The Megyn Kelly Show - The Trials of Claus von Bülow： The Coma at Clarendon Court — Ep. 1 ｜ MK Confidential

00:00:00.000 Clarendon Court is one of the grandest houses on one of the grandest streets in America.

00:00:12.200 The mansion's wrought iron gates form the backdrop of Grace Kelly's final movie before she retires

00:00:17.980 to become the Princess of Monaco, a beautiful, wealthy, high-class woman marrying into aristocracy,

00:00:25.120 a kind of modern fairy tale. In 1980, the Newport, Rhode Island mansion belongs to a real-life,

00:00:32.660 beautiful, wealthy, high-class woman and her aristocrat husband. But behind those wrought

00:00:38.660 iron gates and gold inlaid doors, the real tale is grim. It is the morning of December 21st.

00:00:47.020 The winter sun shines on the sandstone walls of Clarendon Court, an oceanfront property exposed

00:00:52.500 to the bitter wind off the water. Inside, a 49-year-old woman lies unconscious on the cold

00:00:59.020 marble floor of her bathroom. She liked to sleep in a cold room, and the night before, she had

00:01:05.180 asked for her windows to be left open to the Atlantic. With the wind chill well below zero,

00:01:10.180 the room turned frigid. By morning, she has gone ice cold to the touch. Her body temperature falls

00:01:17.440 into the low 80s. Her heart stops. The paramedics bring her back, but only part of the way.

00:01:25.020 Martha Von Bulow, the woman everyone calls Sunny, falls into a coma. She will never regain

00:01:32.660 consciousness. This would be a private tragedy if not for an eerie wrinkle. This exact scene

00:01:38.820 has happened before. One year earlier, almost to the day, in the same house, in the same wing,

00:01:45.640 the same woman was found unconscious on the same floor. That time, a doctor reached her in time.

00:01:53.600 That time she woke up. One woman, two Christmases, two comas, and in between them, a husband,

00:02:01.800 a devoted maid, a locked closet, and a small black bag that the state of Rhode Island will

00:02:07.980 one day hold up in a courtroom and call the weapon. The man at the center of it is Sonny's

00:02:14.380 husband, a Danish-born aristocrat named Klaus von Bülow. Twice a jury will be asked whether

00:02:21.780 he tried to murder his wife. Twice the jury will be shown nearly the same evidence. This is the

00:02:28.820 story of a case that ended and then ended again. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.

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00:03:48.920 promo code Megan, or use the link in our description. To understand how two medical

00:03:54.880 emergencies one year apart become allegations of attempted murder, we have to start with the

00:04:00.880 marriage. From the beginning, it is a match of opposites. Klaus von Bülow is not born an

00:04:07.280 aristocrat. He is not even born a Bülow. He comes into the world as Klaus Borberg in Copenhagen in 0.97

00:04:15.080 the summer of 1926. His father, Sven Borberg, is a Danish playwright and drama critic, a clever,

00:04:22.940 cultured man whose sympathy for Nazi Germany will destroy his life and reputation. He admires the

00:04:30.060 Germans, and he goes on admiring them after they occupied Denmark in 1940. He dines, as his son 0.66

00:04:37.120 will one day put it, with the wrong people. In Klaus's own words years later, his father, quote,

00:04:43.180 gave a good name to a bad cause. When the war ends, the reckoning comes. Sven Borberg is tried

00:04:50.740 as a Nazi collaborator and convicted. The conviction is later overturned on appeal,

00:04:55.840 but the name Borberg, once perfectly respectable, has become an embarrassment. So Klaus escapes it.

00:05:03.560 He takes the name of his mother's father, Fritz Bulow, a former Danish minister of justice,

00:05:10.220 a name that stands for precisely the respectability his father's name has lost.

00:05:15.780 Then there's the Vaughan. It comes later, and how it got there has fascinated people ever since.

00:05:22.820 To much of the press, it is an embellishment, a whisper of old German nobility attached to a

00:05:29.620 borrowed name by a man assembling himself for the world. Klaus tells it differently. He says

00:05:36.460 the Bulows are entitled to the Vaughan by blood, and that it was Sonny who wanted her second 0.97

00:05:41.900 husband to carry one. Sonny's former in-laws, the Vaughan Auerzbergs, say he has no right to it at

00:05:48.360 all. What no one disputes is the effect. By the time he reaches the drawing rooms of London and

00:05:54.700 New York, the aristocrat is, at least in part, a work of his own composition. He studies law at

00:06:02.420 Cambridge, goes to work as an aide to J. Paul Getty, then the richest man in the world. He is

