Lieutenant detective Jack Rhys of the Rhode Island State Police and his partn...
staking out Klossbombuleau. They are set up outside the Vombuleau's place in Manhattan.
When Kloss finally comes up on the sidewalk outside the couple's fifth avenue apartment,
the detective quickly confronts him, questioning him, with no warning and no lawyers around. I didn't warn an interview where he had an opportunity to
“think of what he would say to us. So I thought that the best way to do that was to take”
him by surprise. It was obviously very nervous. Near the end, the detective slips in one more question, almost an afterthought, whether sunny would ever have had a reason to use insulin. Years later, Jack Rhys describes the exchange to journalist Bill Curtis. You know, I asked a kind of ridiculous question and I said, you don't suppose that your wife were using insulin for any reason. And he said, by God, that's the last thing she would need.
That clinched it for the detective. I said to my partner, "Mark my wife, she's going back for that black bag." Within three days, Detective Rhys's prediction comes true. Klossbombuleau drives back up to Newport, Rhode Island, to Clarendon Court, the shuttered ocean front mansion where sunny collapsed.
“The state police follow Klossbombuleau this time with a warrant. Rhys rings the bell for a second”
interview and while two detectives keep Kloss talking in one room, other cops go through the house. During the search officers make several observations. On the desk in Kloss's study, one of them notices a scratch pad. Two words are written on it. Black box. Then officers come upon Kloss's closet standing open and unlocked. Inside it, police find a small black metal box. The one Maria had described. The box that held the little black bag.
Sometime during the police interview, Kloss excuses himself for a few minutes. When the detectives look again, the closet has been relocked and the scratch pad is gone. But the bag is not in that box. It has not been for weeks. Sonny's grown son from her first marriage, Alexander and the locksmith have already carried it out. And by now, it is in an evidence
“room in Providence. Whatever Kloss went upstairs to do, he came back down without it.”
The weeks ago he hadn't found the black bag and he was probably a little concerned when
they may have misplaced him. The detectives never saw Kloss opened that closet, and they never saw
him reach for the bag. What they had was a relocked door, a now missing note pad, and a man who had driven 90 miles to a closed up house in January. It is not proof, but it's enough for detective Jack Reese. A year before all the family had was a maid's bad feeling about a case full of pills. Now the state of Rhode Island has the bag, the needle inside it, and a suspect. I'm Megan Kelly. This is MK confidential.
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Klaus von Buelo on two counts of assault with intent to murder. One count for each of the two comas. A week later, he surrenders for arrangement, leads not guilty, and is released on $100,000 bail. When Klaus is reigned, he gives the only answer he will give in the entire case.
The trial opens in Newport, in February of 1982.
a year apart. The Christmas sunny nearly died in 1979, and the Christmas she did not wake up in 1980.
“Rhode Island has just let television cameras into its courtrooms, so the trial of Klaus von Buelo”
becomes something the country has never quite seen. A crime story, the whole nation can watch nearly
gavl to gavl, like a soap opera, a maid, a mistress, a fortune, a needle, and an aristocratic, silent defendant, the state calls an attempted murderer. Downtown Newport becomes in the words of one man, who is there, a madhouse. The old colonial state house beside the courthouse is turned into a press center. Sketch artists and reporters fight for one of the 80 seats inside. The jury that files in is not made up of Newport's summer people. It is drawn from the year-round town,
working Rhode Islanders, mostly Catholic. It's the kind of jury Klaus's own side privately doubts can ever be a jury of his peers. And at the center of it, ramrod straight and immaculate sits Klaus von Buelo, giving the reporters almost nothing, except now and then a dry line about
this spectacle he has become. "Gus simply is the first time I'd ever been exposed to the media.
“I was new to me and I think I belonged to the kind of people who would like to be in the newspaper”
the day they were born, the day they get married, and the day they die. I suddenly realized that this was a few tile width." For weeks, the trial is the best show in the country. The networks carry it on CNN more than 300,000 viewers routinely tune in a lot for that time. When actress Alexandra Isles of the hit TV show Dark Shadows takes the stand, the audience climbs past 600,000. Newspaper artists sketch Klaus in his dark, well-cut suits and strangers gather on the
courthouse steps, some of them wearing buttons that read free Klaus, others just assure he is exactly what the state says he is, an attempted murderer. The town of Newport itself cannot agree.
