The Trials of Claus von Bülow: The Professor — Ep. 3 | MK Confidential

The phone rings in the office of a Harvard Law Professor.

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

asking the professor to take his case. The 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.”

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That's home title lock.com, promo code, Megan, or use the link in our description. 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, Glenn, always was calling me, pretending to be famous people. He called me,

pretending to be Michael Jackson. I believed him. 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 would 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 cascus. I know he meant it. Alan has said that he would never

even have been allowed into Newport, into Clarenton 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? He is 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, Dershowitz is a really good appellant lawyer, a 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 reversal fortune where your character says to him something like, "You're very odd, Klaus." And Jeremy Irons playing Klaus responds, "You have no idea." No, it was he odd. He was odd. But, my Sunday line wrote that line.

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 went and 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'd been looking at it from the outside thought for sure this guy's 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. We found all the evidence that she was self-destructive and she was drinking and eating 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's entire theory collapsed. And 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? And I write 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 followed each other in the OJK, because they were trying to become the one who got credit for the result. In the Vombule case, we all 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, a medical case. I had been teaching for 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

the masterball court in the backyard and the 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. But the principal Dershwitz 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

withheld evidence, possibly planted evidence. And it sounded intriguing to me. But there is an obvious contradiction. Dershwitz says a wealthy family had effectively built a private prosecution. Class Bombulau was also wealthy and now buying the best defense money goodbye. Harvard students, expert witnesses, and one of the country's top appellate lawyers. Dershwitz said years ago, "That's not a defense of the system. It is an indictment of it."

If Class Bombulau 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 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 Q. Who was Richard Q? And why were you so sure that his notes

“were going to be so important? Because I knew Dick Q, he was a friend of mine. I actually”

supported him when he ran into District Attorney against Bob Moritha who ultimately became a close

friend of mine years later. But at the time, I supported Richard Q. 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

it too. 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. Of course. It mean if there was nothing in the notes,”

he would of course turn them over. And once he said, "I'm not starting over those notes, they're a way of playing for which they weren't aware." A client privilege. And we were entitled to those notes. And under the sixth amendment, we're entitled to all ex-culpatory evidence. And the court so ruled him. We got the notes. We said, "You read that." You know, we now have we now have the proof we needed. And so, you know, it was the combination of using law and

using science together. And, you know, one reason why I was a successful teacher is because I brought the courtroom into the classroom. And one reason I was as successful litigator as 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 me advice about how to handle it and do things. And I take the advice in students and we were able

to use the classroom and bring it into the courtroom. But Q had told you that there was an a scrap 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 may 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 Bambilo 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 doubts. Remember, criminal defencillers don't have to prove anybody's innocence. All F do is raise a 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 agree 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 Maria and Noah several, I didn't put down Maria, she said she saw 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 class may have been innocent. He started with the needle, whose tip the prosecution said was encrusted 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 coded needle that closed from below that 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 Biel. That's right. I remember everybody has some level of almost every

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 became a subject of dispute.

“Do you believe that she injected herself with insulin or that there was no insulin in sunny at all?”

There was no insulin, but I have to tell you, true in compote 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 from a compote. Invite me to his home, he showed me a book he had given her and he told me that he tore her out of 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 will convince 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 her 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 run 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 suicide. 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 phoned 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

a quote, "benevolent, frame up." We asked him to explain. Absolutely believe the classroom bill was 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, not a criminal case, I would say that you couldn't prove even civil liability by a preponderance

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 run 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 sense. And I could 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 the 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 legally not culpable. Now, I didn't

know what happened. I almost never know what happens with my clients. Because the first thing you

know is a criminal defest lawyer is 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, but I didn't do 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 defense lawyer, you're dealing 90 percent with guilty people. That's why the conviction rate is so high. You know, 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, in justifiable convictions. But the criminal defense 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 his 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 Clouse's guilt. Here is Sonny's son

“from her first marriage Alexander. Clouse found Biela, only succeeded in depriving 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 court of 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 them to 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 cue 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 Clouse's defense team behind assertions of privilege. And second, the black bag. At the end of our previous episode, Sonny's son Alexander, cue and a locksmith, go to Clarendon Court, the locksmith opens Clouse's blocked closet, and inside his Clouse's black bag. They simply take it. The contents of that bag are then tested by the Bon Hoursberg's 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 and opening. Durshowitz 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. Clouse 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 of would be murderer and still intended to try him again. Durshowitz says the greatest

on which his own son was a producer. When I loved about the movie, which my son helped to 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 that 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.