And then, in an unexpected twist reminiscent of Perry Mason trials, one of the prosecution’s own witnesses, Dr. Janis Gailitis, Sunny’s personal physician in Newport, rebelled on the stand. The jury was hastily sent from the courtroom and Dr. Gailitis revealed that he was being prevented by the prosecution from delivering his true opinion. In fact, he said that as far back as the first trial he had told the prosecutors that insulin had nothing to do with the first coma.
It was Dr. Gailitis who had responded to Von Bülow’s telephone call when the first coma occurred, and found Sunny unconscious in bed, and vomiting. Then she stopped breathing altogether. Gailitis said that he cleared the vomitus from her throat and began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until her breathing restarted. Sunny’s first coma, so dramatically described by the maid who said it inspired her suspicions of Von Bülow, turned out not to be connected to insulin at all, according to Dr. Gailitis. Instead, it was caused by hypoxia, the cutting off of oxygen to the brain, when her breathing had stopped.
When the jury filed back into the courtroom and heard this testimony from Sunny’s own doctor, the prosecution seemed to be in real trouble. But then they played their ace, Alexandra Isles. After having left the country, apparently to avoid testifying, Isles returned at the last minute to stun the court, and the defense, by bringing up new evidence of a damning nature never revealed at the first trial.
At the first trial, Isles had hurt Von Bülow’s case by claiming she gave him an ultimatum in the very month Sunny fell into her final coma. Now the defense apparently had evidence that no such “ultimatum” had been given, so it was never mentioned. But Isles now said that after the first coma Von Bülow had telephoned her to say he had “watched and watched” his wife suffer all day, but then finally “couldn’t go through with it” and called the doctor.
Her testimony electrified the press, and newspapers the next day said that Isles had, in that one sentence, convicted Von Bülow. Lost in the uproar was Puccio’s reminder to reporters that Isles had admitted in the same conversation that Von Bülow told her that Sunny had taken alcohol and sleeping pills, which caused her illness in the first place.
And then Puccio began his case, and reporters had another shock when they realized that Von Bülow’s entire defense would consist only of the testimony of medical experts. It was a risky strategy, because medical testimony can be extremely complicated. But the eminent medical experts called by the defense managed to make their points clear.
Dr. Leo A. del Cortivo, chief toxicologist of Suffolk County, Long Island, said that the ashlike residue found on the “used” needle, believed to be insulin, meant that the needle had actually not been used at all. When a needle is injected and then withdrawn from the flesh, the needle is cleared of all residue by the clinging skin.
As to the laboratory tests which supposedly showed the presence of insulin on the needle, Dr. Arthur H. Rubenstein, chairman of the University of Chicago Medical Department and a world-renowned endocrinologist, said that the test on the needle-"washing was impossible to interpret because of deficiencies in the procedure.” The result of the first tests on the needle-washing revealed more insulin than could be accurately measured. The laboratory, aware of this, conducted three more tests with three diluted solutions, and three different results were achieved. “The problem I have with these numbers,” Dr. Rubenstein said, “is that when you correct for the dilution, as they did, the numbers are not the same.”
“In other words, doctor,” Puccio said, “this sample was not behaving the same way that insulin behaves, is that correct?”
Dr. Rubenstein replied, “That’s correct.”
As to the tests that allegedly showed high levels of insulin in Sunny von Bülow’s blood, Dr. Rubenstein was equally skeptical. “I find it impossible to assess the validity of the testing,” he said, because of the wildly disparate test results on the same sample. According to accepted procedure, duplicate tests should be run on each sample, and the values should be no more than 10 percent apart. In this case, the duplicate tests performed by a Boston laboratory on the sample revealed readings of 0.8 and 350. The laboratory then sent the sample to Bio-Science laboratory in California, which had more sophisticated testing equipment, but, unfortunately, not enough blood serum was left to perform the necessary duplicate tests. So only one test was made, and it showed a value of 216. “The discrepancies make the numbers totally meaningless,” the endocrinologist testified.
