and thus had no use for any more of it. Maria is a small, plain-spoken woman with a heavy
00:38:07.100German accent, and by common agreement, she is the most important witness the state has. She does not0.89
00:38:13.760raise her voice. She just tells the jury what she saw. The defense cross-examines her over parts of
00:38:20.140two days and does not move her a single inch. Then the doctors, Sonny's own physician of nearly
00:38:27.920three decades, Dr. Richard Stock, tells the jury what he believed had been done to her.
00:38:33.940It was the surreptitious administration of insulin. One of the country's foremost authorities on
00:38:39.620insulin, Dr. George Cahill of Harvard, testifies that the second coma bears the mark of an
00:38:46.000injection, one that no illness in Sonny's own body could produce. The state puts the physical
00:38:53.280evidence beside him. The used needle from the black bag, which the family's own doctor has found
00:38:59.620carried insulin at its tip. And it puts a number in front of the jury. A blood test drawn the
00:39:07.100morning Sonny was admitted, showing an insulin level of 216, many times higher than normal,
00:39:14.540next to a blood sugar that had crashed toward nothing. Then the family's banker, Morris Gurley,
00:39:21.100The trust officer who ran Sonny's fortune gives the jury the arithmetic.
00:39:27.360If Sonny dies, Klaus stands to inherit about $14 million.
00:39:32.240If they divorce, the prenuptial agreement leaves him with almost nothing.
00:39:37.620Sonny alive and divorced from Klaus is worth next to nothing to him.
00:39:45.520The black bag itself is entered into evidence.
00:39:48.160It's small pharmacy laid out on a table for the jury to look at, the vials, the syringes, and the used needle the state calls the attempted murder weapon.
00:40:01.440Doctors for the state and doctors for the defense take the jury down into blood sugar readings and insulin levels and the exact chemistry of a body shutting down, each side certain of the opposite conclusion.
00:40:13.500It is slow, technical, and fiercely disputed.
00:40:18.160What the jurors can weigh more plainly is the maid, the money, and the black bag on the table
00:40:24.500in front of them. Then the state calls the other woman. Alexandra Isles, the mistress,
00:40:31.400takes the stand, and the prosecutor asks her in front of the cameras whether she still thinks
00:40:37.020the charges against the man she loved are nonsense. You still think a speck of nonsense?
00:42:18.860His lawyers spend most of their case picking at the state's witnesses rather than putting up their own defense and pressing the single argument they have.
00:42:26.960that a secretive, self-medicating woman who drank and swallowed aspirin by the fistful
00:42:32.540was the only person who ever did Sonny von Bülow any harm.
00:42:37.900In his closing, defense attorney Faringer goes after the way the black bag was found,
00:42:43.320a private search run by a family that already believed Klaus guilty,
00:42:48.440with no police in the room and no fingerprints ever lifted.
00:42:51.860Had fingerprints been taken off of that bag, off of those vials, off of those needles,
00:43:00.300and Martha von Bülow's fingerprints were on those vials and on those needles,
00:49:43.800He said, Allen, I'm not going into prison.
00:49:46.840I'm going to do what a gentleman does.
00:49:48.720if you don't reverse my conviction, I'm not going to prison. He was going to kill himself.
00:49:55.240And so we did regard the case as a capital case because I know he meant it.
00:49:59.620Allen has said that he would never even have been allowed into Newport, into Clarendon Court,
00:50:04.820with all its glitz and glamour. But Klaus is the ultimate insider. The accent, the title,
00:50:11.620the Fifth Avenue apartment. So why does Klaus von Bulow call a kid from Brooklyn to help him?
00:50:17.800He was the man who recommended me to be his lawyer. I didn't know Klaus Rambiola, he didn't know me, but he sought a recommendation from a former Supreme Court justice of the United States, who was then retired.
00:50:33.620And the justice said, I can't do it. I'm retired. But Dershowitz is a really good appellate lawyer. Hire him. And so actually the justice took notes on the side of the briefs. And I used some of his notes in my argument.
