Spectators surround a cab carrying Claus von Bulow from court in March 1982. / Journal file photo

I should have known I couldn’t get away with it. In a column this summer in which I reminisced about the celebrated trials of Newport socialite Claus von Bulow — charged a quarter-century ago with twice trying to kill his heiress wife, Sunny, by injecting her with insulin — I carefully tried to glide over a question whose answer I didn’t have: Where is she now?

In phone calls and e-mails, readers immediately challenged the omission. Was Sunny, who had sunk into a coma so mysteriously late in 1980, still alive?

And what, some wanted to know, about other people caught up in the case, which saw von Bulow convicted in 1982, then acquitted in 1985 after his conviction was overturned? What of Sunny’s children, Prince Alexander and Princess Ala von Auersperg, who had helped set the case against their stepfather into motion? The suspicious maid, Maria Schrallhammer? Claus’ mistresses, Alexandra Isles and Andrea Reynolds?

So I set out to get the answers.

Some of the trials’ participants had disappeared, it turned out, at least as far as I was able to learn. Others had died. But many others had moved on to interesting new chapters in their lives.

Here’s what I found out.

Claus von Bulow: The Danish-born socialite, now 81, agreed in 1987 to divorce his wife and give up his claim to her money, settling a lawsuit brought by his stepchildren. (One of his lawyers in the case was Michael B. Mukasey, now in the news as President Bush’s nominee to be U.S. attorney general.)

Today, von Bulow lives in London, where he’s been a regular on the party circuit, hobnobbing with the likes of King Constantine of Greece, designer Carolina Herrera and Mick Jagger. He noted in 2001, in one of his periodic columns in the alternative newspaper New York Press, that Britain’s Tatler magazine had voted him “Number 46 on their list of the 100 most popular guests” in the city.

As recently as last November, he was reviewing theater for the Catholic Herald, which calls itself “Britain’s leading Catholic newspaper.” (Von Bulow described himself in that 2001 column as “a convert from the Joyless Danish Lutheranism of my birth to sunny Mediterranean Catholicism.” He had begun attending Mass in 1985 at the behest of his mistress, Andrea Reynolds, while they were living in Sunny von Bulow’s New York apartment before his second trial.)

He had cancer, said Reynolds, who keeps in touch with him, but it’s under control. (For more on Reynolds, see the accompanying story.)

Von Bulow is a member of Brooks’s, the most prestigious men’s club in London, according to Ocean Drive Magazine, which despite its Newport-sounding name chronicles the glamour and social scene of South Florida.

“Nobody at the club ever alludes to the alleged crime,” the magazine said in 2000, and it quoted von Bulow’s friend Taki Theodoracopulos: “Nothing shocks the English upper crust. The only thing that one can do that is unforgivable is go bankrupt.”

But he’s still anathema to writer Dominick Dunne, who profiled him in highly negative terms for Vanity Fair after his acquittal and ran into him again last fall at Theodoracopulos’ 70th birthday party in London.

“We snubbed each other,” Dunne told the New York Post in March, “and we stayed in different rooms.”

Martha “Sunny” von Bulow: The Pittsburgh utilities heiress, now 75, has been in a persistent vegetative state since December 1980. She was moved from New York City’s Columbia Presbyterian Hospital to a private nursing home years ago.

Her impact continues to be felt, however, in the art world. Mrs. von Bulow was a major supporter of museums including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Morgan Library & Museum, and her daughter with Claus von Bulow, Cosima Pavoncelli, still buys and donates art in her mother’s name. “Tales and Travels” — a show of 80 drawings acquired by the Sunny Crawford von Bulow Fund, including works by French masters Antoine Watteau and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and British draftsmen J.M.W. Turner and Samuel Palmer — opened June 29 and ran through Sept. 23 at the Morgan Library.

Family and friends

Cosima von Bulow Pavoncelli: The only child Claus and Sunny had together, Cosima, now 40, inherited $35 million from the estate of her maternal grandmother, Annie-Laurie Aitken, who died in 1984. Cosima shared the $105-million inheritance equally with her half-brother and half-sister after the pair settled a civil suit against Claus von Bulow in 1987 — he agreed to give up the $25 million to $40 million he would have inherited on their mother’s death, as well as a trust fund that provided him with $120,000 a year, and they dropped the suit that accused him of trying to murder her.

