The Doctor’s Wife: The Murder of Marilyn Sheppard

Episode 1Part 1

Part 1Cold Open

Sunday, the Fourth of July, 1954, Bay Village, Ohio. A little town strung out along the shore of Lake Erie, about a dozen miles west of downtown Cleveland. Big trees, big lawns, houses up on the bluff, with wooden stairs running down to the beach. It's a holiday weekend. There'll be parades later, and picnics and fireworks over the water tonight. One house down the road is supposed to have a whole crowd over this afternoon. Doctors and nurses from the local hospital for a party on the beach. But right now, it's not even six o'clock in the morning, and nobody's up.

Then a telephone rings. It rings in the house of the mayor of Bay Village. His name is Spencer Houk. He's forty-two. Being mayor of a little town like this is a part-time job, and during the week, he runs a meat business. Most people just call him Spen. And he picks it up. The voice on the other end belongs to a friend of his, a neighbor from a few houses down the road. They've known each other two and a half years. They even own a little fourteen-foot aluminum boat together. And the friend says: "My God, Spen, get over here quick. I think they've killed Marilyn."

Spen Houk says, "What?" And his friend says it again. The mayor and his wife Esther go. They find their friend downstairs, in his den, leaning half over a chair. And when Spen asks him what happened, he says he doesn't know. The mayor stays down there with him, and Esther Houk goes up the stairs.

What she found at the top of those stairs, the whole country would be reading about by supper time. And who did it? Cleveland would spend the rest of that summer deciding.

Part 2Show Introduction

Hello everyone, and welcome to Forgotten True Crime, the true crime podcast where we tell the stories of crimes that happened long ago. If you're a true crime fan, make sure you subscribe to the podcast. That way, when we have new episodes, you'll be the first to know. Also, check us out on our YouTube and Facebook pages, "Forgotten True Crime." And visit our blog, Section29.com, where we post the cool things we find for every episode. This one, The Murder of Marilyn Sheppard, has some great stuff for you to look at: the Cleveland Press and Plain Dealer coverage from the summer of 1954, the word-for-word testimony from the coroner's inquest, and the court records. The links to all of that are in the description below. Parts of this story may contain opinions and speculations and should be taken as such. What I'm going to do today is tell you this story the way I've come to understand it, built out of the newspaper record and the sworn testimony. Where I'm reading between the lines, I'll tell you I'm doing it. These stories depict violent crimes of all types and may be a trigger for some listeners. Listener discretion is advised. And a word about this one before we go in. It's the beating death of a young woman in her own bed. She was pregnant. And because of where the investigation went, there's some frank talk about a marriage and an affair. I'll keep it to what the record says.

Now, this is a big one. So big that I'm going to tell it in two parts. This is Part One. If you've been listening to this show for a while, you know most of our cases are ones nobody remembers anymore. This one is different. In the summer of 1954, this was the biggest story in Cleveland. Within days it was in papers across the country. And it stayed there for years. Some of you have heard of it. Some of you think you know how it ends. But I want to take you back to the beginning. Before anybody knew how it ends. When it was just a house on a lake, a woman dead upstairs, and a story nobody could make sense of.

And let me tell you, this story has everything. A doctor from a family of doctors. A bushy-haired man on a beach at dawn. Or was there? A dog that didn't bark. Two wristwatches that stopped at two different times. A T-shirt nobody could find. A lady's wristwatch, bought as a gift. A coroner's inquest held in a school, with two hundred people watching. And a newspaper that decided to tell the police, on its front page, exactly what it thought they should do. All of this happened in Bay Village, Ohio, in the summer of 1954. A quiet little suburb on the lake, where people said nothing ever happened. And for a few weeks that summer, Cleveland couldn't talk about anything else. So let's start at the beginning.

Part 3Bay Village

So let's go back a day. Back to Saturday, the third of July, 1954. Bay Village sits right on the south shore of Lake Erie, west of Cleveland. In 1954 it's the kind of suburb that young professional families are moving out to. Doctors. Lawyers. Engineers. Men who drive into the city every morning and drive back out to the lake every night. Big trees, big lawns, a little city hall, and a beach at the bottom of half the backyards. And in Bay Village, if you get hurt, or you get sick, or you have a baby, there's a good chance you're going to Bay View Hospital. And at Bay View Hospital, there's a good chance your doctor's last name is Sheppard. The Sheppards are a family of doctors.

Osteopaths. The father, Dr. Richard A. Sheppard, and two of his sons helped found Bay View Hospital. There are three sons, and all three became doctors: Richard, Stephen, and the one this story is about. Sam. Samuel H. Sheppard. Everybody calls him Sam. If you'd gone to Cleveland Heights High School around 1940, you'd have known Sam Sheppard. Everybody did. He was the quarterback on the football team. He played basketball. He ran the quarter mile, and he was on the relay team that helped win the state championship in 1941. And he was class president. Sophomore year, junior year, and senior year. A newspaper reporter who went back through those yearbooks in 1954 described him as "tall, dark-haired and handsome, an outstanding athlete." "A typical all-American, clean-cut boy." And at that same high school there was a girl a year ahead of him. Marilyn Reese.

