Sunny von Bülow's death in December after 28 years in a coma brought her children no peace, writes the journalist most closely associated with the story, Dominick Dunne of Vanity Fair. Her son's voice when he called with the news contained no "sense of 'Thank God it’s finally over for us,'" Dunne writes in a poignant look back at the scandal and its aftermath. "There was grief."
"She was a first-rate mother," writes Dunne, who admits to siding with Sunny's children from her first marriage over Claus von Bülow, the husband who was tried twice for attempting to kill her. Her funeral was a modest affair, put together "in haste, before the media got wind of it." And at her memorial service on Park Avenue, her children, reunited after a falling-out, permitted "not a single reference to the terrible event that changed all of their lives forever."
(More coma stories.)