Date: 12/29/2008
ST. LOUIS (AP) — A newspaper review of more than 1,000 pages of internal FBI documents on Thomas Eagleton found no evidence that the agency leaked information about his treatment for depression, a revelation that ended his vice presidential campaign.
The public disclosure of his mental illness and shock therapy forced him to withdraw as Democrat George McGovern’s running mate in 1972. Some questioned whether the FBI, which had kept tabs on Eagleton since the 1950s, had shared his medical information to the media or others.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch requested Eagleton’s FBI file through the Freedom of Information Act after the former Missouri attorney general and U.S. senator’s death in March 2007. In a report published Sunday, the newspaper said it found no direct evidence countering the FBI’s longtime denials that it had gathered information on Eagleton’s treatment or had provided that information to others.
“Our records show the FBI conducted no such investigation: received no request for such an investigation and had no information regarding Senator Eagleton’s medical history,” one memo stated.
The documents indicate the agency didn’t find out about Eagleton’s psychiatric treatment until after he revealed the details himself during a news conference after his nomination.
During the next 18 months, FBI officials ordered at least three internal reviews to ensure the agency had played no role in the incident. All said they found no evidence of wrongdoing.
“This would be a pretty strong piece of evidence that the bureau certainly believed it was not the source of the information,” said FBI historian John Fox, who reviewed Eagleton’s file for the newspaper. “The FBI appeared pretty convinced those records had not come from the bureau.”
But Gary Hart, the former Colorado senator who served as McGovern’s campaign director in 1972, said the memos could have been the agency covering its tracks. President Richard Nixon’s administration was known for using government power against his political foes.
“Given the context of the times, I would discount the internal memoranda heavily,” Hart said. “It’s very possible that somebody at the middle levels may have been involved in things that the people at the top knew nothing about.”
The FBI began a file on Eagleton in February 1958, apparently after the young prosecutor — speaking to colleagues while in a Las Vegas coffee shop — criticized an FBI fingerprint examiner’s testimony for helping derail the prosecution’s case in a St. Louis robbery trial. One of the others at the table worked for the FBI and Eagleton’s slight made it all the way to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
The agency withheld at least 28 pages from the newspaper, citing privacy, and others had portions redacted to protect confidential informers, investigative methods and the secrecy of grand jury proceedings.
Campaign aide Edward Filippine said he doesn’t believe the FBI was involved and doesn’t think Eagleton did either.
He said Eagleton later learned the name of a health care worker who he believed leaked his treatment to the media, but he didn’t retaliate against the person and wouldn’t allow others to, either.
“What was revealed was the truth,” Filippine said. “That was something which Tom never hid. He took the position that what is, is, and I’m not going to jump on anyone else’s back for saying it.”
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
Brain Injury Santa’s Wish List
I have been publishing a Santa’s Wish List on Christmas Eve since 1996.
My wish list has always gone something pretty much like this:
While I still believe in Santa Claus but I no longer believe in magic:
I wish:
1. That each time we see a child on a bicycle without a helmet, that we become righteously uninhibited and tell them and their parents off. OK, so I don’t do righteously indignant safely anymore, but this year I need to find someone to more helmets on children.
2. That we get the BIA to sponsor a physician brain injury conference in our home state and personally invite, pressure and lay a guilt trip on every M.D. we know, especially emergency room doctors, to attend; This is really getting to be a reminder of all those great ideas I have that never get done. This year I will promise to make some advocacy effort to help this generation of new doctors apply the lessons that are coming home from Iraq to Civilian brain injury.
3. That we eradicate the use of the term “mild” to describe concussion and permanent brain injury; I am still doing a good job of using the word “subtle” instead of “mild”.
4. That we are never too busy for our cyber friends in need; Sadly, the once vibrant TBI chat lists don’t seem to have the same community as they did a decade ago. I keep trying and keep finding ways to broaden our brain injury web of communication.
5. That we never quit our advocacy against insurance companies, neurologists and those who use the term “malingerer”; Had a good year on this front this year. The only doctor who flat out claimed a client of mine was a malingerer was made totally irrelevant by my deposition of him and the case settled for $1.9 million.
