Word: von
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Even when she was playing the wide-eyed governess on the soap opera Dark Shadows, Alexandra Isles never made such a dramatic entrance. After Judge Corinne Grande told the prosecutors in the retrial of Claus von Bulow that they had four days to produce the former actress whose testimony helped convict Von Bulow in 1982, Isles realized that her greatest star turn was upon her. Ending months of European seclusion, she returned to Rhode Island to testify against her former lover. Demurely yet firmly, she described a 1980 phone call in which Von Bulow confided that he stood...
Isles' testimony ended the state's case against Von Bulow, the jut-jawed Danish socialite who is charged with twice attempting to murder his multimillionaire wife Martha ("Sunny") von Bulow by injecting her with insulin. The prosecution, which called most of the same witnesses from the first trial, sought to prove that Von Bulow was motivated by the love of Alexandra and the money of Sunny. Yet during the 24 days of prosecution testimony, Defense Counsel Puccio pugnaciously cross-examined the witnesses and successfully cast doubt on much of the crucial testimony...
...first trial, Isles proved an effective tragedienne. Despite her little-girl-lost demeanor, she turned steely under cross-examination. Frustrated by Puccio's needling attempts to pin down her changing emotions about Von Bulow, she burst out to the bespectacled defense attorney, "Have you ever been in love? I doubt it." Puccio wryly replied, "Maybe I can tell my wife to answer that...
...defense attempted to depict Isles to the press as a spurned, vindictive woman, not even faithful to the unfaithful Claus. Puccio, admitting that his client had strung Isles along, said that Von Bulow may have been a "cad," but he was not a murderer. Andrea Reynolds, Von Bulow's thrice-married Hungarian-born companion, told the New York Post: "Alexandra is a very pretty girl, but she is not what I call marriage material." Why not, pray tell? "She doesn't seem to be very monogamous, my dear," sniped Reynolds...
Despite the deus ex machina appearance of Isles, her testimony may have hurt the prosecution as much as helped it. Her sensational revelation about the phone call from Von Bulow in which he first disclosed his wife's coma cut both ways. Isles testified that Von Bulow told her that he and his wife had been having an argument about divorce that "had gone on late into the night. She had drunk a great deal of eggnog. Then, he said, 'I saw her take the Seconal.' And then he said that the next day, when she was unconscious, that...