00:06:08.360 tall, polished, quick with a dry, cutting wit, the ideal plus one for a dinner party. In society,

00:06:15.500 they call the Copenhagen native the Great Dane. Years later on trial, Klaus would itemize the

00:06:22.660 ingredients of his own mystique with the detachment of a collector. I think there are certain aspects

00:06:28.780 like the aura of the name Newport. My wife's first marriage gives it a certain cutis. My work

00:06:36.780 years past for Mr. Getty gives it a certain interest. One of the lawyers who would eventually

00:06:42.320 represent him, Alan Dershowitz, describes the two men inside Klaus. It's almost as if there

00:06:48.480 are two Klaus von Willows, and he presses a button when he walks into a room. There's the

00:06:51.580 public austere Klaus von Willow, which he sits there, as his current woman friend put it, as if

00:06:58.260 he were a mortician with an umbrella up his back. And then there's the warm Klaus von Willow, very

00:07:04.020 curing? Sunny is the money. She's born Martha Sharp Crawford in 1931, the only child of a

00:07:12.800 utilities magnet who dies when she is only four years old and leaves her something on the order

00:07:18.400 of $75 million, a staggering fortune in any era, and especially in the years this story takes place,

00:07:26.120 an inheritance that would be worth nearly $2 billion by today's standards. She is shy,

00:07:32.640 private and happiest out of the spotlight. The writer Dominic Dunn knew her for years before

00:07:38.940 she was found on that bathroom floor. Sonny von Beulow was one of America's great heiresses. She

00:07:44.820 was a very beautiful woman. I had been to Sonny von Beulow's coming out party when she was a

00:07:49.780 debutante. In 1957, Sonny marries an Austrian prince, Alfred von Auerzberg, and has two children,

00:07:57.460 Ala and Alexander. By the mid-60s, thanks in part to his infidelities and her homesickness,

00:08:05.020 that marriage is over. She brings her children to America, and in 1966, marries Klaus. A year later,

00:08:13.260 they have their own daughter, Cosima. And away from the gowns and the society columns,

00:08:19.120 Sonny's days have an ordinary, regular routine to them. She wakes late, near 11, and spends the

00:08:25.640 first hour of every morning on the telephone with her mother. She shops, she lunches, she changes

00:08:31.260 into lounging clothes and watches television. She keeps to herself. And at night she sleeps

00:08:37.500 surrounded by her dogs, a pair of Labradors up on the bed. The family lives on Sonny's money.

00:08:44.400 Everyone in Newport understands the arithmetic, which no one mentions until it is admitted inside

00:08:50.540 a courtroom. Clarendon Court, the oceanfront mansion, which they call a cottage, is hers.

00:08:58.200 The 14-room apartment on Fifth Avenue is hers. The staff, the cars, the season in Newport,

00:09:04.140 the whole life among princes and industrialists, all of it is hers. Klaus draws a comfortable

00:09:11.600 income, about $120,000 a year, but it comes out of a trust she sets up for him, which is another

00:09:18.760 way of saying it is an allowance. Among the old families, quietly, he is regarded as a kept man

00:09:25.840 and there is between them a prenuptial agreement with terms that will one day prove enormously

00:09:32.100 important. If Klaus and Sonny divorce, Klaus walks away with almost nothing. If Sonny dies,

00:09:39.720 well, that is another matter entirely. But if Sonny was dead, then he would have title to a

00:09:46.760 house in Rhode Island, their wonderful apartment in Manhattan, and a great deal of money.

00:09:53.200 Sonny's stepfather, the big game hunter Russell Aitken, does not hide his contempt. He tells

00:10:00.640 Dominic Dunn, on the record, Klaus is a Cambridge-educated con man with legal training, 0.99

00:10:06.760 amoral, greedy as a wolverine, and cold-blooded as a snake. And I apologize, Aitken adds, 0.97

00:10:13.660 to the snake. One friend puts it to Dunn this way, quote, the problem with Klaus is that he does not

00:10:19.820 dwell in the palace of truth. He's a fake. Klaus is a Trump loi, a trick of the eye, something painted 0.72

00:10:27.760 to look like what it is not. One person sees this marriage from the inside every day. Her name is

00:10:35.120 Maria Schrollhammer, and she is Sonny's personal maid, a small graying German woman who speaks in

00:10:42.420 heavily accented English and has been at Sonny's side for 23 years. She is fiercely loyal to Sonny.

00:10:50.180 So protective is she of Sonny's privacy that she will refuse to tell even Klaus's own lawyers

00:10:56.300 that Sonny once had a facelift because she had promised Sonny she would never tell.

