Audition (82 page)

I also think that ABC was wrong in reprimanding me, and I was hurt, especially because neither Roone nor Dick Wald defended me. They said it was David Burke’s territory and left the decision to him. From my point of view the news department certainly had no qualms about using the material I provided. I honestly believed that lives were at stake, which justified the exception in ABC’s news policy. I eventually made my peace with Roone and Dick. As for David Burke, we rarely talked, and eventually he left ABC News to head CBS News.

Ironically there turned out to be more than the lives of the hostages at stake. Robert McFarlane, who had resigned as national security advisor in 1985 but privately continued his role in Iran-Contra at President Reagan’s request, attempted suicide in 1987 by overdosing on Valium. Shortly after he was released from the hospital, I was the first to interview him and his wife, Jonda. McFarlane told me he felt he had “failed the country.”

Charges were leveled at several members of the Reagan administration for their roles in Iran-Contra, including McFarlane, who pled guilty to withholding information from Congress. Oliver North and Adm. John Poindexter, McFarlane’s successor as head of the National Security Council, were convicted of various offenses but their convictions would be overturned on technicalities. Reagan’s secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger, would also be indicted, but George H. W. Bush, who succeeded Ronald Reagan as president, pardoned him before he stood trial. Bush would also grant pardons to McFarlane, to former assistant secretary of state Elliott Abrams, and to three high-level members of the CIA. So everyone involved in the Iran-Contra scandal got away with it, including Khashoggi and Ghorbanifar.

I remained in occasional touch with Khashoggi, who continued to wheel and deal. I would interview him again in 1990 when he was indicted, along with Imelda Marcos (whom I would also talk with), for helping to conceal hundreds of millions of dollars in assets she and her husband, Ferdinand Marcos, the deposed president of the Philippines, had allegedly stolen from their country. Both were subsequently acquitted. Khashoggi would have other scrapes with the law, but the last I heard he was living quietly in Monte Carlo, perhaps with his swami but definitely without his yacht. He had sold it years before to Donald Trump, who subsequently passed it on to a Saudi businessman.

I never heard from Ghorbanifar again, though he, too, may still be playing his international games. At one point his name surfaced in connection with the Pentagon and his ongoing quest for a “regime change” in Iran. (According to
Newsweek
, Ghorbanifar claimed to know where Saddam Hussein hid $340 million in cash, half of which, he said, could be used to overthrow the ayatollahs.)

As for the American hostages held in Lebanon, one of whom, journalist Terry Anderson, was held for nearly seven years, they were finally released in 1991. Along with every other American, I was happy their ordeal had ended. That also ended my foray into global diplomacy.

Murderers

I
N MY BUSINESS,
crime always pays. Give us a good rape, give us a good murder, and we are guaranteed a successful broadcast. I don’t mean to sound frivolous or coldhearted, but the more sensational the crime, the higher the ratings. So you won’t be surprised to learn that during my twenty-five years at
20/20
I interviewed almost every important murderer, alleged or convicted, if a murderer can be considered important. Almost all had committed such horrifying crimes that they made sensational headlines.

Consider Arthur Seale, who, in 1992, along with his wife, Irene, kidnapped Sidney Reso, the president of Exxon International, locked him in a box in an unventilated storage unit in New Jersey, and demanded ransom. When Reso died four days later, the couple secretly buried him and continued to press for the ransom. Or Jeremy Strohmeyer, a handsome eighteen-year-old former honor-roll high school student, who in 1997 sexually molested and strangled a seven-year-old girl in the ladies room of a gambling casino in Nevada. Or Rabbi (Rabbi!) Fred Neulander, who had been widely respected at his well-attended affluent temple in New Jersey until he had an affair of
Fatal Attraction
proportions in 1994 and hired two hit men to kill his wife of twenty-nine years. They bludgeoned her to death with a lead pipe. The rabbi is currently serving thirty years to life; Arthur Seale and Strohmeyer are incarcerated forever without parole. Seale’s wife, Irene, is serving a lesser sentence of twenty years because she cooperated with the police and led them to Reso’s grave.