Marilyn was an athlete too. She won her varsity letter in girls' sports. She ran the girls' athletic club her senior year. She was in the modern dance club, the riding club. Brown hair down to her shoulders, sweaters and plaid skirts. But Marilyn's childhood hadn't been an easy one. Her mother died when she was young, and she spent much of her childhood living with her aunt and uncle's family, the Weigles. One of her closest friends said Marilyn had had what she called "a rather lonesome childhood." And that even as a grown woman, she hated being alone in a house at night. Sam and Marilyn got together in high school, and that was it. A reporter who went through those yearbooks called them "fixtures as a romantic twosome around the school." At the 1942 senior prom, the two of them helped lead the Grand March.

It was wartime. Sam went off to college in Indiana, then to osteopathic school in Los Angeles. And Marilyn went out to California, and they got married out there, while he was still a student. He interned at Los Angeles County General Hospital. Then a residency in neurosurgery and trauma surgery. The doctor who ran the osteopathic side of that hospital told a reporter in 1954, "They seemed an ideally suited couple." He called Sam "an outstanding intern and a darned good guy." And about seven years before this story, they had a son. Samuel Junior. Everybody called him Chip. In 1951, Sam brought his family home to Ohio, and went to work at the family hospital. And they moved into a house in Bay Village. 28924 West Lake Road. A big, rambling place, right on the bluff over the lake. Out back, a screened-in porch looking north over the water. And from the backyard, a long flight of wooden stairs runs down the bank, past a little beach house, to their own private beach. That house became a kind of clubhouse for the young couples in Bay Village. Suppers out on the porch. Badminton. Swimming. And water skiing. Sam and Marilyn were both crazy about water skiing. The Cleveland Press ran a picture of the two of them doing it, taken from their own backyard. Marilyn bowled. She'd just started taking golf lessons; a friend from down the road had been teaching her. She was president of the hospital's women's auxiliary, and a member of the junior women's club in town. Sam was the official doctor for the Bay Village police and fire departments. And on top of that, he had a busy practice as a surgeon. They had a dog. An Irish setter named Koko. Some people called him Coke. And that summer, there was good news in the house. Marilyn was pregnant again. She'd told one of her closest friends about two weeks earlier. They were getting ready to go out to a buffet supper at the country club, and Marilyn asked her friend whether her dress looked a little snug. And then she said, "I fill it out quite well, don't you think?" She was four months along. Sam's own father had examined her and confirmed it. The baby was due around December. Their plans for that coming week were simple. On Sunday, the Fourth of July, they'd have a crowd over. Some of the young doctors from the hospital were coming out to the lake to ski. And then Sam was supposed to go to Toronto, to read a paper at an osteopathic convention. While he was gone, Marilyn was going to take Chip to visit her cousin's family.

But first, there was Saturday. And Saturday had been a hard day for Sam. He'd spent it at the hospital. It was a holiday weekend, and holiday weekends bring in accident cases. One of them was a little boy, seventeen months old, who'd been hit by a truck out in North Olmsted. Sam opened the boy's chest and massaged his heart by hand. He kept it up for two hours. And the little boy died.

That evening, Sam and Marilyn went down the road to see some friends.

Part 4Saturday Night

Their best friends in the neighbourhood were Don and Nancy Ahern. The Aherns lived just down Lake Road, a couple of minutes away, and they had two kids about Chip's age. The two couples did everything together. Badminton. Swimming. Water skiing off the Sheppards' beach. Nancy had been teaching Marilyn to play golf. When somebody asked Nancy, later, how close they were, she said, "We were very good friends."

At about six o'clock that Saturday evening, Sam and Marilyn walked over to the Aherns' house. They had a couple of cocktails. They talked about how Marilyn's golf game was coming along. Sam got a call to go look at a patient at the hospital, and he went, and he came back. Around eight, everybody walked back down to the Sheppard house for supper.

Marilyn had gone on ahead to start cooking. While the food was going, Sam and Don walked down those wooden stairs to the beach to look at the lake. Sam had invited some of the young interns from the hospital to come out and ski the next day. But the water was rough that night. Don remembered Sam being a little disappointed. Then Sam took the kids down to the basement. He had a punching bag down there, and he showed them how to hit it and get a rhythm going, even though they were too small to reach it. The kids ate in the kitchen. The four grown-ups ate out on the screened porch, looking out over the water. It was windy, coming in off the lake from the north, so Sam put on a brown corduroy jacket. Marilyn had made a pie, because pie was Sam's favourite.

At about ten-thirty Don walked his own kids home and put them to bed, and came back. And just as he walked back in, Chip came down the stairs in his pajamas to say something to his mother. And Marilyn sent him back up to bed. Then they all settled into the living room. And this is where the two stories of that evening come from. If you'd read the papers that first week, you might have seen it reported that Sam fell asleep listening to a baseball game. That was the Associated Press, from the statement Sam gave on July tenth. The Indians were playing the White Sox at home in Cleveland that night, a game that went fifteen innings. But the Aherns told it differently. They said the four of them were watching a movie on television. And it turns out both stories are true. When Sam told it under oath, he said the TV was on, and they were watching the movie. And Don Ahern was over in a corner of the room, "with the portable radio turned up just high enough so that he could hear it." Every so often, Don would call out the score. And at some point he gave up on the game, turned the radio off, and came over to watch the movie with everybody else. The movie was called Strange Holiday. A 1945 picture with Claude Rains, about a man who comes home from a vacation and finds his whole world turned upside down. Nancy Ahern thought it was "a bit dull." Sam and Marilyn sat squeezed together in one big red armchair in front of the TV. Nancy sat on Don's lap for a bit. Then Marilyn said sitting cramped up like that was bothering her back, and she moved to another chair.

