The Megyn Kelly Show - The Trials of Claus von Bülow： The Black Bag — Ep. 2 ｜ MK Confidential

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00:00:25.860 Lieutenant Detective Jack Reese of the Rhode Island State Police and his partner are staking

00:00:32.500 out Klaus Von Bulo. They are set up outside the Von Bulo's place in Manhattan. When Klaus finally

00:00:39.060 comes up on the sidewalk outside the couple's Fifth Avenue apartment, the detective quickly

00:00:43.960 confronts him, questioning him with no warning and no lawyers around. I didn't want an interview

00:00:51.680 where he had an opportunity to think over what he would say to us.

00:00:56.280 So I thought that the best way to do that was to take him by surprise.

00:00:59.920 He was obviously very nervous.

00:01:02.060 Near the end, the detective slips in one more question, almost an afterthought.

00:01:07.620 Whether Sonny would ever have had a reason to use insulin.

00:01:12.220 Years later, Jack Reese describes the exchange to journalist Bill Curtis. 0.81

00:01:17.060 You know, I asked a kind of a ridiculous question.

00:01:19.420 And I said, you don't suppose that your wife were using insulin for any reason? 0.90

00:01:24.700 And he said, by God, that's the last thing she would need.

00:01:28.480 That clinched it for the detective.

00:01:31.240 I said to my partner, mark my words, he's going back for that black bag.

00:01:35.600 Within three days, Detective Reese's prediction comes true.

00:01:40.280 Klaus von Bülow drives back up to Newport, Rhode Island, to Clarendon Court,

00:01:45.020 the shuttered oceanfront mansion where Sonny collapsed.

00:01:49.020 The state police follow Klaus, this time with a warrant.

00:01:53.100 Reese rings the bell for a second interview,

00:01:55.800 and while two detectives keep Klaus talking in one room,

00:01:59.040 other cops go through the house.

00:02:01.320 During the search, officers make several observations.

00:02:04.920 On the desk in Klaus's study, one of them notices a scratch pad.

00:02:09.460 Two words are written on it, black box.

00:02:13.020 Then officers come upon Klaus's closet, standing open and unlocked.

00:02:18.140 Inside it, police find a small black metal box, the one Maria had described, the box that held

00:02:25.120 the little black bag. Sometime during the police interview, Klaus excuses himself for a few minutes.

00:02:31.060 When the detectives look again, the closet has been relocked and the scratch pad is gone.

00:02:38.900 But the bag is not in that box. It has not been for weeks. Sunny's grown son from her first

00:02:45.740 marriage, Alexander and the locksmith have already carried it out. And by now it is in an evidence

00:02:52.220 room in Providence. Whatever Klaus went upstairs to do, he came back down without it. The way

00:02:59.280 he surprised that he hadn't found the black bag and he was probably a little concerned that he

00:03:04.420 may have misplaced him. The detectives never saw Klaus open that closet and they never saw him

00:03:10.140 reach for the bag. What they had was a relocked door, a now-missing notepad, and a man who had

00:03:17.260 driven 90 miles to a closed-up house in January. It is not proof, but it's enough for Detective

00:03:24.620 Jack Reese. A year before, all the family had was a maid's bad feeling about a case full of pills.

00:03:31.500 Now the state of Rhode Island has the bag, the needle inside it, and a suspect.

00:03:37.180 I'm Megan Kelly. This is MK Confidential. 0.56

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00:04:56.240 In July of 1981, a Rhode Island grand jury indicts Klaus von Bülow on two counts of

00:05:03.120 assault with intent to murder.

00:05:04.820 one count for each of the two comas. A week later, he surrenders for arraignment,

00:05:10.520 pleads not guilty, and is released on $100,000 bail. When Klaus is arraigned,

00:05:16.640 he gives the only answer he will give in the entire case.

00:05:21.440 You are charged with two comas. Count one, assault with attempted murder. Count two,

00:05:27.040 assault with attempted murder. How do you plead? I'm not guilty.

00:05:31.580 the trial opens in newport in february of 1982 the state has to prove two separate crimes a year

00:05:40.620 apart the christmas sunny nearly died in 1979 and the christmas she did not wake up in 1980

00:05:48.320 still ready to proceed yes the state is ready to proceed been ready to proceed

00:05:52.760 rhode island has just let television cameras into its courtrooms so the trial of klaus von

00:05:59.360 Bulow becomes something the country has never quite seen. A crime story the whole nation can

00:06:04.720 watch, nearly gavel to gavel, like a soap opera. A maid, a mistress, a fortune, a needle, and an

00:06:13.840 aristocratic, silent defendant the state calls an attempted murderer. Downtown Newport becomes,

00:06:21.200 in the words of one man who was there, a madhouse. The old colonial state house beside the courthouse

00:06:27.040 is turned into a press center. Sketch artists and reporters fight for one of the 80 seats inside.

