Kirkus评论

Though he promises an ""evenhanded"" presentation of the case, Wright, who covered the trial and interviewed most of the key figures, clearly sides with the Newport, R.I. jury that convicted Claus von Bulow last year of two attempts on the life of his wealthy wife Martha (""Sunny""). This thorough account of the background events and the trial itself should persuade most readers too--media kindness to von Bulow notwithstanding. Wright paints Claus Borberg (Bulow was his mother's maiden name, to which he later tacked a ""von"") as a social climber extraordinaire, the epitome of International White Trash, ""trained for the salon just as a thoroughbred is trained for the track""--who lucked out magnificently in 1966 by marrying the extremely wealthy (and, old school chums suggest, not all that bright) Sunny Crawford, then on the rebound from an unsuccessful marriage to a footloose European prince. Thirteen years later, Sunny had become increasingly reclusive, Claus had tired of being a ""hired ornament"" in her uninteresting life, his television-actress mistress had given him a divorce-by-Christmas ultimatum, and he knew he'd inherit a cool $15 million under Sunny's will. Was it purely coincidental, then, that on the day after Christmas 1979, Sunny was brought into Newport Hospital in a coma, with a very high insulin level? And was not the question posed by Sunny's faithful German maid (""what for insulin?"") an apt one, when she found the bottle in the infamous ""black bag"" in Claus' closet? And, having gotten away with it once, was there any reason for Claus not to try again the following year, especially since Sunny had meanwhile told her son Alexander she wanted to divorce Claus because of something ""too horrible to tell""? Wright emphasizes that the trial demolished the various exculpatory theories: that Sunny's children from her first marriage framed Claus for financial motives (they stood to gain very little by her death, while Claus would make a killing, so to speak); that Sunny was an alcoholic (zero evidence of this from anyone but Claus); that Sunny administered insulin to herself for dieting (the single defense witness who made this claim was exposed as a liar on other grounds); that Claus was too smart to have bungled so badly (he didn't really bungle the job, it was just his ill luck that a reliable test for exogenous insulin had recently been discovered). The jurors took six days to mull it all over, and it was a terrible ordeal for them--""a revealing and affecting saga of twelve people whose emotions, which told them no one could commit such a crime, battled their intellect, which told them the incriminating evidence was overwhelming."" They emerged, stunned, to find that the media had made a hero of Claus. After the jury verdict came in, the judge remarked that the trial of Claus von Bulow was over and the trial of justice was about to begin. No matter what rabbits Harvard's Alan Dershowitz can pull out of his constitutional hat on appeal, Wright argues persuasively that the von Bulow affair is no longer a who-done-it. Not ""evenhanded,"" then, but clear and convincing. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.