Sam had had a very long day. And sometime around eleven-thirty, he got up, went around the corner to the couch, lay down on his stomach with a pillow wadded up under his head, and fell asleep. Then the movie started to get a little better, and Marilyn called over to him. "Sam, wake up, see the rest of the movie it might be good." And Nancy said he put his head up, very drowsy-eyed, looked at it for a minute, and said, "Oh, it is not going to be any good." And he went back to sleep.

Nancy remembered exactly what Sam had on when he fell asleep. Tan-and-white cord trousers. White sweat socks. Loafers. That brown corduroy jacket. And a white T-shirt. Remember that T-shirt. When the movie was ending, Marilyn looked like she was fighting to stay awake. So Nancy whispered to Don that it'd be a good joke to sneak out and not wake them up. But the second they stood up, Marilyn popped right up out of her chair to see them to the door. A little earlier, when Nancy brought the last of the dishes in off the porch, she'd locked the door from the living room out onto the porch, the one toward the lake. Turned the lock and put the night chain on. But the front door, the one that went out to Lake Road? Nancy didn't know. She said, "I am sorry now that we didn't see whether the door was locked or not when she shut it, but you don't do those things when you figure there is a man in the house." They told Marilyn to hurry up and get to bed before she woke up all the way. They walked to their car. And they went home.

That was the last time they saw Marilyn Sheppard alive. Everything that happened in that house after that, there's only one account of. Sam's. Chip slept through the night in the room next door. Sam told his story a lot of times that month. To the coroner, from a hospital bed, that same morning. To a sheriff's detective the next day. To a stenographer the next week. And he didn't always tell it exactly the same way. We'll come back to that. But eighteen days later, under oath, this is how he told it. He said that in his "very hazy recollection," Marilyn had tried to wake him up to come to bed, and he'd gone back to sleep. And then, he said, "I heard her saying my name… loudly… screaming my name." He said he wasn't even sure it was actually a scream. He ran up the stairs. He said he thought she might be having some kind of seizure, the way she had once, early in the pregnancy. "I rushed into the room. I felt that I could see the white form of an individual." He said he was grappling with someone. That Marilyn was moaning loudly. And then he felt he was struck down from behind. When he came to, he was sitting up, facing the doorway. He saw something glint, and it was the badge on his wallet, and he picked it up. He said he looked at Marilyn, and he felt that she was gone. He said he went into Chip's room to see if he was all right. And he was. Then he heard a noise downstairs. He went down. And between the front door and the porch, he said, he saw a figure. He chased it out the back, and down those stairs toward the beach. He said he couldn't quite decide what gave him "the feeling of a big man." Whether it was something he saw, or just how easily the man had knocked him down. And he said, "I grabbed, or tackled, the individual." Then he felt like he was twisted, or choked, and knocked out again. The next thing he remembered was coming to at the edge of the water, his head toward the bank and his feet in the lake. He said, "I felt as though I were being wallowed back and forth in the waves." He dragged himself up onto the sand. He climbed back up the stairs. He went into the bedroom, and he took her hand. And he said, "I thought I'd wake up out of this horrible fantastic dream." He said he walked around. He didn't know what he did. And then a number came into his head. "It was Mr. Houk's. I called him."

Part 5What the Morning Found

Esther Houk went up the stairs. And in the bedroom at the top, she found Marilyn Sheppard on her bed. Esther felt for a pulse. There wasn't one. She came back down, and her husband started making phone calls. The police. An ambulance. The first policeman through the door was a Bay Village patrolman named Fred Drenkhan. Then the police chief, John Eaton. And the police called one of Sam's brothers, Dr. Richard Sheppard. He went upstairs, and he pronounced Marilyn dead.

It was the Fourth of July. And within the hour, the house on Lake Road was full of people. The Sheppards got there fast. Both of Sam's brothers. And before the police had really questioned him, his family took Sam out of the house, to their own hospital, Bay View. Chief Eaton said later that nobody had asked his permission.

Chip had slept through all of it, in the room right next to his mother's. One of his uncles took him out of that house. The newspaper said he was "still unaware of the tragedy." And the dog? Koko was loose in the house when the Houks walked in. A neighbour took him in for the day. The man who lived next door told the Plain Dealer that, most mornings, that dog's barking was what woke him up. That night, he said, he never heard a thing.