“The old families who somewhere behind the same hedges are split down the middle over whether”
the man is a wronged husband or a fortune hunter who finally reached too far and they say so at their dinner tables and to any reporter who will write it down. Klaus has pleaded not guilty.
He makes one more choice that will shape the whole trial. He will never take the stand.
Across the whole trial, the jury, the 12 people deciding his fate will not hear a single word from the accused inside the family the sides are already fixed. Sonny's two older children brought the case, Aala and Alexander. The only person in the family standing with Klaus is Kosoma, the daughter he and Sonny had together, still just a teenager. There was never a time where I doubted it. And we would always talk openly about what was going on and just seeing him go through the
anguish of their all-insing and with the lawyers saying you can investigate anything. I really don't have anything to hide. It was enough for me to believe it. Klaus sits through it all with a stillness that unsettles the people around him. He is unfailingly courteous to the reporters in the hallway. Dominic Dunn covers the trial for vanity fair magazine whose readers cannot get enough. He describes a defendant who seems less like a man
fighting for his life than a man watching with mild interest, a drama about someone else. The prosecutor is Stephen Famillietti and in his opening he tells the jury exactly what the state means to prove. "The stable crew was a clandestine, subtle, and ingenious in the tap of town, and the photographer has been Klaus von Duelo, to germinate her life, to murder her, by secretly injecting her with a drug called insulin." It is a large promise and Famillietti
knows the case is harder than it sounds. No eyewitnesses, no confession, a woman in a coma who cannot testify and weeks of medical testimony ahead of him. I thought it was an extremely difficult case and primarily because it was a circumstantial evidence case, meaning that there were no eyewitnesses to be alleged, a criminal conduct, and it was so much medical testimony. The tougher job for the
State is the first coma, the one from which Sonny recovered, to make it a cri...
night, Famillietti has to convince the jury that this was a first attempt or rehearsal for the next
“Christmas when it worked. The state's first witness is Sonny's own son, Alexander, who gives the”
jury the story of the marriage from the inside. My stepfather said that after my younger sister was born, my mother was unable to have sex, and that he looked towards other women. Did he mention any other woman, one woman in particular? Alexander Owls. His sister, Alah, takes the stand and tells the jury why her mother had begun talking about a divorce. She felt he was on the verge of an aristocratia, but he was blaming her for the fact that he'd been having no success in his professional
life. Then comes Maria Schrawlhammer, Sonny's maid of 23 years. Maria has never once sat in a witness box
and when she climbs into one now in a new port courtroom in front of the television cameras and in nation leaning in, she is going to do the one thing no detective and no doctor in this case can do. She is going to look 12 jurors in the eye and tell them plainly what she saw inside that house. She describes the black bag, the vials, and the small bottle of insulin, she says she found among the belongings of a woman who had low blood sugar, which can be caused by too much insulin, and thus
had no use for any more of it. Maria is a small plain spoken woman for the heavy German accent,
“and by common agreement she is the most important witness the state has. She does not raise her voice,”
she just tells the jury what she saw. The defense crossed examines her over parts of two days and does not move her a single inch. Then the doctors, Sonny's own physician of nearly three decades, Dr. Richard Stock, tells the jury what he believed had been done to her. Who is the suraptitious administration of insulin? One of the country's or most authorities on insulin, Dr. George K. Hill of Harvard, testifies that the second coma bears the mark of an injection,
one that no illness in Sonny's own body could produce. The state puts the physical evidence beside him, the used needle from the black bag, which the family's own doctor has found carried
“insulin at its tip, and it puts a number in front of the jury. A blood test drawn the morning”
Sonny was admitted showing an insulin level of 216, many times higher than normal, next to a blood sugar that had crashed toward nothing. Then the family's banker Morris Gurley, the trust officer who ran Sonny's fortune, gives the jury the arithmetic. If Sonny dies,
Clouse stands to inherit about $14 million, if they divorce the pre-neutral agreement leaves him
with almost nothing. Sonny alive and divorced from Clouse is worth next to nothing to him. Sonny dead is worth a fortune. The black bag itself is entered into evidence. It's a small pharmacy laid out on a table for the jury to look at. The vials, the syringes, and the used needle, the state calls the attempted murder weapon. The medical case runs on for weeks. Doctors for the state and doctors for the defense take the jury down into blood sugar readings and insulin levels
and the exact chemistry of a body shutting down each side of the opposite conclusion. It is slow, technical and fiercely disputed. What the jurors can weigh more plainly is the maid, the money, and the black bag on the table in front of them. Then the state calls the other woman, Alexander Isles, the mistress takes the stand and the prosecutor asks her in front of the cameras, whether she still thinks the charges against the man she loved are nonsense.
