The Summing Up

By Richard Stengel

Nineteen years to the day before the two attorneys made their final pleas to the jury, Claus and Martha ("Sunny") von Bulow were married in a small ceremony in New York City. If the defendant was aware of the irony, he did not show it. While his lawyer depicted him as a callous philanderer but not a murderous one, and the prosecution made him out to be a homicidal schemer, Claus von Bulow, his wedding ring as ever on his left hand, maintained an attitude of intense if slightly distant interest. Afterward, the jury of eight men and four women filed out of the courtroom to begin deliberations on whether he had twice attempted to murder his wife with insulin injections. At week's end, the sequestered jurors still had not rendered a verdict.

In their summations, the attorneys in the Von Bulow case seemed to have exchanged roles. Defense Counsel Thomas Puccio once again seemed to be the aggressive prosecutor of his Abscam days, assertively addressing the facts of the case, while Prosecutor Marc DeSisto offered a histrionic and impassioned plea, long on emotion, short on detail.

Puccio, standing stiffly behind a wooden lectern ten feet from the jury, relentlessly disputed the central tenet of the prosecution's case: that insulin had been used to cause Mrs. Von Bulow's two comas. With increasing vehemence, he punctuated his argument with the phrase "No insulin injection!" as he recapitulated testimony by the defense's medical experts.

Puccio then set out to discredit the prosecution's witnesses. He insisted that the sparrowlike Maria Schrallhammer, Mrs. Von Bulow's maid of 23 years, viewed Von Bulow as a shadowy interloper who broke up the "fairy tale" romance of Sunny's first marriage, which ended in divorce. About onetime Soap Opera Actress Alexandra Isles, Claus' former lover, Puccio turned sarcastic: "She appeared before you in one of her most dramatic performances." In the end, Puccio asked not for sympathy but justice. "It's not a pretty picture," he said. "Mr. Von Bulow was cheating on his wife and he was stringing Alexandra Isles along. No matter what you think of Mr. Von Bulow's conduct of his marriage, please don't hold that fact against him in this case."

DeSisto, in contrast, was earnest and amiable, beginning his summation with a windy anecdote about Abraham Lincoln. Instead of reviewing his case, he painted an emotional and highly colored tableau of the alleged murder attempts. With his hands resting on the front of the jury box, DeSisto pleaded with the jurors to try to relive the crime, to put themselves in the room where Sunny von Bulow went into her two comas. As if holding a syringe in his hand, DeSisto asked, "Can you see it? As he was pushing the plunger down, can you see it? The defendant then sat down and read a book . . . Think about that room and stay there all afternoon while his wife is unconscious. Stay there until you can hear Martha von Bulow rattle. Rattle!"

DeSisto's showmanship was one of the few tactics left to him. Earlier in the week, a businesslike Judge Corinne Grande rejected all but one of the prosecution's rebuttal witnesses and dashed the state's last hope that it could offer testimony about the $14 million that Von Bulow stood to inherit upon his wife's death. Her rulings spurred accusations of partiality from Claus' stepchildren. Said Alexander von Auersperg: "We can't understand why $14 million isn't considered a motive to murder someone, especially when Mr. Von Bulow doesn't have any money of his own." But Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, another member of the defense team, praised Grande's fairness. Said he: "The judge allowed only testimony that was narrow, spare and to the point. She understood the difference between a soap opera and a trial."

Despite her strict rulings on evidence, Grande seemed to give the prosecution's case more leeway in her instructions to the jury. Having reviewed medical testimony on Saturday, the jury broke off work at 4:30 p.m. After church and brunch on Sunday, they planned to re-examine the testimony of Maria Schrallhammer and Alexander von Auersperg on the whereabouts of a black bag containing a used syringe, as well as that of an expert defense witness concerning the presence of insulin on the needle. While they continued to deliberate, Von Bulow, chain-smoking and chatting with reporters, roamed the mostly deserted hallways of the Providence courthouse.

With reporting by Timothy Loughran/Providence