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Season Five Home for the Holidays 10
137 Plays8 days ago
In Today’s Episode, we put together our Home for the Holiday cases.
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Sources:
Various News Sources Mentioned by Name
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Transcript
Content Warning and Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
The content you're about to hear may be graphic in nature. Listener discretion is advised.
Influence and Depth of Episodes
00:00:22
Speaker
This is True Crime XS.
00:00:29
Speaker
We get pretty deep into these episodes and I realize some of them have like spawned other media.
Introducing Martha Sharp Crawford's Story
00:00:39
Speaker
This story for me was really interesting because it starts with a pretty affluent person. Had you ever read about these guys like before we started talking about this one? now
00:00:54
Speaker
I did not know that much about the family here, but I wanted to start with the victim in this case, which depending on how you look at it, I guess your opinion can change as we talk about it. So this is a woman named Martha Sharp Crawford, and she was born in September of 1932. She was an heiress and a socialite. How her life starts, she's the only child of a man named George Crawford. George Crawford at one point in time was a chairman of a company called Columbia Gas and Electric. And his title sort of in history or his legacy is that he was a utilities magnet. He was a big deal in the utility world. His wife and Martha's mom
00:01:42
Speaker
was a woman named Anna Laurie Warmack. She had the distinction of having been born on her father's personal railway carriage in Manassas, Virginia in route from Hot Springs, Virginia up to New York. So mom in this situation, Annie, Annie Laurie, she was known as Choo Choo as a child because she had been born on a train.
Marriage into Austrian Royalty
00:02:06
Speaker
Her father passes away and she at three years old is worth of reported $100 million in 1935. I don't know how they do those numbers. I don't know if it's adjusted for inflation. I know you've always said that, like, that doesn't matter. Her mom, she got remarried. The man that she got remarried to you was a man named Russell Aitken, who was a known sculptor and writer. Now, Anna Laurie, in her own right, and she was the daughter
00:02:40
Speaker
of the founder of what was known as the International Shoe Company. The International Shoe Company today is a division of Furniture Brands International. So when they say Eris here for Martha shop Sharp Crawford, it is an Eris of the craziest nature. That is a lot of money between her parents. On July 20th in 1957,
00:03:09
Speaker
Martha gets married to a man named Alfred Edward Friedrich Binsons Martin Maria Alsberg. He is the son of Prince Alois Maria Joseph Alexander von Alsberg and the prince's wife Countess Henriette Maria Louise Laris von Monck.
00:03:35
Speaker
So she is marrying into Austrian, A-U-S-T-R-I-A-N royalty. And their family had once ruled over the print principality of Alresberg. But the Austrian empire had collapsed, and his family over time had become relatively impoverished. But technically, he was a prince.
00:04:02
Speaker
So this socialite had married a prince. Now, Alfred's older sister, who was Princess Henrietta von Auschberg. She had also married an heir. She had married Arndt von Boelen and Halbach. He was the last male heir of the Krupp company. They were the largest company in Europe at one point in time. They were a huge part of World War II. Martha and Alfred had met while he was teaching her to play tennis at a Swiss resort.
00:04:40
Speaker
So they had two children together. They named one of their children Anna Laurie after Martha's mom. She is actually the co-founder of the National Center for Victims of Crime, which I thought was kind of a cool thing. That's a 501c3 not-profit organization that's dedicated to providing advocacy for victims of all types of crime. She was married to Ralph Isham, who is the son of a diplomat named hayward isham He was a foreign service officer. He was a huge deal in ending the Vietnam conflict. Their other child was Alexander, and he was a co-founder of the National Center for Victims of Crime with his sister, Anna Laurie. And he married an investment banker named Nancy Louise Weinberg. In 1965, Martha and Alfred get divorced.
Suspicion and Medical Issues
00:05:36
Speaker
At that time, Martha's net worth was reported to be still over $75 million. dollars Now Prince Alfred, he's later going to die in 1992. He has a car accident in Austria in 1983, and he's in an irreversible coma for nine years, and he finally dies. That's more in the future from all of this.
00:05:56
Speaker
On June 6, 1966, Martha gets married again. She gets married to a man named Klaus von Bülow. Klaus von Bülow had been an aide to a man named J.P. Getty. Do you know who J.P. Getty was? No.
00:06:11
Speaker
Okay, so Jean-Paul Getty was a American-born British petroleum magnet. He founded the Getty Oil Company in 1942. He was the son of another oilman named George Getty. He was a very, very rich man. They get married at the Brick Presbyterian Church in New York City. They have a daughter, and I don't know how do you pronounce her name. She is still alive today. I think it's Cosima. It's C-O-S-I-N-A.
00:06:41
Speaker
And Cosima will eventually be married to Count Ricardo Pavicelli. Alright, by 1979, the marriage between Martha and Klaus is not going great. They have significant stresses and tensions in their marriage, and they start speaking about the possibility of getting divorced.
00:07:03
Speaker
On December 26, 1979, the whole family had gotten together at this mansion in Newport, Rhode Island that they owned. They were all there to celebrate Christmas together. Martha is found unresponsive, and she's rushed to the hospital where she slips into a coma. But they're able to revive her.
