- von Bulow, Sunny
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▪ 2009Martha Sharp CrawfordAmerican heiressborn Sept. 1, 1931, Manassas, Va.died Dec. 6, 2008, New York, N.Y.spent nearly 28 years in a coma after being found unconscious in a bathroom of her Newport, R.I., mansion on Dec. 21, 1980; in two sensational trials, her second husband, Claus von Bülow, was initially convicted but then acquitted of having attempted to murder her by injecting her with drugs. Sunny, as she was known from childhood, was the daughter of George Crawford, the multimillionaire founder of the Columbia Gas and Electric Co. Her first marriage, to Prince Alfred von Auersperg, ended in divorce in 1965. She married von Bülow the following year. After the conclusion of the trials, her two children from her first marriage established the Sunny von Bülow National Victim Advocacy Center (later named the National Center for Victims of Crime) and the Sunny von Bülow Coma and Head Trauma Research Foundation. Her story was dramatized in the 1990 film Reversal of Fortune.
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Universalium. 2010.