00:11:02.080 If anyone sees the marriage up close, it's Maria. I'm not going to answer the question because I

00:11:07.920 By the late 1970s, the Von Bulo marriage is cold.

00:11:14.180 Separate bedrooms, separate routines, and Sunny is not well.

00:11:18.960 Her doctors diagnose reactive hypoglycemia.

00:11:22.620 Her blood sugar can crash on its own, and when it does, she turns confused and unsteady and slurred,

00:11:28.620 the way a person does when they've had far too much to drink.

00:11:32.680 She keeps herself going on sweets and aspirin and sedatives like Valium and Secanal,

00:11:38.740 and on alcohol her body can barely handle.

00:11:42.060 It is a real and documented illness, 0.57

00:11:44.580 and it will also one day give the defense a natural explanation for everything that happens to her. 1.00

00:11:51.260 And there is another woman.

00:11:53.540 By the late 70s, Klaus is having an affair with Alexandra Isles.

00:11:58.540 She is not just, as the papers will call her, a soap opera actress,

00:12:02.860 though she does play one on the gothic serial Dark Shadows.

00:12:06.820 Alexandra is royalty, the daughter of a countess, schooled alongside Sonny herself.

00:12:13.140 The family would learn of the affair and testify to how they found out.

00:12:18.060 Klaus told them.

00:12:19.040 I then asked him about Alexandra Isles specifically.

00:12:24.260 He told me that there had been a relationship.

00:12:26.820 And Isles, by most accounts, was pressing Klaus to make a choice.

00:12:31.140 I said, would six months be suitable?

00:12:36.640 He asked me to marry him.

00:12:37.840 That is the pressure Klaus is under by 1980.

00:12:41.060 A marriage that has gone cold and a mistress who wants a decision.

00:12:45.820 Leaving Sonny for another woman would mean leaving the life her money pays for. 0.85

00:12:50.640 Leaving Sonny dead would not.

00:12:52.600 Plenty of men have affairs and unhappy marriages and never harm anyone.

00:12:57.320 That alone proves nothing.

00:12:59.140 But it is the shape of a situation that investigators years later will recognize as motive.

00:13:06.220 The first collapse comes at Christmas 1979 at Clarendon Court.

00:13:11.600 Sunny fades over a long day and Maria, who has cared for her for two decades, can see her lady sinking.

00:13:18.460 I went to her, and I saw that her right arm was hanging out of the bed, and I took her arm, and the arm was ice cold.

00:13:28.700 She hardly could breathe anymore, and I thought she would stop any minute now.

00:13:35.220 I got very scared she would die, and first I asked Mr. von Willow to help me to put her up, and he said he couldn't help me.

00:13:45.300 So I just picked her up, and I was holding her in my arms until the doctor came.

00:13:52.040 Here's the chronology that will trouble everyone later.

00:13:55.440 By Maria's account, she urges Klaus for hours.

00:13:59.240 He first telephones the doctor only in the early afternoon and leaves a message.

00:14:03.600 When the doctor calls him back, Klaus tells him only that Sonny is sleeping off a night of drinking and is told to keep watching her.

00:14:11.220 Not until around six that evening, when her breathing turns to a rattle, does Klaus let

00:14:16.420 the doctor be called for real. The local physician who answers, Dr. Janice Galitis, arrives at the

00:14:23.100 same moment as the ambulance. Galitis clears Sunny's throat with his fingers, strikes her chest,

00:14:29.260 and does CPR until Sunny's heart restarts. He saves her life by a matter of minutes.

00:14:35.400 Within a day, Sunny is awake and recovering. And then Klaus does something a little strange.

00:14:41.100 Weeks later, on January 22nd, 1980, he sits down and writes the doctor a careful letter.

00:14:48.260 His mother-in-law feels he was slow to get help, so Klaus lays out the timeline his own way,

00:14:54.040 and then asks the doctor two direct questions. Have I stated everything fairly? And was I to

00:15:01.080 blame? Two weeks later, Galetus writes back that the collapse was unpredictable, and that by

00:15:07.300 recognizing the change in Sonny's condition and calling him, Klaus saved her life. To investigators

00:15:13.900 who read it later, this looks like a man collecting protection on paper, the way other men collect

00:15:18.920 receipts. In February 1980, Maria is cleaning a closet in the Fifth Avenue apartment when she

00:15:25.980 comes across a soft traveling case that Klaus carries back and forth to Newport each week.