00:07:26
Speaker
After days of testing, doctors determined that the coma was the result of low blood sugar, and they diagnosed her as hypoglycemic. They warned her against overindulging in sweets or going too long without eating. Now, there's no foul play suspected at that moment. But in April of 1980, she's again hospitalized after she appears to be incoherent and disoriented.
00:07:56
Speaker
When this happens, the doctors reconfirm that she is suffering from reactive hypoglycemia. She is advised at this point to control her hypoglycemia by following a strict diet, limiting her sugar intake, and staying away from alcohol. So a year later, on December 21st of 1980, she's again celebrating Christmas with her family at this mansion. And the mansion was named Clarendon Court. This is in Newport, Rhode Island.
00:08:24
Speaker
Her family members observed her displaying confusion and a lack of coordination. They put her in bed, but the next morning, she's found unconscious on a bathroom floor. She's taken to the hospital where it became clear that she had suffered enough of a brain injury from whatever had happened to her that they believed that she would be in a persistent vegetative state.
00:08:51
Speaker
Clinically, what happened to her resembled a drug overdose, but some of the laboratory evidence done, specifically the blood testing, suggested that this is still a result of hypoglycemia. At this point in time,
00:09:07
Speaker
the lawyers get involved. The reason is there's so much money at stake. You have this Klaus and Martha maybe getting divorced, their children get involved. Because of all of this having happened at the same time they were having marital problems, her children become suspicious that her being in this persistent vegetative state or this coma this brain injury that she has, might have been the result of foul play by Klaus. Her two oldest children persuade Richard Caw, who's the former New York County District Attorney, to investigate the possibility that Klaus had attempted to murder their mom. So they gather all this evidence together, and they bring it over to the Rhode Island prosecutors for Newport. They present the case to a grand jury, and the grand jury returned an indictment.
00:10:01
Speaker
And in July of 1981, Klaus is charged with two counts of attempted murder. Okay, I'm starting here because ah this story has always been interesting to me. I don't know if you're very familiar with it. Klaus von Bülow and the story of Martha Sharp at that time, von Bülow, is interesting. Now, Martha is known as Sonny von Bülow, and their characters and literature are named after them. They are a huge deal. In fact, I think in ah the Lemony Snicket stories, ah Klaus and Sonia are named after them.
00:10:38
Speaker
Had you ever heard of any of this happening before? No. No, I didn't know anything about any of this. I get into these cases because it's like America's sort of aristocracy, so to speak, and their lives are fascinating to me. I think that this story would make the best limited series. It has been made into a movie before, ah but we're gonna talk a little bit about how these trials go and like and what happens kind of after them. um Alan Dershowitz, you know who Alan Dershowitz is, right?
00:11:13
Speaker
yes Okay, so he is Klaus's attorney at some point in here. I believe he gets hired on when he's like at Harvard to come over and work on the appeal. But let's talk a little bit about Klaus. So
The Trials of Klaus von Bülow
00:11:30
Speaker
Klaus was a son of a Danish author and playwright named Sven Borberg. And Klaus's mom was ah named Jana von Bülow Pluska. His father was accused of being a Nazi collaborator for activities during the Second World War and related to the German's occupation of Denmark. His father was later cleared. So Klaus goes to university, he gets a degree in law, and he becomes an apprentice in the legal profession.
00:12:02
Speaker
For reasons we don't necessarily know, Klaus, is he chooses to go by the last name Bülow instead of his father's surname, Borberg. Now, his mother was the daughter of Fritz Bülow von Plaskow, and he had been the Danish minister of justice from 1910 to 1913.
00:12:27
Speaker
He was the president of the Upper Chamber of the Danish Parliament from 1920 to 1922, and he was a member of the old, dino-German, noble, quote, Bülow family. He's originally from a place called Mecklenburg. Mecklenburg is a historical region in northern Germany. Bülow graduated from Trinity College at Cambridge.
00:12:52
Speaker
He practiced law in London in the 1950s, where he became the aide to J. Paul Getty. He had a lot of things that he did for Getty, but one of the things that he did that like really helped was he became very familiar with the economics of the oil industry, and this elevated him in Getty's eyes.
00:13:14
Speaker
Getty ends up writing about Bülow and said that he showed a remarkable forbearance and good nature as his occasional whipping boy. I thought this would be an insult. To me, it it kind of feels like that would be an insult. If somebody called you their whipping boy, would you be insulted? I feel like whipping boy is subjectively insulting and that anybody like saying otherwise, maybe they meant to say something else.
00:13:43
Speaker
When a prince was going through their education, like anyone who was considered to be in line for the heir to some form of throne or lineage, they would give them a whipping boy. So when the prince did something that ordinarily would get them in trouble with the tutor or the teacher or whoever had happened to catch him doing something,
00:14:12
Speaker
that was considered out of line or like considered to be, quote, bad behavior, the whipping boy would take the punishment because the prince would not be punished because his royal status as an heir or being in the ah lineage towards the the monarchy or the throne, the idea was that they were above the tutor and the tutor could not punish them.
