My name is Alex Hatra and I have a friend who is in the middle of the club.
And it's been a very long time. I'm a very close friend who has been working with me for several years.
“We are a family member and my friend was the one who said, "Look, there are some portal.”
I don't need to worry about it. I'm a friend of mine. I'm a family member. I have a family member and I have a hotel, a hotel, a hotel, a hotel, a hotel, a hotel, a hotel, a hotel, a hotel, a hotel, a hotel, a hotel. The last week in the summer. I have a family member, but the chances of having a family member are very close. to buy. "Starts a Dining Spendon of Rufner heute. In just a few minutes of GoFantMe.com, GoFantMe.com. For Dining Spendon of Ruf. This is a
"Claring in Court is one of the grandest houses on one of the grandest streets in America. The
mansions rot iron gates form the backdrop of Grace Kelly's final movie, before she retires to become the princess of Monaco. A beautiful, wealthy, high-class woman marrying into aristocracy,
“a kind of modern fairy tale. In 1980, the Newport Rhode Island mansion belongs to a real life,”
beautiful, wealthy, high-class woman, and her aristocrat husband. But behind those rot iron gates and gold in laid doors, the real tale is grim. It is the morning of December 21st, the winter sun shines on the sandstone walls of Clarenton Court, an ocean-front property exposed to the bitter wind off the water. Inside a 49-year-old woman lies unconscious on the cold marble floor of her bathroom. She liked to sleep in a cold room, and the night before
she had asked for her windows to be left open to the Atlantic. With the wind chill, well-blows zero, the room turned frigid. By morning, she has gone ice-cold to the touch. Her body temperature falls into the low 80s. Her heart stops. The paramedics bring her back, but only part of the
“way. Martha Vaughan-vuelo, the woman everyone calls sunny, falls into a coma. She will never”
regain consciousness. This would be a private tragedy if not for an eerie wrinkle. This exact scene has happened before. One year earlier, almost to the day, in the same house, in the same wing, the same woman was found unconscious on the same floor. That time, a doctor reached her in time. That time she woke up. One woman, two Christmases, two coma's, and in between them, a husband, a devoted maid, a locked closet, and a small black bag that
the state of Rhode Island will one day hold up in a courtroom and call the weapon. The man at the center of it is Sunny's husband, a Danish born aristocrat named Clouse Vaughan-vuelo. Twice, a jury will be asked whether he tried to murder his wife. Twice, the jury will be shown nearly the same evidence. This is the story of a case that ended and then ended again. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK confidential.
AI can clone your voice. Forge your signature. Even create fake documents that fool experts, and criminals are using these tools right now to potentially steal from you. How? It's called title fraud. Your property records are public by law. Your name, your address, even your signature. It's all sitting in a database. Anyone can access. A cyber scammer can pull your records use AI to forge a transfer document, file it with your county and on paper, they're
the new legal owner of your property. Then they can borrow against your equity, or even sell your property long before you realize anything's even wrong. But let me tell you about home title lock. They monitor your property's title 24/7, alert you of any changes, and if you
are a victim, their team of restoration experts will spend up to 1 million bucks restoring
your title. So when's the last time you check your title records? You can do it today. Use my promo code, Megan, at hometitlelock.com to get a free title history report plus a free trial of $1 million triple lock protection so you can make sure you're not already a victim. That's hometitlelock.com promo code, Megan, or use the link in our description. To understand how two medical emergencies, one year apart, become allegations of attempted murder, we have to
start with the marriage. From the beginning, it is a match of opposites. Class Bombulo is not born
Aristocrat.
in Copenhagen in the summer of 1926. His father, Sven de Borerberg, is a Danish playwright and
“drama critic. A clever, cultured man whose sympathy for Nazi Germany will destroy his life and reputation.”
He admires the Germans and he goes on admiring them after they occupy Denmark in 1940. He dines as his son will one day put it with the wrong people. In class's own words years later, his father, quote, "gave a good name to a bad cause." When the war ends, the reckoning comes. Sven de Borerberg is tried as a Nazi collaborator and convicted. The conviction is later overturned on appeal, but the name Borerberg, once perfectly respectable, has become an embarrassment. So
class escapes it. He takes the name of his mother's father, Fritz Bulo, a former Danish minister of justice, a name that stands for precisely the respectability his father's name has lost. Then, there's the Vaughan. It comes later, and how it got there has fascinated people ever since.
“To much of the press, it is an embellishment. A whisper of old German nobility attached to a borrowed”
name by a man assembling himself for the world. "Claus tells it differently. He says the Bulo's
are entitled to the Vaughan by blood, and that it was Sonny who wanted her second husband to carry one.