That morning, the county coroner came out. Dr. Samuel Gerber. He'd been the coroner of Cuyahoga County for almost twenty years. And here is what the coroner, and the police, and the newspapers found in that house. Upstairs: Marilyn had been beaten. Twenty-five blows, to her head and face. Her skull was fractured. Her hands and wrists were injured too, the kind of injuries you get from trying to cover your face. The twin bed next to hers hadn't been slept in. Her clothes were laid out neatly on the rocking chair. And there was no sign of a struggle in the room, except for what had been done to her. The first day, the papers called their best clue two little chips of tooth, found on the bed. A day later, the coroner said they were Marilyn's own.

Downstairs: Sam's doctor's bag had been dumped out on the floor of the front hall. The desk in the living room had been pulled open and gone through. So had the desk in Sam's den. But there was money in that house, and nobody had taken it. Sixty-three dollars in Sam's wallet. Thirty-seven more in a jar. Marilyn's wallet was in the kitchen. Over the next few days, the police would count about two hundred dollars in cash, sitting in different spots around the house. And out back, in the weeds on the slope going down toward the lake, a neighbourhood teenager found a small green cloth bag. Inside it was Sam's wristwatch. His ring. A chain of fraternity keys. And a key ring with the initials S.S. Sam's watch had blood on the band, and on the crystal. There was water inside it. And it had stopped at four-fifteen.

Marilyn's watch wasn't on her wrist. It was found downstairs, on the floor of Sam's study. And her watch had stopped too, at about ten minutes past three. Two watches. Stopped an hour apart. Nobody could explain it. The one thing they couldn't find anywhere was whatever had been used to kill her. The coroner put the time of death somewhere between four and five in the morning. As for the weapon, he guessed out loud: something with a sharp edge. A heavy piece of wood. A fireplace tool. A metal bar. That summer, nobody found it. And then there was Sam himself. When the Houks found him, he was wearing a pair of wet cord trousers, wet socks, and loafers. That's all. The white T-shirt the Aherns saw him fall asleep in was gone. The Press said he was dripping wet and dazed, his mouth was bleeding, and his right eye was swelling shut.

Esther Houk would say later, under oath, that on one of her trips up and down the stairs that morning she noticed what looked like wet footprints. And there was water on the back porch, and on the steps. Nobody had broken in. No jimmied windows. No forced locks. No footprints around the house. They dusted for fingerprints. They got one partial palm print, on the desk in the study. Down on the beach, some of the boys helping search found a cheap pair of sunglasses and a white handkerchief lying on the sand. Nobody ever said whose they were. And under Marilyn's fingernails, the coroner's office found tiny fibres. They sent them off to be analyzed.

So what was the theory, that first day? In the Monday papers, the mayor and the police chief had an answer. A burglar, maybe a drug addict, came in looking for narcotics in the doctor's bag. Marilyn woke up and surprised him. And when Sam came running, the man knocked him down. Sam had told the coroner, from his hospital bed, that he'd been asleep, woke up to Marilyn screaming, ran up the stairs, and was attacked. And that maybe, he wasn't sure, there might have been two men. But even that first week, the drug theory started to come apart. There was morphine still sitting in the doctor's bag. The coroner said he was dropping the idea. A sheriff's deputy did report that, according to what he'd been told, some Demerol, a narcotic painkiller, was missing from the house. But only Sam could say whether it had ever been there. And that was the problem. A burglar who leaves the money. Who takes a watch and a ring, and then throws them in the weeds. Who kills a woman with twenty-five blows, and only knocks her husband out. Who gets past a dog that doesn't bark. Nobody in Bay Village could make it add up.

And over that holiday weekend, the cars started coming. People drove out from Cleveland just to slow down on Lake Road and look at the house. The traffic backed up all day. Down below the house, the beach where the hospital's doctors and nurses were supposed to be having their party that afternoon was full of policemen instead. And somewhere in that crowd, people were already starting to ask a different question.

Part 6The Family Closes the Door

By Monday, Sam Sheppard was in a bed at Bay View Hospital, the hospital his own family ran. And there was a Bay Village policeman sitting in a chair halfway down the corridor, keeping visitors away. His brother Stephen, also a doctor, studied Sam's X-rays. And early Tuesday morning, Stephen told reporters that Sam's neck was broken. A fractured vertebra. Sam would have to wear a steel and leather brace for six to eight weeks. His face was bruised down the whole right side, his right eye was swollen shut, and he had two broken teeth. His brother also told the Associated Press that Sam had been punched, and choked, and beaten on the head and neck. And that nobody could possibly have done that to himself.

Back on Monday, a sheriff's deputy named Carl Rossbach came to the hospital to get Sam's story. And Sam gave him the first description of the man he said he'd fought. Taller than Sam, and Sam was about six feet. Bushy hair. A white shirt. One paper wrote it up as six-foot-three and middle-aged. That was about all he could say. And while Rossbach was in the room, another man walked in. William J. Corrigan. One of the best-known criminal defence lawyers in Cleveland. Corrigan said Sam wasn't in good shape, and the questioning should wait until he was out of bed. And right after that, Sam's room was closed to visitors.

On Wednesday, the seventh of July, they buried Marilyn. Sam left the hospital for the private service, in his neck brace, with a Bay Village police sergeant beside him. The sergeant said the family kept the conversation off the murder. "He took it pretty hard," the sergeant said. "He sobbed most of the time."

