Claus von Bülow: The FULL MK Confidential Series

the least.

“Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly, welcome to the Megan Kelly show in today's Sunday”

mega episode.

Today we are bringing you our entire five part MK confidential series looking at the

trials of Klaus Vombulo, including an interview with the man who changed the entire trajectory of this case and not to mention the life of Vombulo and that's Alan Dershowitz. We are continuing our MK confidential series tomorrow night and all next week with the DC sniper story.

You will not want to miss that tune in each night. We air them at 9 p.m. Enjoy and we'll see you tomorrow. 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 Claring

in court, an oceanfront 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 windshield well below 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 Klaus von 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. 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. Klaus von Vuelo is not born an aristocrat, he is not even born a Vuelo. He comes into the world as Klaus Borberg, in Copenhagen, in the summer of 1926. His father, Sven Dvorberg, is a Danish playwright and drama critic, a clever, cultured man who's sympathy for Nazi Germany will destroy his life and reputation.

He admires the Germans, and he goes on admiring them after they occupied Denmark in 1940. He dines as his son will one day put it with the wrong people, in Klaus's own words years later his father, quote, "gave a good name to a bad cause." When the war ends, the reckoning comes. Sven Dvorberg is tried as a Nazi collaborator and convicted.

The conviction is later overturned on appeal, but the name Bvorberg, once perfectly respectable, has become an embarrassment. So Klaus escapes it, he takes the name of his mother's father, Fritz Vuelo, 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.

a borrowed name by a man assembling himself for the world. Klaus tells it differently.

“He says the Buelos are entitled to the Vaughan by blood, and that it was Sunny, who wanted”

her second husband to carry one.

He'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 aid 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, Klaus would itemize the ingredients of his own mystique with the

detachment of a collector.

“One of the lawyers who would eventually represent him, Alan Dershowitz, describes the two men”

inside Klaus. It's almost as if you're too fast on Buelos and he presses a button when he walks into a room. Klaus was a steer, Klaus von Buelos, a current woman friend, put it as if he were a more tition with an umbrella up his back, and then there's the warm Klaus von Buelos

very caring. Sunny is the money. She's born Martha Sharp Crawford in 1931, the only child of a utility 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. Sunny von Buelos was one of America's great eras as she was a very beautiful woman.

I had been to Sunny von Buelos, coming out party when she was a debutant. In 1957, Sunny marries an Austrian prince, Alfred von oursburg, and has two children, Aala and Alexander. By the mid-60s, thanks in part to his infidelitys and her home sickness, that marriage is over. She brings her children to America, and in 1966, marries Klaus.

A year later, they have their own daughter, Kosova, and away from the gowns and the society columns, Sunny'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 lounging 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 Sunny's money.

Everyone in Newport understands the arithmetic, which no one mentions, until it is admitted inside a courtroom. Clarendon 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. The house draws a comfortable income, about $120,000 a year, but it comes out of a trust. She sets up for him, which is another way of saying it is an allowance. Among the old families quietly, he is regarded as a kept man, and there is between

“them a preneutral agreement, with terms that will one day prove enormously important.”

If Clarendon's sunny divorce, Clarendon walks away with almost nothing. If Sunny dies, while that is another matter entirely. But if Sunny was dead, then he would have titled to a house near Odyle and their wonderful apartment in Manhattan, and a great deal of money. Sunny's stepfather, the Big Game Hunter Russell 8kin, does not hide his contempt.

He tells Dominic Dunn on the record, Clarendon's a Cambridge-educated con man with legal training. A moral, greedy as a Wolverine, and cold-blooded as a snake, and I apologize akin adds to the snake. One friend puts it to Dunn this way, quote, "The problem with Clarendon is that he does not

dwell in the palace of truth. He's a fake.

not."

“One person sees this marriage from the inside every day.”

Her name is Maria Schrawlhammer, and she is Sunny's personal maid, a small, grey, German woman who speaks in heavily-accented English and has been at Sunny's side for 23 years. She is fiercely loyal to Sunny. So protective is she of Sunny's privacy, that she will refuse to tell even Clouse's own

lawyers that Sunny once had a face lift, because she had promised Sunny she would never

tell. If anyone sees the marriage up close, it's Maria. "I'm not going to answer the question, because I promised Mrs. Bumpurlo." By the late 1970s, the Vombule Marriage is cold. Separate bedrooms, separate routines, and Sunny is not well.

Her doctor's diagnosed 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 in 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, Klaus is having an affair with Alexandra 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. Alexandra is royalty, the daughter of a Countess, schooled alongside Sunny herself. The family would learn of the affair and testify to how they found out. Klaus told them.

I then asked him about Alexandra Isles specifically, he told me that there had been a relationship. An Isles by most accounts was pressing Klaus to make a choice. I said, "Would six months be suitable?" "Yes, me to marry him."

“That is the pressure Klaus is under by 1980.”

A marriage that has gone cold and a mistress who wants a decision, leaving Sunny for another woman would mean leaving the life her money pays for. Leaving Sunny 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 Clarendon Court. Sunny 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 she would die and first I asked Mr. Van Bullot 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 her in my arms until the doctor came. Here's the chronology that will trouble everyone later. By Maria's account, she urges Klaus for hours.

He first telephones the doctor only in the early afternoon and leaves a message.

When the doctor calls him back, Klaus tells him only that Sunny is sleeping off a night of drinking and is told to keep watching her. Not until around 6 that evening when her breathing turns to a rattle, this Klaus let the doctor be called "for real." The local physician who answers Dr. Janus Galetus arrives at the same moment as the ambulance.

Galetus clears Sunny's throat with his fingers. Strikes are chest and does CPR until Sunny's heart restarts. He saves her life by a matter of minutes. Within a day, Sunny is awake and recovering. And then Klaus 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 Klaus 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, Galetus writes back that the collapse was unpredictable and that by recognizing the change in Sunny's condition and calling him, Klaus 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

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, Sunny's daughter, Allah, and the two women take careful notes. Reptions from a Madison Avenue pharmacy, one bottle made out to a Leslie Baxter, another one made out to Klaus Vombulo at an address that does not exist. Maria gets a little of the powder and liquid to Sunny's doctor of nearly 30 years. Dr. Richard Stock, he identifies them.

Valium and a barbituette, Seco-Barbidol. In April, Sunny 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 Klaus nor Sunny is diabetic.”

Maria takes the bottle to Sunny's son Alexander.

There was a bottle of insulin and the syringes and needles, I called 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, Sunny 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 Klaus 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 Sunny in bed, full with blood, with

a wound at the back of her head and blood on the pillow and the carpet. Klaus says Sunny 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 Clarendon Court. Over dinner, Sunny 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 Daly Parton in '95 and then come home. Klaus goes off to his study, Sunny stays up with Alexander and Kosma.

As the evening wears on, Sunny'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, and 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. Sunny is a late sleeper, but after 11 o'clock, Klaus 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. Klaus puts a finger under her nose and says, "She is still breathing and goes to call for help." 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, Nelpy cider, she was in trouble, but there was no blood anywhere in the bathroom. Six minutes later, the ambulance arrives and takes her, with Klaus riding along to the Newport Hospital emergency room. Sunny'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.

This Devon Bielo looked at this person we identified as his wife, with ice-cold, blue eyes,

He just sits there.

The doctors can restart Sunny's heart.

“They cannot bring back the woman her children knew.”

She's alive and breathing and gone. On this time, there is no letter, no relief, no narrow escape. There are only questions about what happened in that house the night before. Sunny'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. In that winter of 1980 into 1981, their stepfather, Klaus, is on the phone with the two of them almost every day urging them to agree to take Sunny off the machines, appealing by more than one account to their emotions and their finances.

