Sunny von Bülow, a wealthy Newport resident active in charity and social organizations, was found unconscious and undressed on the floor of her bathroom. Sunny had suffered catastrophic brain damage and would likely remain in a persistent vegetative state for the rest of her life.  Before this, Sunny appeared to have it all. In her younger years, people said she resembled actress Grace Kelly. She knew literary giants, aristocrats, and movie stars. She was the beneficiary of a fortune conservatively valued at $75 million. All this and she had a suave spouse to boot: Claus von Bülow.  Claus and Sunny met while she was wed to her first husband, Prince Alfred von Ausberg of Austria, whom Sunny wished to divorce. A witty Dane and lawyer who had spent much of his young life in London, Claus was tall, handsome, and eccentric, but with impeccable manners. Sunny saw him as a knight in charming armor. Claus and Sunny wed in 1966, and moved with Sunny’s two young children to the United States, where the family split their time between a spacious Fifth Avenue apartment and this immense mansion in Newport. Less than two decades later, Claus’ new family accused him of trying to kill Sunny and the court of public opinion soon agreed.  During trial at Newport’s Municipal Court, the prosecution contended that Claus had injected Sunny with an overdose of insulin and he was found guilty of Sunny’s attempted murder and sentenced to serve thirty years. This verdict was overturned on technical grounds during an appeal led by Professor Alan Dershowitz, one of Harvard Law School’s most illustrious faculty members.  In 1986, Dershowitz published a book based on the case, Reversal of Fortune, which was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film in 1990 by director Barbet Schroeder. Ron Silver’s performance as Dershowitz garnered wide praise, and Jeremy Irons won the Oscar for Best Actor for his portrayal of Claus. Critics also marveled at Glen Close’s portrayal of Sunny, though her children publicly disputed its accuracy. Claus eventually moved to London, where he wrote theatre reviews and remains a fixture on the city’s social scene. Sunny, meanwhile, never woke from her coma. She died in December 2008, surrounded by her children, at a nursing home in New York City, almost twenty-eight years to the day after she lost consciousness. 

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This extravagant pile was designed in two phases (1875 and 1888) by renowned Providence architects Stone, Carpenter & Willson, but tradition states that the emphatic personality of its owner determined the eclectic mix of shapes and styles. Jerothmul B. Barnaby was a king of Providence retail with a massive department store downtown. He was known to race his four-in-hand recklessly down Broadway and left a tightly entailed estate to his daughters that was contested by his wife Josephine Barnaby at his death in 1889. Josephine was thought to be easily manipulated, and indeed she fell under the spell of her physician Dr. Thomas Thatcher Graves. While on a visit to Denver in 1891, she received a gift of poisoned whiskey by mail and quickly died. Graves’ trial was a national sensation. He was convicted of America's first murder-by-mail and committed suicide in prison in 1893 while awaiting an appeal. The house today is undergoing a painstaking renovation to recapture its original splendor. Don't forget to peek down Sutton Street to see the fabulous Moorish Revival carriage house where the wedding reception for Barnaby’s daughter Mabel was held. The carriage lift, still functional, was used to lower the banquet down to the elite crowd.

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A tall man in a long, dark coat and a broad-brimmed hat walked the 2,000 feet across Stone Bridge from the Portsmouth shore to the Tiverton side, where a toll keeper waited to collect his fare. The man passed the money to the keeper, William Cranston, and remarked: “It is a cold blustery day.”

The Stone Bridge keeper’s house provided a warm refuge from the chill of that day, December 20, 1832, but the man declined Cranston’s invitation to come in, saying he was bound for Fall River.

“I shut the gate about sundown,” Cranston later testified, when the man, the Reverend Ephraim Avery, stood trial for the murder of Sarah Maria Cornell, a pregnant Fall River mill worker, whose body was found at sunrise on December 21, hanging from a pole on Job Durfee’s farm.

“There is a way by which passengers can get round the gate at night, after it is closed,” Cranston said. “They have to get down the wall on the beach just where the tide flows, and step up the other side; I sometimes look to see if any people have left tracks passing that way.”

On the morning after the tall man crossed the bridge, Cranston saw tracks “fresh and distinct” in the sand, leading around the toll gate toward the Portsmouth side.

It’s not surprising that Tiverton’s Stone Bridge played a key role in the salacious Avery-Cornell murder trial. For more than 150 years, Stone Bridge acted as a funnel through which anyone traveling across the Sakonnet River on foot, horseback, wagon—or later, automobile and street car—had to pass.

From the 1680s until 1795, when the Rhode Island Bridge Company built a wooden bridge here, a ferry shuttled goods, horses, wagons, and people across the Sakonnet River. The first bridge lasted two years before a high tide swept it away. The rebuilt bridge lasted one year, and ferry service resumed for a decade until subscribers raised $80,000. In 1810, travelers began to cross the new bridge constructed of 280,000 tons of stone at a cost of more than $200,000.

The Great Gale of September 1815 bit a 200-foot chunk out of the bridge, and a gale in 1868 caused a similar breach, prompting the state to take control of a new, toll-free bridge in 1871. The free bridge became a popular spot for hooking striped bass, blue fish, and shark, with one reported landing of a 500-pounder.

Trolley cars from the Newport and Fall River Street Railways began crossing the bridge in 1898, which required replacing the old wooden draw with iron and steel strong enough to hold 20 tons.

On the Tiverton side of the bridge, a village of stores, fish markets, and blacksmith shops blossomed. For more than 100 years, a succession of inns at the foot of the bridge served weary travelers and hosted milestone celebrations for town residents until the 1980s, when the Stone Bridge Inn was razed.

The last car crossed the Stone Bridge on May 6, 1957. The Hurricane of 1938 and Hurricane Carol in `54 weakened the bridge’s approaches and caused service interruptions, leading to construction of the steel Sakonnet River Bridge about a half-mile north of the Stone Bridge. The Sakonnet River Bridge served from 1956 until its replacement was completed in 2012. After almost 150 years of free crossings over the Sakonnet River, tolls may be imposed on the new Sakonnet River Bridge.

Finally, despite testimony that the Reverend Ephraim Avery crossed the bridge into Tiverton, met with Sarah Maria Cornell, and crossed the bridge back to Portsmouth on the night of her murder, he was found not guilty.

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