Cosima graduated from Brown University in 1989 and moved to London, where her father was living. She was a mainstay of the city’s party scene when, seven years later, she married Italian Count Riccardo Pavoncelli. He was a divorced, polo-playing investment banker with, The Daily Mail reported, a “huge house” in London’s Chelsea section and an estate in Umbria, Italy. She made Vanity Fair’s international best-dressed list in 1999.

The Pavoncellis have three children: Nicolas, born in 1998; Marina, born in 2000; and Antonia, born in 2005. Last October, Cosima told W magazine at a London polo match also attended by the likes of actresses Mischa Barton and Juliette Lewis, “I’m a polo widow; it’s my life.”

Annie-Laurie “Ala” von Auersperg Isham: Sunny von Bulow’s daughter from her first marriage, now 49, was divorced from her first husband, Austrian Franz Kneissl, after her stepfather’s second trial. The marriage had produced two daughters — Sunny Annie Laurie, in 1983, and Alexandra in 1985.

She married Ralph Isham, an international banker, in 1989, and the pair were named in June 2006 as among the “Hamptons 500” — the 500 people who most impact the posh New York suburbs — by Hampton Style magazine.

The Ishams both serve on the board of the Washington-based National Center for Victims of Crime, which Ala and her brother, Alex, founded in 1985; Ala is a former chairwoman. The group describes itself as “the nation’s leading resource and advocacy organization for crime victims”; since its founding, it says, “we have worked with more than 10,000 grassroots organizations and criminal justice agencies serving millions of crime victims.”

She served for a time as president of the Sunny von Bulow Coma and Head Trauma Research Foundation — an offshoot, the Brain Trauma Foundation, still is operating in New York City — and was co-producer of Drinking & Driving: Severe Head Injury, a PBS special. She also was the host of another PBS special, The Journey Back: Surviving Coma.

Alexander von Auersperg: Sunny von Bulow’s son from her first marriage, now 48, graduated from Brown University in 1983 and has worked in a number of financial services jobs. In 1995, he married Nancy Louise Weinberg, the daughter of a Virginia lawyer.

The couple, who have dropped the aristocratic “von” from their names, have two children: Anna, born in 1995, and Alfred, born in 2000. They have an apartment in a 12-story Park Avenue cooperative building in New York, but have kept a residence on Newport’s tony Harrison Avenue, as well as other ties to the city — Nancy Auersperg is on the board of the classical Newport Music Festival, the couple has contributed thousands of dollars to the Aquidneck Land Trust, and in 2004 both the Auerspergs and the Ishams attended the gala for the 50th anniversary of the International Tennis Hall of Fame.

Alex and Nancy Auersperg both have contributed several thousand dollars to state and federal election campaigns of Sheldon Whitehouse, himself a veteran of Newport’s social scene, and now Rhode Island’s junior senator.

Alex and Nancy also have stayed involved in the family-founded National Center for Victims of Crime. In May, Nancy was co-chair of a $275-a-head reception that honored talk-show host Montel Williams for treating victims with dignity and compassion.

Alexandra Isles: Claus von Bulow’s onetime mistress, the Swedish-born daughter of a Danish count, first gained fame on the 1960s TV vampire serial Dark Shadows, where under the name Alexandra Moltke she played Victoria Winters Clark. But since the trial, she has gone on to a different kind of media life as the director of documentaries whose subjects have included the McCarthy-era blacklist and the Holocaust. Her 1994 film The Power of Conscience: The Danish Resistance and the Rescue of the Jews debuted at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

Her most recent film, The Healing Gardens of New York, chronicles gardens that have brought communities together. In an artist’s statement in 2005, she said she had made it to explore “the heart’s capacity to mend.”

Prince Alfred “Alfie” von Auersperg: Sunny von Bulow’s first husband, the father of her older children, was injured in a 1983 auto accident. He lingered in a coma in a hospital in his native Austria until his death at age 55 in June 1992.

Maria Schrallhammer: The maid whose suspicions helped launch the probe of Claus von Bulow had served Sunny von Bulow for 23 years, never marrying or having children. After her mistress fell ill, she worked for a time for Sunny’s daughter Ala. Maria, who was in her early 60s during von Bulow’s second trial, in 1985, returned to her native Germany after the trial ended.

Robert Biastre: The butler whose testimony helped both the prosecution and the defense died at age 63 in 1989, of a heart attack in his Newport home.

Judges, police and lawyers

Stephen R. Famiglietti: The prosecutor, who was 34 when he won von Bulow’s conviction in the first trial, left the attorney general’s office in 1983. He currently shares a Lincoln law practice with another lawyer, Susan M. Carlin. His clients have included former Providence Police Chief Urbano Prignano Jr., in a case involving Prignano’s city pension, and Robert Picerno, a Lincoln Planning Board member who admitted taking bribes.

