Reasonable Doubt

REASONABLE DOUBT is a two-act courtroom drama inspired by the two criminal trials of Claus von Bülow, Newport in 1982 and Providence in 1985. Martha “Sunny” von Bülow, heiress to a $75 million fortune, is found unconscious at Clarendon Court, the family’s Newport mansion, and will never regain consciousness. Her children accuse her husband Claus of injecting her with insulin to free himself for his mistress and her fortune. Act One follows the first trial, where a circumstantial case built on financial motive and a devoted maid’s devastating testimony convicts Claus and sentences him to thirty years. Act Two follows the appeal, in which Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and trial attorney Thomas Puccio dismantle the forensic evidence and the maid’s certainty, winning Claus’s acquittal at a second trial. But the play refuses resolution. Claus von Bülow walks free, and whether he did it remains the question that outlives every verdict, haunted throughout by the silent, comatose presence of the woman only the play’s audience will ever really try to hear.