00:06:33.440 The jury that files in is not made up of Newport's summer people. It is drawn from the year-round town,

00:06:40.440 working Rhode Islanders, mostly Catholic. It's the kind of jury Klaus's own side 0.57

00:06:45.760 privately doubts can ever be a jury of his peers. And at the center of it, ramrod straight and

00:06:53.500 immaculate, sits Klaus Van Bulo, giving the reporters almost nothing, except now and then

00:07:00.500 a dry line about the spectacle he has become.

00:07:04.380 This simply is the first time I'd ever been exposed to the media. It was new to me, and I

00:07:10.460 think I belong to the kind of people who like to be in the newspaper the day they are born,

00:07:15.420 the day they get married, and the day they die. I suddenly realized that this was a futile wish.

00:07:21.240 for weeks the trial is the best show in the country the networks carry it on cnn more than

00:07:28.700 300 000 viewers routinely tune in a lot for that time when actress alexandra isles of the hit tv

00:07:35.600 show dark shadows takes the stand the audience climbs past 600 000 newspaper artists sketch

00:07:43.620 klaus in his dark well-cut suits and strangers gather on the courthouse steps some of them

00:07:49.380 wearing buttons that read free Klaus, others just as sure he is exactly what the state says he is,

00:07:56.340 an attempted murderer. The town of Newport itself cannot agree. The old families who summer behind

00:08:02.860 the same hedges are split down the middle over whether the man is a wronged husband or a fortune

00:08:08.740 hunter who finally reached too far, and they say so, at their dinner tables and to any reporter

00:08:15.280 who will write it down. Klaus has pleaded not guilty. He makes one more choice that will shape

00:08:22.120 the whole trial. He will never take the stand. Across the whole trial, the jury, the 12 people

00:08:28.740 deciding his fate, will not hear a single word from the accused. Inside the family, the sides

00:08:35.240 are already fixed. Sonny's two older children brought the case, Allah and Alexander. The only

00:08:42.160 person in the family standing with Klaus is Cosima, the daughter he and Sonny had together,

00:08:47.640 still just a teenager. There was never a time where I doubted it. And

00:08:52.360 we would always talk openly about what was going on. And just seeing him go through the anguish

00:09:00.600 of it all and seeing him with the lawyers just saying, you can investigate anything. I really

00:09:06.840 don't have anything to hide was enough for me to believe it. Klaus sits through it

00:09:12.120 all with a stillness that unsettles the people around him. He is unfailingly courteous to the

00:09:18.260 reporters in the hallway. Dominic Dunn covers the trial for Vanity Fair magazine whose readers

00:09:24.480 cannot get enough. He describes a defendant who seems less like a man fighting for his life

00:09:31.100 than a man watching with mild interest a drama about someone else. The prosecutor is Stephen

00:09:39.360 Famiglietti. And in his opening, he tells the jury exactly what the state means to prove.

00:09:45.740 The state will prove was a clandestine, subtle, and ingenious attempt on the part of her husband,

00:09:52.220 Klaus von Dulo, to terminate her life, to murder her by secretly injecting her with a drug called

00:09:59.160 insulin. It is a large promise, and Famiglietti knows the case is harder than it sounds. No

00:10:06.140 eyewitnesses, no confession, a woman in a coma who cannot testify, and weeks of medical testimony

00:10:13.380 ahead of him. I thought it was an extremely difficult case, and primarily because it was

00:10:18.700 a circumstantial evidence case, meaning that there were no eyewitnesses to the alleged

00:10:23.480 criminal conduct, and there was so much medical testimony. The tougher job for the state is the

00:10:30.480 first coma, the one from which Sonny recovered. To make it a crime, and not just a bad night,

00:10:37.160 Famiglietti has to convince the jury that this was a first attempt, a rehearsal, for the next

00:10:43.020 Christmas when it worked. There's nothing better than ballpark evenings, but nothing worse than

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00:10:54.020 five, they'll pay out immediately. And the earlier you get paid, the earlier you can get another

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00:11:03.740 Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you or someone you know has concerns about gambling,

00:11:08.020 visit connectsontario.ca. Terms and conditions apply. The state's first witness is Sonny's own

00:11:14.000 son, Alexander, who gives the jury the story of the marriage from the inside. My stepfather said

00:11:20.380 that after my younger sister was born,

00:11:23.780 my mother was unable to have sex

00:11:26.780 and that he looked towards other women.