00:14:39
Speaker
So the idea was that the prince would see their friend getting their butt beat and that it would provide like and ah ah the same motivation as them getting their own butt beat. That sounds about right for a society that would elevate somebody aristocratically.
00:14:59
Speaker
Yeah, the idea was that Klaus kind of took the brunt of what was happening with John Paul Getty at different times. Klaus von Bülow leaves being Getty's aide in 1968.
00:15:17
Speaker
Now, he had gotten married to Sonny, who was Martha in our and our previous setup. She goes by Sonny at this point in her life in 1966. He had been working off and on as a consultant to oil companies. And when he married Sonny, she ah obviously already has a son and a daughter from her previous marriage. Now, the way that this rolls out in terms of trials,
00:15:47
Speaker
In 1982, Klaus, he finally is arrested when he's charged for the attempted murders of Sonny by the Rhode Island grand jury. They charge him twice for two occasions and two consecutive years of two attempted murders. So they're saying that the most recent incident of her having low blood sugar or whatever you want to call this, was actually him drugging her with insulin. Kind of confusing, right? It's not confusing to me. Okay, well, so they're charging him for a 1979 incident and a 1980 incident where a doctor said, this is low blood sugar. buts type She's hypoglycemic. Right, and so that doesn't really make any sense, does it?
00:16:43
Speaker
for them to then seek an indictment. Right. And I can't help but wonder if this is financially motivated. But again, it's one of those things that like this story is weird. So the main medical and scientific evidence that is used against Klaus is that Sunny had low blood sugar But a blood test showed high insulin levels. Now this test is not repeated. There was a needle used as evidence against Klaus in court with the prosecution alleged that he had used it with a vial of insulin to try and kill his wife. His mistress of two years is a woman named Alexandra Iles. Do you know who Alexandra Iles is? I know as much about hers, I do the rest of them.
00:17:31
Speaker
She had been on Dark Shadows. So Dark Shadows, she played Victoria Winters. ah Dark Shadows was like a, it was a soap opera that was a little more edgy, but it was focused on the Collins family up in Collinsport, New York. And it ran from 1966 until 1971. And it was a soap opera that introduced, quote, supernatural and paranormal occurrences.
00:18:01
Speaker
So she had been a part of the soap opera playing a character, and he's been having an affair with her. Her testimony in court was that, quote, he said they had been having a long argument talk about divorce that had gone on late into the night, and she had drunk a great deal of eggnog. And then he told me I saw her take the second all.
00:18:28
Speaker
And then he went and said that the next day, when she was unconscious, that he watched her knowing that she was in a bad way all day, and watched her and watched her. And finally, when she was at the point of dying, he said that he couldn't go through with it, and he called the doctor to save her life. This having been said becomes a focal point later on. Secondly, an interesting thing It's a, it is a, it's queen old barbatons. It's second barbatons. It's a, it's a barbiturate derivative. He watched her take. Right. This trial goes on and Klaus is found guilty. He sentenced to 30 years in prison in 1982, but he appeals. And this is the point where he hires Alan Derswitch to come in and represent him.
00:19:18
Speaker
Now, Dershowitz had served as a consultant to the trial team, which had been run by a former federal prosecutor named Thomas Puccio. I just want to make sure that I completely understand this is attempted murder, right? these are Yeah, these are two counts of attempted murder. Like she didn't actually die.
00:19:42
Speaker
No, she did not die. Right. so he and And the indictment. But she is she's in a persistent vegetative state at the point of this trial. Right, but the charges are still attempted murder. Correct. And the testimony, the most damning testimony um that we've heard so far in this story is that he watched her take the medicine.
00:20:07
Speaker
Right, but that he didn't do anything about it. He watched her, he watched her, and he didn't do anything about it, knowing that she could potentially die from whatever she had, was going on with her. Right, and so, if you watch somebody take medicine, are you, I'm just saying, like, I don't know that that rises. I mean, if he crushed it and put it in her drink, like, you see what I'm saying? Right. To me, it's two different things.
00:20:37
Speaker
I agree with you. What Alexandra Iles brings up is the barbiturate. But what the prosecution has said is that he tried to kill her with insulin. Does that make sense? It's two different things that are happening. It's important for Lee. Right, with the testimony cut. Well, that's fine. Yeah.
00:20:54
Speaker
Dershowitz puts together a team to try and deal with Cloud von Bülow's appeal. Now, this is a crazy team. So first of all, you got Alan Dershowitz on there, who's a big name even now. But guess who else is on this team? It could be anybody. Why don't you tell us?
00:21:11
Speaker
So Jim Kramer is on here, the mad money guy that's like screams about ah ah finances today. He's a television personality today. So jim c cramer Jim Kramer is a Harvard lawsuit at the time. And so is Elliot Spitzer, who ends up being the 54th governor of New York. They're on this team for this appeal after the 1982 convention.