And Chip? His uncle Stephen told the papers what the family had told him. Stephen and his wife had lost their own baby daughter that spring. So they told Chip that God had picked his mother to go up to Heaven and help take care of her, because she'd done such a good job taking care of him.

Back downtown, the men running the case were running out of patience. On Thursday, the eighth, an assistant county prosecutor named John Mahon took over the investigation. And he said this to the Cleveland Press: "In my twenty-three years of criminal prosecution, I have never seen such flagrant stalling as in this case by the family of Dr. Samuel Sheppard." The Sheppards saw it the other way. Stephen told reporters that Sam had already been interviewed four times, and had told them everything he knew. And he said this: "It's fantastic to think that we're trying to impede the investigation. We tried to protect Sam physically so he could get well as soon as possible and be of more help." Stephen gave the Press one more line that day. "I can see it in their eyes. But they're wrong. If Sam had done this thing, he would have told me. We were very close. They were going to name their child, if it was a boy, after me."

That morning, the coroner, Dr. Gerber, came out to the hospital with a pocketful of subpoenas. He signed one for Sam, and said, serve it forthwith. And at the door of room 119, Corrigan stopped it. "Absolutely not," Corrigan said. "This man is sick. He is in a hospital. He cannot be moved." And Gerber told the paper: "Here is a witness surrounded and shielded by his own family of doctors." That same day, Sam's lawyer handed reporters a typed statement, signed in ink. Sam was offering ten thousand dollars for the arrest and conviction of whoever killed his wife. "I have never refused to talk to any authorities," it said. "I have lived an honorable life."

And that afternoon, Sam finally sat down with them. In a wheelchair, in his hospital room. It started with an argument. The coroner said Corrigan told Sam, "Don't say a word. I'm your lawyer." Sam turned to his brother Stephen and asked him what he should do. And Stephen said, "Look, you're over twenty-one. Make up your own mind." Sam said, "I'll talk."

And here is where it turned. Before the questions started, Corrigan told his client, flatly, what was going on. And the Press printed his words. "You're being accused of murdering your wife. These men are out here to get a confession." Sam broke down. "I didn't do anything to Marilyn," he said. And then Rossbach asked him straight out. You don't have to answer this, he said. But did you kill your wife? "Oh, my God, no," Sam said. "Why should I? I loved her." Rossbach questioned him for three hours. Afterwards, the deputy said Sam's story hadn't changed from the first time he told it. And at one point, telling them about the high school girl he'd married, Sam said: "She was the only girl I ever loved and ever will love."

They asked him about his marriage. Every part of it. And Sam told them there had been only one, in his words, "major misunderstanding." He'd taken a former employee of Bay View Hospital to a wedding. She lost her watch there. So he bought her a new one. And he didn't tell his wife. Marilyn found out about it later. Other than that, Sam said, they'd only had the normal disputes that any two people living together might have. That night they let him go home from the hospital. Not to Lake Road. He slept at his father's house, just up the road from the hospital. The night before, Mahon's men had searched Sam's house again. They didn't find anything new. But the Cleveland Press reported one thing from that search. The paper said that among the paperback mystery novels lying around the house were three with these titles: "I Killed My Wife," "Blood on My Hands," and "Blood in Your Eye." That's what the Press chose to print. On Friday, the ninth, Sam went back to the house on Lake Road for the first time since that Sunday morning. With his two lawyers, and the coroner, and the deputy. To walk them through it. That morning, he'd turned down a lie detector test for the second time. Not, he said, in "my present emotional state." When they pulled up, there were sightseers all over the lawn. And Sam was angry about it. He told the mayor he wanted them off his property. And then he said: "Marilyn wouldn't like it." He had three daisies in his right hand the whole time. He showed them the bed. He showed them the spot outside the bedroom where he said he'd been hit. And then he led them out back, down toward the beach, and pointed. "There's where I struggled with the slayer." Out on the lake, a diver was going down, looking for the weapon. Sam told it all the same way he'd told it before. The coroner said so. There was one small difference.

Earlier, he'd said he was knocked out on the beach about eight or ten feet from the steps. Now he pointed to a spot sixteen or eighteen feet away. Gerber said the differences didn't, quote, "appear to amount to anything." But while Sam was at the house, the prosecutor's office was reading something else. Marilyn's letters. They'd found them in the house. Most of them were written to her by relatives, back in the Los Angeles years, while Sam was still in medical school. And the Press quoted from them. One of them said, "When we have children, the family unit must be preserved." The same letter said that Sam was too fine a man not to realize "how foolish his actions were." And another one, from a woman in the family, told her: "Hold onto yourself, Marilyn, and try in every possible way to remain the ideal wife."

The Sheppard family said the couple had no special marital problems. They were, the family said, "deeply in love with each other." Nobody said in print what those letters were about. Not yet.