The process of securing an interview with accused murderers or convicted murderers like these is often long and arduous. First of all you can’t do it unless the prisoner agrees and makes it known to the proper authority. On our part this then requires a lot of petitioning and many phone calls for official permission to whoever is in charge, be it the warden, the sheriff, or the state superintendent of prisons.

Once at the prison you have to leave whatever you are carrying—pocketbook, wallet, mirror, and so on—before you enter the restricted area. You are not allowed to bring in gifts, even books or magazines. Sometimes you can bring in a certain number of quarters that the prisoner, provided he or she is in the common visiting room, can use to buy candy, hamburgers, or soft drinks from vending machines. These are eagerly accepted.

I’ve visited many prisons all over the country, once touring an execution room with its equipment for lethal injections. Whenever I make one of these visits, for whatever the reason, I am haunted for days after. I hear the noises in my head from the prisoners as I’ve walked down the halls, the shuffle of the shackled legs, the clang of the lockup gates behind me. When I leave the prison, I take deep gulps of fresh air. I never say, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” But I do say, “Thank God I am free.” The prisoner I’ve just interviewed, no matter how hideous the crime he or she has committed, has become a real person to me, and I have to clear my head.

The fact that I can sometimes feel empathy for someone who has brutally killed another human being doesn’t mean that I can understand the murder. But at the time I am sitting opposite the killer, I am not judgmental. I don’t say, “How could you be such a monster?” I do, however, say, “There are people who think you are a monster. How do you respond to that?” During the actual interview I am not feeling a lot of emotion. It is when I leave that the force of the crime hits me. Why? I ask myself. Most of these killers, when you meet them, are mild-mannered, polite, articulate. Some, like the rabbi, still claim their innocence, but most of the convicted murderers I’ve interviewed express great regret.

O
F THE MANY MURDER CASES
I’ve been involved in, five stand out in my mind.

The most intriguing murderer turned out not to be one. When I first sat down with the mysterious and debonair Claus von Bülow in 1982, he had been convicted one month earlier of twice trying to murder his very wealthy wife, Sunny, who was then in a coma and remains in a vegetative state to this day. His weapon was a hypodermic needle, which the jury believed he had used to inject Sunny von Bülow with insulin, a potentially fatal drug for his wife, who had a serious low blood sugar condition.

The case had ignited worldwide attention, given Sunny von Bülow’s fortune of $75 million, the testimony against von Bülow by his stepchildren (a prince and a princess of Austrian nobility), and Claus’s attractive lover, Alexandra Isles. (Isles had cut off her relationship with von Bülow on the advice of her attorneys when he was indicted.) Von Bülow himself had not testified at the trial and everybody in the media, both print and television, was scrambling for an exclusive interview with him to hear his side of the story. I had no particular entrée to von Bülow and never thought I’d get the interview, were he to give one. So I was surprised when I received a call soon after his conviction from Andrea Reynolds, von Bülow’s adviser and current lover. She had something to tell me, Mrs. Reynolds said. Would I please come see her at the von Bülows’ Fifth Avenue apartment?

I was cool in more ways than one when I arrived. I didn’t know what the “something” was Mrs. Reynolds wanted to tell me, plus the fact that it was a foul, cold day and I’d ruined my new suede boots in a puddle of slush. Von Bülow’s apartment was opulent and in one of Fifth Avenue’s grandest buildings, but I’d seen opulent before. Mrs. Reynolds invited me to have tea in the library, and while I was sitting there, mourning my boots, in walked the tall, smiling Claus von Bülow. He shook my hand, sat down, and began to talk about a mutual friend of ours, an Englishman. He acted as if we were dinner partners who were meeting for the first time, so I did, too. “Uh, how is he and how is the family?” I responded politely about our friend. And yes, I’d like another cup of tea. Then he very calmly, quietly explained what his situation was.

His sentencing was two weeks away, his appeal of the guilty verdict, if accepted, even further away, and the prosecution, fearing he was a flight risk, wanted to imprison him. He impressed upon me that he was very devoted to his and Sunny’s only child, Cosima, that he had no intention of skipping bail and abandoning her, that he wanted to correct the misrepresentations about him in the media and remain at home.