6. That we each personally tell a doctor, lawyer or health care professional about how much information there is on the web, how to find it and that it is their sworn duty to go get it; The web has changed so much in 12 years that even old doctors have figured that out. I still remember the defense doctor who when he looked up the answer to a question he couldn’t ask in deposition, wrote a supplemental report answering the question, and ended up quoting one of my web pages as a source.
7. That you all find a good neurologist and pass on the word when you do; This has still got to be the most frustrating part of representing brain injured people. Neurology is a very broad practice area. Few members of this specialty do any significant amount of brain injury. Please if you know of good ones, anywhere, let us know.
8. That we all make a caregiver feel how special and critical they are; Each year I try. And to the very special caretaker in my life, who “cares” for the daily needs of the clients of the Brain Injury Law Group, Jayne Zabrowski, you are the best. And to Angela, my proof reader (God knows I need her) and to Becca, the true pioneer of brain injury advocacy on the Web, thank you so much.
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a safer, less overwhelming year.
My wish list has always gone something pretty much like this:
While I still believe in Santa Claus but I no longer believe in magic:
I wish:
1. That each time we see a child on a bicycle without a helmet, that we become righteously uninhibited and tell them and their parents off. OK, so I don’t do righteously indignant safely anymore, but this year I need to find someone to more helmets on children.
2. That we get the BIA to sponsor a physician brain injury conference in our home state and personally invite, pressure and lay a guilt trip on every M.D. we know, especially emergency room doctors, to attend; This is really getting to be a reminder of all those great ideas I have that never get done. This year I will promise to make some advocacy effort to help this generation of new doctors apply the lessons that are coming home from Iraq to Civilian brain injury.
3. That we eradicate the use of the term “mild” to describe concussion and permanent brain injury; I am still doing a good job of using the word “subtle” instead of “mild”.
4. That we are never too busy for our cyber friends in need; Sadly, the once vibrant TBI chat lists don’t seem to have the same community as they did a decade ago. I keep trying and keep finding ways to broaden our brain injury web of communication.
5. That we never quit our advocacy against insurance companies, neurologists and those who use the term “malingerer”; Had a good year on this front this year. The only doctor who flat out claimed a client of mine was a malingerer was made totally irrelevant by my deposition of him and the case settled for $1.9 million.
6. That we each personally tell a doctor, lawyer or health care professional about how much information there is on the web, how to find it and that it is their sworn duty to go get it; The web has changed so much in 12 years that even old doctors have figured that out. I still remember the defense doctor who when he looked up the answer to a question he couldn’t ask in deposition, wrote a supplemental report answering the question, and ended up quoting one of my web pages as a source.
7. That you all find a good neurologist and pass on the word when you do; This has still got to be the most frustrating part of representing brain injured people. Neurology is a very broad practice area. Few members of this specialty do any significant amount of brain injury. Please if you know of good ones, anywhere, let us know.
8. That we all make a caregiver feel how special and critical they are; Each year I try. And to the very special caretaker in my life, who “cares” for the daily needs of the clients of the Brain Injury Law Group, Jayne Zabrowski, you are the best. And to Angela, my proof reader (God knows I need her) and to Becca, the true pioneer of brain injury advocacy on the Web, thank you so much.
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a safer, less overwhelming year.
Nation’s first face transplant done in Cleveland
Perhaps it is the tragic line of work in which I engage, but my first thought on reading this headline was not cosmetic surgery, but real trauma related plastic surgery. It is an awful memory, but I once represented a client whose entire face was cut off in a car wreck. Everything about that case was awful, including that my client also lost both eyes. Her brain injury seemed trivial in the scheme of all that was gone.
To transplant a face for such a survivor? That would be an amazing thing. Not as great as new eyes, undoing all of the tragedy of her eminently avoidable accident, but still a major step forward for medical science. If you scratch below the surface of the great plastic surgeons, it was to be able to do such a thing that “called” them to this profession.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
http://subtlebraininjury.com
http://thelegaltimes.net
http://tbilaw.com
https://waiting.com
http://vestibulardisorder.com
http://youtube.com/profile?user=braininjuryattorney
g@gordonjohnson.com
800-992-9447
©Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr. 2008
Date: 12/16/2008 9:11 PM
By MARILYNN MARCHIONE
AP Medical Writer
CLEVELAND (AP) — How bad must it be for people to hate their face so much that they would take a new one, unseen, from a corpse? Dozens of burn victims and others so horribly disfigured that they can’t go out in public have begged a Cleveland surgeon for just that chance.