Part 7The Light in the Window

On Saturday, the tenth of July, six days after the murder, Sam Sheppard came downtown. He walked into the sheriff's office at the Criminal Courts Building wearing dark glasses and his neck brace, and he sat down with the deputies, the homicide detectives and an assistant prosecutor. This time there was a stenographer in the room, taking it all down. The Press said he told the same story, virtually word for word, for five hours. A couple of days later, the same paper called it a nine-hour interrogation. And afterwards, Deputy Rossbach said the quiet part out loud. Quote: "There's one suspect so far and that's Dr. Sheppard." The Associated Press reported what Sam said when Rossbach told him that. "You don't think I killed her? My God, do you think I'd do that when we were expecting our baby."

Rossbach kept asking for one more thing. A lie detector test. "He doesn't have to if he doesn't want to," Rossbach said, "but I intend to keep on asking until he agrees." Sam said no. His reason, in his words: "Because of the emotional strain I have suffered, the lie detector would be very unreliable." And the family's lawyer said he'd told all three Sheppard brothers to refuse, because the tests were, quote, "inconclusive and inadmissible as evidence in courts."

The prosecutor's office saw it the other way. Assistant Prosecutor John Mahon told the Press, "It is a fundamental proposition that anyone telling the truth would have no fear of taking a lie detector test." And it wasn't only Sam. Mahon said that everyone they'd asked to take one in this case had refused.

At the Morgue, they had two tiny fibres from under Marilyn's fingernails. A short brown one under the little finger of her left hand. And a bit of red wool under her right thumbnail. The coroner said they might crack the case. Or they might have, quote, "no significance whatever."

Then, on Monday, the Cleveland Press found a couple who said they'd driven past the Sheppard house in the middle of the night. Mr. and Mrs. Jay Bender were driving home along Lake Road from visiting friends, sometime between two and two-thirty in the morning. Every house was dark, Mrs. Bender said, until they got to the Sheppards'. There, she remembered three lights: one in the downstairs study, one in the living room, and one upstairs. That mattered, because Sam's story was that he was asleep on the couch until about four. And the coroner said, "It is very unlikely that a burglar would enter a house where there were lights on." But then, the next day, two more witnesses came forward. A young man whose family lived two doors down, and a technician from the hospital. They'd been standing in his driveway at about three o'clock that morning, and they said there were no lights on at the Sheppard house at all. Lights at two-fifteen. Dark at three. The witnesses didn't agree, and they never would.

There was the neck, too. The Sheppard family said Sam's X-rays showed a fractured vertebra. But the coroner now told the Press that the doctor the Bay Village police had called that first morning found no visible sign of any neck injury. Just a black eye and a puffed-up face. Sam told the coroner that he felt all right, except that his neck got tired after he'd been up a while.

On Tuesday, the thirteenth, Sam was back at the house with the investigators. And he was wearing a small revolver, in a holster on his hip. He said he'd been advised to carry it, for protection. He also offered to go through his files for the names of former patients who might have had a grudge against him. "I'm doing this," he said, "because I want to cooperate with the authorities." A few days later, Deputy Rossbach said he didn't like, quote, "the only suspect in the case walking around with a gun on his hip." Sam took it off. "I am not now carrying the gun," he said, "and won't carry it unless it's absolutely necessary."

And then, on Wednesday the fourteenth, just before noon, a Bay Village patrolman pulled something out of the lake. A T-shirt. Torn from top to bottom, snagged on a wire on the concrete pier right next door to the Sheppards' beach. It had reddish-brown stains on it. Nobody could tell yet whether it was blood or rust. Rossbach said it was the same brand and size as one he'd borrowed from Sam for comparison. Sam told the Press, "It's hard to say whether it's mine. I'll have to examine it before I can tell." The next day, the lab reported back. No blood on it anywhere. And the coroner said there was "considerable doubt" it was Sam's shirt at all. By that weekend, he said, they were back where they started on July fourth.

And then there were the tips. Because by now, everybody in Ohio was a detective. In Baltimore, a drifter named George Ennis telephoned a Cleveland newspaper and said he'd once been offered a thousand dollars to kill Marilyn Sheppard. An assistant prosecutor flew to Maryland that night. And Ennis took it all back. The Baltimore police said he'd cooked the story up to impress a girlfriend. In Painesville, a young woman named Jessie Dill said that back in June, on the beach at Fairport, she'd talked with a woman who looked like Marilyn, and that woman had talked about her marriage and wanting a divorce. But Marilyn's cousin said that was very unlikely. That date was his mother's birthday, he said, and Marilyn would have called on them. And near Vermilion, a woman told police she'd seen a tall, bushy-haired man getting on a Greyhound bus to Baltimore on the morning of the murder. A sergeant said he'd try to find the bus driver. As far as the papers show, nothing ever came of it.

That Friday, the Cleveland Press ran a headline across the top of its front page. "DID PROBERS BUNGLE?" The paper had asked the chief of Cleveland's detective bureau, Deputy Inspector James McArthur, to pick the case apart. His department wasn't even on it. But he gave them plenty. The house had been searched without a plan, he said. The cars in the garage should have been checked right away. And from the photographs he'd seen, quote, "it appears that this was the neatest burglar ever." About the dog, McArthur said, "I can't understand this dog's silence." The coroner had a simpler answer. "Everybody says the dog doesn't bark very much." And McArthur finished with this: "It would almost appear that someone had made an effort to mislead the investigators."