00:21:39
Speaker
So, Dershowitz and his team, they focus in on the discovery of a bag that contained needles and contained a vial of insulate. Now, Sunny's family had hired a private investigator to look into how she came to be in this coma. This is a guy named Edward Lambert. Edward Lambert, at the time, was working for Richard Kuh. This is who they went to and said, and I know you're a prosecutor in New York, but we really need something to take to the prosecutors in Rhode Island. How would you do this? And Edward Lambert had been told by several family members and at least one household employee that Klaus had recently been been seen locking up a particular closet in the the mansion at Clarendon Court that previously had always been left open.
00:22:31
Speaker
So the family, they hire a locksmith. Locksmith comes out to Clarendon Court and they're going to have this locksmith pick the closet lock to see what's inside. Now, the kids, they lie to the locksmith and they tell them that one of them had owned the house. They never say who, the boy or the girl, but they lie.
00:22:58
Speaker
So the three of them get there, and the locksmith insisted that they try again to find their key. So they they do some digging, and the lawyer is there with them, the von Bülow's lawyer. So Richard Koeff finds the key in Klaus's desk, and this key is able to unlock the closet. At this point, according to the private investigator, the locksmith, and the lawyer,
00:23:25
Speaker
In the original interviews, the locksmith gets paid for his trip and he leaves before the closet is actually opened. Later on, they recant that version and they insist that the locksmith had been with Edwin Lambert when he opens the door to the closet. This closet is where the bag of syringes and the insulin, which is used as the main evidence against Klaus von Bülow, had been found.
00:23:52
Speaker
So the Rhode Island Supreme Court gets a hold of this. And in 1984, it's presented to them and they decide to overturn the two convictions for attempted murder from the first trial. So now we move to a second trial. At this point, the the defense knows the prosecution's case and you've got a little beefier defense team working on this.
00:24:19
Speaker
They end up calling eight medical experts, all of whom are university professors, and they testify that Sunny lapsing into this state both times, so she she lapses into it in 79 and then again in 80, but they say that it's not been caused by insulin, but by a combination of ingested, not injected, drugs, alcohol, and chronic health conditions.
00:24:47
Speaker
Those experts were John Corona, who is the chairman of neurology at Cornell. Leo Del Cortivo, who was a ah former president of the U.S. Toxicology Association. Ralph DeFranzo, who had been at the medical school at Yale University. Kurt Debowski, who was a forensic pathology professor from University of Oklahoma. Daniel Foster, who had been at the med school for the University of Texas Southwestern. ah Daniel First, who was a
00:25:18
Speaker
medical professor at the School of Medicine at the University of Iowa, ah Harold Leibovitz, who was the director of clinical research at SUNY New York, ah Vincent Marks, who was a vice president at the Royal College of Pathologists and had been the president of Association of clinical biochemistry, and Arthur Rubinstein, who was a professor at the, he might have actually been a dean at the University of Chicago's medical school. Cortivo testified that the hypodermic needle had been tainted with insulin on the outside, but not on the inside. It would have been dipped into the insulin, but not injected into the insulin where it could have been filled and then injected through the flesh.
00:26:03
Speaker
because they said that putting it into the flesh would have wiped the outside clean. At the time that Sunny had been admitted to the hospital, which was the fourth time, it was three weeks before the Christmas incident that like lands her in her final coma. Doctors there showed that she had ingested at least 73 aspirin tablets.
00:26:29
Speaker
And that's a quantity that could only have been self-administered. And they felt like that indicated her state of mind at the time. Have you ever heard of somebody taking that many aspirin? No, but I've heard of people taking excessive amounts of aspirin to kill themselves. And since the blood is what the problem is. yeah And so you actually, like I would say, you can't die from that, but you absolutely can.
00:26:54
Speaker
Yeah, you absolutely can die from aspirin. So the aftermath of all of this is keys let go at this point. Now, multiple people along the way here recant their testimony from the first trial and they still think that the insulin was the most reasonable explanation for Sunny being in a coma, but none of them could say for sure what they had seen happening in the house. And Sunny's family remains convinced that Klaus had tried to
Family Wealth and Legal Disputes
00:27:28
Speaker
murder her. I feel like this entire thing is, um so this is what I would ask myself. If she was not this heiress, would any of this have happened? No, but in my, so the reason I picked this case is because I felt like it showed, first of all, quite a bit of privilege. In order for it to even get to the indictment, you're dealing with a lot of privilege.
00:27:51
Speaker
because they bring in this investigator and they bring in a prosecutor out of New York to kind of spoon feed them what they need to take to the Rhode Island prosecutor. If the family had paid that much attention to her mental health, they would not be in the situation. It was like afterwards, they decided they needed to pen this murder on this guy, and she's not even murdered.
00:28:17
Speaker
Like, that's the problem. And to me, it sounds pretty obvious that I don't feel like anything was sinister happening here, except perhaps he ignored the fact that she was trying to kill herself. There are murders that don't get this much attention and investigation. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I noticed that you clarified this was an attempted murder early on. right be has and It would still be heinous, but yeah. Well, it never becomes a murder, does it not? I mean, I don't even know how this ends, because we're literally talking about all this hullabaloo for in the attempted murder indictments that ended up with him being charged, right? And convicted until it's set aside. Right. Well, do you want to know the ending, and then I'll go back through why I find all this so fascinating?
