The Sam Sheppard Mystery: An American Travesty of Justice?

Forty years ago today, Dr. Sam Sheppard carried an unloaded pistol in his pocket as he awaited the verdict in his second trial for having allegedly bludgeoned his wife to death. If convicted again, he planned to pull out the empty gun and die in the resulting fusillade from courtroom guards. Having spent 10 years behind bars, he said, “I wasn’t going back.”

His case has been called “the country’s most enduring murder mystery.” With its elements of wealth, violence, sex, conflicting stories, and dramatic reversals, it riveted the nation in the 1950s in a way that would not be repeated until the O. J. Simpson trial 40 years later.

On the evening of July 3, 1954, Sam and Marilyn Sheppard had dinner with a neighbor couple. Everything seemed normal in their suburban home, which sat on the shore of Lake Erie west of Cleveland. After dinner Dr. Sam, as he was called, dozed off on a downstairs couch. His wife, four months pregnant, and their seven-year-old son Chip slept upstairs.

At 5:40 a.m., Sheppard called a neighbor, Spencer Houk, the mayor of the small community, and said, “I think they’ve killed Marilyn.” Houk hurried to the house and found Marilyn Sheppard half naked, her head severely beaten. Blood was sprayed over the walls of the bedroom. Sam was shirtless, his pants soaking wet, the side of his face bruised.

When the police arrived, he told them he had awakened to hear his wife crying for help. Running upstairs, he had seen the form of a man, who knocked him unconscious. He had come to, heard someone downstairs, and chased a man out of the house and down to the shore. There he had grappled with a “bushy-haired intruder” and again been knocked out. Regaining consciousness to find himself lying partly in the water, he had returned to the house and called for help.

The investigation was quickly taken over by the county coroner, Dr. Samuel Gerber. Having looked over the scene, Gerber stated, “It’s obvious that the doctor did it.” He told detectives to go to the hospital where Sheppard had been taken and get a confession.

Gerber jumped to his conclusion for two reasons. First, it was standard practice in domestic killings to target the husband. Sheppard was at the scene of the murder and his story sounded unlikely, so he automatically became the prime suspect. Second, Gerber disliked the Sheppard family. Sam and his two brothers and father were all doctors of osteopathy, and they ran a 100-bed hospital. Gerber had earlier vowed, “I’m going to get them someday.” Traditional medical practitioners disdained osteopaths, the only other physicians licensed to practice medicine and surgery. Osteopaths took an idiosyncratic approach to health, basing treatments in part on manipulation of the spine and other bones.

Cleveland newspaper editors, who initially speculated that a jewel thief or drug addict might be the culprit, quickly came to share Gerber’s suspicion. Reports that Sheppard had hired a defense lawyer were offered as evidence of his guilt. The papers began to press the authorities for action. Headlines like “Someone Is Getting Away with Murder” helped turn public sympathy against the doctor.

Gerber finally held an inquest in a school gymnasium. More than two hundred spectators, mostly housewives, filled the seats. They laughed and hooted at testimony and cheered when Gerber had Sheppard’s lawyer removed for trying to have the outbursts noted in the record. Gerber questioned Dr. Sam for five hours with no legal counsel present.

Sheppard unwisely testified that he was not a philanderer, but prosecutors were able to produce a female lab technician who swore otherwise. While the doctor’s love life fascinated the public, no one could explain its relevance. Why would a past affair provoke him to kill his wife?

After a process more salacious than forensic, Gerber issued a “coroner’s verdict” that asserted that “the injuries that caused this death were inflicted by her husband.” His evidence for this conclusion? The unlikelihood of Sheppard’s story, his failure to cooperate with police, and the fact that he had “called in two lawyers.”

By July 30 the Cleveland Press, the most rabid of the local papers, was demanding in a front-page editorial, “Quit Stalling and Bring Him In!” That night, Sheppard was arrested.