But go back three days. Back to Tuesday the thirteenth, the same day as the revolver and the grudge list. Because that day, on the front page of the Cleveland Press, there was a photograph. A young woman, smiling, holding a tennis racket. The picture was a few years old, from a style show at a hotel in Westlake. She was a former technician at Bay View Hospital. She was living in Southern California now. And the caption over her picture began with four words. "Recipient of Gift Watch."

Her name was Susan Hayes.

Part 8The City Takes the Case

Out in Los Angeles, the district attorney had already called Susan Hayes in. She was twenty-four. And she told her version of the watch story. Back in March, she said, Sam had taken her to a wedding. Not in Los Angeles, but in San Diego, about a hundred miles away. Sam was out there at an osteopathic convention. With his wife.

Marilyn didn't go to the wedding. She said she lost her watch at dinner after the wedding. And later, Sam came to see her and gave her a new one. A Lady Elgin. He stayed about fifteen minutes, she said, and he mentioned that his wife was in Los Angeles with him. Back in Ohio, she said, Sam had sometimes driven her to and from work at the hospital. Her father had been one of his patients.

Deputy Rossbach said there were points in her story that Sam hadn't mentioned in his. The biggest one was San Diego. Sam hadn't said it was a hundred miles away, while his wife stayed behind. And there was the date. Sam had told investigators the wedding was back in 1950. In her telling, the watch was a gift from this past March. The district attorney said he was convinced she'd told him everything she knew. And the Press called it, in its own quotation marks, a "casual relationship."

Sam, meanwhile, had gone back to work. The Monday after the murder, he was seeing patients at Bay View again, in his neck collar. "These people need me," he told the Press. He was operating again. And by the next weekend he'd put the collar aside and started making house calls. His very first one, the paper said, was to the mayor's mother, Mrs. Pearl Houk. She was seventy-seven.

Back downtown, the people running the investigation had started talking to the newspapers about the killer. A lot. On Monday the nineteenth, the coroner told the Cleveland Press that whoever had done this was, quote, "the most brilliant murderer in the annals of Greater Cleveland crime." Sheriff Joseph Sweeney said that in fifty-one years of police work, he had "never saw a better cover-up." And the coroner had a theory about the killer. He said the man had been, in effect, overwhelmed by an emotional storm. And then, in a split second, he'd realized what he'd done, and in maybe less than an hour, he'd wiped away his fingerprints, washed up the trail of blood, and planted false clues. The tipped-over bag. The rifled desk. The green bag in the weeds. All of it, the coroner said, "apparent plants." "He might have been an avid reader of murder mysteries," the coroner said. And then the Press added this. Marilyn, her friends said, had loved murder mysteries. She liked to guess the killer before she got to the last chapter. The coroner believed the killer was still in Greater Cleveland, reading every word the papers printed about him. In his words, "chuckling over his shrewdness if he remembers that he committed the crime." They brought in an Army mine detector to sweep the beach and the lawn for the weapon. It found rusty nails, old bottle caps, and, the paper said, the "normal amount of metal junk."

Two days later, the coroner asked Sam for one more thing. A pathologist from Western Reserve University, Dr. Alan Moritz, suggested an injection of sodium pentothal. The papers called it truth serum. The idea was that, under the drug, with a psychiatrist asking the questions, Sam might remember something from that morning that he couldn't recall now. After talking with his lawyers, Sam said no. And Gerber made his reasons public. Sam had already been questioned right after the crime, while he was under sedation; if he'd had anything to tell, he believed he would have told it then. He "cannot face further interrogation."

And he was reluctant, the statement said, "to put himself in a position in which he might make statements that would incriminate innocent people." Sam had promised to telephone Dr. Moritz. He didn't call. And Gerber told the paper, "We can interpret this as meaning we can expect no further cooperation from Dr. Sheppard." And that same day, Wednesday the twenty-first of July, the Cleveland Press did something newspapers don't usually do. It put an editorial on the front page, under its own headline, aimed at one man. "Why No Inquest? Do It Now, Dr. Gerber." "Why hasn't County Coroner Sam Gerber called an inquest into the Sheppard murder case? What restrains him?" An inquest, the editorial said, puts witnesses under oath. It makes it possible to examine every witness, every suspect, every relative. And "it sometimes solves crimes." "The murder of Marilyn Sheppard is a baffling crime," it went on. "It may never be solved. But, this community can never have a clear conscience until every possible method is applied to its solution." That same afternoon, the coroner said he was not prepared to call an inquest. "At this time." But he also said he had a sheaf of subpoenas in his pocket, and, quote, "I don't know when I'll have to get rough, but I'm prepared to do so."

And the city of Cleveland took over the case. Bay Village was a small town with a small police force. The night before, its council had voted to hand the investigation to the Cleveland police, and to put up five thousand dollars to pay for it. Cleveland's mayor, Anthony Celebrezze, agreed. Cleveland's head of homicide, Captain David Kerr, was ordered to fly home from his vacation in Florida and Havana to take charge. Before the city would sign on, the mayor had two questions. Who'd pay if a Cleveland policeman got hurt? And who'd be liable if somebody filed a suit for false arrest? An assistant prosecutor, Thomas Parrino, told the paper, "If the investigation had been handled differently from the start, we'd have a solution by now."

