Martha "Sunny" von Bulow, the American heiress who was first married to an Austrian playboy prince and then to a Danish-born man-about-society who was twice tried on charges of attempting to murder her, died Saturday at a nursing home in Manhattan. She was 76.
Von Bulow's death came 27 years, 11 months and 15 days after she was found unconscious on a bathroom floor in her mansion in Newport, R.I., on Dec. 21, 1980.
Her second husband, Claus von Bulow, was convicted and later acquitted of twice trying to kill her with injections of insulin so as to aggravate her hypoglycemia, a low blood sugar condition.
His trials were among the most sensational of the 1980s. The prosecutions were the result of an investigation initiated at the time by Alexander von Auersperg and his sister Annie-Laurie von Auersperg Kneissl, the children of Sunny von Bulow's marriage to Prince Alfred von Auersperg. The accusations pitted the von Auerspergs against their stepfather and their half-sister, Cosima von Bulow, and divided the loyalty of friends in both Newport and New York.
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