Susan E. McGuirl: A 29-year-old deputy attorney general when she supervised the prosecution team that convicted von Bulow, she entered private practice and went on to become chief judge of the Providence Housing Court. In the 1990s, she fought breast cancer and adopted two babies in China. In 2001, she was named a judge of the Superior Court, where she is to preside over the upcoming trial of seven Narragansett Indians arrested in a state police raid on their tribe’s Charlestown smoke shop.

Thomas H. Needham: The outspoken judge who presided over the first trial died at age 77 in 2000, after a history of heart problems and 26 years on the bench.

John F. “Jack” Reise: The state police lieutenant who headed the investigation of von Bulow retired from the force in 1985 to become head of security for Rhode Island Hospital Trust National Bank. He stayed with the bank when it was bought by Bank of Boston, adding Florida and southern Massachusetts to his area of responsibility, and retiring in 2000.

“I did nothing for a year,” says Reise, now 68, “and I got bored.” He now manages outdoor operations for Carnegie Abbey, in charge of the private Portsmouth club’s golfing ranges and transportation from them to its tennis, yachting, equestrian and dining facilities.

“It’s my job to make sure people get where they’re going,” he says. “It’s a seasonal position, and being a golfer myself, I kind of enjoy it.”

Joseph C. Miranda: The state police detective who worked with Reise to investigate the case made sergeant in 1988 and retired in 1990 to take a job as an investigator with the Rhode Island Housing and Mortgage Finance Corporation. That lasted for three years, but a combination of back surgery and the need to take care of his aging mother led Miranda, now 61, to permanently retire in the mid-’90s.

Herald Price Fahringer: The New York lawyer who represented von Bulow in his first trial is 78 and still practicing law. And Fahringer, who has represented such titans of the adult-entertainment world as Hustler publisher Larry Flynt and Screw publisher Al Goldstein, is still in demand. In April, he was the lawyer of choice for Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the “D.C. Madam” whose prostitution operation counted among its clients Louisiana Sen. David Vitter.

Palfrey, who had clashed with her public defender, asked the U.S. District Court for $150,000 to pay Fahringer’s fee. But a judge instead appointed Preston Burton, who had represented Monica Lewinsky after her affair with President Bill Clinton.

John F. Sheehan: Von Bulow’s “local lawyer” in both trials was appointed in 1988 to the Superior Court, where among other cases he presided over the trial of Christopher Hightower, the Barrington man convicted in 1991 of killing the Brendel family. Sheehan died of lung cancer in 2002, at age 73.

Alan M. Dershowitz: The Harvard law professor, who handled von Bulow’s successful Rhode Island Supreme Court appeal of his first-trial conviction, wrote the best-selling Reversal of Fortune about the case. He has gone on to represent clients including football star O.J. Simpson in his murder trial and actress Mia Farrow in her child-custody case against Woody Allen.

His recent books range in subject from America’s Declaration of Independence to the Arab-Israeli conflict to an exploration of how God changes in the course of the biblical book of Genesis. At 69, he still teaches and practices law.

Henry Gemma Jr.: One of two prosecutors in von Bulow’s second trial, he left the attorney general’s office in 1986 to work as legal counsel to then-Senate Majority Leader John Revens, then was appointed to the Superior Court in 1989. He retired as a judge in 1999, though he was only 57 years old, saying that he wanted to spend more time with his wife and do volunteer work. Now the couple is living most of the time in Sarasota, Fla., and, at 66, Gemma says he’s “just enjoying a nice retirement.”

Marc DeSisto: Only 29 when he was one of two prosecutors in the second trial, DeSisto left the attorney general’s office at the end of 1985 to enter private practice. He’s been involved since in a number of high-profile cases in varying roles — representing Governor Carcieri as the governor tries not to testify in the upcoming Narragansett Indian smoke-shop trial, for instance.

He also helped to investigate, on behalf of the federal government, the leak of a videotape in Buddy Cianci’s corruption trial to Channel 10 News. Channel 10’s Jim Taricani spent months in home confinement to protect his source; eventually, the source, lawyer Joseph A. Bevilacqua, went to jail for perjury and contempt of court.

Thomas P. Puccio: The defense lawyer took up where Dershowitz left off, winning von Bulow’s freedom in the second trial. Now in his early 60s, he is still a Park Avenue lawyer in New York, and has continued to represent prominent clients.