The calls only stop when Sunny is taken off the respirator and keeps breathing on her

own. So the children decide to act. His Alexander who says out loud what the others are thinking. Their half-sister, Kosoma, 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 Kosoma 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 Klausian. 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. I 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 to no publicity unless or until ultimately there was proof of Klaus's guilt.

Q sits down first with Alexandra and Ala 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, Klaus 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 investigative very skilled one with whom I'd work any lamb at.

And I said no, he'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 Alaxmith, 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 detailed 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 amphibiotal on it. There were several other things that had led to suspicions everything put together, made this belief that we had to go to the police. The family's own doctor tests the bag. Fines insulin on the used needle and tells them plainly either you take this to the police

or I will and so the case passes to the Rhode Island State Police and to a detective named Jack Rees, 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 went to his credibility. The detective talks to his partner and decides to set a trap for Klaus. 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 Rees and his partner drive to the Vombulo's place in Manhattan and park outside the apartment and wait for Klaus. Just watching for their chance.

watch and see what he does next. What will Klaus do when he thinks no one is watching? That's next time on MK Confidential. Lieutenant detective Jack Rees of the Rhode Island State Police and his partner are staking out Klaus Bumbulo.

They are set out outside the Vombulo's place in Manhattan.

When Klaus 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 want him to 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 Sonny would ever have had a reason to use insulin, years later Jack Rees 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 we're 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 Rees' prediction comes true.

Class Bombulo drives back up to Newport, Rhode Island, to Clarendon Court, the shuttered

“ocean front mansion where Sonny collapsed.”

The state police follow class this time with a warrant. Rees rings the bell for a second interview, and while two detectives keep class talking in one room, other cops go through the house. Considering the search officers make several observations, on the desk in class's study, one of the notices a scratch pad, two words are written on it, black box, then officers

come upon class's closet standing open and unlocked. Inside it, police find a small black metal box, the one Maria had described, a box that held the little black bag. From time during the police interview, class excuses himself for a few minutes when the detectives look again, the closet has been re-locked, 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. Whenever class went upstairs to do, he came back down without it. The way somebody's a he hadn't found the black bag, and he was by a little concerned that he made, misplaced him.

The detectives never saw a class open that closet, and they never saw him reach for the bag.

What they had was a re-locked door, a now missing no 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 a detective Jack Rhys, 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. In July of 1981, a Rhode Island grand jury in Dites, class Von Buelo on two counts of assault with intent to murder, one count for each of the two commas. A week later, he surrenders for a arrangement, pleads not guilty, and is released on $100,000 bail.

When class is arraigned, he gives the only answer he will give in the entire case. "The trial opens in Newport in February of 1982. The state has to prove two separate crimes 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 courtroom.

So the trial of class Von Buelo becomes something the country has never quite seen.

A crime story, the whole nation can watch, nearly gaveled to gavel, like a soap opera, a maid, a mistress, a fortune, a needle, and an aristocratic, silent defendant, the state calls an attempted murderer.

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 class's own side privately doubts can ever be a jury of his peers.

And at the center of it, ramrod straight and immaculate sits class 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'd 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'd get married, and the day they'd die. I suddenly realized that this was a futile wish." 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 clouds in his dark, well-cut suits, and strangers gather on the courthouse steps, some of them wearing buttons that read free clouds, 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 summer 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. Class is 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 twelve 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, Allah and Alexander. The only person in the family standing with class is Kosima. 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 it all and seeing him with the”

lawyers just saying, "You can investigate anything I really don't have anything to hide," was enough for me to believe it. Class sits through it all with a stillness that unsettles the people around him. He is unfailing ly 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 Familietti, and in his opening he tells the jury exactly what the state means to prove. It is a large promise, and Familietti 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. It thought it was an extremely difficult case, and primarily because it was a circumstantial evidence case, meaning that there were no eyewitnesses to the alleged criminal conduct, and there was so much medical testimony.

The tougher job for the state is the first coma, the one from which Sunny recovered,

to make it a crime, and not just a bad night, Familietti 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 Sunny's own son, Alexander, who gives the jury the story of the marriage from the inside. My stuff, Father said, that after my younger sister was born, my mother was enabled

to have sex, and that he looked towards other women, women in particular. Alexander Owls His sister, Ola, 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 earthquake, that he was blaming her for the fact that

Then comes Maria Schrawlhammer, Sunny's made 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 a 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 with a 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 cross examines her over parts of two days and does not move her a single inch. Then the doctors, Sunny's own physician of nearly three decades, Dr. Richard Stock, tells the jury what he believed had been done to her. One of the countries 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 Sunny'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 Sunny 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 Sunny's fortune, gives the jury the arithmetic.

If Sunny dies, Klaus stands to inherit about $14 million, if they divorce the prenuptial

agreement leaves him with almost nothing. Sunny alive and divorced from Klaus is worth next to nothing to him. Sunny 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.

I don't know, I didn't have that answer. Let me ask you this slow and last question, Miss Isles, may if 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.

The house's lead lawyer, Harold Price Faringer, tells the court he will not put Miss 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, that's sunny with her drinking her aspirin, her sedatives, 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.

Clouds doesn't testify.

“His lawyers 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 Faranger goes after the way the black bag was found. A private search, run by a family that already believed Cloud's guilty, with no police

in the room and no fingerprints ever lifted. Had fingerprints been taken off of that bay? Off of those vibes, off of those needles. And Martha van Belbulo's fingerprints were on those bios and on those needles wouldn't that be important to you.

“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 hallucinant, random, agglaring in court, with them, know it that that was their intention that they were going to plant, something like a lot bad?" 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 van Belbulo tried to murder his wife.

The jury goes out, "One day passes, then a second."

Outside the courthouse, the two camps sit, Sonny's grown children wait on one side, while classes 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 and 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 Clouse van Belbulo guilty. 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

let's stay free on a million dollar bail while he appeals.

Outside the courthouse, Sonny'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 cashpore 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.

The phone rings in the office of a Harvard law professor.

“On the other end, his man, the entire country has just watched get convicted of attempted murder,”

asking the professor to take his case. Harvard man thinks it's a prank, very nearly hangs up, but he doesn't. Over the next three years, that professor and 18 law students will take the most famous conviction in America and turn it completely inside out. The professor's name is Alan Dershowitz, a kid from Brooklyn, a graduate of Yale Law,

with a reputation as the top lawyer of last resort and a friend of mine. So rather than tell you what happened with Alan Dershowitz and his students, we decided to ask him directly. Coming up, Alan breaks it down in his own words, "The notes, the needle, the science, and any doubt he still carries."

I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK confidential. A quick word about this episode. Most of what you're going to hear is a conversation, yours truly, and Alan Dershowitz, the man who engineered one of the most stunning reversals in American legal history. You will also hear a few moments from the 1990 Oscar-winning film made based on Alan's book,

"Reversal of Fortune," starring Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close. So let's start at the beginning with your relationship with Klaus. He called you for the first time on April Fool's Day. You did not believe it was actually Klaus Vombulo, so what actually made you take Klaus Vombulo's case?

Well, first of all, my son, I thought, was him who called me.

My son, he learned always, was calling me, pretending to be famous people, he called me,

pretending to be Michael Jackson, I believed him. And so I thought he was Klaus Vombulo, but then when he told me, "Everybody thinks I'm guilty." I said, "That's my kind of case, I'm going to do it." And everybody said, "There's no way you would win the appeal, there's no way you'd

win a retrial." So it was a challenge and I love challenges. And this was not to him an ordinary appeal. So what was at stake for Klaus? Alan spoke to that.