About two weeks ago, Dr. Maria Siemionow chose one, a woman, and gave her the nation’s first near-total face transplant.
In a bold and controversial operation certain to stoke the debate over the ethics of such surgery, Siemionow and a team of other specialists replaced 80 percent of the woman’s face with that of a female cadaver, the Cleveland Clinic announced Tuesday.
The transplant was the fourth worldwide; two have been done in France, and one was performed in China.
The patient’s name and age were not released, and the hospital said her family wanted the reason for her transplant to remain confidential. The hospital plans a news conference Wednesday and would not give details until then.
Surgeons not connected to the Cleveland case reacted cautiously since little is known about the circumstances, but generally praised the operation.
“There are patients who can benefit tremendously from this. It’s great that it happened,” said Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, a surgeon at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston who plans to offer face transplants, too.
Dr. Laurent Lantieri, a plastic surgeon at Henri Mondor-Albert Chenevier Hospital, near Paris, who did a face transplant on a man disfigured by a rare genetic disease, said: “This is very good news for all of us that doctors in the U.S. have done this.”
Unlike operations involving vital organs like hearts and livers, transplants of faces or hands are done to improve quality of life — not extend it. Recipients run the risk of deadly complications and must take immune-suppressing drugs for the rest of their lives to prevent organ rejection, raising their odds of cancer and many other problems.
Arthur Caplan, a leading bioethicist who has expressed grave concerns in the past about such surgery, withheld judgment on the Cleveland case but said the woman’s doctors should give her the option of assisted suicide if they wind up making her life worse.
“The biggest ethical problem is dealing with failure — if your face rejects. It would be a living hell,” said Caplan, bioethics chief at the University of Pennsylvania. “If your face is falling off and you can’t eat and you can’t breathe and you’re suffering in a terrible manner that can’t be reversed, you need to put on the table assistance in dying.”
Siemionow’s long and careful preparation should help prevent such a horrific outcome, those familiar with her said. Siemionow, (pronounced SIM-en-now), 58, a noted hand microsurgeon, has been testing the surgical approach and ways to temper the immune system’s response in experiments for more than a decade.
She has considered dozens of potential candidates over the past four years, ever since the clinic’s internal review board gave permission for her to attempt the operation, and has said she would choose someone severely disfigured as her first case.
“She’s a leader in this field. She’s been investigating this for a long time. She has done the most amount of research in small animals looking at this,” said Dr. Warren Breidenbach, a surgeon at Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Ky., who did the nation’s first hand transplant, in 1999. Siemionow trained with him in Louisville.
Details of the Cleveland surgery are not known, but surgeons generally transplant skin, facial nerves and muscle, and often other deep tissue. That is done so that the new face will actually function and not just be a mask.
The world’s first partial face transplant was performed in France in 2005 on a 38-year-old woman who had been mauled by her dog. Isabelle Dinoire received a new nose, chin and lips from a brain-dead donor. She has done so astoundingly well that surgeons have become more comfortable with a radical operation considered unthinkable a decade ago.
Two others have received partial face transplants since then — a Chinese farmer attacked by a bear and a European man disfigured by a genetic condition. Both are believed to be doing well, though details, especially of the Chinese case, have been scant.
In the Cleveland case, “it is very important what kind of recipient they selected,” and how great the need was, Pomahac (POE-ma-hawk) said. “Hopefully it will open the door both to the public and to other centers” wanting to do these operations.
In an interview in 2005, Siemionow spoke of the terrible need she saw in people horribly disfigured, and how badly it scarred their social and emotional lives, not just their bodies.
“There are no really good alternative therapies for the severely burned or patients with a facial injury or damage,” she said.
Her task now is to prevent organ rejection while managing the risk of infection from taking strong immune-suppressing drugs.
Rejection is a possibility whenever someone receives an organ or cells from someone else because the body regards this as foreign tissue. Two types of problems can result.