In any event, these and other witnesses came to the stand to testify that both of Sunny’s comas had been caused not by insulin, but by hypoxia: the first coma from vomiting which obstructed the air passages; the second from cardiac arrest induced by drugs and alcohol, and complicated by her fall and hypothermia, a lowering of her body temperature caused by lying on a cold bathroom floor.
When the defense abruptly rested its case after presenting only medical witnesses, and Claus von Bülow had not been placed on the stand to rebut Alexandra Isles’ explosive testimony, most courtroom observers believed that Puccio had made a mistake. In effect, he was gambling on the jury’s ability to understand and evaluate medical evidence over the human and often emotional testimony of the loyal maid, the loving children and the former lover.
I had no such doubts. I believed that Puccio had made the correct decision because, as far back as the first trial, I thought that the evidence used to convict Von Bülow was primarily medical. And after my discussion with Dr. Buck I also came to believe that Sunny von Bülow’s comas resulted from natural causes.
Or perhaps the word should be “unnatural.” From time to time during the second trial, medical experts testified that Sunny had a “chemical abnormality” in her endocrinological system, without ever speculating as to what that abnormality was. Dr. Buck was not called to the stand, obviously because Puccio was attempting to prove that hypoxia was the final cause of the two comas and there was no need to analyze or speculate on the origin of the chemical abnormality that may have contributed to it.
In spite of expert testimony questioning the validity of tests that showed the presence of excessive insulin in Sunny’s blood, I believe that excessive insulin was in her blood, and that it was caused by the chemical abnormality, islet cell hyperplasia, which sends powerful surges of insulin into the blood much more profound and dangerous than the modest surges associated with reactive hypoglycemia. As we know from the Statum case in California, this condition by itself can lead to coma. In my view, in both of Sunny’s comas, hypoxia was the culminating event, but they began with that abnormality in her system and, aided by drugs and hypothermia, ended in the final coma.
When Puccio interviewed my collaborator before the second trial, he was surprised by my information that insulin had to be refrigerated. “Just think,” he said, “a whole trial was held with experts, then an appeal was filed with long opinions by more experts, and no one ever mentioned that insulin had to be refrigerated.”
Puccio didn’t mention it himself at the second trial, perhaps because whether or not the insulin had been refrigerated was not germane to his defense, which attempted to prove that insulin had nothing whatsoever to do with Sunny Von Bülow’s condition. I do not know if Dr. Buck’s findings, and my own belief in Claus von Bülow’s innocence, influenced the course of Puccio’s strategy. But certainly he must have realized that since medical evidence had convicted Von Bülow in the first trial, it was necessary to call that same medical evidence into question to secure his acquittal.
His strategy worked. The jury apparently had little difficulty making up its mind. Claus von Bülow was innocent of the charge of twice attempting to murder his wife by the surreptitious injection of insulin. There was no medical evidence to prove it “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
The Von Bülow case revolved around the human tragedy of a woman, Sunny von Bülow, who lies in an irreversible coma, her family still divided and torn, warring in the media. But in another sense it was a battle between forensic scientists of opposing poin
ts of view. And for me, it was a dramatic illustration that a jury of laymen can comprehend the complexities of medical evidence—and that medical evidence must be irrefutable to secure conviction.
FOR LOVE OF HY
The Jean Harris Case
1
In 1984 I heard surprising news. The bedroom of the house in which Dr. Herman Tarnower was killed in 1980 had been preserved by its new owners exactly as it was at the time of the tragedy, with furniture riddled by a bullet hole, a window broken by Jean Harris in a jealous rage, a chipped bathtub where she had banged the gun trying to remove its jammed shells, and a bullet gouge from a wild shot in the floor of the balcony outside the bedroom.
Jeffrey and Valerie Westheimer, who purchased the home shortly after Tarnower’s death, had not allowed any journalists or investigators to inspect the room, despite repeated requests over the years. But the Westheimers had preserved the room intact because they believed passionately in Jean Harris’s innocence and hoped that someday, if she is allowed another trial, the evidence still contained in the room may help free her.