He said, " Alan, this is a capital case, I said, but you haven't been sent into death. You've been sent into the 30 years." He said, " Alan, I'm not going into prison. I'm going to do what a gentleman does. If you don't reverse my conviction, I'm not going to prison."

He was going to kill himself. And so we did regard the cases of capital case because I know he meant it.

Alan has said that he would never even have been allowed into Newport, into Clarendon

Court, with all its glitz and glamour, but Klaus is the ultimate insider. The accent, the title, the Fifth Avenue apartment.

“So why does Klaus Vonbulo call a kid from Brooklyn to help him?”

As the man who recommended me to be his lawyer, I didn't know Klaus Vonbulo and he didn't know me, but he sort of recommendation from former Supreme Court justice of the United States who was then retired. And the justice said, "I can't do it, I'm retired, but Dershwitz is a really good appellant lawyer higher him."

And so actually the justice took notes on the side of the briefs and I used some of his notes in my argument. There's a famous scene in Reverseville, Fortune, where your character says to him something like, "You're very odd, Klaus, and Jeremy Irons playing Klaus's response, you have no idea." "No, it was he odd."

"He was odd, but my sony line wrote that line." "You're a very strange man, you have no idea." I had told my sony line was one of the producers of the movie and of course he knew me very well. And I told him about my actual encounter with Klaus and that I said to him, "You know,

Klaus, I don't understand you, you're, you're, I just, we are totally different. You seem so, so we're in strange and he said back, yeah, but you don't really have any idea about how strange I am," and then he line wrote it into "You have no idea." And they used that in the Lion King as well, and it became kind of a famous line in motion picture, but it was a very important line in the movie.

So you, like everybody else, when you've been looking at it from the outside, thought for sure this guy is guilty. Oh, of course.

“Then you get on the inside and did you change your mind about his almost certain guilt?”

Yeah, I changed it first from almost certain guilt to I'm not sure to finally, there was

no crime here. There was just no crime. She did it to herself.

things, she wasn't supposed to drink and eat.

And then we were able to prove scientifically that there was never any insulin and the government

was an entire theory, collapsed, at that point I was fairly confident that we'd win the appeal. So you decide to assemble a dream team of lawyers and lawyers and training from Harvard Law School, where you have been a professor at that point for years and ultimately for 50 years. It was a dream team, right?

“Am I right that some of the people helping you have household names today?”

Oh, yeah, you know, it was a real dream team, unlike the OJK, which was a nightmare team. Everybody, forward each other in the OJK, because they were trying to become the one who got credit for the result in the bumpy OJK skill and worked together very, very nicely. I worked with Susan Astridge, I worked with some other professors and then, of course, I assembled a group of great students, not only from the law school, but from the medical

school as well, because this was very much a scientific case. I had been teaching the years the issue of law and science, how students, if they want to become really great criminal lawyers, have to really immerse themselves in science and technology and medicine, and this was the perfect case to illustrate that. All right, so you've got your dream team assembled.

What was the room actually like, as you broke them out into teams? Well, I had a very large Harvard house back in the day with a masterball court in the

“backyard and a big yard and about, I don't know, 10 rooms, and I would divide the team”

into rooms. This was the insulin room. This was the room for search and seizure. This was the case where they found the case. So everybody was divided into a team and I was kind of the general, and I would go from

room to room asking them about their progress. The principal Dershwit says pulled him in was bigger than one wealthy man's freedom. In his telling years ago, it was about how this case had been built in the first place. Here's Alan talking with journalist Bill Curtis in 1997. They had paid for private prosecutors and private investigators and had circumvented

the strictures of the Constitution and had done things that private people could do, but

that public police and prosecutors could never do with held evidence, possibly planted

evidence, and it sounded intriguing to me. But there is an obvious contradiction. Dershwit says a wealthy family had effectively built a private prosecution. Class Bombulo was also wealthy, and now buying the best defense money could buy. Harvard students, expert witnesses, and one of the country's top appellate lawyers.

Hershey Witt said years ago, that's not a defense of the system, it is an indictment of it. If Class Bombulo had been a poor, butler, charged with putting his wife into two commas, he would be in jail today. There is no question in my mind that it took a lot of money to pay to scientific experts

particularly to be able to get justice. In this case, this is a terrible commentary on the American system of justice. You knew early on that this case could turn on the notes of a man named Richard Cue, who

“was Richard Cue, and why were you so sure that his notes were going to be so important?”

Because I knew Dick Cue, he was a friend of mine, and I actually supported him when he

ran into District Attorney against Bob Moritha, who ultimately became a close friend of mine

a year later, but at the time I supported Richard Cue, I liked him, and I knew he was a good lawyer, so I knew he was going to take very, very careful notes of what was said to him by the children and by others, and I had a strong suspicion that these notes would show that there was no answer. He didn't want to turn those notes over to you, so as a lawyer did your

spidey sense go up as soon as he refused. Oh, of course. I mean, if there was nothing in the notes, he would have of course turned them over, and once he said, "I'm not turning over those notes. They're a way of playing football, which they weren't aware of, a client privilege."

And we were entitled to those notes, and under the sixth amendment, we're entitled to all exculpatory evidence, and the court's so ruled number, we got the notes. We said, "You're right, you know, we now have the proof we needed." And so, you know, it was a combination of using law and using science together. And, you know, one reason why I was a successful teacher is because I brought the court

room into the classroom, and one reason I was as successful litigator is I brought the classroom into the courtroom, and the vanilla case is a perfect example of both. I taught the case in class, I got student input from brilliant brilliant Harvard students who gave

And I take the advice of students, and we were able to use the classroom and bring it into the courtroom. But Q had told you that there was an ascrap of paper in his possession that was exculpatory, so he didn't have to turn these notes over. Then finally, he was ordered to turn them over to you, and did your jaw drop when you read them explain what was so explosive about what was in those notes.

Well, the notes proved that there was no insulin, and that there never was insulin.

How? They had descriptions of what was found every time the main looked into the little case, and there was no mention of anything even resembling insulin. Now, you know, I can't really blame

“that Q. I think he honestly believed because he believed that Bambiolo was guilty.”

He honestly believed that it wasn't exculpatory, but to a defense attorney, I am, and by the way, Dick Q wasn't that point in his life too. He had been a prosecutor. He would realize that even if you don't think it's exculpatory, you can use it in a way that raises the scouts. Remember, criminal defencylers don't have to prove anybody's innocence. All F do is raise your reasonable doubt. So in other words, if the children had genuinely believed that they found insulin in this bag,

and that it was used by Klaus to inject Sonny causing her coma, one would think they would have mentioned that in their sit-down with Q, but that's not what happened. Of course, that's exactly what we discovered, and the court of appeals agreed with us. The Supreme Court of Rhode Island agreed with us and said, you know, turn over the material. I don't know whether at the time they told them to turn over

“the material. They knew how explosive the material was, but as soon as we saw it,”

we realized that this was, you know, our ticket, this was his get out of jail free card.

Q has always said that proves nothing. Here he is. What things I put in my notes of the original

interview really have nothing to do with it? If Alex and Ella had told me as I'm sure they did, when preliminarily I interviewed them that this insulin was found, the fact that in my notes of the first interview with Mary Ann, there was several. I didn't put down Maria. She said, "She's so insulin, no need to put it down. I'd already heard that." Alan has said that looking at the state's evidence, the blood of the needle, the bag, he too, would have voted to convict.