00:50:50.820There's a famous scene in Reversal of Fortune where your character says to him something like,
00:52:36.980So you decide to assemble a dream team of lawyers
00:52:40.740and lawyers in training from Harvard Law School,
00:52:43.520where you have been a professor at that point
00:52:46.220for years and ultimately for 50 years. It was it was a dream team, right? Am I right that
00:52:52.280some of the people helping you have household names today?
00:52:56.080Oh, yeah. You know, it was a real dream team, unlike the OJ case, which was a nightmare team.
00:53:02.200Everybody fought with each other in the OJ case because they were trying to become the one who
00:53:07.240got credit for the result. In the Ivan Bulow case, we all worked together very, very nicely.
00:53:13.320I worked with Susan Estridge. I worked with some other professors. And then, of course, I assembled a group of great students, not only from the law school, but from the medical school as well, because this was very much a scientific case, a medical case.
00:53:27.020I had been teaching for years the issue of law and science, how students, if they want to become really great criminal lawyers, have to really immerse themselves in science and technology and medicine.
00:53:38.120And this was the perfect case to illustrate that.
00:53:40.400all right so you've got your dream team uh assembled what what was the room actually like
00:53:45.420because you broke them out into teams well i had a very large harvard house back in the day with
00:53:50.960the basketball court in the backyard and the big yard and about i don't know 10 rooms and i would
00:53:57.900divide the team into rooms this was the insulin room um this was the room for search and seizure
00:54:04.680This was the case where they found the case.
00:54:14.340And I would go from room to room asking them about their progress.
00:54:18.460But the principle Dershowitz says pulled him in was bigger than one wealthy man's freedom.
00:54:23.660In his telling years ago, it was about how this case had been built in the first place.
00:54:28.760Here's Alan talking with journalist Bill Curtis in 1997.
00:54:31.740They had paid for private prosecutors and private investigators and had circumvented the strictures of the Constitution, had done things that private people could do, but that public police and prosecutors could never do, withheld evidence, possibly planted evidence.
00:55:17.520If Klaus von Bülow had been a poor butler charged with putting his wife into two comas, he would be in jail today.
00:55:26.280There is no question in my mind that it took a lot of money paid to scientific experts, particularly, to be able to get justice in this case.
00:55:36.740This is a terrible commentary on the American system of justice.
00:55:40.980You knew early on that this case could turn on the notes of a man named Richard Q.
00:58:22.080He would realize that even if you don't think it's exculpatory, you can use it in a way that raises doubts.
00:58:28.880Remember, criminal defense lawyers don't have to prove anybody's innocence.
00:58:32.500All they have to do is raise a reasonable doubt.
00:58:35.320So in other words, if the children had genuinely believed that they found insulin in this bag and that it was used by Klaus to inject Sunny, causing her coma, one would think they would have mentioned that in their sit down with Q.
01:01:24.200They tested the laboratory itself, sending in needles containing different substances to see whether the lab could reliably identify insulin.
01:01:33.660What we did is we sent them several needles.
01:01:37.540One had insulin, one had saline solution, one had barbiturates, one had combinations.
01:01:44.680And we wanted to see what the test results would be.
01:01:55.400There was a second story about Sonny herself, the first jury, never really heard.
01:02:00.260Not Sonny the victim, but Sonny the patient.
01:02:03.080In the film that was based on Dershowitz's book, Reversal of Fortune, that other Sonny narrates the whole case from inside her coma.
01:02:12.720On December 27th, 1979, I lay in bed all day.
01:02:19.180Whether I was asleep or in a coma, later became a subject of dispute.
01:02:26.620Do you believe that she injected herself with insulin or that there was no insulin in Sonny at all?
01:02:31.980There was no insulin. But I have to tell you, Truman Capote told me that he gave her insulin and told her how to inject it as a kind of weight loss or something.
01:02:43.560I don't know. But I never knew whether to believe Truman Capote. He invited me to his home.
01:02:49.120He showed me a book he had given her. And he told me that he taught her how to self-inject.