For me, the existence of that room presented a rare opportunity—and a fantastic challenge. In 1984, through the kind intermediation of an acquaintance, the noted New York attorney Michael Russakow, who is a personal friend of the Westheimers, I was exclusively permitted to inspect Dr. Tarnower’s bedroom and examine the forensic evidence it contained.
On the day of my visit, with Valerie Westheimer as my guide, I climbed a small spiral staircase that rose vertically from the garage through the living room to Dr. Tarnower’s bedroom. Emerging from the staircase, the only means of ingress, I found myself in a corner of a room with a low, peaked roof. To my right were glass doors leading to a balcony overlooking the grounds of the estate. Facing me were twin beds backed by a headboard containing books. A bedside table and a lamp stood between the beds, in front of a shelf in the headboard which held a telephone and notepads. In the aisle between those two beds, many of the bloody events occurred the night that Tarnower met his death.
I found the bedroom to be oddly designed. The beds and other furniture, such as armchairs and a television set, were all situated in just one half of the space, the area facing the glass doors and the balcony. Behind the high headboard was nothing but empty floor space for about ten feet, reaching to the outer wall, which contained a window (with a pane broken by Jean Harris that fateful night), and three-foot-high cabinets along the floor, used for storage.
On both the left and the right of this room, situated slightly behind the headboard, were “his” and “hers” bathrooms. Tarnower’s bed was on the left as I faced it from the staircase, and his bathroom was on that side. The other bathroom was for his female guests. This, then, was the room in which the tragedy had taken place, and Mrs. Westheimer told me that Jean Harris, during her visit at the time of her trial for the murder of her lover, had said that she still “loved” this house. “All of my best memories are here,” she said. Then she went to the balcony door to gaze out at the large pond on the estate and murmured, “I want my ashes spread on that pond when I die.”
I was familiar enough with the Jean Harris case to know what to look for in that bedroom, but both Mrs. Westheimer and I were in for a surprise. We were standing near the floor cabinets lining the outer wall on the far side of the room behind the beds, and Mrs. Westheimer told me that the cabinets were empty because Tarnower’s sister had removed all of his personal effects years ago. She idly slid open a few doors just to show me that the cabinets were vacant, then said, “What’s this?”
For the first time since she had moved into the house, she spotted, deep in the dark recess of a cabinet, two pieces of cardboard about three feet square. She reached in and brought them out—and we both stared at collages made by Jean Harris for her lover, the first one dated New Year’s Day of 1979, and the second New Year’s Day of 1980, only two months and ten days before Tarnower was killed. The collages had never been mentioned by Jean Harris at the trial and, hidden away in the cabinets, were probably unknown to anyone else connected to the case.
A chill went down my spine as I read the words on those happy, almost exuberant collages, especially the headline on the one prepared just a few months before Dr. Tarnower fell dead with bullets in his body fired by Jean Harris:
HOW YOU CAN USE LOVE TO LIVE LONGER.
2
Dr. Herman Tarnower’s house, a modern, rambling structure set in a verdant lawn that sloped down to a picturesque pond, was completely dark at 10:30 P.M. on March 10, 1980, when a car pulled up and parked in the circular driveway in front. A minute later Jean Harris, headmistress of the fashionable Madeira School, emerged, dressed in a smartly tailored suit, and looked up at the darkened windows of Tarnower’s bedroom. “Hy” had not waited up for her even though she had telephoned to say she was coming.
A few minutes later she climbed up the spiral staircase from the garage in the dark, passing the level that opened on the living room, then paused. She had forgotten the flowers she had brought along on the trip from Washington. Hy would be angry that she was waking him, but perhaps the flowers would help soften his irritation.