00:29:06
Speaker
Okay, the family loses it at this point. Now, Kasima is Sunny and Klaus's daughter. She had stayed on her father's side. She did not believe that Klaus would kill Sunny. She did believe they might be headed to divorce, but she didn't believe that there was any chance Klaus had tried to kill Sunny. So as a result of that, the family, like Sunny's family, including the children and her grandma,
00:29:36
Speaker
They disinherit Cosima and they remove her from the will. Like when you're disinherited, you have to be it has to be specifically stated in the will in some jurisdictions that you are not to get any of the family fortune. this comes out in May of 1984 when Anna Laurie Aiken, whose sonny's mom, passes away. She is out of the will. In July of 1985, this would have been about 10 days after the second trial where Claus von Buehler is acquitted. The two kids, so we have
00:30:12
Speaker
Anna Laurie, she's known as Alla, and then Alexander. These are the kids from Sunny's first marriage to the prince. They file a $56 million lawsuit against Klaus on their mother's behalf. You have to remember, she's in a coma, still. She's been in a coma since all of this began.
00:30:31
Speaker
And she's going to stay in a coma for a very long time. On December 24th of 1987, that part of the case gets settled out of court and Klaus agrees to divorce Sunny, who's still in a coma. He gives up all claims to her fortune, which at that point in time was estimated to be worth around $40 million. dollars And Klaus agrees to leave the country voluntarily.
00:30:55
Speaker
In exchange, Cosima is reinstated into Anna Laurie's will and all the trusts that her grandmother had left for the other kids. Now, she ends up getting $30 million dollars as her share of the trust from her grandmother, not Sunny, but Sunny's mom's estate. So at this point in time is when the National Victim Advocacy Center is founded.
00:31:23
Speaker
At the time, it was named the Sonny Von Buhle National Victim Advocacy Center, and they founded it out of Fort Worth, Texas. It's currently known as the National Center for Victims of Crime, and it's headquartered in Washington, D.C. They also founded the Sonny Von Buhle Coma and Head Trauma Research Foundation in New York.
00:31:44
Speaker
Sunny remains in a persistent vegetative state until her death from cardiopulmonary arrest on December 6, 2008, at the Mary Manning Walsh Nursing Home in New York City. At her memorial service, with her three children who have since sort of reconciled, they hold the memorial for her on January 14, 2009, at the Brick Presbyterian Church in New York. This is the same church where Sonny and Klaus got married. Sonny was then buried at the cemetery at St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. For Klaus's part, Klaus actually lives a really long time, but he lives in London, England. He doesn't die a pauper or anything like that. I had mentioned this before, but in the series of unfortunate events books, Klaus and Sonny Baldullaire are named after Klaus and Sonny von Buehler. And in 1990, a film called The Reversal of Fortune, which is about this case and all of the fallout, starring Jeremy Irons as Klaus, its release. And Jeremy Irons ends up winning the Academy Award for Best Actor for playing
00:32:55
Speaker
Klaus van Buylo. So he wins an Oscar for this. And Klaus finally dies May 25th, 2019 at his home in London, England. I thought this was a really interesting story. I believe all of the kids are still alive. I would have to look that up to be sure. Cosimo is still alive. She is married to an Italian nobleman. She spends her money on, you know, sort of philanthropic endeavors ah around the UK.
Life After Acquittal and Cultural Impact
00:33:26
Speaker
um And then obviously the other two found that the crimes. I thought this was one of those cases where like it feels so soap offery that like it doesn't even matter that he was acquitted. Does that make sense?
00:33:42
Speaker
Well, right, it doesn't matter that he was like even charged to begin with. um Unfortunately, the story is interesting. The story makes a lot of points actually, but I feel like this may be the most unrelatable story that we've ever covered. It really is in a way, isn't it? It's like kind of a break in the middle of all of it because it's so weird and out there and it's almost like you're talking about royalty. And I guess in some instances you literally are.
00:34:08
Speaker
Well, at least perceived royalty, sure. It seems to me, though, that the inn's being that he was self-exiled, I guess. I don't really know what you would call that. You know, he left and he gave up any sort of claim.
00:34:28
Speaker
To me, that shows the prerogative here. right oh yeah The prerogative was that in the event that their mother died, they didn't want to lose everything. And as soon as he was willing to take his you know run out of the race, so to speak, it all went away.
00:34:46
Speaker
right Yeah. It's really, really strange. um And it all boils down to money. And they really did give him just hell, it seems like. Now, I have no idea. I don't feel like you're going to do a half job of attempted murder, like repeatedly. If your prerogative is actually trying to murder someone, but you're not going to keep like doing it so subtly that you, you know, There's multiple attempted murder situations. You try harder, right, if you're going to do it. But when you do something different, if it didn't work the first time? That's what I mean. That's what I'm saying. Like, you would like you don't, you're not going to do it.
00:35:26
Speaker
It doesn't seem realistic that it's almost like either they were responsible for it or this was just concocted, right? It was a concocted narrative to go along with the story that they could tell. She lived a really long time in a coma. Yeah. Okay. And you know, that's kind of their bad to the extent that people put her through that because she was unassisted. She was living by machine, I imagine. That's another situation. You don't hear people living that long in a coma with life support.