The first is graft-versus-host disease, which could happen if the new facial tissue were to attack the recipient’s body. The second is if the patient’s body were to attack the bone marrow or the transplanted face, causing inflammation and other problems at the site of the new tissue.
Either of these can be life-threatening. They can come on suddenly, within days or weeks of the operation, or set in slowly.
___
AP Medical Writer Maria Cheng in London contributed to this report.
___
On the Net:
Cleveland Clinic: http://www.clevelandclinic.org
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
To transplant a face for such a survivor? That would be an amazing thing. Not as great as new eyes, undoing all of the tragedy of her eminently avoidable accident, but still a major step forward for medical science. If you scratch below the surface of the great plastic surgeons, it was to be able to do such a thing that “called” them to this profession.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
http://subtlebraininjury.com
http://thelegaltimes.net
http://tbilaw.com
https://waiting.com
http://vestibulardisorder.com
http://youtube.com/profile?user=braininjuryattorney
g@gordonjohnson.com
800-992-9447
©Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr. 2008
Date: 12/16/2008 9:11 PM
By MARILYNN MARCHIONE
AP Medical Writer
CLEVELAND (AP) — How bad must it be for people to hate their face so much that they would take a new one, unseen, from a corpse? Dozens of burn victims and others so horribly disfigured that they can’t go out in public have begged a Cleveland surgeon for just that chance.
About two weeks ago, Dr. Maria Siemionow chose one, a woman, and gave her the nation’s first near-total face transplant.
In a bold and controversial operation certain to stoke the debate over the ethics of such surgery, Siemionow and a team of other specialists replaced 80 percent of the woman’s face with that of a female cadaver, the Cleveland Clinic announced Tuesday.
The transplant was the fourth worldwide; two have been done in France, and one was performed in China.
The patient’s name and age were not released, and the hospital said her family wanted the reason for her transplant to remain confidential. The hospital plans a news conference Wednesday and would not give details until then.
Surgeons not connected to the Cleveland case reacted cautiously since little is known about the circumstances, but generally praised the operation.
“There are patients who can benefit tremendously from this. It’s great that it happened,” said Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, a surgeon at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston who plans to offer face transplants, too.
Dr. Laurent Lantieri, a plastic surgeon at Henri Mondor-Albert Chenevier Hospital, near Paris, who did a face transplant on a man disfigured by a rare genetic disease, said: “This is very good news for all of us that doctors in the U.S. have done this.”
Unlike operations involving vital organs like hearts and livers, transplants of faces or hands are done to improve quality of life — not extend it. Recipients run the risk of deadly complications and must take immune-suppressing drugs for the rest of their lives to prevent organ rejection, raising their odds of cancer and many other problems.
Arthur Caplan, a leading bioethicist who has expressed grave concerns in the past about such surgery, withheld judgment on the Cleveland case but said the woman’s doctors should give her the option of assisted suicide if they wind up making her life worse.
“The biggest ethical problem is dealing with failure — if your face rejects. It would be a living hell,” said Caplan, bioethics chief at the University of Pennsylvania. “If your face is falling off and you can’t eat and you can’t breathe and you’re suffering in a terrible manner that can’t be reversed, you need to put on the table assistance in dying.”
Siemionow’s long and careful preparation should help prevent such a horrific outcome, those familiar with her said. Siemionow, (pronounced SIM-en-now), 58, a noted hand microsurgeon, has been testing the surgical approach and ways to temper the immune system’s response in experiments for more than a decade.
She has considered dozens of potential candidates over the past four years, ever since the clinic’s internal review board gave permission for her to attempt the operation, and has said she would choose someone severely disfigured as her first case.
“She’s a leader in this field. She’s been investigating this for a long time. She has done the most amount of research in small animals looking at this,” said Dr. Warren Breidenbach, a surgeon at Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Ky., who did the nation’s first hand transplant, in 1999. Siemionow trained with him in Louisville.
Details of the Cleveland surgery are not known, but surgeons generally transplant skin, facial nerves and muscle, and often other deep tissue. That is done so that the new face will actually function and not just be a mask.
The world’s first partial face transplant was performed in France in 2005 on a 38-year-old woman who had been mauled by her dog. Isabelle Dinoire received a new nose, chin and lips from a brain-dead donor. She has done so astoundingly well that surgeons have become more comfortable with a radical operation considered unthinkable a decade ago.