00:15:31.420 It is open. Inside it is a smaller case, black vinyl, about six inches long with a zipper around

00:15:39.180 it. Maria opens it. Inside is a little pharmacy, pills and vials. She calls in Sonny's daughter,

00:15:48.040 Ala, and the two women take careful notes. Prescriptions from a Madison Avenue pharmacy,

00:15:54.160 one bottle made out to a Leslie Baxter, another one made out to Klaus von Bülow at an address

00:16:00.220 that does not exist. Maria gets a little of the powder and liquid to Sonny's doctor of nearly

00:16:05.200 30 years, Dr. Richard Stock. He identifies them, Valium and a barbiturate, Secobarbital.

00:16:14.120 In April, Sonny is hospitalized again, weak and disoriented. The doctors point once more to her

00:16:20.660 blood sugar. Then on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, Maria goes back into the black bag. This time,

00:16:27.500 Next to the familiar vials, there is something new, a small bottle labeled insulin and syringes.

00:16:35.820 Neither Klaus nor Sonny is diabetic. Maria takes the bottle to Sonny's son, Alexander.

00:16:41.900 There was a bottle of insulin added, a syringe and needles. I called Alexander insulin for what? Insulin.

00:16:52.480 Insulin is the reason this bag matters.

00:16:55.180 To the investigators who eventually build the case, it looks almost ideal for a killer.

00:17:01.220 A large enough insulin dose can drive a person's blood sugar into a fatal coma.

00:17:06.420 And once it has done its work, it is very hard to prove after the fact that an injection ever happened.

00:17:12.100 For now, it is a bottle that has no business in this house.

00:17:15.880 sitting in the private bag of a man whose wife has already suffered one unexplained collapse

00:17:21.280 that nearly killed her. The insulin is not the only alarm that winter. In early December,

00:17:26.920 Sunny takes so much aspirin, she says for a sinus headache, that she is hospitalized for

00:17:32.160 about a week with aspirin poisoning. Around the same time, there is a night when Klaus

00:17:37.240 knocks on Maria's door and tells her not to get excited, but that something has happened.

00:17:43.200 Maria will later say she entered the room and found Sonny in bed full with blood,

00:17:49.060 with a wound at the back of her head and blood on the pillow and the carpet.

00:17:53.700 Klaus says Sonny got dizzy and fell.

00:17:56.400 Depending on who's telling it, this is either a woman being harmed inside her own home

00:18:00.820 or a fragile, sick woman leaning on pills and drink coming apart on her own.

00:18:07.600 Then, almost a year to the day later, comes the second coma.

00:18:12.420 December 20th, 1980. The family is together at Clarendon Court. Over dinner, Sunny insists

00:18:19.900 on an ice cream sundae with caramel sauce, exactly the kind of sugar her doctors have told her to

00:18:26.280 avoid. Afterward, they go out to the movies to see Dolly Parton in 9 to 5 and then come home.

00:18:33.700 Klaus goes off to his study. Sunny stays up with Alexander and Cosima. As the evening wears on,

00:18:40.660 Sunny's speech starts to slur and thicken. She can't quite hold a conversation. Her son helps

00:18:47.880 her up to her bedroom and gets her into bed. Then Alexander goes back out to meet friends at a bar.

00:18:53.580 When he leaves, his mother is unwell but talking. The next morning, she does not come down. Sunny

00:19:01.740 is a late sleeper, but after 11 o'clock, Klaus goes up to check on her. He comes back down a few

00:19:07.440 minutes later and motions to Alexander, who follows him upstairs. They find her on the marble

00:19:13.700 floor of the bathroom, unconscious. Her head near the base of the toilet, her lips swollen and

00:19:20.460 bleeding, the sink tap still running. Klaus puts a finger under her nose and says she is still

00:19:26.440 breathing and goes to call for help. Alexander touches his mother's neck, feels that she is

00:19:32.060 ice cold and covers her with a fur throw. The first responders would never forget the scene.

00:19:41.400 Soon as I walked in the room, Nelpy sighed her. She was in trouble. There was no blood anywhere

00:19:45.900 in the bathroom. Six minutes later, the ambulance arrives and takes her with Klaus riding along

00:19:50.740 to the Newport Hospital emergency room. Sunny's body temperature is 81 degrees, her pulse barely

00:19:58.540 there. A few minutes after she arrives, her heart stops, and it takes two doctors to bring her back.

00:20:05.340 From Newport, she is moved to a specialist hospital in Boston, and the scans come back

00:20:11.000 with the answer, no one wants. What the responders remembered was the husband. Mr. Von Bulo looked at

00:20:19.440 This person we identified as his wife with ice, cold, blue eyes, and there was absolutely no feeling.

00:20:29.760 He just sat there.

00:20:30.560 The doctors can restart Sonny's heart.

00:20:33.580 They cannot bring back the woman her children knew.

