Martha "Sunny" von Bulow died Saturday at the age of 77 in a New York nursing home. She spent the last 28 years of her life in a coma after what prosecutors alleged were two murder attempts by her husband, Claus.
The story of Claus and Sunny von Bulow was made into several movies and documentaries, including 1990's Reversal of Fortune, which starred Jeremy Irons as Claus and Glenn Close as Sunny.
Claus von Bulow was tried and convicted in 1982 of twice trying to kill Sunny by injecting her with insulin at their estate in Newport, R.I. That verdict was thrown out on appeal and in a second trial in 1985 Claus was acquitted.
After his acquittal, his main accusers, his wife's children by a previous marriage, Princess Annie Laurie von Auersperg Kniessl and Prince Alexander von Auersperg filed a wrongful death suit. At the same time his daughter Cosima was disinherited by her maternal grandmother, Annie Laurie (Crawford) Aitken.
In response to both of these, two years later, Claus von Bulow agreed to renounce any claims to his wife's estimated $75 million fortune and to the $120,000-a-year trust she set up for him. He also agreed to divorce her, leave the country and to never profit from their story. In exchange, besides the lawsuit being dropped, Cosima was reinstated as joint heiress to the Crawford fortune.
von Bulow, 82, now lives in London.
Sunny von Bulow was born Martha Sharp Crawford in Pittsburgh on Sept. 1, 1931, daughter of utilities tycoon George Crawford, who died when she was 4. She was nicknamed "Sunny" for her personality.
In 1957, she married Prince Alfred von Auersperg, an Austrian tennis instructor, on July 20, 1957. They had two children, Annie-Laurie (born 1958) and Alexander Georg (born 1959). They divorced in 1965.
On June 6, 1966, Sunny married Claus von Bulow, and they had a daughter, the aforementioned Cosima von Bulow, in 1967.
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