Sonny's former in laws the Vaughan hoursburgs say he has no right to it at all. What no one disputes is the effect. By the time he reaches the drawing rooms of London and New York, the aristocrat is, at least in part, a work of his own composition. He studies law at Cambridge, goes to work as an aide to J. Paul Getty, then the richest man in the world. He is tall, polished, quick with a dry, cutting wit. The ideal plus one for a dinner party.
In society, they call the Copenhagen native the Great Dane. Years later, on trial, "Claus would itemize the ingredients of his own mystique with the detachment of a collector."
“"I think that certain aspects like the all of the name Newport,”
my wife's first marriage gives it a certain cutest. My work, he has posthumous to Geshe and gives it a certain
interest." One of the lawyers who would eventually represent him, Alan Dershowitz, describes the two men inside Claus. "It's almost as if you're too fast on violas and he presses a button when he walks into a room, there's the public, wassteer Claus Vaughan violo." "Actors, it's there, it's a current of woman friend, put it as if he were a mortician with an umbrella up his back. And then there's the warm Claus Vaughan violo very caring." "Sonny is the money.
She's born Martha Sharp Crawford in 1931, the only child of a utilities magnet, who dies when
she is only four years old, and leaves her something on the order of $75 million, a staggering
fortune in any era, and especially in the years this story takes place, and inheritance that would be worth nearly $2 billion by today's standards. She is shy, private, and happiest out of the spotlight. The writer Dominic Dunne knew her for years before she was found on that bathroom floor. "Sonny Vaughan violo was one of America's great erases. She was very beautiful woman. I had been to Sonny Vaughan violo's coming out party when she was a debutant."
In 1957, Sonny Mary's an Austrian prince, Alfred von oursburg, and has two children, Ala and Alexander. By the mid-60s, thanks in part two, is in fidelitys and her home sickness that marriage is over. She brings her children to America, and in 1966, Mary's Claus. A year later, they have their own daughter, Kosova. And away from the gowns and the society columns, Sonny's days have an ordinary, regular routine to them. She wakes late, near 11, and spends the first hour of every morning
on the telephone with her mother. She shops, she lunches, she changes into lounge and clothes, and watches television. She keeps to herself. And at night, she sleeps, surrounded by her dogs, a pair of laboratories, up on the bed. The family lives on Sonny's money. Everyone in Newport understands the arithmetic, which no one mentions until it is admitted inside a courtroom. Clarened in court, the oceanfront mansion, which they call a cottage, is hers. The 14-room apartment
on Fifth Avenue is hers. The staff, the cars, the season in Newport, the whole life among princes and industrialists. All of it is hers. Claus draws a comfortable income about $120,000 a year,
It comes out of a trust.
Among the old families quietly, he is regarded as a kept man, and there is between them a pre-neptial
“agreement with terms that will one day prove enormously important. If Claus and Sonny divorce,”
Claus walks away with almost nothing. If Sonny dies, while that is another matter entirely. But if Sonny was dead, then he would have titled to a house in Rhode Island, their wonderful torment in Manhattan, and a great deal of money. Sonny's stepfather, the Big Game Hunter, Russell Aiken, does not hide his contempt. He tells Dominic Dunne on the record, Claus is a Cambridge-educated con man with legal training, a moral, greedy as a Wolverine,
and cold-blooded as a snake, and I apologize Aiken adds to the snake. One friend puts it to Dunne this way, quote, "The problem with Claus is that he does not dwell in the palace of truth. He's a fake. Claus is a Trump-loy, a trick of the eye, something painted to look like what it is not."
“One person sees this marriage from the inside every day. Her name is Maria Schrawlhammer,”
and she is Sonny's personal maid, a small, graying, German woman, who speaks in heavily-accented English and has been at Sonny's side for 23 years. She is fiercely loyal to Sonny. So protective is she of Sonny's privacy, that she will refuse to tell even Claus's own lawyers
that Sonny once had a face lift, because she had promised Sonny she would never tell.
If anyone sees the marriage up close, it's Maria. I'm not going to answer the question because I promise Mrs. Bumpulau. By the late 1970s, the Vombulau marriage is cold. Separate bedrooms, separate routines, and Sonny is not well. Her doctor's diagnose reactive hypoglycemia. Her blood sugar can crash on its own,
“and when it does she turns confused and unsteady and slurred, the way a person does when they've”
had far too much to drink. She keeps herself going on sweets and aspirin and sedatives like valium and secondal, and on alcohol her body can barely handle. It is a real and documented illness, and it will also one day give the defense a natural explanation for everything that happens to her, and there is another woman. By the late 70s, Claus is having an affair with Alexandria Isles. She is not just as the papers will call her A soap opera actress, though she does play one on the
Gothic serial Dark Shadows. Alexandria Is Royalty, the daughter of the Countess, schooled alongside Sonny herself. The family would learn of the affair and testify to how they found out. Claus told them. I've been asked him about Alexandria Isles specifically. He told me that there had been a relationship. And Isles by most accounts was pressing Claus to make a choice. I said, "Would six months be suitable?" He asked me to marry him.