So we asked him to explain how he got from there to ultimately believing, "Claus, may have been innocent." He started with the needle, whose tip the prosecution said was "incrusted with insulin." They had a needle, which they said had insulin on it, and we were able to show that if that needle had been injected into a human body, the body would act as a swab, and the insulin would not be encrusted on the bottom, but it would be encrusted near the top.

And we were able to prove that the insulin was at the very bottom showing that that needle had

never been injected into any human being, but that it had been dipped into insulin in order to

create the impression that this was an insulin-coated needle, that Claus von Bula had injected his wife with. The jury was very impressed with that demonstration. Alan, what was the 216

“insulin reading? Do you remember that? It sent a man to prison. What was actually wrong with that”

number 216 insulin? Well, there were three readings, and they suppressed the most exculpatory reading, and just allowed the two readings, both of which were consistent with guilt. Once we were able to get at all the readings, we were able to show that they were inconsistent readings. Again, that doesn't prove his innocence. That just raises a reasonable doubt, and that's what we have to... Of what the level of insulin was inside of Sunny Von Bula? That's right. I remember

everybody has some level of almost every chemical, so it's always a matter of how much it shouldn't matter of degree. Dershawitz's team did not stop there. They tested the laboratory itself, sending in needles containing different substances to see whether the lab could reliably identify insulin. What we did is we sent them several needles. One had insulin, one had saline solution, one had barvicuids, one had combinations, and we wanted to see what the test results

would be. And they came back, and many of them came back saying insulin when there was no insulin, so they were false positives. There was a second story about Sunny herself, the first jury, never really heard. Not Sunny the victim, but Sunny the patient. In the film that was based on Dershawitz's book, "Reversal of Fortune," that other Sunny narrates the whole case from inside her coma. On December 27, 1979, I lay in bed all day, whether I was asleep or in a coma later,

was no insulin in Sunny at all? There was no insulin, but I have to tell you, Truman Capote told me that he gave her insulin and told her how to inject it as a kind of weight loss

or something. I don't know, but I never knew whether to believe Truman Capote invited me to his home,

he showed me a book he had given her, and he told me that he taught her how to self inject. We know she injected herself with B12 vitamins, but he told me that she also injected herself with insulin, but we had no proof of that. We never found any evidence that there was ever any insulin beyond the normal that's found in her body. So what was the defense's theory about what actually put Sunny into a coma? We asked the professor. She was told she had reactive hypoglycemia,

and she shouldn't be drinking sweet drinks and on Christmas Eve. She was having one after the other of these very, very sweet Christmas drinks, and we were convinced that she put herself into a coma.

“Remember, this was her second coma. She had one year earlier, and then they found her,”

even though she had been in a coma and told that she shouldn't smoke, and she had oxygen around her. They found their smoking cigarettes right near the oxygen. She was self-destructive. She was an extraordinarily unhappy woman, and I don't blame her if I were married to a close fund below. I'd be very unhappy woman too. He was a front-around, and he had mistresses and weird tastes, but she was

very, very unhappy. He obviously married her for a money, not for love, not the first time. That's

ever happened, but he was not a good husband, and she was very depressed and very perhaps even suicidal. We're not sure about that. Again, we don't have to prove anything. It's the government that has the burden of proving everything. There was also a very public front to this case. The trial was televised, and a reversal in a courtroom might not be enough to change the public's mind. Waging that media war was a glamorous, relentless, Hungarian-born force of nature

named Andrea Reynolds. Reynolds worked the press like a switchboard. She phone reporters who covered the trial in a way she didn't like, and when that failed, she went over their heads to their editors.

While Dershoitz was in a library dismantling the evidence, Andrea Reynolds ran a whole other campaign

out in the open, not a lawyer, but a fixer and a general. Access, energy, total belief, a woman who refused to let a guilty verdict be the last word. Allen has accused the children of equal, benevolent, frame up. We asked him to explain. Absolutely, we believe the classroom below his guilty, but that he was too smart to be compacted. So they tampered with the evidence. And they allowed evidence to be submitted to the jury, which was not authentic, and we were able

to disprove that a scientifically. There is a catch he can see. You can frame a guilty man. A frame up would not mean class Bombulo was innocent, which is why the blunt question still has to be asked. But sitting here today, thinking back to your comment at the top of the

“interview, you don't believe that class Bombulo committed this crime. I don't. Is it possible?”

It is. I don't believe that the evidence points away from it. The evidence points very strongly to a self-inflicted comb. That's the balance of evidence. Even if this were a civil case, it's not a criminal case, I would say that you couldn't prove even civil liability by a preponderance of the evidence. The preponderance favors innocence. That doesn't mean he's innocent. That means the evidence isn't there to convert. I don't know whether he's guilty,

and that's true of many of my clients. When I was said and done, there's a scene where you pull class aside after you've gotten his convictions overturned. And you say one thing plus, legally this wasn't important victory. Marley, you're on your own.

“It did that happen, and if so, why did you say that to him?”

I did. Because he wanted me to go on television and proclaim my absolute certainty in this innocence. And I couldn't do that. I mean there were many, many possible theories. One possible theory that a lot of people who knew them told me, it's just a possible theory, is that she went into a coma. He saw her, and he could easily have called the ambulance, and he didn't. Because he was perfectly happy to have her die. Now, that would be morally horrible, but

clients, because the first thing you know is the criminal defest lawyers, they all lied to you all the time.

You know, my first meeting with most of my defendants, the first meeting they say, oh, I didn't do anything. I'm perfectly innocent, and I should win the Nobel Prize. Second meeting, they take the Nobel Prize up the table. I didn't do anything. Third meeting, well, I did a lot of bad things right into this. The fourth meeting is, I did this, but they can't prove it. So, you know,

“you have to know when you're dealing with these people. And when you're a criminal defest lawyer,”

you're dealing 90% with guilty people. That's why the conviction rate is so high. I've been very, very lucky. I've won like 30 of my 32 or three homicide, homicide related cases, but most of these cases result in convictions. And in many of the cases, unjustifiable convictions. But the criminal defest lawyer has to do everything in their power ethically and morally to bring about a reversal or an acquittal of the best possible deal you can. And a lot of people don't understand that,

and they think my job is to be as rabbi as priest as minister as mother. No, I'm his defense lawyer.

That's all I do. But the family has never wavered on their belief about Claus's guilt.

Here is Sunny's son from her first marriage, Alexander. Claus found Bula, only succeeded

“into proving our mother of meaningful life. And now he's gotten away with it. In 1983,”

Durshowitz stood in front of the Rhode Island Supreme Court. In the first appellate argument that state ever put on live television and asked five justices to do the most unpopular thing they could. Erase a conviction the public strongly supported. We argued it in front of the Supreme Court of Rhode Island, which was a very tough court. And people told me that we would never win in front of that court. Years after the trial, Durshowitz says he and his team

realized the legal violation alone would not be enough to get a reversal. We had to persuade and they had really been a miscarriage of justice, not merely a violation of the Constitution. In April of 1984, the court gave its answer. Both counts reversed. On two grounds. First, those Q notes, the family's lawyer could not hand pieces of his file to the state police and attorney general and then hide the rest from Claus's defense team behind assertions of privilege.