00:11:31.220 Did he mention any other woman, one woman in particular?

00:11:35.380 Alexandra Isles.

00:11:37.400 His sister, Ala, takes the stand and tells the jury

00:11:40.140 why her mother had begun talking about a divorce.

00:11:43.980 She felt he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown,

00:11:47.480 that he was blaming her for the fact that he'd been having no success in his professional life.

00:11:53.360 Then comes Maria Schralhammer, son he's made of 23 years. Maria has never once sat in a witness

00:12:00.860 box. And when she climbs into one now in a Newport courtroom in front of the television

00:12:06.420 cameras and a nation leaning in, she is going to do the one thing no detective and no doctor in

00:12:12.640 this case can do. She is going to look 12 jurors in the eye and tell them plainly what she saw

00:12:20.360 inside that house. She describes the black bag, the vials, and the small bottle of insulin she

00:12:28.560 says she found among the belongings of a woman who had low blood sugar, which can be caused by

00:12:35.260 too much insulin, and thus had no use for any more of it. Maria is a small, plain-spoken woman

00:12:43.020 with a heavy German accent, and by common agreement, she is the most important witness

00:12:48.000 the state has. She does not raise her voice. She just tells the jury what she saw. The defense

00:12:55.040 cross-examines her over parts of two days and does not move her a single inch. Then the doctors,

00:13:02.960 Sonny's own physician of nearly three decades, Dr. Richard Stock,

00:13:07.460 tells the jury what he believed had been done to her.

00:13:10.580 It was the surreptitious administration of insulin.

00:13:13.880 One of the country's foremost authorities on insulin, Dr. George Cahill of Harvard,

00:13:19.600 testifies that the second coma bears the mark of an injection,

00:13:23.380 one that no illness in Sonny's own body could produce.

00:13:28.880 The state puts the physical evidence beside him.

00:13:31.120 the used needle from the black bag, which the family's own doctor has found carried insulin at

00:13:38.040 its tip. And it puts a number in front of the jury. A blood test drawn the morning Sonny was

00:13:44.580 admitted showing an insulin level of 216, many times higher than normal, next to a blood sugar

00:13:52.220 that had crashed toward nothing. Then the family's banker, Morris Gurley, the trust officer who ran

00:13:59.540 Sonny's fortune, gives the jury the arithmetic. If Sonny dies, Klaus stands to inherit about

00:14:06.940 14 million dollars. If they divorce, the prenuptial agreement leaves him with almost nothing.

00:14:14.280 Sonny alive and divorced from Klaus is worth next to nothing to him. Sonny dead is worth a fortune.

00:14:22.060 The black bag itself is entered into evidence, its small pharmacy laid out on a table for the

00:14:27.680 jury to look at, the vials, the syringes, and the used needle the state calls the attempted murder

00:14:34.260 weapon. The medical case runs on for weeks. Doctors for the state and doctors for the defense

00:14:40.000 take the jury down into blood sugar readings and insulin levels and the exact chemistry of a body

00:14:45.840 shutting down, each side certain of the opposite conclusion. It is slow, technical, and fiercely

00:14:53.540 disputed what the jurors can weigh more plainly is the maid the money and the black bag on the

00:15:00.860 table in front of them then the state calls the other woman alexandra isles the mistress takes

00:15:08.260 the stand and the prosecutor asks her in front of the cameras whether she still thinks the charges

00:15:14.240 against the man she loved are nonsense you still think a speck of nonsense don't know i didn't hear

00:15:22.080 that answer? I don't know. Let me ask you this long last question, Mrs. Isles. Maybe you can't

00:15:28.640 answer. Do you still love the defender? I don't know. The defense is offered the chance to cross

00:15:39.800 examine her and turns it down. Klaus's lead lawyer, Harold Price Ferringer, tells the court he will

00:15:47.160 not put Mrs. Isles through any more questioning. The line going around the courthouse is that a

00:15:52.580 gentleman does not permit the cross-examination of his lover. She steps down. The defense's case 0.91

00:15:59.800 is that there was no crime here at all. That Sonny, with her drinking, her aspirin, her sedatives,

00:16:05.860 and her failing blood sugar, had done this to herself. What happened to her was not anyone's

00:16:12.180 fault by her own. And that sad fact will emerge in this case if the truth is to prevail.

00:16:18.580 To account for the insulin, the defense calls a former exercise instructor named Joy O'Neill,

00:16:25.640 who testifies that Sunny once told her years earlier that she injected insulin herself to

00:16:31.840 keep her weight down. It is the innocent account the defense has been looking for.

