AI Summary
5 min readThe Two Trials of Claus von Bülow
On the morning of December 21, 1980, in the Newport, Rhode Island mansion called Clarendon Court, a 49-year-old heiress named Sunny von Bülow was found unconscious on the cold marble floor of her bathroom. Her body temperature had fallen into the low 80s. Her heart stopped. Paramedics brought her back, but she never regained consciousness. The eerie detail that transformed this private tragedy into a national sensation was that it had happened before—almost exactly one year earlier, in the same house, the same woman had been found unconscious on the same floor. That time, she woke up. This time, she would spend the next 28 years in a coma.
The man at the center of the case was Sunny's husband, a Danish-born figure named Claus von Bülow, and the story of what happened to Sunny became one of the most contested criminal cases in American history—one that produced two opposite verdicts from two different juries, and left the central question unresolved.
The Marriage and the Motive
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What you'll learn
- 1 Claus von Bülow: The FULL MK Confidential Series
- 2 Main Outline
- 3 (03:00) **Opening Scene: Clarendon Court** - Megan Kelly sets the scene at the Newport mansion where Sunny von Bülow is found unconscious on the marble floor of her bathroom, her body temperature in the low 80s, her heart stopped.
- 4 (05:30) **Who Is Claus von Bülow?** - The Danish-born aristocrat is revealed as a self-made creation, not born into nobility, and the marriage to Sunny is a match of opposites built on her enormous fortune.
- 5 (08:45) **Sunny's Fortune and the Marriage's Arithmetic** - Sunny Crawford inherits roughly $75 million (worth nearly $2 billion today) from her utilities magnate father, and the entire Newport lifestyle is hers—Claus draws an allowance from a trust she set up for him.
- 6 (14:37) **The First Coma: Christmas 1979** - Sunny collapses at Clarendon Court, and her maid Maria Schrallhammer urges Claus for hours to call a doctor before he finally does—a delay that will become central to the prosecution's case.
- 7 (17:09) **The Black Bag Discovered** - Maria finds a soft traveling case in Claus's closet containing a smaller black vinyl case with pills and vials, including insulin and syringes—neither Claus nor Sunny is diabetic.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
Megyn Kelly brings you the full five episode Claus von Bülow "MK Confidential" series. What do you think happened? Tune in to a new edition of "MK Confidential" every weeknight this summer on the Megyn Kelly podcast feeds and YouTube channel.
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