I realized then I was auditioning for an exclusive interview. Why me and not everyone else clamoring for the opportunity? Because Andrea (who now asked me to call her by her first name) told me later that she had called the William Morris Agency, where she had a connection, and asked who the best person would be to interview her lover, and the agency had said that I was. Von Bülow must have felt confident enough of her opinion and comfortable enough with me because I got the interview.

The prosecutor who’d won the murder conviction was furious that I was going to give von Bülow his moment in the court of public opinion. Indeed, von Bülow seemed sincere and convincing during the interview about his loyalty to, if not love for, his wife, whom he described as “the most beautiful woman” yet also “a deeply unhappy person…with virtually no self-confidence.” He admitted that the conflict they’d had over his work schedule had brought them in recent years to the brink of divorce (Sunny wanted him to spend the entire summer with her at their “cottage” in Newport, Rhode Island, as well as a month in Europe). He was also candid about the sexless relationship they’d had at Sunny’s instigation ever since the birth of Cosima, by then a teenager, and their agreement that he could do what he wanted “but be discreet.” But there remained the issue of his conviction for attempted murder. “One final question, simply this: Mr. von Bülow, did you try to kill your wife?” I asked him. “No, I did not,” he replied. Our interview was over.

I don’t know whether this interview had anything to do with the outcome, but von Bülow was allowed to stay out on bail. Even better for him, after hiring the famous Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, he was granted a new trial. In June 1985 the second jury declared von Bülow not guilty, based on new medical evidence and inconsistencies and conflicting testimony in the first trial. The onetime murderer was a free man, and soon afterward I interviewed von Bülow again.

He was as elegant and formal and mysterious as ever as we rehashed the trials. He reminded me of those British actors in old movies playing the master of the house wearing a smoking jacket and velvet slippers. But what struck me the most about von Bülow was that at no time during our meetings and interviews did I hear him say, “This is a terrible thing that’s happened to me.” In all the time I spoke with him, he never complained. He never raised his voice. He never got emotional. He was a very cool character.

He was not above the fury of his stepchildren, however, who remain convinced to this day that he “murdered” their mother. Alexander von Auersperg and Ala Kneissel (now Isham) launched a civil suit against him after he was exonerated, and von Bülow, evidently fearing a loss this time, capitulated to their demands. He renounced any claim on their mother’s estate and basically got out of town. Von Bülow now lives in London attending dinner parties and occasionally writing theater and art reviews. Sunny, now in her seventies, remains comatose in a nursing home in New York.

An aside. In the subsequent film about the von Bülows,
Reversal of Fortune
, Glenn Close played Sunny and Jeremy Irons played Claus. Irons, whose portrayal earned him the Academy Award for best actor in 1991, told me he watched my interviews with von Bülow again and again to capture that sort of suave charm and reserved hauteur he had. Among the rumors about the mysterious von Bülow at the time was that he was a necrophiliac, which led to this exchange toward the end of the movie. Ron Silver, who played defense attorney Alan Dershowitz, says to Irons, “You’re a very strange man,” and Irons, aka von Bülow, responds: “You have no idea.” And that’s the way I felt about him…indeed, a very strange man.

The most dramatic prison interview I conducted was with actor Robert Blake, who was also charged with murdering his wife, but, unlike von Bülow, was denied bail and had to spend almost a year in prison awaiting trial. When I interviewed him in Los Angeles County Jail in February 2003, the preliminary hearing had just begun on whether to free him on bail. The former Emmy-winning star of the seventies television series
Baretta
looked gaunt and seemed emotionally drained. Handcuffed and wearing a prison-issue orange jumpsuit, the seventy-year-old actor had spent most of every day of the last year in solitary confinement, supposedly for his own protection, in the cell formerly occupied by O. J. Simpson. No wonder he looked as awful as he did.

He was charged with shooting Bonny Lee Bakley, his wife of less than six months and mother of his baby daughter, in the head on May 4, 2001, while she waited for him in a car after dinner near a restaurant in Studio City. Though he claimed he was still in the restaurant at the time she was shot, a year later, Blake was arrested for her murder. The incriminating evidence had come from two former stuntmen, both heavy drug users, who claimed Blake had hired them to kill her.