Star Witness

Insulin and a sleeping beauty

The spectators start lining up a few minutes before dawn outside the Newport, R.I., Superior Court. Only about 80 can hope to get seats for the proceedings, which begin three hours later, but the whole nation is being offered nightly peeks inside the paneled courtroom. Television cameras are recording the trial, and excerpts have been shown on network news programs. Viewers have not been disappointed: in its opening weeks, "the case of the sleeping beauty" has lived up to its billing as an Agatha Christie drama in real life.

On trial is Jet-Setter Claus von Buelow, 55. He is accused of twice trying to murder his heiress-wife of 15 years, Martha ("Sunny"), by injecting her with insulin. Sunny, 50, went into a coma at Christmas time in 1979 and again in 1980; the second seems irreversible. She "is alive in the most primitive sense of the word . . . vegetative," said Prosecutor Stephen Famiglietti. The defense contends that Sunny brought on the comas by overindulging in alcohol, sweets and drugs.

The prosecution's star witness so far has been Maria Schrallhammer, Sunny's maid for 23 years. On the day of the first coma in 1979, she testified, she had heard "madame" moaning and had entered the bedroom: "She was rattling, and I thought she would die any second." But, said Schrallhammer, Von Buelow had insisted his wife was only sleeping and refused for almost nine hours to heed the maid's pleas to call a doctor. Later, Schrallhammer testified, she had found in Von Buelow's closet a black bag containing hypodermic needles and insulin. Speaking in heavily accented English, the German-born maid told the court she had asked Von Buelow's stepson, Alexander von Auersperg, "What for insulin?"

According to Schrallhammer, Sunny had confided to her that she might seek a divorce from Von Buelow because she felt that he blamed her for his inability to pursue an active career and said she "wanted to be married to a successful businessman." Von Buelow has admitted having an affair with another woman, but claims that Sunny had lost interest in sex and had given him permission to seek satisfaction elsewhere. The prosecution contends that Von Buelow wanted to be free of Sunny but could not face the thought of losing a claim to his wife's fortune, which is conservatively estimated at $35 million.

Gerhard Meier, an internist who examined Sunny when she was taken to Newport Hospital on Dec. 21, 1980, suffering her second coma, said that she had "low blood sugar and an incredibly high insulin level," which is considered an abnormal combination. The defense had hoped that pretrial depositions from lab technicians would substantiate a mix-up in tests indicating that the insulin might have been manufactured in Sunny's body after her admission. But on the stand the technicians said they had been "confused" by defense questions in the pretrial testimony, and insisted that the tests actually had been made and labeled in unambiguous order. The switch in testimony visibly dismayed Defense Attorney Herald Price Fahringer.

The prosecution estimates it will need three more weeks to complete its case. Fahringer will not disclose the list of defense witnesses, but promises some "surprises." qed

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.