And second, the black bag. At the end of our previous episode, Sunny's son, Alexander, Q, and a locksmith go to Clarence in court. The locksmith opens Claus's locked closet and inside his Claus's black bag. They simply take it. The contents of that bag are then tested by the Bon hour's Bergs family doctor and he finds insulin. The bag and its contents are then given by the family to the Rhode Island state police. The state police send all the bags contents to

a lab for testing without getting a warrant. That gave the defense an opening. Dersuets had built the whole appeal on state law Rhode Island's own Constitution, which put the reversal beyond the reach of the U.S. Supreme Court. The only question left was whether prosecutors would seek a retrial. Because a reversal is not an acquittal. It doesn't send you home for good. It sends you back to the starting line. Claus Vombulo was

not a free man in the spring of 1984. He was an unconvicted one. And the state of Rhode Island still believed he was a would-be murderer and still intended to try him again. Dersuets says the greatest compliment he's received about this case actually came from the movie "Reversal of Fortune" on which his own son was a producer. What I loved about the movie, which my son helped her produce, was when we went to see it a few times in the theater. People would walk out,

arguing with each other as to whether he did it or not. And that was the brilliance of the movie I thought that it didn't give you an absolute final resolution. It lets you decide what you think. So the case that ended, restart. The trial moves from Newport to Providence.

“Vombulo's defense changes hands. And a reversal, remember, is not the same as proving a man”

innocent. That distinction runs through this whole story. This time, though, the dream team will not

just play defense. This time, they will try to prove there was never a crime at all.

That's next time on MK Confidential. It is the spring of 1985. In a hospital bed in New York, a woman named

90 miles away in Rhode Island, the man, a jury once said, "Put her in that coma,

“is preparing to stand trial for a second time." Sunny's children speak as she cannot.”

She'll never open her eyes again or recognize anybody. She'll never talk to a children,

she'll never see a parent. Three years ago, a Rhode Island jury found Klausbaumbulo guilty of trying to murder his wife. A year ago, a higher court threw out that verdict. Klaus, now free on bail, his first conviction erased, once one thing and says so to anyone with a camera. Here he talks to Kiro, eyewitness News. "I admit to great fatigue and suffering during the last three years and their moments when I just wish it would go away. So there's a

dichotomy, but I want to get exonerated." Exonerated is the word he keeps using. Not released on a technicality, but rather cleared by a jury out loud. Now Klaus is back where he started,

“facing the same two counts of attempted murder, but with a new direction for the defense,”

courtesy of the Dershoitz team in a new courthouse in Providence with a jury that has never heard the

case. If this jury convicts, the appeal that freedom will have bought him nothing and he will likely spend the rest of his life in prison. This time, the defense will not just argue that the state cannot prove its case, but that there was never any crime at all. I'm Megan Kelly and this is MK Confidential. For the Retrial, Klaus Vombulo has a new lead lawyer and he is nothing like the elegant defendant he represents. His name is Thomas Puchio. He made his reputation as a federal

prosecutor who ran the FBI's sting operation abscam in which agents posed as wealthy Arab businessman to expose political corruption and put multiple congressmen in prison. He is not a

“society lawyer. He is blunt and combative, a street fighter. Puchio takes over the courtroom and”

Allen Dershoitz who won the appeal moves into the background. Puchio's plan is the opposite of the first trial, the one that had been about money, a mistress, and an oceanfront mansion. Puchio strips all of it away and tries the case as a single question of medicine. What actually put Sunny Vombulo into a coma? And as before, Klaus Vombulo will not take the stand. But moving into the background is not the same as stepping away. Years later, Dershoitz

would describe just how much of the second trial ran on the work he and his students had already done. The whole retrial was based on our work. In fact, my two main research assistants from the Law School, Joanne Crispy and a guy from the medical school, they sat with the trial lawyer and fed him all the information. So I was very centrally involved in the trial. I spoke to the legal team every single day. And out of the courtroom, another figure is fighting for Klaus Vombulo

and fighting the loudest. Her name is Andrea Reynolds. She's Hungarian born and glamorous and still married to her television producer husband. Andrea has known Klaus and Sunny socially for years, but she and Klaus did not become lovers until after his first trial had ended. That timing matters. The mistress, the state-built its motive around at the first trial, was a different woman. The actress, Alexandra Isles, Reynolds entered the story only afterward.

So the companion of the cameras now catch at Klaus's side was never part of the love and money case

Rhode Island prosecutors once put to a jury. Andrea Reynolds does not do subtle. She courts the reporters covering the case, dines with them, drives them around and calls their editors when the coverage displeases her. Bored from the courtroom, she watches the live feed from inside the CNN truck and slowly takes over the booth until the network finally asks her to leave. It is Reynolds who decides Klaus needs a warmer face for the retrial. At the cold, a risk-to-cratic

figure the first jury saw was half the reason they convicted him. She runs the campaign to clear his name like a military operation. Andrea's own husband, watching all of it from the outside, offers the driest verdict of the whole affair. If Klaus has to marry Andrea, he will wish he had

arrived at the Biltmore Hotel. The next day, when Bob Ulo showed up report house for the first

“day of jury selection, a small army of print and broadcast journalists from around the world”

surrounded him as he made his way into the building. It takes nine days just to see the jury, eight women and four men, and judge Corinne Grant orders them sequestered, kept together in a hotel, cut off from the outside for the length of the trial. Before a word of testimony they are loaded onto a bus and driven to Newport, Rhode Island, to walk through Clarence in court itself. The oceanfront mansion where both Komas happened. The press follows, filming the entire thing,

rising above the grounds in bucket trucks while helicopters circle overhead. And Klaus, who has not set foot in the house in more than four years, steps onto the grounds, sees the dogs he used to walk, and for a moment, his composure breaks. He weeps, briefly, then he collects himself and goes inside with the jury. To see what Puchio is up against,

“remember what convinced the first jury. The state's medical case rested on a simple, powerful chain.”

When Sunny was admitted for her Komas, her blood sugar was dangerously low, and after her final coma, the lab reported an enormous amount of insulin in her blood. Low sugar, high insulin, which the state said could only mean insulin from outside her body, from a needle. To get there on the first trial, the prosecution had called Dr. George K. Hill of Harvard. The man other doctors called the experts expert on blood sugar. K. Hill told the jury that only injected insulin could

explain what the lab found. Dr. Do you have an opinion based upon your review of the records and based upon your experience in the training? And based upon a reasonable degree of medical certainty as to whether or not the insulin was endogenous or exogenous? Like all the data that I've

“looked at, it would be exogenous. And when the defense suggested Sunny's barbituates and drinking”

might have caused a coma on their own, K. Hill did not give an inch. Asked whether barbituates can cause a coma he answered they certainly can, but not with a blood sugar of 29, sir. It was clean, it was confident, and the first time around, it helped produce the sentence of 30 years in prison for Klaus Bombuelo. Kuchio's team goes after that chain one link at a time, starting with the image everyone carried out of the first trial. The small black bag from Bombuelo's closet and the used needle

inside. It looked like a murder weapon, but one of the young lawyers Dershoitz recruited a Harvard

log graduate named Joanne Crispy, says the bag was never really the heart of the case. Here she is

with journalist Bill Curtis on American Justice. Well a lot of people, you know, outside the case, think of the encrusted needles in the black bag or the black bag itself as the smoking gun. The the black bag was not the smoking gun in this case. The smoking gun in this case was the 216 insulin level in Sunnyland, Bua's blood. 216. That's the number on which this entire case rests. An insulin reading so high the state's doctors said it could only mean insulin from

outside her body, from a needle. Hold on to that 216 number though because the defense will. When Dershoitz, Crispy and the team pull the laboratory's own records, they find something the

first jury never heard. The lab had run that same blood sample for insulin more than once and had

gotten wildly different answers. One reading came back at 216. Another came back at 0, a third at 350. One sample tested again and again three vastly different results. To the defense, a number that cannot be reproduced is not evidence of anything and should never have gone to a jury as the truth. Then there is the needle itself. It's tip encrusted with insulin. The prosecution in trial one said that residue tied the weapon to the crime.