00:35:56
Speaker
It's not a typical thing to have because we're talking about what like she died in 2008. And so that's like 28 years. Yeah. Yeah. She's going to stay there for 28 years and he's going to live another 11 years beyond her. Well, right. And it's a very odd story, but it also speaks to the fact that they were able to get this entire thing happening with what I see as a concocted story. They were trying to get her husband to be put away also by being put away. I presume it would have made it so he was not, he wouldn't have any sort of claim towards her estate, right? Yeah. Yeah. The whole idea was to separate him and punish him financially. Yeah. And it's really weird to me that there was so much
00:36:48
Speaker
ah and a moss I don't really know what it is. I also think you said, for some reason I thought her her whole family was involved in it, like her parents, but that doesn't make sense for the rest of the story. I think that there can be some underlying, ah like, you know, oh, our mom couldn't possibly hurt herself, that kind of thing. Denial, I guess, it would just be overt denial, I guess, that drives. Yeah.
00:37:18
Speaker
different motivations here. It's a big leap to go to to murder, though, I think. Oh, it's a huge leap to go to murder. I mean, OK, look, if your life has gotten to the point, and I'm just going to throw this all out there, that you pop out in a movie. So the movie is narrated by Sonny. And Sonny is played by Glenn Close. So Jeremy Irons, we already talked about, he plays Klaus. Annabelle Sciora is in here.
00:37:47
Speaker
So Miss Sunny back from coma? No, like this, the movie story is told from her coma. I mean, even after the fact, I never figured out if Alan ah Dershowitz, he sue he wrote a book called Reversal of Fortune, by the way, it's his whole thing that pushes to the movie. I don't think he believed that like his client necessarily wasn't involved.
00:38:16
Speaker
So it's interesting how all of this ah sort of unfolds. In the end, if you want to read more about this, because I'm not going to drag this out forever, but for people that like really want to read more about this, Justia has the 1984 appeal. And it's it's from the Supreme Court of Rhode Island. It's just a state versus a von Buehler.
00:38:38
Speaker
Now, from what they described there, this case created 5,200 pages of court transcripts in 26 volumes and that the initial trial lasted more than six weeks for two counts of attempted murder. You wanna talk about- Attempted murder. Two counts of attempted murder. Right, I'm just saying attempted murder, like she's not dead.
00:39:05
Speaker
They tell the story like in the best way possible there. And I pulled some from that Justia document. That's just a law that.justia j us stiiaa dot.com. If you go on there and look for the state versus on below.
00:39:21
Speaker
It's a kind of a lengthy read, but it sort of summarizes how we get to the point that like the Supreme Court of Rhode Island is dealing with this.
Legal Proceedings and Evidence
00:39:31
Speaker
And I'll go ahead and tell you that one of the things I kind of left out is there's a lot of drugs involved and they never really point to what was actually going on with the drugs. And it's not just the drugs that they mentioned in these other articles and in the movie. There's a lot of stuff, like they're trying to figure out how lidocaine fits in, there's Valium, there's drugs from, ah that have ah French names on them. So like the people involved are misidentifying them. There's a lot that happened there. Like when you look at this case, it is like the epitome of first world problems.
00:40:08
Speaker
My conclusion in all of it was there is no way this woman didn't just like accidentally drop herself into a coma. I think because of her behavior, like what we see in the medical records that they bring up there, um which that would also be terrible to be this you know sort of high-faluting aristocrat and then have all your medical records dumped out in this six-week trial.
00:40:35
Speaker
Like she pretty clearly was miserable with her life. And I honestly think she was miserable with her children. I think she was miserable with her mom. I do not think it was just Klaus. And at the end of it all, I came to the conclusion that she may not have been like out and out trying to commit quote suicide, although 73 aspirin is a lot dude, but she didn't care if she made it or not through whatever the next crazy thing she did was. And I do not think these drugs were Klaus's unless they were his in the guise of Sonny specifically saying, bring me my drugs.
00:41:12
Speaker
So part of my distinction here between like attempted murder versus like being charged with an actual crime. So she goes into a coma and like she never gets out of it, right? Correct. They go back in time, they say, oh, there was this other incident too, right? Yes. why Okay. So Typically, if someone commits attempted murder, okay, the person does not linger in a state between the act having been committed, which would be a murder charge, right? Versus attempted murder, which is like you you try to shoot somebody and you miss. rightney Okay, so what part of this
00:42:03
Speaker
Is that what part of this is attempted murder, yeah right? Well, they're saying, and I'm paraphrasing, they're saying he knew her so well and wanted her money so bad that he started to incorporate into her routine of the drugs she was using and the things she used to basically wake herself up and put herself out.
00:42:32
Speaker
harmful elements where if she would have shot herself up with, and I'm not kidding when I say this, insulin instead of lidocaine, then the potential was there for the insulin to kill her.
