By GottaLaff
Martha (Sunny) von Bulow, the American heiress who was first married to an Austrian playboy prince and then to a Danish-born man-about-society who was twice tried on charges of attempting to murder her, died Saturday at a nursing home in Manhattan. Mrs. von Bulow, who was 76, had been in a coma for nearly 28 years. [...]Mrs. von Bulow's death came nearly 28 years after she was found unconscious on the floor of her bathroom in her mansion in Newport, R.I., on Dec. 21, 1980.
In her long, silent years at the Milstein Building at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia and then at the nursing home on the Upper East Side, Mrs. von Bulow was not on any life support system. She was fed through a tube in her stomach. Though doctors said she showed no signs of brain activity, there were always fresh flowers in the room, and photographs of her children and grandchildren sat on a bedside table. [...]Her second husband, Claus von Bulow, was convicted and later acquitted of twice trying to kill her with injections of insulin so as to aggravate her hypoglycemia, a low blood sugar condition.
His trials were among the most sensational of the 1980s. The news media from around the world were irresistibly drawn to the drama of the beautiful heiress who lay in a twilight zone, the debonair husband accused of murder, two royal children pitted against their younger stepsister and the glittering social milieu of Newport and New York providing the backdrop.
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