The defense now says the residue tells the opposite story. Dershoitz would later illustrate the argument on television with a glass of soda. We did it with Turkey skewer and a glass of milk, but you can do it with anything. If you stick something in a liquid like my finger in this glass of

That's the way the insulin was found on the needle. In this case, if on the other hand what you

“were to do was to take a needle and inject it, the liquid would spread all throughout.”

A needle pushed through skin wipes clean as it goes in. The defense argues, a needle dipped in insulin and left dry collects it at the very tip. To the defense, the encrusted is not proof the needle was used on sunny. It's assigned the needle was dipped staged to look like a weapon. And the team goes one step further, they put the testing itself to the test. Labs are just people and scientists are just people and people make mistakes all the time.

So we decided first of all to test the lab. What we did is we sent them several needles. One had insulin, one had saline solution, one had barbituids, one had combinations, and we wanted to see what the test results would be. And they came back and many of them

“came back saying, "insulin" when there was no insulin. So there were false positives.”

Then the defense calls a witness who had testified for the prosecution the first time around. Dr. Janice Galetus, the new port physician who saved Sonny's life during her first coma back in 1979. This time Galetus tells the jury that in his own judgment that first coma was not caused by insulin at all, but by Sonny's airway closing and her aspirating while unconscious. And the doctor testifies to something even more damaging. That before the first trial he had

given the prosecutors that very opinion and that they told him not to volunteer it on the stand. If even one of Sonny's two comas was not an insulin injection, the state's elegant chain

begins to come apart. This second jury also never hears the prosecution's clearest motive.

“At the first trial, the state told the story of love and money. First and foremost, a mistress”

pressing clouds to marry her more on that in a minute. Clause's other alleged motive, the roughly $14 million, equivalent to about $48 million today. He stood to inherit under Sonny's will, versus what he would get if he divorced her. This time, Judge Grant bars the family's banker more as girly from telling the jury about the money at all. Her ruling is narrow, and at the time it is one of the most criticized decisions of the trial.

Grant finds there is no foundation connecting financial gain to the specific acts the state alleges. That in her words, there is not a suggestion anywhere that financial gain drove the defendant to do with the state says he did. To let a jury hear the $14 million anyway, she reasons would invite them to convict on a motive rather than on evidence.

And because Clause again does not testify, the prosecution never gets another opportunity

to introduce the inheritance evidence in Rebuttal. The motive that anchored the whole first trial, the idea that Sonny's fortune gave Clause a reason to want her dead, is a story this second jury simply never hears. And now the jury hears about the cue notes. In our last episode, Alan Durschewitz pried loose the interview notes that the family's own lawyer, the former Manhattan prosecutor Richard Cue, had kept from the defense for years by claiming they were privileged.

At this trial, those notes finally come out in open court. The defense argues that in the earliest interviews taken within days of Sonny's coma, the insulin that would become the center of this entire case went unmentioned and that the account changed over time, hardening into the version

eventually presented to the first jury. Cue has always answered that omission means nothing,

that he simply did not write down everything he was told. This jury gets to weigh both. To Durschewitz, the notes were the entire case. The notes proved that there was no insulin and that the level wasn't insulin. And look, I don't know how they had descriptions of what was found every time the maid looked into the little case and there was no mention of anything even resembling the insulin. The prosecutions other pillar was the mistress, Alexandre Eils, the soap opera

actress, the state had cast as Vombulo's reason to kill in the first trial. She has fled the

telling a former lover of hers that she has no intention of returning to testify.

“For most of the second trial, Sonny's children remain remote figures staying out of sight.”

But upon hearing this news that their stepfather's former mistress is not coming back to testify, Alexandre and Alas step forward in a blaze of publicity. At a New York news conference, they appeal for Alexandre Eils to return and testify, and they speak as they have all a long for the mother who cannot speak for herself. Clouds found you, though, as a defender, isn't titled to a fair charm.

But as a victim, it's so as our mother. Our mother has been deprived and affect her for a life. Please don't let our mother be deprived from justice. Alexandre Eils realizes that her greatest star turn is upon her.

“She ends her months of European seclusion and returns to Rhode Island to take the stand against her”

former lover. Even when Alexandre was starring on the TV show "Dark Shadows," she never made

such a dramatic entrance. Demurly, yet firmly, she takes the stand at the second trial and describes a 1980 phone call in which Clouds bombed you low confides in her that he stood by and watched as his wife slipped deep into a coma. He watched her, knowing that she was in a bad way. All day, and watched her and watched her, and finally, when she was on the point of dying, he said that he couldn't go through with it, and he called and saved her life.

It is testimony that cuts both ways. In the same account, Clouds watches his wife sink toward death and does nothing, and then, at the last moment, calls the help that saves Sonny's life. The prosecution hears a near confession. The defense hears the opposite, a man who could have a woman who tried to kill herself, die, and instead, rescues her. But Puchio is not satisfied with turning Alexandre's account into a rescue,

on cross-examination he turns it back on her. "Well, you're saying that you're wrote a letter, saying that you wanted it to paint you."

I also conceived that even after the first trial she had written the

Clouse, asking to continue the relationship. That's Puchio's point. A woman who truly believed this man had tried to murder his wife would not have kept writing to him, wanting to be with him, asking him back. After weeks of experts in lab reports and blood chemistry, the lawyers sum up. Puchio zeros in on the heart of the prosecution's case, the maid. He turns the jury back to Maria Schrawlhammer, Sonny's devoted maid of 23 years and the state's star witness

in both trials. Puchio argues that if Maria had really seen what she later swore she saw, she would not have stayed quiet about it. "If, in fact, she saw, as she says she gave, about what it said, it's the beautiful surrogate, that was what it got on. That was what it got on up at the home, and that very moment." The prosecutor Mark Disisto gives the jury the other picture. The one the state has believed

from the start. He loads his needle and surrenders with him. He goes to the fight and you see

“he had what he thinks. He finds a spot. And now he's pressing the plunger in and what does he think?”

As that insulin is released into a fire, I don't see thinking, can you see it? He's pressing the bucket down and the insulin is going in and it's releasing potential. He's going to be with her as he propels. He doesn't have to find the jury. He can see it." The case goes to the jury and the waiting begins. These 12 people have now been sequestered for roughly 8 weeks. Kept together in a Providence Holiday Inn, apart from husbands and wives and children,

the entire time. By now the trial has disrupted not only their lives, but the lives of the people waiting for them back at home. "We've been married 36 years and I don't think we've ever been separated a little five days, so it's been a long while." On June 10, 1985, after roughly 8 weeks of testimony and four days of deliberation, the jury comes back into courtroom number 8 in Providence, Rhode Island and the clerk reads the two charges. "As you've felt wrong, the charges have been admitted

for the 727-779, the quieter assault attention on that body part, guilty of your accidents,

three years fighting to free him, begins to cry. Klaus Vombulo convicted three years earlier and sentenced to 30 years in prison, walks out of the courthouse, a free man. That evening,

Klaus sits down with News Watch 10 for his first interview since the acquittal. When he has asked

what he thinks actually happened to his wife, his answer is not triumphant. "I don't know. I know that I'm totally convinced by the medical picture. I know I didn't do anything." An acquittal is not the same as innocence. A jury has found only that the state did not prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. It has not found that no one harmed Sonny Vombulo and it answers none of the questions at the center of this case. Dennis Roberts, the Rhode Island attorney general

“who prosecuted the first trial, makes this distinction. "It's important I think for our viewers to”

note that being found not guilty because there is a reasonable doubt is a long way from being found innocent." The trial judge, Corinne Grand, will say privately that in her view, it was not even a close case. That Klaus simply did not try to kill Sonny. Sonny's children see it the other way around. The day of the verdict they step up to a bank of microphones. "We are disappointed with the jury's verdict, but we know that this jury was not permitted to hear all of

the evidence that was admitted at the first trial." At the start of the second trial, the jury had

toured the darkened halls of Clarence in court, walking the layout of the alleged crime scenes.

