My name is Alex Andra and I have a friend who is in the middle of the club.
And it's been a very long time. I'm a very close friend who has been working with me for several years.
“We are a family member and my friend was the one who said, "Look, there are some portal.”
I don't need to worry about it. I'm a friend of mine. I'm a family member. I have a family member and I have a hotel, a hotel, a hotel, a hotel, a hotel, a hotel, a hotel. The last week in the summer, the rooms were closed, but the rooms were closed. The rooms were closed. The rooms were closed. The rooms were closed. The rooms were closed. The rooms were closed. The rooms were closed.
It is the spring of 1985. In a hospital bed in New York, a woman named Sunnywembulo has been unconscious for more than four years.
“And she is never going to wake up. 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's serving a life sentence. 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 Klaus Bombulo 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 the 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. AI can clone your voice, forge your signature, even create fake documents that fool experts and criminals are using these tools right now to potentially steal from you. How? It's called title fraud. Your property records are public by law, your name, your address, even your signature.
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So when's the last time you checked your title records? You can do it today. Use my promo code, Megan, at home title lock.com to get a free title history report, plus a free trial of a million dollar triple lock protection. So you can make sure you're not already a victim. That's home title lock.com, promo code, Megan, or use the link in our description. For the retrial, Klaus Bombulo 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 era 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 Alan Dershowitz, who won the appeal, moves into the background. Puchio's plan is the opposite of the first trial, but 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 Vaambulo into a coma?
But moving into the background is not the same as stepping away.
“Years later, Dershowitz 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 Crisby, 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 Vaambulo, 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 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, barred 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 aristocratic 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 been convicted. On April 7, Juan Bulo, his daughter Cosima, and his girlfriend Andrea Reynolds, arrived at the Biltmore Hotel. The next day, when Juan Bulo 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 Grand, 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 ocean front mansion where both comas 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, and 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 comas, 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 Kail of Harvard, the man other doctors called the experts expert on blood sugar. Kail told the jury that only injected insulin could explain what the lab found.
“The doctor, do you have an opinion based upon your review of the records and based upon your experience in your 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, Kail did not give an inch. The last weather 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 a sentence of 30 years in prison for Klossbombulo.
Puchio's team goes after that chain, one link at a time, starting with the im...
The small black bag from Bambulo's closet and the used needle inside.
“It looked like a murder weapon, but one of the young lawyers Dershowitz recruited a Harvard law 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 black bag was not the smoking gun in this case, the smoking gun in this case was the 216 insulin level in Sunnyland Bula'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 Dershowitz, 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 zero, 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. Dershowitz 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 soda, and you just let it dry.
“You see the liquid goes to the very tip and is encrusted in that way.”
And 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 incrustation 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 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. 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 Sunny'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 Sunny'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 Sunny'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 bucks today. He stood to inherit under Sunny's will versus what he would get if he divorced her. This time, Judge Grand 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 decisi...
Grand 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 Sunny'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 Q notes. In our last episode, Alan Dershowitz, pride loose the interview notes that the family's own lawyer, the former Manhattan prosecutor Richard Q, 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 Sunny'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.
“Q 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 Dershowitz, the notes were the entire case.
The notes proved that there was no insulin and that there never 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 insulin. The prosecution's other pillar was the mistress, Alexandra Isles, the soap opera actress, the state head cast as Vombulo's reason to kill in the first trial. She has fled the United States rather than face the second trial, purportedly to visit her mother in Ireland, telling a former lover of hers that she has no intention of returning to testify.
For most of the second trial, Sunny'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,”
Alexander and Alas step forward in a blaze of publicity. At a New York news conference, they appeal for Alexander Isles to return and testify, and they speak as they have all along for the mother who cannot speak for herself. Clouds formed ULO as a defender is entitled to a fair trial, but as a victim is so as our mother. Our mother has been deprived and effect of her life.
Please don't let our mother be deprived of justice. Alexander Isles 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 Alexander 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 ULO 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 Alexander's account into a rescue. On cross examination, he turns it back on her. Well, you're saying that you wrote a letter saying that you wanted to continue. I also conceived that even after the first trial she had written to Clouds, 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. Dissistow gives the jury the other picture, the one the state has believed from the star. He loads his needle and syringe with his soul.
“He calls for the flight and you see the intent, what do you think?”
He finds a spot. And now he's pressing the plunger in. And what does he think? As that insulin is released into a bio, I was thinking, can you see it? He's pressing the button down to the insulin that's going in and it's releasing potential.
He's going to be experiencing properties. 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 eight weeks.
Kept together in a Providence Holiday Inn, a part 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 from five days, so it's been a long while. On June 10, 1985, after roughly eight weeks of testimony and four days of deliberation, the jury comes back into courtroom number eight in Providence, Rhode Island and the clerk reads the two charges.
It's about around the charge of the clinic committed for the 727-779. The criminal assault I took to learn that body part, guilty or nexus, not guilty.
I took out two on the charge of the clinic committed for the 727, the first man's in the eight, the criminal assault.
“An extension of how do you find guilty for that case?”
Not guilty. Not guilty on both counts. Andrea Reynolds, the woman who spent three years fighting to free him, begins to cry. Class Vambulo convicted three years earlier and sentenced to 30 years in prison, walks out of the courthouse, a free man. That evening, class 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 Sunnyvambulo 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 close simply did not try to kill Sunny. Sunny'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 Clarendon Court, walking the layout of the alleged crime scenes.
While that jury is out deliberating, Sunny's children, Aala and Alexander, invite journalist Dominic Dunn, who had known Sunny since she was a debutant and has covered the whole affair to spend the night at Clarendon Court. He finds Sunny's bedroom kept exactly as it was the night of the second coma. He finds the twin beds pushed together and made up with Sunny's photo sheets. An old photograph of Clarendon, 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 Sunny's oldest friend, one from her dead mother.
On Clouse's bedside table, there is a handsome box, Dominic Dunn opens it, in...
Dunn thinks about that box for a long time afterward.
“Twelve strangers saw Clarendon Court for an afternoon as evidence of a reporter sees what it has truly become.”
The night of the verdict, Clouse Bombulau can go anywhere he likes. He's a free man, acquitted of the crime that made him famous.
90 miles away, in a room on the tenth floor of a New York hospital, his wife Sunny 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 nor 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, Sunny's children have one more arrow in their quiver, and Clouse Bombulau begins his next life and ocean away. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.