00:16:35.780 Then the prosecution produces the exercise studio's own appointment cards.

00:16:41.680 They show O'Neill had given Sonny a handful of sessions only, not the hundreds she had just described under oath.

00:16:50.820 Beyond O'Neill, the defense is thin.

00:16:53.900 Klaus doesn't testify.

00:16:55.520 His 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.

00:17:03.580 that a secretive, self-medicating woman who drank and swallowed aspirin by the fistful

00:17:09.200 was the only person who ever did Sonny von Bülow any harm. In his closing, defense attorney

00:17:16.200 Faringer goes after the way the black bag was found, a private search run by a family that

00:17:22.900 already believed Klaus guilty, with no police in the room and no fingerprints ever lifted.

00:17:28.520 Had fingerprints been taken off of that bag, off of those vials, off of those needles,

00:17:37.020 and Martha von Bülow's fingerprints were on those vials and on those needles,

00:17:41.340 wouldn't that be important to you?

00:17:43.160 It's a fair question, and it is the one the defense will build an entire second trial around.

00:17:49.220 But in this courtroom, the prosecutor answers it and gets the last word.

00:17:53.560 In his summation, Famiglietti reduces the case to one question.

00:18:12.620 Not a menu of innocent explanations, he tells the jurors.

00:18:16.200 One thing, true or false.

00:18:18.900 Did Klaus von Bülow try to murder his wife?

00:18:21.740 the jury goes out one day passes then a second outside the courthouse the two camps sit

00:18:30.040 Sonny's grown children wait on one side while Klaus's loyalists and the reporters who have

00:18:35.680 covered every hour of the trial on the other no one can read the silence coming out of the jury

00:18:41.200 room a third day a fourth the longer it runs the more the whispers start that the jury is divided

00:18:49.120 that the case could end in a hung jury that after everything the state may not have convinced all

00:18:55.160 12 jurors. A fifth day comes and goes then on the sixth day a verdict. The courtroom fills fast

00:19:04.600 Klaus in his usual chair his daughter Cosima not far away the cameras running. It is the morning of

00:19:11.820 March 16th, 1982.

00:19:14.780 The jury finds that the defendant, Klaus Van Bueel, guilty.

00:19:19.320 Guilty on both counts.

00:19:22.180 There are audible gasps in the courtroom.

00:19:24.980 Klaus does not move.

00:19:27.200 The cameras catch only a flicker across his face, a small twitch, there and gone.

00:19:33.960 Weeks later, a judge will sentence him to 30 years, 10 for the 1979 coma and 20 for 1980.

00:19:40.820 and lets him stay free on a million-dollar bail while he appeals.

00:19:46.400 Outside the courthouse, Sonny's children say what they have believed from the start.

00:19:51.460 We feel very strongly that he tried twice to murder our mother.

00:19:56.480 We believe that he deprived her of life as we know it,

00:19:59.660 deprived her of many years of happiness.

00:20:03.560 And that is the story.

00:20:05.700 A cash-poor Danish aristocrat marries a wealthy heiress,

00:20:09.080 lives lavishly on her fortune, falls in love with another woman, and stands to inherit $14

00:20:14.840 million if his wife dies. Twice at Christmas in the same house, the state says he tried to collect.

00:20:23.340 A maid noticed the bottle that did not belong. The woman's children refused to let it go,

00:20:30.140 and 12 ordinary people from Rhode Island looked past the title and the accent and convicted him.

00:20:37.540 The system worked.

00:20:39.000 A rich man tried to murder his wife, and he was caught.

00:20:42.600 Case closed.

00:20:44.360 Except it isn't, because the case does not end here, not by a long shot.

00:20:51.600 Everything the first jury believed, the maid's memory, the needle, the blood test, the $14

00:20:56.760 million, is about to be examined again, only this time by a Harvard law professor and 18

00:21:04.040 of his best and brightest students, and they are going to find questions no one in that first

00:21:10.880 courtroom even thought to ask. Just over two weeks after the guilty verdict, before Klaus has even

00:21:17.920 been sentenced, the phone rings in the professor's office on April Fool's Day. The man on the line

00:21:25.040 says he has just been convicted of trying to murder his wife, and he wants the professor to

00:21:30.420 take his case. The professor is certain it is a prank. He almost hangs up the phone. But then?

00:21:39.920 That's next time on MK Confidential, where we speak to the professor directly.

The Megyn Kelly Show - July 29, 2026

The Trials of Claus von Bülow： The Black Bag — Ep. 2 ｜ MK Confidential

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