“While that jury is out deliberating, Sonny's children, Aala, and Alexander invite journalist Dominic”

Dunn, who had known Sonny since he was a debutant and has covered the whole affair to spend the night at Clarence in court. He finds Sonny's bedroom kept exactly as it was the night of the second coma. He finds the twin beds pushed together and made up with Sonny's photo sheets. An old photograph of Klaus looking almost noble in a silver frame on his side of the bed, and in a closet beside her evening gowns, the Christmas presents from 1980, still wrapped the festive paper gone faded and limp.

One from Sonny's oldest friend, one from her dead mother. On Klaus's bedside table, there is a handsome box. Dominic Dunn opens it. Inside our cartridge shells and underneath the shells,

“a used syringe. Dunn thinks about that box for a long time afterward. 12 strangers saw Clarence”

in court for an afternoon as evidence, a reporter sees what it has truly become. The night of the verdict, Klaus bombed you looking, go anywhere he likes. He's a free man, a quitted of the crime that made him famous. 90 miles away, in a room on the tenth floor of a New York hospital, his wife Sonny lies exactly as she has since that second Christmas in 1980. Her hair washed and set twice a week, and she will stay that way for the next 23 years, like a doll, print, and perfectly clothed,

well looked after, and all but dead, confined to a life of no mobility, no consciousness. She is the silent center of a case the jury just decided, without deciding anything about how she, in fact, got there. Next time, Sonny's children have one more arrow in their quiver, and Klaus bombed you low begins his next life, and ocean away. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK confidential. June 1985, on the tenth floor of the Harkness Pavilion,

inside Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, a woman lies in a private room

she will never leave on her own. She's not on a respirator, she breathes without help.

A tube feeds her through her nose, private nurses watch her around the clock, and twice a week someone washes and sets her hair. There are scented flowers on the table and music playing softly in the room. Her name is Martha von Buelo, everyone who loves her, Klaus or Sonny, and she has not

world that the man accused of putting her in that bed is not guilty. The Klaus bombed you low trial

“is finally over, and he is not guilty. Bombed you low was tried twice in a soap opera setting”

for the attempted murder of his wealthy wife. The first jury found him guilty, but he won a new trial, and this time he was cleared. How do you start guilty of the murder? Not guilty. So ended the second trial of Klaus von Buelo accused of trying to murder his wife, longer but not as dramatic as the first trial three years ago. Tonight, Klaus bombed you low can go anywhere he likes. Sonny cannot turn her head.

The murder trials are the part of this story that ends relatively quickly. Her is the part that does not. Her two children from her first marriage, Alexander and Allah von oursburg turned their grief into something that will outlast the case. In 1985, they

“helped found a national organization for the victims of crime, and they named it for their mother.”

The Sonny bombed you low national victim advocacy center. In time, it drops her name, but it grows into one of the largest victims' rights groups in America, known today as the National Center for Victims of Crime. That becomes the legacy of Sonny bombed you low. That and the belief that whatever a Rhode Island jury says, someone put her there, condemned her to unconscious bedrest for the rest of her life. But Klaus does not walk away,

Scott Free. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK confidential. Klaus bombed you low's acquittal ends the state's case. It does not end his stepchildren's. Alexander and Allah cannot put him on trial for the crime again, so they do the one thing the law still allows. They sue him in federal court

“in Manhattan, in a civil case. The number they seek is enormous, $56 million, and the claim behind it”

is the one the prosecution made twice, that he tried to kill their mother for her money. The man who has just cleared his name in a criminal court now has to defend it again in a civil one. His appellate lawyer Alan Dershowitz laid out the stakes back in 1986. Yeah, we see each other all the time. We talk about his ongoing cases being sued by his

stepchildren for $56 million. The case is not over, and indeed the American public still remains

undecided. One of the reasons I wrote this book is Klaus bombed you low not only wanted to be acquitted, he wanted to be vindicated. In time, the civil case settles, and the settlement reads like a verdict of its own. Under its reported terms, Klaus gives up every claim to Sonny's fortune, and agrees to divorce his wife, who will never know she has been divorced. In exchange, the lawsuit against him is dropped. He keeps his freedom. He gives up the money. The state

always said was his motive. One person is caught between the two sides of the family. Kosoma, the only child of Klaus and Sonny, who stood by her father through both trials and it cost her. Sonny's mother, Kosoma's grandmother, Annie Laurie Aiken, cuts Kosoma out of her will, and a state valued between $50 and more than $110 million. Kosoma lost a share worth about

$25 million. The exact figure was never the point. The rift was about a daughter's loyalty to a man,

the rest of the family, believed had tried to kill her mother. The Estrangement is real, and for years, it holds. Through both trials, Kosoma and her half-sister Aala are not unspeaking terms. On the last day of the second trial, Dominic Dunn watches the two of them pass in a courthouse corridor. The first time the two women have laid eyes on each other in three years. In neither one says a word. Later Aala tells him, "She's gotten so beautiful. My mother would be very proud of her.

The affection is still there. The rupture is over money, loyalty, and a father the rest of the family cannot forgive." What finally closes the rift is not a scene of forgiveness. It's a legal document.

In December 1987, the same settlement that ends the $56 million lawsuit against

Klaus, Reyn States, Kosoma's inheritance. The grandmother who had cut Kosoma out was dead, and her will stood. Aala and Alexander say, "They have no quarrel with Kosoma at this point, and they agreed to restore her to the one-third share their grandmother had first intended all three of them to have." The thing that had split the three of them, Klaus's treatment of

this family finally does through Sunny. Whatever the three of them feel about Klaus, they are bound

“to the silent woman in the hospital bed, and over the years all three keep coming back to her room.”

When she dies in 2008 after 28 years in that bed, her children come together to bury her. Kosoma would also spend years caring for her own father, financing, and following him when he moves out of the country. She stays close to Klaus for the rest of his life. So, what becomes of Klaus Vambulo? Free and stripped of the fortune that made him who he wanted to be, he does not retreat. He gives interviews. He goes to parties. He lets the notoriety settle over him,

and carries it, almost with relish. The image that fixes him in the public mind comes from the

trial itself. All through the second trial, while a jury is weighing whether or not he tried to murder

his wife, Klaus spends his weekends back in New York. There, his lover and public relations strategist Andrea Reynolds has moved into Sunny's own 14 room apartment on Fifth Avenue. There, in rooms still full of Sunny's things, the couple entertains. Dominic Dunne, who travels in the same circles, sees what goes on inside. He described it in an interview with the television Academy Foundation. She had moved into Sunny Vambulo's apartment on Fifth Avenue, one of the most

beautiful apartments, and they gave a lunch party. This is during a murder trial with butlers with white gloves and all this kind of stuff. Well, I mean, that's right up my alley. I have to tell you,

“I mean, and Helmut Newton, the great photographer, a wonderful man, genius, I think, and a great”

friend of mine. He photographed Klaus and Andrea in black leather. I don't know if you remember those famous photographs during the trial. The audacity is the point. While on trial, for trying to murder his wife, Klaus hosts a lunch party in her apartment with white-loved butlers serving the guests, then poses in black leather for one of the world's most famous photographers. And when the acquittal comes, society does not shut its doors to him. In fact,

it opens them. Klaus and Andrea make one of their first appearances at a party given by Lady Jean Campbell, a Duke's daughter, and a former wife of Norman Miller. They take a box at the Metropolitan Opera on Monday nights. The house's old society night where white tie is still the