"You still take us back on nonsense." "Don't know." "I didn't have that answer." "I don't know." "Let me ask you this little last question, Mrs. Isles. Maybe you can't answer. Do you still love the defender?" "I don't know." The defense is offered the chance to cross examine her and turns it down. Clouse's lead lawyer, Harold Price Fairinger, tells the court he will not put Mrs. Isles through any more questioning. The line going around the courthouse is that a gentleman does
not permit the cross examination of his lover. She steps down. The defense's case is that
There was no crime here at all.
and her failing blood sugar had done this to herself. To account for the insulin, the defense calls
“a former exercise instructor named Joy O'Neill, who testifies that Sunny once told her years earlier”
that she injected insulin herself to keep her weight down. It is the innocent account that defense has been looking for. Then the prosecution produces the exercise studios' own appointment cards. They show O'Neill had given Sunny a handful of sessions only. Not the hundreds she had just described under oath. Beyond O'Neill, the defense is thin. Clouse doesn't testify. His lawyer 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. That a secretive, self-medicating woman who drank and swallowed aspirin by the fistful, was the only person who ever did Sunnyvombulo
“any harm. In his closing, defense attorney Faringer goes after the way the black bag was found.”
A private search, run by a family that already believed Clouse guilty, with no police in the room and no fingerprints ever lifted. It's a fair question, and it is the one the defense will build
an entire second trial around, but in this courtroom the prosecutor answers it and gets the last
word. Why would they call a halocid, random agglaring in court, with them, knowing that that was their intention that they were going to plant something like a black bag. In his summation, familiarity reduces the case to one question. Not a menu of innocent explanations he tells the jurors, one thing, true or false. Declouse Von Vuelo tried to murder his wife.
“The jury goes out, one day passes, then a second. Outside the courthouse, the two camps sit,”
Sunny's grown children wait on one side, while Clouse's loyalists and the reporters who have covered every hour of the trial on the other. No one can read the silence coming out of the jury room, a third day, a fourth. The longer it runs, the more the whispers start, that the jury is divided, that the case could end in a hung jury, that after everything the state may not have convinced all 12 jurors. A fifth day comes and goes, then on the sixth day, a verdict. The courtroom
fills fast, Clouse in his usual chair, his daughter Kosima, not far away, the camera's running. It is the morning of March 16th, 1982. The jury finds that the defendant calls Van Buo guilty. On both counts, there are audible gasps in the courtroom. Clouse does not move. The cameras catch only a flicker across his face, a small twitch, there and gone. Weeks later a judge will sentence him to 30 years, 10 for the 1979 coma and 20 for 1980,
and lets him stay free on a million dollar bail while he appeals. Outside the courthouse, Sunny's
children say what they have believed from the start. We feel very strongly that he tried twice to murder our mother. We believe that he deprived her of life as we know it, deprived her of many years of happiness. And that is the story. A cash poor Danish aristocrat Mary's a wealthy eras lives lavishly on her fortune, falls in love with another woman, and stands to inherit $14 million if his wife dies. Twice at Christmas in the same house,
the state says he tried to collect, a maid noticed the bottle that did not belong. The woman's children refused to let it go, and 12 ordinary people from Rhode Island looked past the title and the accent and convicted him. The system worked, a rich man tried to murder his wife, and he was caught, case closed, except it isn't. Because the case does not end here, not by a long shot. Everything the first jury believed the maid's memory, the needle,
the blood test, the $14 million, is about to be examined again. Only this time,
By a Harvard law professor and 18 of his best and brightest students.
And they are going to find questions no one in that first courtroom even thought to ask.
“Just over two weeks after the guilty verdict before a class has even been sentenced,”
the phone rings in the professor's office on April Fool's Day. The man on the line says he has just
been convicted of trying to murder his wife, and he wants the professor to take his case.
“The professor is certain. It is a prank. He almost hangs up the phone. But then,”
that's next time on MK confidential, where we speak to the professor directly.
