Von Bulow’s Retrial Ordered to Start April 2

Claus von Bulow, the Danish-born socialite whose conviction on charges of trying to murder his heiress wife was overturned last year, will be retried, Rhode Island’s attorney general announced Saturday.

Arlene Violet, a former nun who took office five days ago, said she reviewed the original trial as well as new evidence submitted by defense lawyers and concluded that “there is sufficient probative evidence which, if believed by a jury, would result in conviction.”

In announcing her decision, Violet criticized Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor and key Von Bulow defense attorney, for saying Friday that new evidence would destroy the prosecution’s case. She threatened to try to have him removed from the case if he continued to “try the case in the media.”

The new trial is scheduled to begin April 2 in Newport.

Von Bulow, a New York City financier, was convicted in March, 1982, on two counts of trying to kill his wife, Martha (Sunny) von Bulow, so he could marry his mistress, former soap opera star Alexandra Isles. The conviction was overturned last year by the Rhode Island Supreme Court.

Mrs. Von Bulow, 53, heiress to a Pittsburgh utilities fortune worth more than $34 million, entered what doctors call an irreversible coma during the 1980 Christmas holiday at Clarendon Court, the couple’s Newport home. She remains in a New York hospital.

The state contended that Von Bulow induced the coma by giving his wife insulin injections. She suffers from hypoglycemia, a condition that would be aggravated by insulin.

Von Bulow refused to comment Saturday.

Dershowitz told reporters Friday that notes by Richard H. Kuh, a New York attorney hired by Mrs. Von Bulow’s children whose private investigation led to Von Bulow’s indictment, would “blow the prosecution’s argument completely out of the water.”

He said that notes from a Kuh interview with the Von Bulows’ maid, Maria Schrallhammer, show that there were “no needles, no syringe and no insulin” in a black bag found in Von Bulow’s closet, contradicting testimony she gave at the trial.

“Obviously, Mr. Dershowitz is also Mr. Showman,” Violet said at a press conference Saturday. “If he persists in these types of comments, we feel that for the integrity of the system, we’ll have to move to have him removed as counsel for the defense until he learns our rules.”

Violet, the nation’s first elected woman attorney general, said Dershowitz violated state rules of ethics by making out-of-court statements about the case.

She added that Dershowitz’s statements about Kuh’s notes are false. Superior Court Judge Albert E. DeRobbio on Friday ordered Kuh to turn over most of his notes.

Dershowitz, who led the defense in Von Bulow’s successful appeal, said Saturday that he complied with all the ethical rules.

The state Supreme Court overturned Von Bulow’s conviction last April, ruling that the trial judge should have allowed the defense access to Kuh’s notes and that state investigators erred by not obtaining a search warrant before testing drugs found in the black bag. In its decision, the court ruled that Von Bulow should be granted a new trial, but allowed prosecutors to determine if the case would be retried.

The U.S. Supreme Court refused in October to hear the state’s appeal.