MARTHA "SUNNY" von Bulow, an heiress of misfortune who spent almost 28 years in a coma and whose husband Claus von Bulow twice went on trial for attempting to kill her, died on Saturday at a nursing home in New York, aged 76.
Sunny von Bulow, born Martha Sharp Crawford, had a fortune estimated to be as much as $75 million (€59.9 million) when she married Claus von Bulow, a Danish-born financier, in 1966. By all accounts, they lived a charmed life in multimillion-dollar homes on New York's Fifth Avenue and in Newport, Rhode Island.
Trouble developed in the marriage, however, and Sunny von Bulow went into a coma on December 27th, 1979, but was soon revived. A year later, on December 21st, 1980, she was found unconscious on her bathroom floor and never recovered.
Sunny von Bulow's two children from her previous marriage to an Austrian prince financed a $400,000 private investigation that led to Claus von Bulow's indictment in 1981. They alleged that he was having an affair and stood to inherit $14 million if his wife were to die.
In one of the most sensational legal scandals of the 1980s, von Bulow was initially convicted of attempting to kill his wife with an overdose of insulin, "knowing that it could be fatal". The von Bulows' maid said she had found a black bag in von Bulow's closet containing syringes with traces of insulin and sedatives.
Harvard University lawyer Alan Dershowitz took up von Bulow's defence on appeal and painted his wife as an alcoholic and drug abuser who was subject to attacks of hypoglycaemia. High-profile friends, including writer Truman Capote and comic Johnny Carson's ex-wife, Joanne Carson, testified that she had used drugs extensively - a charge her older children strenuously denied.
In the end, Claus von Bulow's conviction was overturned on technical grounds that police had mishandled evidence - specifically, the black bag with the syringes.
Rhode Island prosecutors brought attempted murder charges against von Bulow for a second time in 1985, but he was acquitted. A best-selling book by Dershowitz about the case, Reversal of Fortune, was made into a popular film in 1990, with Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close.
The movie depicted Sunny von Bulow as a nagging wife with problems with substance abuse. Her children objected, saying: "Our mother has been portrayed as pathetic and self-destructive. We reject this injurious and erroneous portrayal."
Her two older children, Annie-Laurie von Auersperg Isham and Alexander von Auersperg, were convinced of their stepfather's treachery. They were outraged when he posed for the cover of Vanity Fairin 1985 in his wife's New York apartment. He was wearing a black leather jacket - "thumbing his nose at us", Alexander von Auersperg said.
The von Auersperg children filed a $56 million civil suit against von Bulow in 1985 and settled it two years later with the proviso that von Bulow would file for divorce and never speak in public about the case again. He renounced any claim to his wife's fortune.
Martha Crawford was born on September 1st, 1932, in Pittsburgh and acquired the nickname "Sunny" early in life from her warm, upbeat personality.
Her father, who was chairman of a utilities company, died when she was four years old. She grew up in New York. In 1957, she married Prince Alfred von Auersperg, a penniless 20-year-old Austrian prince who was teaching tennis at a resort in Europe.
They lived in Germany and Austria until their divorce in 1965.(In an odd twist of fate, he died in 1992 after spending nine years in a coma as a result of a car accident.)
In 1966 she married von Bulow, who was born Claus Cecil Borberg and took the name von Bulow from one of his mother's German ancestors. They had one daughter, Cosima, who was born in 1967 and who sided with her father during the trials of the 1980s.
The von Auersperg children maintained that until her mother entered her final coma, she had been healthy and happy, with a love of opera and reading. She spent many years on life support at New York's Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, with a guard at the door.
"Claus von Bulow only succeeded in depriving our mother of meaningful life and getting away with it," Alex von Auersperg said in 1985. "We know and he knows that he tried to murder our mother."
Claus von Bulow, now 82, lives in London. - (LA Times-Washington Post service)