00:42:50
Speaker
and he was just trying to usher her out the door faster to get access to her money. That's what they're saying in the prosecution's two presentations at trial. But the truth is, even the prosecution's own witnesses, although they get a conviction at the first trial,
00:43:08
Speaker
they cannot tell who is doing what drugs in this situation. They can only go by what she has in her body. Like, it was crazy because one person would testify, Sonny's an alcoholic. And then another person would say, that person is lying. Well, and all of that put together, just like you just said, it's still not adding up to attempted murder.
00:43:36
Speaker
No, but like if he was trying to kill her by overdosing her on insulin, it would be attempted murder. They never get there. Even at the first trial where they get the conviction, you can read it. And like I said, it's a lot of pages. They never get to the point where they actually put the insulin in his hand and then have him put it in her body.
00:43:57
Speaker
for the purpose of killing her. Right, and that technical aspect of the situation is exactly what I'm talking about here. Because ultimately she died from the coma that she had been in for all those years.
00:44:12
Speaker
Right? Okay. But attempted murder is not a situation where I don't think usually the act of the attempt has ended when someone is charged with attempted murder. Oh, are you saying because of the coma aspect? Well, right. I'm saying that like none of the it none of it makes sense because they didn't even know the outcome of what the allegations were yet. Yeah, I follow you there. But like so if you had shot her in the head and she ends up in a coma.
00:44:50
Speaker
They don't know the outcome. They could charge him with attempted murder or assault with a deadly weapon or they could see what the prognosis is and when she died, charge them with murder. So you're saying charge him with like... I'm just saying that this doesn't follow that.
00:45:10
Speaker
but it could have been poisoning charges. Is that what you mean? I mean, yeah, I'm saying that it doesn't line up with ah what I had, what I have in mind. He was charged and convicted until it was overcharged of attempted murder. But I don't think there were any underlying charges. This is a complete, like all of it is a a completely made up situation. it It really is. And I thought it was like a good break from like, since we were kind of trashing everybody. Honestly, I think this was a suicide attempt by Sunny Benvulo. I say that because between Thanksgiving and Christmas of that year, she had medical intervention for what to me and everything I know can only be described as
00:46:01
Speaker
either the world's worst headache or a suicide attempt. You could take that for what you want, but shoving down a bottle of aspirin at that time in that milligram that they were talking about, it would have had a hundred pills in it, say she'd taken a few of them, she somehow took 73 of them. okay so You feel like she attempted suicide because I feel like she committed suicide. Yeah, she may have committed the world's slowest suicide here. And so that's where I'm getting at with like the whole attempted murder thing. There's nuances there that I understand fall in the cracks of this very, very just... ah These aren't real problems, right? I mean, you have a person who was, you know, an heiress socialite with too much money, who had first world problems coming out of her ears, who didn't want to live anymore.
00:46:59
Speaker
that's what it seems like, right? yeah And no matter how you you paint that, it doesn't really change that underlying thing. And so it's the attempted murder, if we're gonna go like down the path towards like the law and going to court and trying to get justice, the charge doesn't even fit in my opinion, because like you were saying about her, like,
00:47:23
Speaker
you know, attempting suicide. Well, it wasn't just that she attempted suicide, she committed suicide, unless there's something in between the time this happens and her dying.
00:47:35
Speaker
Right. And so to me, it it's maybe it's just I think that it might illustrate my other point, which is like the class differentiation of like all the things that went into play here as far as like having this come to fruition in a trial. Right. Yeah. as opposed to all the justice that's not ever gotten by people sometimes. um Because this is, you know, this is in the 80s. It's not like it's, you know, it's it seems like it should be longer ago than that. but Like 300 years ago. I know, right? That's what it seems like. um But it, you know, it's not that long ago. And it,
Reflections on the Case's Legacy
00:48:18
Speaker
but so it may just further illustrate the fact. My point is,
00:48:24
Speaker
Most of the time, in these types of situations, the ending would have to occur, right? like Yeah. um And attempted murders are typically things that, like, the person's not being tried for it while the victim is still hanging in the balance, right? Yeah. It's a weird it's a weird combination of things that are happening. Yeah, I, you know,
00:48:53
Speaker
I feel like he, you know, he ends up sort of making up for it in life, but I do feel like Klaus gets a little screwed here. First of all, the, I think if you're seeing someone for two years and there's this thing, this time where your wife goes into a coma, maybe it's time to like take a look around and take stock of your life and be like, well, what am I going to do if something happens to her? But I don't think he ever like looked at it and went, well, I could be accused of her murder.
00:49:22
Speaker
or her attempted murder. I mean, I can see where that lines up for a motive, but I don't know that his seeing this woman had anything to do you with anything beyond the fact that it was just a convenient feature of that they could point to. Oh yeah, no, you're right.
00:49:42
Speaker
and Especially just, I'm talking about like more of just like the actual technical side of this. And the fact that like if this was not a rich heiress, you're not looking at a situation where any of this is happening. Hmm.
00:49:59
Speaker
i i You know what? i don't I don't know what to say about all this. I picked it because I thought, this is the biggest waste of everything. Time, resources, energy. I mean, thank God the kids kind of did some stuff, but like, they're sort of the catalyst for this. I was gonna say, I feel like the kids are the catalyst and I feel like they were driven by the fact that I don't know that you came across anything. Was there information that had she died, none of this court stuff happening, would he just get everything? Yeah, if she had died, they were still married and living as husband and wife.