That is the pressure Claus is under by 1980. A marriage that has gone cold and a mistress who wants a decision. Leaving Sonny for another woman would mean leaving the life her money pays for.
Leaving Sonny dead would not. Plenty of men have affairs and unhappy marriages and never harm
anyone. That alone proves nothing. But it is the shape of a situation that investigators, years later, will recognize as motive. The first collapse comes at Christmas 1979 at Clarence in court. Sonny fades over a long day, and Maria, who has cared for her for two decades, can see her lady sinking. 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. She hardly could breathe anymore, and I thought she would stop
any minute now. I got very scared to go die, and first I asked Mr. Van Bullo to help me to put her up and he said he couldn't help me, so I just picked her up, and I was holding my arms until the doctor came. Here's the chronology that will trouble everyone later. By Maria's account she
urges Claus for hours. He first telephones the doctor only in the early afternoon and leaves a message.
When the doctor calls him back, Claus tells him only that Sonny is sleeping off a night of drinking, and is told to keep watching her. Not until around six that evening when her breathing turns to a rattle, this Claus let the doctor be called for real. The local physician who answers
Dr.
with his fingers. Strikes are chest and does CPR until Sonny's heart restarts. He saves her life
by a matter of minutes, within a day Sonny is awake and recovering, and then Claus does something a little strange. Weeks later on January 22nd, 1980, he sits down and writes the doctor a careful letter. His mother-in-law feels he was slow to get help, so Claus lays out the timeline his own way,
“and then asks the doctor to direct questions. Have I stated everything fairly? And was I to blame?”
Two weeks later, Gallidis writes back that the collapse was unpredictable and that by recognizing the change in Sonny's condition and calling him, Claus saved her life. To investigators who
read it later, this looks like a man collecting protection on paper the way other men collect
receipts. In February 1980, Maria is cleaning a closet in the Fifth Avenue apartment when she comes across a soft traveling case that Claus carries back and forth to newport each week. It is open. Inside it is a smaller case, black vinyl, about six inches long with a zipper around it. Maria opens it. Inside is a little pharmacy, pills and vials. She calls in, Sonny's daughter, Ola, and the two women take careful notes. Prescriptions from a Madison Avenue pharmacy, one bottle made out to a
“Leslie Baxter, another one made out to Claus Vombulo at an address that does not exist.”
Maria gets a little of the powder and liquid to Sonny's doctor of nearly 30 years. Dr. Richard Stock, he identifies them, valium and abarbituate, secobarbital. In April, Sonny has hospitalized again, week and disoriented. The doctor's point wants more to her blood sugar. Then, on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, Maria goes back into the black bag. This time, next to the familiar vials, there is something new, a small bottle labeled insulin and syringes.
Neither Claus nor Sonny is diabetic. Maria takes the bottle to Sonny's son Alexander. There was a bottle of insulin at a syringe and needles. I calls Alexander insulin for what insulin. Insulin is the reason this bag matters. To the investigators who eventually build the case,
“it looks almost ideal for a killer. A large enough insulin dose can drive a person's blood sugar”
into a fatal coma, and once it has done its work, it is very hard to prove after the fact that an injection ever happened. For now, it is a bottle that has no business in this house, sitting in the private bag of a man whose wife has already suffered one unexplained collapse that nearly killed her. The insulin is not the only alarm that winter. In early December, Sonny takes so much aspirin, she says for a sinus headache, that she is hospitalized for about a
week with aspirin poisoning. Around the same time, there is a night when Claus knocks on Maria's door and tells her not to get excited, but that something has happened. Maria will later say she entered the room and found Sonny in bed, full with blood, with a wound at the back of her head and blood on the pillow and the carpet.laus says Sonny got dizzy and fell, depending on who's telling it, this is either a woman being harmed inside her own home, or a fragile sick woman
leaning on pills and drink, coming apart on her own. Then, almost a year to the day later,
comes the second coma, December 20, 1980. The family is together at Clarence in court,
over dinner, Sonny insists on an ice cream Sunday with caramel sauce, exactly the kind of sugar her doctors have told her to avoid. Afterward, they go out to the movies to see Deli Parton in nine to five, and then come home. Claus goes off to his study, Sonny stays up with Alexander and Kosama. As the evening wears on, Sonny's speech starts to slur and thicken. She can't quite hold a conversation. Her son helps her up to her bedroom and gets her into bed, then Alexander
goes back out to meet friends at a bar. When he leaves, his mother is unwell, but talking. The next morning, she does not come down. Sonny is a late sleeper, but after 11 o'clock, Claus goes up to check on her. He comes back down a few minutes later, and motions to Alexander, who follows him, upstairs. They find her on the marble floor of the bathroom, unconscious. Her head near the base of the toilet, her lips swollen and bleeding. The sink tap still running.