She went back down to her car and opened the door. The flowers had been tossed into her automobile by a student at Madeira School as a friendly gesture when Jean Harris was driving away from the campus, at the beginning of her trip. Now they lay on the passenger side of the front seat, in a colorful little bouquet. Beside them was her handbag, which she had also forgotten on her first trip upstairs. The handbag contained a Harrington and Richardson .32-caliber revolver with five live rounds in its chambers. Jean Harris had brought the weapon to Purchase, New York, to kill herself beside the beautiful pond she loved so much.
Earlier that day she had signed her will and left suicide notes in her home addressed to close friends at Madeira. At fifty-six, she believed that both her professional and personal lives were over. A controversy about her expulsion of three students for smoking marijuana had led to flaring problems with the school’s board of supervisors, and a feeling that she had failed as a headmistress. Worse, her lover and confidant for fourteen years, Dr. Tarnower, a prominent physician and author of the best-selling book The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet, had let her know that he was abandoning her for a younger rival, Lynn Tryforos.
Determined to kill herself, Jean Harris felt she could not die without talking one last time, to the man who had been at the core of her life for so long. She picked up the flowers in one hand and her handbag in the other, and started back up the staircase.
According to Jean Harris’s later testimony, this is what happened next:
Tarnower, when awakened, refused to talk to her, even though she implored him, “It’s not really that late and I’m not going to stay very long.” She went into “her” bathroom, the one on the right, and discovered “a greenish-blue satin negligee” belonging to Lynn Tryforos. “I took it off the hook and threw it on the floor. By this time I felt hurt and frustrated…. I picked up a box of curlers and threw them … they … broke a window.”
At that point, Hy Tarnower, not only awake but angry, got out of bed and slapped Harris. The slap, she said, calmed her down, and now “I simply wanted to get dying over with.” She stood at the foot of the bed, “picked up my pocketbook and I felt the gun and I unzipped my bag and I took out the gun…. I raised it to my head and pulled the trigger at the instant that Hy came at me and grabbed the gun and pushed my hand away from my head and pushed it down and I heard the gun explode. Hy jumped back and…. held up his hand and it was bleeding and I could see the bullet hole in it and he said, ‘Jesus Christ, look what you did.’”
Tarnower went to his bathroom on the left side of the room. Harris, more determined then ever to kill herself, dropped to her knees to retrieve the gun, which had fallen on the floor under a bed. But Tarnower, returning from the bathroom, took the gun away from her, then went to the phone at the head of the bed and pressed the buzzer to his housekee
per’s quarters. At this point he was sitting on the side of his bed, Harris said. “I pulled myself up on his knees…. and I was just about straight, and the gun was there…. on his lap…. I grabbed the gun and Hy dropped the phone and…. grabbed my wrist and I pulled back and he let go and I went back on the other bed…. Hy lunged forward, as though he were going to tackle me, and his hands came around my waist and there was an instant when I felt the muzzle of the gun—and I had the gun in my hand and I pulled the trigger and it exploded…. and my first thought was, ‘My God, that didn’t hurt at all.’”
Still clutching the gun, Harris pulled herself away from Tarnower and ran completely around the bed to get away from him. There she placed the gun to her temple and pulled the trigger.
Click!
The gun had malfunctioned. She held it away from her and pulled the trigger again. To her amazement, this time it fired, the bullet plowing into a cabinet in the headboard of the bed next to her. She placed the gun to her temple again and pulled the trigger. Click! Click! Click!
Sobbing, semihysterical, she ran to her bathroom to reload the gun with the extra bullets in her purse so that she could kill herself. But she couldn’t pry loose the cartridge shells in the cylinder. Angrily she banged the gun against the tub, gouging chips in its side, and broke the weapon.
She returned to the bedroom, and saw Tarnower lying on the floor, bleeding. She picked up the phone to call for help, but heard nothing. She didn’t know that the housekeeper had left the extension off the hook. “I said, ‘Hy, it’s broken….’ I helped him onto the bed. He looked exhausted, but he didn’t look dying.”
The Coroner Series Page 22