00:50:37
Speaker
So everything, he would just ah have an inherited her and estate. And on top of that, except for certain provisions, he would have inherited a ah ah piece of her family money. Well, right. And well so that would be if she died either with that and her wishes and her will.
00:50:56
Speaker
or and test it, right? If she died and test it, then yeah now again, this is not as long ago as it seems like it should be. When we start talking about a risk to cradle, Aristotle, whatever. aris how do you ertock this like To me, it seems like we should be talking about like the 1500s, right? When you start talking about um situations where you have adults that have adult children who are from different other partners, so like they have different fathers basically. In some states, the laws are different
00:51:35
Speaker
with regard to just the husband getting everything. um And so I don't really know how that would have affected the situation here, but I bet if you really drilled down on it, their whole prerogative was to make sure that they were kept in the inheritance. And I feel like that's really sad. Yeah, the kids were, their kids were young. I think they were 20 and 21 when this happened to her. Like they had been born in 58 and 59 respectively. This happened in 79. So they're young.
00:52:04
Speaker
when they're doing this. So they're in their 20s. They actually went first to like, you're completely right on a couple counts. They went first to the family financial advisor and they're like, what happens to our trust and what happens to our, like, you know, our inheritance if something happens to her. And that guy was like, well, you know, a lot of this, the way it's set up would just go to Klaus.
00:52:27
Speaker
but you would still get things from your grandmother. And at that point in time, they were like, what can we do to make sure that like he's not cutting us out? And one of the things that he listed off was, you can talk to my friend who's a prosecutor in New York and he can like dig deep into this and and see what's happening there, see if there's some angle on this. And I think that's how it went down.
00:52:50
Speaker
how to and see why does that even come up, right? It's a weird. It came up because you get 20 year old millionaires asking questions. I didn't understand that, but like that wouldn't come up today.
00:53:02
Speaker
It shouldn't, no, but. I mean, again, we're not talking about the 1500s, right? We also don't have this distinction here. I don't think, I mean, maybe we do and I'm not aware of it, but I feel like this was a pretty particular situation. How much money are we talking about? Do you mean overall or like that they would stand to lose? I don't know. I don't have a good grasp on it.
00:53:30
Speaker
So the timing of it, remember it's the eighties. So at the timing of all of this, Sunny's a estate at that time was worth $40 million dollars and she had another $20 million dollars in trust and she was set to inherit I want to say about $100 million dollars from her mom. So just take all of those numbers. And because cause I know later when grandma's trust is like split up, it was $50 million dollars going three ways at that time. And so she had $150 million.
00:54:10
Speaker
but it wasn't all gonna go to Sunny, but figure it's 1980 and these people are probably worth somewhere between 150 and $250 million. dollars I felt like Sunny had a really sad life. It seems like everywhere she turned, like she, you know, married the broke royalty, right? Yeah. Ended up not being worth anything to her. I mean, cause maybe they were in love. That would be great, but maybe also they were trying to get their status back.
00:54:39
Speaker
Could be, yeah. Right. um Because you know the bloodline, if it's not handled correctly, a royal bloodline doesn't just automatically have money, right? Right. Well, they they were probably worth, if you look at inflation calculators, and I know you don't like to do that. In today's money, just to compare it to something, somewhere around a half a billion dollars. Yeah, so I mean, I feel like it was enough, even less than that, I would say. I think that you can have a very short-sighted view of what you're doing for self-preservation because he wasn't their father, right?
00:55:15
Speaker
Right. just one He was only one of their fathers. and the one he was yeah they had already They had kind of disinherited her a couple of different ways. But yeah, they were not talking to the person who had supported them, who was their stepsister. Half sister. Half sister. Who was their half sister. Right. Okay. and you know To me, that seeks volumes because it wasn't their father. There's always going to be contention. It's a very interesting story. He lived ah to be very, he lived a very long time and then there was no further drama, right? No, he he left and and he lived to be 92 years old and he passed away. That would be a weird life though, I'll tell you that.
00:55:58
Speaker
There was nothing, normal there was never anything normal about any of that situation. None of it's normal. That's all I got on this one. um I like doing these stories every once in a while that are a little weirder than like our normal gloom and doom. So that's how this one makes up. I got really, I got to say that I got really hung up on the fact that like, there's all this happening on attempted murder charges. Well, it it was it was yeah, I mean this would like I know there's already been a movie made about Dersha was his book on this but like this would make a fascinating Netflix series like it would it would be
00:56:33
Speaker
really crazy to see how you get these type of people who, in my mind, they sort of fall in the sociopath realm where everybody's headed towards just blowing all the resources of a 1986 week trial in Rhode Island. That is just crazy to me, like so much money just flying out the window at that trial. that i for an attempted murder charge where where the person is still lingering in a coma. But it doesn't make sense. But both incidents did happen at Christmas, so it is tied to the holidays.
00:57:16
Speaker
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00:59:23
Speaker
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01:00:16
Speaker
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Speaker
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