Claus puts a finger under her nose and says, "She is still breathing and goes...
Alexander touches his mother's neck, feels that she is ice cold, and covers her with a
“fur throw. The first responders would never forget the scene.”
Soon as I walked in the room, Nalpi cider, she was in trouble. There was no blood anywhere in the bathroom. Six minutes later, the ambulance arrives and takes her, with Claus riding along to the Newport Hospital emergency room. Sonny's body temperature is 81 degrees, her pulse barely there. A few minutes after she arrives, her heart stops, and it takes two doctors to bring her back. From Newport, she is moved to a specialist hospital in Boston,
and the scans come back with the answer, no one wants. What the responders remembered
was the husband. Mr. Van Buelau looked at this person we identified as his wife, with ice cold, blue eyes, and there was absolutely no feeling. He just sit there.
“The doctors can restart Sonny's heart. They cannot bring back the woman her children knew.”
She's alive, and breathing, and gone. And this time, there is no letter, no relief, no narrow escape. There are only questions about what happened in that house the night before. Sonny's family does not accept this as bad luck. In the New York hospital where she is moved, a neurologist tells Alexander and Aala that in his judgment, their mother's coma was caused by injected insulin, and that winter of 1980 into 1981, their stepfather Claus 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. The calls only stop when Sonny is taken off the respirator and keeps breathing on her own. So the children decide to act. It is Alexander who says out loud what the others are thinking. Their half-sister, Kosima, is a teenager, and she is living under the same roof as the man
“they now suspect of trying to murder or mother. Can they leave Kosima there?”
My mother is a very trusting person. I think nobody really could believe that somebody could be plotting to kill you while at the same time. They're being nice to you and telling you they love you. The family's banker Morris Gurley urges Kosin. Before anyone accuses anyone, he says they should do this quietly and properly and hire a professional. So they hire Richard Q, a former district attorney of Manhattan. His job is not to go to the police, not yet, and not to go to the press.
His job is to build the case the family believes is there statement by statement. They who felt there was the need for somebody who knew something about criminal justice and who could conduct some further investigation and do it discreetly. They went that no
publicity unless or until ultimately there was proof of classes guilt. Q sits down first with
Alexander and Alaw and then with Maria and Maria tells him about that bag, the bottles, the syringes, the insulin with no patient. Everything the family's suspicion has fastened on to keeps leading back to the same place. The small, black case, clouse carries between the houses and that Maria last saw inside a locked closet at Clarendon Court. To prove anything someone is going to have to open that closet. Alex said he'd go up and look for the bag and we had a private
vestigator very skilled one with whom I'd worked any lamb at. And I said no, we'd send Eddie with him really to protect Alex in case anything untoward happened. On a January day in 1981, they do it. Alexander, the investigator, and a locksmith, drive to the shuddered mansion and the locksmith opens the locked closet. Inside is the bag. In their haste, they take no photographs and lift no fingerprints. A detail the defense will one day make a great deal of. But for now, they simply
take the black bag. We knew that there was a pouch in a metal box in my stepfather's closet containing a needle which then turned out to have insulin and amovator on it. There were several other things that had led to suspicions. Everything put together made us believe that we had to go to the police. The family's own doctor tests the bag. Finds insulin on the used needle and tells them plainly
Either you take this to the police or I will.
and to a detective named Jack Reese, who starts over from the beginning. When he interviews
“Alexander, one thing lands hard. The young man's honesty about the limits of what he actually saw.”
He was so determined to build a case against his stepfather. It would have been very easy for him to
say I saw the insulin. He did not. To me, that, uh, lunch was credibility.
“The detective talks to his partner and decides to set a trap for close. The police already have”
the black bag with a pharmacy inside. They have the used needle and they have a husband who may
still believe both are locked away inside Clarendon Court. So detective Jack Reese and his partner
“drive to the Vombuleau's place in Manhattan and park outside the apartment and wait for close.”
Just watching for their chance. Reese sits in his car ready to confront close to ask him a question to push him and then watch and see what he does next. What Will Clouds do when he thinks no one is watching. That's next time on MK Confidential.