In 1995, he wrote an autobiography, In the Name of the Law. That same year, he was hit by tragedy when, while he was giving his 16-year-old son a driving lesson near their Connecticut home, their Mercedes-Benz station wagon went out of control and rolled down an embankment into a yacht basin, killing the boy.

Corinne P. Grande: The judge who presided over von Bulow’s second trial resigned in 1993, a few weeks after turning 65. But she continued on active status even after she resigned, hearing cases until about five years ago. She said Thursday that she is enjoying her retirement.

The movie, the mansion, Howard Hunt and more

Reversal of Fortune: In 1990, Alan Dershowitz’s book was made into a film that was a box-office disappointment, taking in only $15.4 million, but is listed in The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made.

Jeremy Irons won an Oscar for his portrayal of Claus von Bulow. Later, Disney animators incorporated some of Irons’ dialogue into his role voicing the villainous Scar in the animated film The Lion King. In Reversal of Fortune, for instance, Dershowitz tells von Bulow he’s a very strange man, to which von Bulow replies, “You have no idea.” Scar says the same thing.

Also in Reversal of Fortune’s stellar cast: Glenn Close as Sunny von Bulow, Ron Silver as Dershowitz, Christine Baranski as Andrea Reynolds, and in lesser roles, Annabella Sciorra, Uta Hagen, Lisa Gay Hamilton and Felicity Huffman.

Clarendon Court: The Bellevue Avenue mansion is where Sunny von Bulow entered both of the comas her husband was charged with inducing, in December 1979 and again in December 1980. It was sold for $4.2 million in 1988 to Glenn C. Randall, a Washington, D.C., art dealer, and his wife, Patricia. The Randalls sold 61,000 square feet of the estate’s land in the 1990s to Mark and Sherry Brice, who built a house on the lot.

E. Howard Hunt: In 1986, the Brown University grad and organizer of the Watergate break-in co-wrote Beautiful People, a would-be Broadway musical whodunit based on the von Bulow case. My Fair Lady star Rex Harrison attended a staged reading in Manhattan where Hunt, better known for wearing a cheap red wig while casing the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, donned a tux to play the narrator.

Despite song titles such as “Trust Me, My Dear,” “I’m a Self-Made Man” and “I Won’t Be a Kept Woman,” the play went nowhere, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported in 2005. Hunt died in January at age 88.

Barbara Connett: The jury forewoman who quietly pronounced von Bulow guilty at his first trial died in 1997 at age 54.

The Rev. Philip A. Magaldi: The priest, charged with lying in a sworn statement on behalf of von Bulow as part of the legal maneuvering surrounding the second trial, saw perjury and obstruction-of-justice charges dropped in 1987. But his legal problems were far from over.

In 1992, he was sentenced to two years in prison after pleading guilty to stealing more than $120,000 from his North Providence parish, St. Anthony’s. Authorities said he had spent some of the stolen money for tropical vacations with adolescent boys and once gave a teenager he met in a park enough money to get a car. He served eight months before being paroled.

Then, in 1997 and 1998, he was accused by men in both Massachusetts and Texas of having molested them in the course of his priestly duties, in Rhode Island in the 1970s and in Fort Worth in 1995. After the first allegation, The Dallas Morning News reported, church investigators found him “guilty of sexual exploitation” and he was barred from supervising altar boys but allowed to continue as chaplain of the Fort Worth diocesan Boy Scout program. After the second, he was suspended, but returned to part-time ministry after his accuser died; he was accused of misconduct with boys at his new job and removed again.

Still, in 2000 he celebrated Mass with Pope John Paul II at the pontiff’s private chapel at the Vatican. Parishioners argued that if he was fit to share the altar with the pope, he ought to be able to preach in North Richland Hills, Texas.

He was allowed to continue his ministry at the North Richland Hills retirement home where he was living until August 2006, when a new bishop revoked all his priestly powers. But The Morning News reported in November that he had defied the bishop’s orders and remained in ministry at the home.

A message left for him there this month was not returned. But Jerry Koller, a friend and former parishioner of Father Magaldi’s who described himself as the ex-priest’s caregiver, said Wednesday that Magaldi is in “too weak condition” to continue his ministry. Koller said Magaldi suffers from dementia and has had a series of strokes, which have affected his eyesight and left him legally blind.

Alan Rosenberg is The Journal’s South County regional editor. He was among the reporters covering both von Bulow trials for the newspaper.