01:02:55.980We know she injected herself with B12 vitamins,
01:03:00.040but he told me that she also injected herself with insulin.
01:07:29.040I almost never know what happens with my clients, because the first thing you know as a criminal defense lawyer is they all lie to you all the time.
01:07:36.360You know, my first meeting with most of my defendants, the first meeting they say, oh, I didn't do anything.
01:07:42.620I'm perfectly innocent and I should win the Nobel Prize.
01:07:46.540Second meeting, they take the Nobel Prize off the table.
01:07:50.300Third meeting, well, I did a lot of bad things, but I didn't do this. The fourth meeting is I did this, but they can't prove it. So, you know, you have to know when you're dealing with these people and when you're a criminal defense lawyer, you're dealing 90 percent with guilty people. That's why the conviction rate is so high.
01:08:08.020You know, I've been very, very lucky. I've won like 30 of my 32 or three homicide homicide related cases. But most of these cases result in in convictions and in many of the cases in justifiable convictions.
01:08:23.140But the criminal defense lawyer has to do everything in their power,
01:08:27.600ethically and morally, to bring about a reversal or an acquittal
01:08:34.120And a lot of people don't understand that.
01:08:36.600And they think my job is to be his rabbi, his priest, his minister, his mother.
01:08:40.360No, I'm his defense lawyer. That's all I do.
01:08:44.660But the family has never wavered on their belief about Klaus's guilt.
01:08:49.160Here is Sonny's son from her first marriage, Alexander.
01:08:52.020Klaus von Bülow only succeeded in depriving our mother of meaningful life, and now he's gotten away with it.0.58
01:08:59.340In 1983, Dershowitz stood in front of the Rhode Island Supreme Court in the first appellate argument that state ever put on live television and asked five justices to do the most unpopular thing they could, erase a conviction the public strongly supported.
01:09:17.040We argued it in front of the Supreme Court of Rhode Island, which was a very tough court.
01:09:25.100And people told me that we would never win in front of that court.
01:09:29.140Years after the trial, Dershowitz says he and his team realized the legal violation alone would not be enough to get a reversal.
01:09:37.080We had to persuade them there had really been a miscarriage of justice, not merely a violation of the Constitution.
01:09:43.360In April of 1984, the court gave its answer. Both counts reversed. On two grounds. First,
01:09:52.780those Q notes. The family's lawyer could not hand pieces of his file to the state police
01:09:58.500and attorney general and then hide the rest from Klaus's defense team behind assertions of
01:10:04.240privilege. And second, the black bag. At the end of our previous episode, Sonny's son, Alexander,
01:10:11.660Q, and a locksmith go to Clarendon Court. The locksmith opens Klaus's locked closet,
01:10:19.020and inside is Klaus's black bag. They simply take it. The contents of that bag are then tested
01:10:25.000by the von Oersberg's family doctor, and he finds insulin. The bag and its contents are then given
01:10:32.460by the family to the Rhode Island State Police. The state police send all the bag's contents to
01:10:38.640a lab for testing without getting a warrant. That gave the defense an opening. Dershowitz
01:10:45.680had built the whole appeal on state law, Rhode Island's own constitution, which put the reversal
01:10:51.820beyond the reach of the U.S. Supreme Court. The only question left was whether prosecutors would
01:10:58.160seek a retrial. Because a reversal is not an acquittal. It doesn't send you home for good.
01:11:04.880It sends you back to the starting line.
01:11:07.740Klaus von Bülow was not a free man in the spring of 1984.
01:11:14.140And the state of Rhode Island still believed he was a would-be murderer and still intended to try him again.
01:11:21.220Dershowitz says the greatest compliment he's received about this case actually came from the movie Reversal of Fortune, on which his own son was a producer.
01:11:29.200What I loved about the movie, which my son helped to produce, was when we went to see it a few times in the theater, people would walk out arguing with each other as to whether he did it or not.
01:11:41.240And that was the brilliance of the movie, I thought, that it didn't give you an absolute final resolution.