Two others have received partial face transplants since then — a Chinese farmer attacked by a bear and a European man disfigured by a genetic condition. Both are believed to be doing well, though details, especially of the Chinese case, have been scant.
In the Cleveland case, “it is very important what kind of recipient they selected,” and how great the need was, Pomahac (POE-ma-hawk) said. “Hopefully it will open the door both to the public and to other centers” wanting to do these operations.
In an interview in 2005, Siemionow spoke of the terrible need she saw in people horribly disfigured, and how badly it scarred their social and emotional lives, not just their bodies.
“There are no really good alternative therapies for the severely burned or patients with a facial injury or damage,” she said.
Her task now is to prevent organ rejection while managing the risk of infection from taking strong immune-suppressing drugs.
Rejection is a possibility whenever someone receives an organ or cells from someone else because the body regards this as foreign tissue. Two types of problems can result.
The first is graft-versus-host disease, which could happen if the new facial tissue were to attack the recipient’s body. The second is if the patient’s body were to attack the bone marrow or the transplanted face, causing inflammation and other problems at the site of the new tissue.
Either of these can be life-threatening. They can come on suddenly, within days or weeks of the operation, or set in slowly.
___
AP Medical Writer Maria Cheng in London contributed to this report.
___
On the Net:
Cleveland Clinic: http://www.clevelandclinic.org
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
Trial Lawyer Lessons from Sunny von Bulow Coma
Earlier this week, we published a story about the death of Sunny von Bulow after 28 years in a coma. See previous blog. This has been a sensational story for nearly three decades, with little relevance to what we do as traumatic brain injury lawyers. However, there are two issues that are relevant, seemingly buried in this story.
The first is that the cost of caring for her. According to the story: “Her doctor testified that the cost of maintaining her was $375,000 the first year, 1981.” In any catastrophic injury case, there is always an argument about the cost of care. Her care cost $375,000, in 1981. Adjusted to today’s dollars, that would be well in excess of a million dollars.
Perhaps the most important personal injury precedent in this case, is that Sunny, despite her severe coma, lived 28 years, likely to her normal life expectancy. One thing defense lawyers try to argue in almost every case is that they should not have to pay the cost of care for a normal life expectancy because the now severely injured plaintiff won’t live very long. Such an argument should be rule unconscionable and never allowed, because no defendant should get the benefit of a reduced life expectancy, caused by its own conduct.
But what the von Bulow case shows is that if you get the best care, with evolving improving care for comatose patients, there is no reason to presume a shortened life expectancy. Perhaps the lower standard of care defense lawyers claim is all that is necessary will result in a shortened life expectancy. But for Sunny, because she got the best care, her life wasn’t shortened by the wrongdoing.
We believe that if a person’s life is shortened by wrongful conduct, at the point of death, then the actionable conduct becomes a wrongful death. Here there was no “wrongful death” just the loss of everything that “life” means other than a heartbeat
The first is that the cost of caring for her. According to the story: “Her doctor testified that the cost of maintaining her was $375,000 the first year, 1981.” In any catastrophic injury case, there is always an argument about the cost of care. Her care cost $375,000, in 1981. Adjusted to today’s dollars, that would be well in excess of a million dollars.
Perhaps the most important personal injury precedent in this case, is that Sunny, despite her severe coma, lived 28 years, likely to her normal life expectancy. One thing defense lawyers try to argue in almost every case is that they should not have to pay the cost of care for a normal life expectancy because the now severely injured plaintiff won’t live very long. Such an argument should be rule unconscionable and never allowed, because no defendant should get the benefit of a reduced life expectancy, caused by its own conduct.
But what the von Bulow case shows is that if you get the best care, with evolving improving care for comatose patients, there is no reason to presume a shortened life expectancy. Perhaps the lower standard of care defense lawyers claim is all that is necessary will result in a shortened life expectancy. But for Sunny, because she got the best care, her life wasn’t shortened by the wrongdoing.
