For Love Or Money?

By Richard Stengel

Even when she was playing the wide-eyed governess on the soap opera Dark Shadows, Alexandra Isles never made such a dramatic entrance. After Judge Corinne Grande told the prosecutors in the retrial of Claus von Bulow that they had four days to produce the former actress whose testimony helped convict Von Bulow in 1982, Isles realized that her greatest star turn was upon her. Ending months of European seclusion, she returned to Rhode Island to testify against her former lover. Demurely yet firmly, she described a 1980 phone call in which Von Bulow confided that he stood by and watched as his wife slipped deep into a coma. Recounted Isles: "Finally, when she was on the point of dying, he said he couldn't go through with it, and he called (a doctor) and saved her life."

"You certainly didn't believe he intended to harm his wife, or you wouldn't have associated with him, isn't that true?" challenged Chief Defense Attorney Thomas Puccio. Replied Isles, with a sigh: "I'm ashamed to say it's not true."

Isles' testimony ended the state's case against Von Bulow, the jut-jawed Danish socialite who is charged with twice attempting to murder his multimillionaire wife Martha ("Sunny") von Bulow by injecting her with insulin. The prosecution, which called most of the same witnesses from the first trial, sought to prove that Von Bulow was motivated by the love of Alexandra and the money of Sunny. Yet during the 24 days of prosecution testimony, Defense Counsel Puccio pugnaciously cross-examined the witnesses and successfully cast doubt on much of the crucial testimony.

As in the first trial, Isles proved an effective tragedienne. Despite her little-girl-lost demeanor, she turned steely under cross-examination. Frustrated by Puccio's needling attempts to pin down her changing emotions about Von Bulow, she burst out to the bespectacled defense attorney, "Have you ever been in love? I doubt it." Puccio wryly replied, "Maybe I can tell my wife to answer that."

The defense attempted to depict Isles to the press as a spurned, vindictive woman, not even faithful to the unfaithful Claus. Puccio, admitting that his client had strung Isles along, said that Von Bulow may have been a "cad," but he was not a murderer. Andrea Reynolds, Von Bulow's thrice-married Hungarian-born companion, told the New York Post: "Alexandra is a very pretty girl, but she is not what I call marriage material." Why not, pray tell? "She doesn't seem to be very monogamous, my dear," sniped Reynolds.

Despite the deus ex machina appearance of Isles, her testimony may have hurt the prosecution as much as helped it. Her sensational revelation about the phone call from Von Bulow in which he first disclosed his wife's coma cut both ways. Isles testified that Von Bulow told her that he and his wife had been having an argument about divorce that "had gone on late into the night. She had drunk a great deal of eggnog. Then, he said, 'I saw her take the Seconal.' And then he said that the next day, when she was unconscious, that he watched her, knowing that she was in a bad way, all day, and he watched her and watched her." Though it reveals Von Bulow's callousness, Isles' account nevertheless supported the defense claim that Sunny was an abuser of alcohol and drugs.

Puccio succeeded in embarrassing Alexander von Auersperg, Sunny's son, by forcing him to admit that the family had contemplated buying Claus out before they went to the police with their suspicions. He also obtained testimony from Sunny's personal physician, Dr. Janis Gailitis, that the latter believed that his patient's 1979 coma was due not to an insulin injection but to her choking on her own vomit, a theory the doctor said the prosecutors told him to keep to himself in 1982. Finally, Puccio prevented Mrs. Von Bulow's personal banker, G. Morris Gurley, from testifying about the millions Von Bulow stood to inherit, thereby undermining the state's claim that greed motivated Von Bulow.

In his opening statement for the defense last week, Puccio promised to "present a picture of Mrs. Von Bulow as a woman who over a period of years became addicted to the use of drugs . . . a woman who was besieged by many problems, by her daughter leaving home to get married, by her husband involved with another woman, and who on at least three occasions took actions with her own hand which caused her to be in the state she is in today." His first expert, Dr. Leo Dal Cortivo, chief toxicologist in the Suffolk County, N.Y., medical examiner's office, said the insulin on the needle that the state contends Von Bulow used to inject his wife was not left over from an injection, since a needle is always wiped clean by the skin upon removal. The doctor went on to speculate that Sunny's hospitalization three weeks before she fell into her second, irreversible coma was the result of a suicide attempt in which she had probably taken a "massive overdose" of about 65 aspirin tablets.

A succession of experts then began to unravel the prosecution's case on the basis of Sunny's medical records. One testified that Mrs. Von Bulow had taken 15 aspirin tablets, six to seven amobarbital capsules and a few stiff drinks before losing consciousness in 1980. Another asserted that Mrs. Von Bulow's comas were each caused by cardiopulmonary arrest. On Friday Dr. Arthur Rubenstein, an endocrinologist, testified that the positive insulin test results at the center of the state's case were invalid. "I personally would have no confidence in any of those values," he said. Claimed Puccio: "By the end of this, the whole issue of insulin will be out of the trial."

Von Bulow, who appeared nervous and incredulous when Isles was testifying, seemed almost smug once his own witnesses took the stand. During a recess, he declared with a disdainful sweep of his hand, "It's a medical, scientific case. When they start throwing the dirt around, it's really irrelevant." Yet it may be the dirt rather than the science that settles in the minds of the jurors.

With reporting by Timothy Loughran/Providence