01:16:10.640She's Hungarian-born and glamorous and still married to her television producer husband.
01:16:17.000Andrea has known Klaus and Sonny socially for years,
01:16:19.520but she and Klaus did not become lovers until after his first trial had ended.
01:16:24.560That timing matters. The mistress the state built its motive around at the first trial was a different woman, the actress Alexandra Isles. Reynolds entered the story only afterward, so the companion the cameras now catch at Klaus's side was never part of the love and money case Rhode Island prosecutors once put to a jury.
01:16:46.400Andrea Reynolds does not do subtle.1.00
01:16:49.620She courts the reporters covering the case, dines with them, drives them around and calls their editors when the coverage displeases her.1.00
01:16:57.820Barred from the courtroom, she watches the live feed from inside the CNN truck and slowly takes over the booth until the network finally asks her to leave.
01:17:07.000It is Reynolds who decides Klaus needs a warmer face for the retrial.
01:17:12.800That the cold, aristocratic figure the first jury saw was half the reason they convicted him.
01:17:18.920She runs the campaign to clear his name like a military operation.
01:17:23.380Andrea's own husband, watching all of it from the outside, offers the driest verdict of the whole affair.
01:17:30.260If Klaus has to marry Andrea, he will wish he had been convicted.
01:17:34.840On April 7th, Bombulo, his daughter Cosima, and his girlfriend Andrea Reynolds arrived at the Biltmore Hotel.
01:17:42.600The next day, when Bombulo showed up at the courthouse for the first day of jury selection,
01:17:47.040a small army of print and broadcast journalists from around the world surrounded him as he made his way into the building.
01:17:54.020It takes nine days just to seat a jury, eight women and four men.
01:17:58.600and Judge Corinne Grand orders them sequestered, kept together in a hotel, cut off from the outside
01:18:05.920for the length of the trial. Before a word of testimony, they are loaded onto a bus and driven
01:18:11.560to Newport, Rhode Island, to walk through Clarendon Court itself, the oceanfront mansion
01:18:17.560where both comas happened. The press follows, filming the entire thing, rising above the
01:18:23.380grounds in bucket trucks while helicopters circle overhead. And Klaus, who has not set foot in the
01:18:31.100house in more than four years, steps onto the grounds, sees the dogs he used to walk, and for
01:18:37.760a moment his composure breaks. He weeps briefly, then he collects himself and goes inside with the
01:18:46.420jury. To see what Puccio is up against, remember what convinced the first jury. The state's medical
01:18:53.880case rested on a simple, powerful chain. When Sunny was admitted for her comas, her blood sugar
01:19:00.640was dangerously low. And after her final coma, the lab reported an enormous amount of insulin in her
01:19:08.040blood. Low sugar, high insulin, which the state said could only mean insulin from outside her body.
01:19:16.420from a needle. To get there in the first trial, the prosecution had called Dr. George Cahill of
01:19:22.100Harvard, the man other doctors called the experts expert on blood sugar. Cahill told the jury that
01:19:29.160only injected insulin could explain what the lab found. Doctor, do you have an opinion based upon
01:19:36.060your review of the records and based upon your experience in your training and based upon a
01:19:40.540reasonable degree of medical certainty as to whether or not the insulin was endogenous or
01:19:46.040exogenous. Like all the data that I've looked at, it would be exogenous. And when the defense
01:19:52.220suggested Sonny's barbiturates and drinking might have caused a coma on their own, Cahill did not
01:19:58.840give an inch. Asked whether barbiturates can cause a coma, he answered they certainly can,
01:20:04.260but not with a blood sugar of 29, sir. It was clean. It was confident. And the first time
01:20:11.620around, it helped produce a sentence of 30 years in prison for Klaus von Bülow. Puccio's team goes
01:20:19.040after that chain, one link at a time, starting with the image everyone carried out of the first
01:20:24.580trial, the small black bag from von Bülow's closet and the used needle inside. It looked
01:20:32.220like a murder weapon. But one of the young lawyers Dershowitz recruited, a Harvard law graduate
01:20:38.340named Joanne Crispy, says the bag was never really the heart of the case. Here she is with
01:20:44.520journalist Bill Curtis on American Justice. Well, a lot of people, you know, outside the case think
01:20:52.540of the encrusted needles in the black bag or the black bag itself as the smoking gun. The black bag
01:28:33.020that her greatest star turn is upon her.