We believe that if a person’s life is shortened by wrongful conduct, at the point of death, then the actionable conduct becomes a wrongful death. Here there was no “wrongful death” just the loss of everything that “life” means other than a heartbeat
Sunny von Bulow dead after 28 years in coma
Date: 12/6/2008
By VERENA DOBNIK
Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) — Martha “Sunny” von Bulow, an heiress who spent the last 28 years of her life in oblivion after what prosecutors alleged in a pair of sensational trials were two murder attempts by her husband, died Saturday at age 76.
She died at a nursing home in New York, her children said in a statement issued by family spokeswoman Maureen Connelly.
Sunny von Bulow was a personification of romantic notions about high society — a stunning heiress who brought her American millions to marriages with men who gave her honored old European names.
But she ended her days in a coma, showing no sign of awareness as she was visited by her children and tended around the clock by nurses.
In the 1980s, she was the offstage presence that haunted her husband’s two sensational trials in Newport and Providence, R.I.
At the first trial, in 1982, Claus von Bulow was convicted of trying twice to kill her by injecting her with insulin at their estate in Newport, R.I. That verdict was thrown out on appeal, and he was acquitted at a second trial in 1985.
The murder case split Newport society, produced lurid headlines and was later made into the 1990 film, “Reversal of Fortune,” starring Glenn Close and Jeremy Irons.
Claus von Bulow is now living in London, “mostly taking care of his grandchildren,” said Alan Dershowitz, the defense lawyer who handled the appeal and won his acquittal at the second trial. He wrote the book “Reversal of Fortune: Inside the von Bulow Case,” on which the movie was based.
Dershowitz said there was “overwhelming” evidence that her coma was self-induced — caused by a “large ingestion of drugs, and Claus had nothing to do with it,” Dershowitz said.
“There are no winners in a case like this,” he added.
Claus von Bulow’s main accusers were his wife’s children by a previous marriage to Austrian Prince Alfred von Auersperg — Princess Annie-Laurie “Ala” von Auersperg Isham and Prince Alexander von Auersperg. They renewed the charges against their stepfather in a civil lawsuit a month after his acquittal.
Two years later, Claus von Bulow agreed to give up any claims to his wife’s estimated $25 million-to-$40 million fortune and to the $120,000-a-year income of a trust she set up for him. He also agreed to divorce her, leave the country and never profit from their story.
Sales of Sunny von Bulow’s property brought $4.2 million from her oceanfront estate in Newport, $6.25 million from her 12-room apartment on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and $11.5 million from the art and antiques from the homes.
Prosecutors contended that Claus von Bulow wanted to get rid of his wife to inherit a large chunk of her wealth and be free to marry a mistress. The defense countered by painting Sunny von Bulow, who suffered from low blood sugar, as an alcoholic and pill popper who drank herself into a coma.
Claus Von Bulow was accused of injecting his wife with insulin first in December 1979, causing a coma from which she revived. Prosecutors said he tried again a year later, on Dec. 21, 1980, and the 49-year-old heiress fell into what her children on Saturday called “a persistent vegetative state.”
Her world was reduced to a private, guarded room in the Harkness Pavilion and later the McKeen Pavilion of Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. She died at the Mary Manning Walsh Nursing Home, her family said.
Her doctor testified that the cost of maintaining her was $375,000 the first year, 1981.
No figures were available for the years that followed, but by the early 1990s, room charges were up to about $1,500 a day — $547,000 a year — plus $200,000 to $300,000 for round-the-clock private nursing.
She was born Martha Sharp Crawford aboard a railcar in Manassas, Va., on Sept. 1, 1932, daughter of utilities tycoon George Crawford, who died when she was 4.
Sunny, nicknamed for her disposition, was raised by her mother in New York City.
While touring Europe with her mother, she met Prince Alfred von Auersperg, who was younger, penniless and working as a tennis pro at an Austrian resort catering to rich Americans. They were married in 1957 and divorced eight years later after she returned alone to New York with their young son and daughter.
On June 6, 1966, she married von Bulow, who then quit his job as an aide to oilman J. Paul Getty. He could not immediately be reached for comment Saturday.
In addition to her two children from her first marriage, Sunny von Bulow is survived by Cosima Pavoncelli, a daughter from her marriage to von Bulow. Pavoncelli sided with her father during the trials.