Reporters traveled from all over the country to cover the trial. Before the proceedings began, the trial judge startled the popular newspaper columnist Dorothy Kilgallen by telling her, “He’s guilty as hell. There is no question about it.” The investigation had been plagued by oversights. The press was allowed to tramp through the murder scene; clues were overlooked; examination of blood evidence was haphazard; few fingerprints were taken.

The trial itself was a travesty. Prospective jurors’ names, addresses, and pictures were printed in newspapers long before they could be warned to avoid publicity. After a panel was chosen, jurors were interviewed and photographed by reporters. They were never sequestered and were exposed to the publicity churned up both by local papers and by national media figures like Walter Winchell. Clevelanders, one columnist reported, discussed the case with “leer-glinted eyes” and “drooling lips.”

One telling piece of evidence was the lack of blood on the suspect. Anyone administering the beating would have been thoroughly splattered, but Sheppard’s pants showed only a single spot. Another was the fact that in spite of prosecution claims that his injuries were fake or self-inflicted, a neurologist determined they were real. Still another was the trail of blood drops found through the Sheppard home. There was evidence that Marilyn had bitten her attacker, yet Sam had no open wounds that could account for that evidence.

These and other exculpatory facts, combined with the prosecution’s entirely circumstantial case, called for acquittal. After a 43-day trial and five days of deliberation, the jury declared Sheppard guilty of second-degree murder. He was immediately sentenced to life in prison.

“It was a verdict wrongly arrived at,” Kilgallen wrote, “and therefore frightening.” Appeals failed. Refusing to confess in exchange for an early parole, Sheppard remained in the Ohio penitentiary for almost 10 years.

While he was behind bars, The Fugitive became one of the most popular shows on television. The series, which ran from 1963 to 1967, featured a Midwestern doctor who was wrongfully convicted of killing his wife, escaped from custody, and hunted the real killer, a “one-armed man.” The parallels to the Sheppard case struck many, though the writer denied that the Cleveland murder had inspired the story.

In 1962 the young lawyer F. Lee Bailey took on Sheppard’s case. He contended that publicity had robbed the doctor of a fair trial. He won his case in federal court two years later. The state appealed, and the matter reached the United States Supreme Court in 1966.

In an eight-to-one decision, the high court ruled for Sheppard and scathingly condemned the “carnival atmosphere” of the original trial. Ohio prosecutors indicted him again. The second trial lasted only two weeks and featured half as many witnesses. Sheppard did not need to pull his pistol. He was acquitted on November 16, 1966.

No one else was ever charged with the crime. Many, including Ohio authorities, believed that Sheppard had gotten off on a technicality. He tried to resume his medical career, but he remained a notorious figure in Cleveland. Two botched operations and malpractice suits crippled his ability to earn a living. A second marriage failed.

In a twist as sad as it was bizarre, he became a professional wrestler (always athletic, he had wrestled in prison). He wore a white lab coat into the ring and took the nickname “Killer.” His life spiraling downward, he drank himself to death in 1970. He was 46.

Even that was not the end. In the 1990s Sheppard’s son, Samuel Reese Sheppard, sued the state of Ohio for his father’s wrongful imprisonment. To win his case he had to prove conclusively that Dr. Sam had been innocent. His lawyer marshaled DNA evidence that was suggestive but not decisive. He tried to prove that a window washer who had worked for the Sheppards was the actual slayer. The man had later been convicted of another murder and had been found with two of Marilyn’s rings in his possession. But in April 2000 the jury in the civil trial refused to declare Sam Sheppard innocent.

Sheppard’s case stands as an object lesson about the adversarial system of American courtrooms: Once locked into a theory of a crime, prosecutors are sometimes more interested in winning than in achieving justice. Coroner Gerber’s initial impulse to “get” Sam Sheppard was reflected in the prosecution of the case through the ensuing decades.

One question remains. In the half century during which the murder has been talked about, written about, and adjudicated, no one has answered it definitively: Who killed Marilyn Sheppard?