Word: bulow
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...smiles around the defense table in the Providence courtroom all but told the story. Judge Corinne Grande had just deflated one of the prosecution's main hopes in the retrial of Claus von Bulow for allegedly trying to kill his now comatose wife Martha ("Sunny") von Bulow in 1979 and again in 1980. The judge had ruled that the state could not offer the jury the 1982 testimony by ex-Soap Opera Actress Alexandra Isles, who helped convict her former lover in his first trial. Isles had testified that she had threatened to leave Von Bulow unless he divorced...
DeSisto, the new prosecutor, is an earnest but inexperienced 29-year-old legal beagle who already seems frustrated. Von Bulow's principal attorney for this trial is former Abscam Prosecutor Thomas Puccio, who is as brashly streetwise as Claus is polo-wise; Dershowitz, a constitutional expert, is advising him from the wings...
...Bulow, who maintained an imperious aloofness during the first trial, seems to have undergone image surgery. Though he still looks as if he would be most at home in a uniform, he has taken to draping his 6-ft. 3-in. frame with the occasional plaid sport coat instead of the somber suits of the first trial. Last week, as Corinne Grande, the presiding judge, led jurors on a walking tour of Clarendon Court, the family mansion in Newport and the alleged scene of the crime, Von Bulow strayed over to the kennel to play with the three golden retrievers...
...prosecution strategy mirrors that of the first trial: persuade the jury that Von Bulow tried to murder Sunny because of the $14 million he stood to inherit and because his mistress, Alexandra Isles, had threatened to leave him if he did not marry her. Isles, a socialite and former soap-opera actress whose dramatic testimony may have helped convict her ex-lover the first time around, has apparently left the country, and no one seems sure whether she will reappear...
...team says it will remedy what Puccio regards as a bungled job the first time out. Puccio intends to portray Sunny as a bored, boring and spoiled brat, as well as a depressed drunk and drug abuser who may have intended to take her own life. As ever, Von Bulow can be seen, the / testimony playing itself out in front of him, leaning back in his wooden chair, with two perfectly manicured fingers placed horizontally across his lips...