“custom and the same families fill the same boxes they always have. Klaus and Andrea turn up at”

Mortimer's, the restaurant where Manhattan goes to be seen. Not everyone will have him. At one dinner, a magazine editor says she will walk out if she is seated at his table. But most of the charm circle takes him back. Dominic Dunne would write that Vambulo's dark and spacious place in social history has been assured. It is Reynolds who has stage managed this whole comeback. She's the one who decided that the cold aristocratic figure, the first jury saw,

needed softening, and she remade his public image for the retrial. She calls their courtship a ballet of seduction, and says he needs a witness to account for his every move. But the romance does not last. Within a few years of the verdict, Reynolds and Klaus quietly part ways. She goes on to marry an English aristocrat, the honorable Sean Plunkett. Klaus does not stay in New York to be talked about. Dominic Dunne watches Klaus return to

society and remains convinced the jury got it wrong. Here he is again with the television Academy Foundation. And he hates me a lot, the way I wrote about him. So, Klaus moves to London, the city where he first made his name and settles back into its dinner parties and its opera boxes, as though the last five years had been a long, unpleasant weekend.

He takes a job reviewing plays for a Catholic newspaper. He never again mounts a public campaign

to prove his innocence, and by all appearances, he never needs to. He has his verdict, and he has received in the drawing rooms of London again if not on the scale sonny's money once paid for. He lives out his years quietly and comfortably, on Klaus's support. He follows the advice of his lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, the same advice, Alan's given every client

I gave him advice. The same advice I gave away J Simpson when we won both cases.

“I said disappear. Nobody wants to see your face. They hate your guts. Go away. And Klaus took”

my advice, went to England, stayed out of the public light. Through it all, Klaus's reinvention and interviews and parties, sonny vombulo does not change at all other than to age. While Klaus dines out first in New York and then in London, his wife lies in the same hospital bed, and the argument over what she was and what was done to her carries on above her head.

And she cannot say a word. Her care costs a fortune more than half a million dollars a year.

Dr. Richard Stock, who has been her physician for nearly 30 years, comes to see her several times a week. Her room is kept as for a wife being welcomed home. Her own night gowns, her own skin creams,

“music in the air, and her children keep watch. Alexander and Alla visit their mother often.”

When Alla's own daughter is small, she brings the little girl named Sunny for her grandmother into the room so that Sunny might somehow know she has a granddaughter. They talked to her, they touch her, they tell her about their lives. The years passed far more of them than anyone imagined. In 1998 at age 67, Sunny has moved to a Manhattan nursing home. Her hair still set, her night gowns still her own, fresh flowers still by the bed. And on December 6th, 2008,

Sunny dies there, without ever having woken up. She is 76. Her children release a short statement calling her a woman of grace and dignity, and the most loving mother imaginable. A woman lost 28 years of her life. Whoever decided to hurt Sunny Vambulo that day in 1980, this can't possibly have been the desired outcome. As for the public relations around her case, long before Sunny died, the case had already split into competing stories.

Alla and Dershowitz wrote the defense account in a book called "Reversal of Fortune." Reporters like Dominic Dunn wrote the skeptical ones, among them Dunn's own fatal charm,

“and then came the version most people would remember. A Hollywood movie. The film,”

also called "Reversal of Fortune" arrives in 1990. It does the one thing neither trial could, it gives Sunny a voice. The filmmakers let her narrate the story from inside the coma that silenced her. This was my body. On December 27th, 1979, I lay in bed all day, whether I was asleep or in a coma later became a subject of dispute. Jeremy Irons, please close and wins the Academy Award for it. He almost turned down the part. He explained

why to the Hudson Union Society in 2009. When the movie "Reversal of Fortune" was offered to me, I thought it was a very tasteless idea because most of the family was still alive and had been through a very difficult, awful time. I thought to have a film made about that, it's all nightmare. So I passed on it a few times and then my friend Glen Close persuaded me she said, quite rightly, if I didn't do it, someone else would. Irons would go on to win the Oscar for

best actor in a leading role in 1991. This is great. Thank you, my co-stars,

Ron Silver and Glen for finally persuading me to do it. And lastly, if I may cut the call of a

telephone to London, where my wife is trying to keep away from a weight and a hotel bedroom, I wish you were here to help me carry this because you helped me win it. Thank you all. The movie becomes the definitive version of the Vambulocase. It makes Sunnyfamous all over again, and dramatizes the doubt at the heart of everything. Conveniently avoiding some of the more troubling facts for Klaus, like his quick return to the new port home, three days after Detective

Rhys asks him about insulin. What the movie fails to do is settle the doubt. No film could possibly answer what two juries could not. Those two juries did not judge the same case.

The first heard the state's motive, the mistress, and the 14 million Klaus stood to inherit.

family banker about the will, citing a lack of foundation. She said there was insufficient evidence

“that Klaus's potential financial gain, quote, "impelled him to allegedly harm Sunny."”

The move was widely criticized at the time. The second jury did hear a medical defense,

the first jury never did, that the science behind the insulin reading was not reliable,

that one of Sunny's commas may not have involved insulin at all, and that the needle with insulin found in the infamous black bag looked like it had been dipped in insulin, not used to inject an actual person. One jury convicted Klaus Vambuloc, a higher court, throughout that conviction, a secondary acquitted him, and that verdict was final. Two juries, two opposite conclusions,

“and in the end only the acquittal stood. Both were asked the same question, did Klaus Vambuloc”

try to kill his wife? Beneath that question, a harder one, was either Koma caused intentionally

at all. Alan Dershowitz has never claimed to know the answer. The evidence points very strongly to

a self-inflicted Koma. That's the balance of evidence. Even if this were a civil case, not a criminal case, I would say that you couldn't prove even civil liability by a proponderance of the evidence. The proponderance favors innocence. That doesn't mean he's innocent. That means the evidence isn't there to convert. I don't know whether he's guilty. Sunny Vambuloc knew she was in the room both times. The one witness who knew everything was unable to tell any of it

frozen instead in an unreachable state. This is all you can know. All you can be told. When you get where I am, you another rest. More than a century ago, an American writer published a story called "Velady" or "The Tiger". In the tale, a barbaric king decides guilt or innocence through a public spectacle and accused person must choose between two identical doors. Behind one ways a tiger that would kill him. Behind the other, a woman he must immediately marry.

When the king discovers that his daughter is secretly in love with a young man on the royal court, he sends the man into the arena to choose between a tiger and a beautiful woman his daughter deeply resents. The princess learns which door is which. From inside the arena, her lover looks to her for guidance. She signals toward the door on the right and he opens it without hesitation. The story ends without showing what lies beyond that open door. Did the princess save the man she

“left, knowing he would marry another woman, or did jealousy cause her to send him to the tiger?”

The writer never tells us, was it the lady or the tiger? The reader is left to decide.

The Vambulo case has its own two doors. Behind one is the defense's version, an unhappy, self-destructive woman whose medical crises became a murder case through fear, unreliable memory and flawed science. Behind the prosecution's door, a husband who twice tried to kill his wife and whose money built a defense powerful enough to escape a second conviction. The two juries in this case opened two different doors, but neither could say what actually happened inside Clarendon court.

The answer stayed forever with sunny and clouds who died in London in 2019. Of course we all have our opinions. I have mine. What do you think happened to sunny Vaughan Buelo? Send me an email at Megankelly.com. We'll be back Monday evening with another case. This one out of the nation's capital for MK confidential. I'm Megankelly.