00:20:37.000 She's alive and breathing and gone.

00:20:41.060 And this time, there is no letter, no relief, no narrow escape.

00:20:47.200 There are only questions about what happened in that house the night before.

00:20:52.300 Sonny's family does not accept this as bad luck.

00:20:56.560 In the New York hospital where she is moved, a neurologist tells Alexander and Ala that in his judgment their mother's coma was caused by injected insulin.

00:21:05.340 And 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.

00:21:24.080 The calls only stop when Sonny is taken off the respirator and keeps breathing on her own.

00:21:30.400 So the children decide to act.

00:21:32.500 It is Alexander who says out loud what the others are thinking.

00:21:36.660 Their half-sister, Cosima, is a teenager and she is living under the same roof

00:21:41.180 as the man they now suspect of trying to murder her mother.

00:21:45.460 Can they leave Cosima there?

00:21:47.780 My mother is a very trusting person.

00:21:50.040 I think nobody really could believe that somebody could be plotting to kill you

00:21:55.340 while at the same time they're being nice to you and telling you they love you.

00:22:01.000 The family's banker, Morris Gurley, urges caution. Before anyone accuses anyone, he says,

00:22:07.440 they should do this quietly and properly and hire a professional. So they hire Richard Q,

00:22:13.780 a former district attorney of Manhattan. His job is not to go to the police, not yet,

00:22:20.680 and not to go to the press. His job is to build the case the family believes is there,

00:22:27.380 Statement by statement.

00:22:28.800 They felt there was the need for somebody who knew something about criminal justice

00:22:34.440 and who could conduct some further investigation and do it discreetly.

00:22:39.940 They wanted no publicity unless or until ultimately there was proof of Klaus's guilt.

00:22:48.540 Q sits down first with Alexandra and Ala, and then with Maria.

00:22:52.920 And Maria tells him about that bag, the bottles, the syringes, the insulin with no patient.

00:23:02.040 Everything the family's suspicion has fastened onto keeps leading back to the same place.

00:23:07.220 The small black case Klaus carries between the houses

00:23:10.940 and that Maria last saw inside a locked closet at Clarendon Court.

00:23:16.420 To prove anything, someone is going to have to open that closet.

00:23:19.840 Alex said he'd go up and look for the bag.

00:23:23.960 And we had a private investigator, a very skilled one, with whom I'd worked, Eddie Lambert.

00:23:28.500 And I said, no, we'd send Eddie with him, really to protect Alex in case anything untoward happened.

00:23:36.640 On a January day in 1981, they do it.

00:23:41.540 Alexander, the investigator, and a locksmith drive to the shuttered mansion,

00:23:46.440 and the locksmith opens the locked closet.

00:23:50.140 Inside is the bag.

00:23:52.200 In their haste, they take no photographs and lift no fingerprints,

00:23:56.280 a detail the defense will one day make a great deal of.

00:24:00.080 But for now, they simply take the black bag.

00:24:02.720 We knew that there was a pouch and a metal box in my stepfather's closet

00:24:06.920 containing a needle, which then turned out to have insulin and amobarbital on it.

00:24:12.140 There were several other things that had led to suspicions.

00:24:14.800 everything put together made us believe that we had to go to the police. The family's own doctor

00:24:19.980 tests the bag, finds insulin on the used needle, and tells them plainly, either you take this to

00:24:27.780 the police or I will. And so the case passes to the Rhode Island State Police and to a detective

00:24:33.780 named Jack Reese, who starts over from the beginning. When he interviews Alexander, one

00:24:40.640 thing lands hard the young man's honesty about the limits of what he actually saw if he was so

00:24:47.440 determined to build a case against his stepfather it would have been very easy for him to say i saw

00:24:53.380 the insulin uh he did not uh to me that uh led to his credibility the detective talks to his

00:25:01.400 partner and decides to set a trap for klaus the police already have the black bag with a pharmacy

00:25:07.980 inside. They have the used needle, and they have a husband who may still believe both are locked

00:25:13.680 away inside Clarendon Court. So Detective Jack Rees and his partner drive to the von Bulow's

00:25:20.200 place in Manhattan and park outside the apartment and wait for Klaus, just watching for their chance.

00:25:28.060 Rees sits in his car, ready to confront Klaus, to ask him a question, to push him, and then watch

00:25:33.740 and see what he does next. What will Klaus do when he thinks no one is watching? That's next time

00:25:40.860 on MK Confidential.

The Megyn Kelly Show - July 28, 2026

The Trials of Claus von Bülow： The Coma at Clarendon Court — Ep. 1 ｜ MK Confidential

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