01:28:37.120She ends her months of European seclusion
01:28:39.380and returns to Rhode Island to take the stand against her former lover.
01:28:44.700Even when Alexandra was starring on the TV show Dark Shadows,
01:28:48.480she never made such a dramatic entrance.
01:28:52.180Demurely yet firmly, she takes the stand at the second trial
01:28:56.260and describes a 1980 phone call in which Klaus von Bülow confides in her
01:29:01.300that he stood by and watched as his wife slipped deep into a coma.
01:29:06.820He watched her, knowing that she was in a bad way all day, and watched her and watched her, and finally, when she was on the point of dying, he said that he couldn't go through with it, and he called and saved her life.
01:29:25.800It is testimony that cuts both ways. In the same account, Klaus watches his wife
01:29:32.420sink toward death and does nothing, and then at the last moment calls the help that saves Sonny's
01:29:38.980life. The prosecution hears a near confession. The defense hears the opposite. A man who could
01:29:45.900have a woman who tried to kill herself die and instead rescues her. But Puccio is not satisfied
01:29:54.360with turning Alexandra's account into a rescue.
01:29:57.800On cross-examination, he turns it back on her.
01:30:01.800Well, you're saying that you wrote a letter
01:30:03.960saying that you wanted a continue relationship.
01:33:01.840Not guilty on both counts. Andrea Reynolds, the woman who spent three years fighting to free him,
01:33:08.780begins to cry. Klaus von Bülow, convicted three years earlier and sentenced to 30 years in prison,
01:33:17.100walks out of the courthouse a free man. That evening, Klaus sits down with Newswatch 10
01:33:22.880for his first interview since the acquittal. When he is asked what he thinks actually happened to
01:33:28.380his wife, his answer is not triumphant. I don't know. I know that I'm totally convinced by the
01:33:38.720medical picture i know i didn't do anything an acquittal is not the same as innocence
01:33:45.620a jury has found only that the state did not prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt
01:33:50.880it has not found that no one harmed sonny von bulow and it answers none of the questions at
01:33:57.280the center of this case dennis roberts the rhode island attorney general who prosecuted the first
01:34:03.220trial, makes this distinction. It's important, I think, for our viewers to note that being found
01:34:10.240not guilty because there is a reasonable doubt is a long way from being found innocent.
01:34:15.860The trial judge, Corinne Grand, will say privately that in her view, it was not even a close case,
01:34:21.880that Klaus simply did not try to kill Sonny. Sonny's children see it the other way around.
01:34:28.840The day of the verdict, they step up to a bank of microphones.
01:34:32.360We are disappointed with the jury's verdict, but we know that this jury was not permitted to hear all of the evidence that was admitted at the first trial.
01:34:39.800At the start of the second trial, the jury had toured the darkened halls of Clarendon Court, walking the layout of the alleged crime scenes.
01:34:48.080While that jury is out deliberating, Sonny's children, Ala and Alexander, invite journalist Dominic Dunn, who had known Sonny since she was a debutante and has covered the whole affair, to spend the night at Clarendon Court.
01:35:04.360He finds Sonny's bedroom kept exactly as it was the night of the second coma.
01:35:09.500He finds the twin beds pushed together and made up with Sonny's porto sheets.
01:35:14.060An old photograph of Klaus looking almost noble in a silver frame on his side of the bed and in a closet beside her evening gowns, the Christmas presents from 1980, still wrapped, the festive paper gone faded and limp.
01:35:33.560One from Sonny's oldest friend, one from her dead mother.
01:35:37.460On Klaus's bedside table, there is a handsome box.