___
Associated Press writers Jay Lindsay in Boston and Raphael G. Satter in London contributed to this report.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
By VERENA DOBNIK
Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) — Martha “Sunny” von Bulow, an heiress who spent the last 28 years of her life in oblivion after what prosecutors alleged in a pair of sensational trials were two murder attempts by her husband, died Saturday at age 76.
She died at a nursing home in New York, her children said in a statement issued by family spokeswoman Maureen Connelly.
Sunny von Bulow was a personification of romantic notions about high society — a stunning heiress who brought her American millions to marriages with men who gave her honored old European names.
But she ended her days in a coma, showing no sign of awareness as she was visited by her children and tended around the clock by nurses.
In the 1980s, she was the offstage presence that haunted her husband’s two sensational trials in Newport and Providence, R.I.
At the first trial, in 1982, Claus von Bulow was convicted of trying twice to kill her by injecting her with insulin at their estate in Newport, R.I. That verdict was thrown out on appeal, and he was acquitted at a second trial in 1985.
The murder case split Newport society, produced lurid headlines and was later made into the 1990 film, “Reversal of Fortune,” starring Glenn Close and Jeremy Irons.
Claus von Bulow is now living in London, “mostly taking care of his grandchildren,” said Alan Dershowitz, the defense lawyer who handled the appeal and won his acquittal at the second trial. He wrote the book “Reversal of Fortune: Inside the von Bulow Case,” on which the movie was based.
Dershowitz said there was “overwhelming” evidence that her coma was self-induced — caused by a “large ingestion of drugs, and Claus had nothing to do with it,” Dershowitz said.
“There are no winners in a case like this,” he added.
Claus von Bulow’s main accusers were his wife’s children by a previous marriage to Austrian Prince Alfred von Auersperg — Princess Annie-Laurie “Ala” von Auersperg Isham and Prince Alexander von Auersperg. They renewed the charges against their stepfather in a civil lawsuit a month after his acquittal.
Two years later, Claus von Bulow agreed to give up any claims to his wife’s estimated $25 million-to-$40 million fortune and to the $120,000-a-year income of a trust she set up for him. He also agreed to divorce her, leave the country and never profit from their story.
Sales of Sunny von Bulow’s property brought $4.2 million from her oceanfront estate in Newport, $6.25 million from her 12-room apartment on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and $11.5 million from the art and antiques from the homes.
Prosecutors contended that Claus von Bulow wanted to get rid of his wife to inherit a large chunk of her wealth and be free to marry a mistress. The defense countered by painting Sunny von Bulow, who suffered from low blood sugar, as an alcoholic and pill popper who drank herself into a coma.
Claus Von Bulow was accused of injecting his wife with insulin first in December 1979, causing a coma from which she revived. Prosecutors said he tried again a year later, on Dec. 21, 1980, and the 49-year-old heiress fell into what her children on Saturday called “a persistent vegetative state.”
Her world was reduced to a private, guarded room in the Harkness Pavilion and later the McKeen Pavilion of Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. She died at the Mary Manning Walsh Nursing Home, her family said.
Her doctor testified that the cost of maintaining her was $375,000 the first year, 1981.
No figures were available for the years that followed, but by the early 1990s, room charges were up to about $1,500 a day — $547,000 a year — plus $200,000 to $300,000 for round-the-clock private nursing.
She was born Martha Sharp Crawford aboard a railcar in Manassas, Va., on Sept. 1, 1932, daughter of utilities tycoon George Crawford, who died when she was 4.
Sunny, nicknamed for her disposition, was raised by her mother in New York City.
While touring Europe with her mother, she met Prince Alfred von Auersperg, who was younger, penniless and working as a tennis pro at an Austrian resort catering to rich Americans. They were married in 1957 and divorced eight years later after she returned alone to New York with their young son and daughter.
On June 6, 1966, she married von Bulow, who then quit his job as an aide to oilman J. Paul Getty. He could not immediately be reached for comment Saturday.
In addition to her two children from her first marriage, Sunny von Bulow is survived by Cosima Pavoncelli, a daughter from her marriage to von Bulow. Pavoncelli sided with her father during the trials.
___
Associated Press writers Jay Lindsay in Boston and Raphael G. Satter in London contributed to this report.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.