The man who'd be in charge was Cleveland's police chief, Frank Story. He hadn't wanted the case. He called it "almost beyond solution." But, he said, he'd take orders from the mayor. And then Chief Story said something else. The Press printed it at the top of the front page. He said he was "convinced of the identity of the murderer." "But the suspect has his story down pat. And if he stays pat, there isn't much that we can do."

Part 9Normandy School

On Thursday, the twenty-second of July, the coroner finally called his inquest. But not downtown at the Morgue. He held it right there in Bay Village, in the assembly room at Normandy School. About two hundred people packed in to watch. Mostly housewives, the Press said, a lot of them the Sheppards' own neighbours. It was July, the room was hot, and the sun came streaming in through the windows. One young mother rode her bicycle three miles each way, every day, because she was, quote, "interested in the hearing."

Sam's lawyers were allowed in, but only as spectators. They couldn't object, and they couldn't ask questions. Dr. Gerber, who was a lawyer as well as a doctor, asked all the questions himself. The first day belonged to the people who'd been there. Spen Houk told about the phone call. Esther Houk told about the wet footprints on the stairs. And Nancy Ahern told about Saturday night: the dinner, the dull movie, Sam asleep on the couch. And then the coroner asked her what Marilyn had thought about Susan Hayes. Nancy said Marilyn had heard the rumor that Sam had been out with Miss Hayes, and "didn't seem to be too upset about it." Marilyn had told her about a watch Sam bought for a young lady in California. Nancy said she asked her, "Did it upset you, is there anything to it?" And Marilyn said, "No, I don't think there is." Then the police chief, John Eaton. He said he'd heard rumors that Sam paid attention to other women. Only rumors, he said. And he said he'd read letters that Sam's brothers' wives had written to Marilyn back in 1951, advising her not to divorce him.

And then, late that afternoon, Sam Sheppard took the witness chair. Under oath, he told it all again. The couch. Marilyn's voice. The bedroom. "I felt that I could see a white form of an individual," he said. The blow. The beach. The waves. The phone. The coroner asked him about divorce. Sam said there had never been any serious talk of it. "That is not true," he said. But he admitted that years ago, in California, Marilyn had been, in his words, "at times quite jealous." He said he'd reassured her, and things got better. At the end of the day, Gerber asked if he was getting tired. And Sam said, "I will go on as long as you want to."

Friday morning, the crowd was even bigger. Before Sam took the chair again, a deputy sheriff searched him to make sure he wasn't carrying a gun. He wore his dark glasses. He had his neck collar on, and partway through he took it off and held it in his lap. And Gerber went at him, point by point. Why was his corduroy jacket folded neatly on the couch, when he'd been wearing it when he fell asleep? "I can't account for it," Sam said. "I don't know." Where was his T-shirt? "I can't be specific," he said. "I wish I could be." Why hadn't he turned on the light when he ran up the stairs? And when Sam couldn't say exactly where the switch was, Gerber said, "Do you mean you've been living in that home three years and don't know where that light switch is?" And Sam said, "There are a lot of things I've been living with for three years that I can't give the location of." At one point he accused the coroner of trying to put words in his mouth. Gerber ignored it and kept going.

When Gerber asked him to describe going back up to the bedroom and finding Marilyn, Sam broke down. He wiped his eyes with a handkerchief. It was the first time anyone in that room had seen him cry. And then, just before the noon break, the coroner switched subjects. Fast. He asked about California, back in March. Sam had stayed at the home of a friend, another osteopath named Dr. Arthur Miller. Marilyn was off at a ranch up near Monterey. And Susan Hayes had stayed at the Millers' too, for a while. "Did you sleep in the same bedroom with Susan Hayes?" "No." "At no time?" "Absolutely not." "Did you have any sexual relationship with Susan Hayes at that time?" "No." "Not during any time in California?" "Not any time." "You didn't sleep in the same bedroom four nights in a row?" "No." He said Susan was a good friend. And he said Marilyn had known about it, and had even suggested he look Susan up while they were out there. He was excused a little before one-thirty that afternoon, after almost five and a half hours under questioning. And out in the hallway, he said three words to the reporters. "That was rough."

His brother Stephen testified after him. And when he was done, Stephen turned around and spoke to the room. "This could happen to you," he told them, "and you also could be completely innocent. You also could be subjected to hours and hours of interrogation." During a break that week, Stephen had walked up to the Cleveland police chief, Frank Story, and introduced himself. "Personally," Stephen said, "I'm elated that you're on the case now." And Story said, "I'm not." The inquest picked back up on Monday, the twenty-sixth. Gerber had ordered Sam's son, Chip, to come and testify. At the last minute, he excused him. "The boy couldn't add anything at this time," the coroner said. Nancy Ahern was called back. And this time, she told the coroner about a morning in April, right after the Sheppards came home from California. She'd dropped in on Marilyn, and Marilyn felt like talking. According to Nancy, Marilyn told her that a friend of Sam's, Dr. Chapman, had told Marilyn that Sam had thought about asking her for a divorce. That the two men had talked it over on the long drive to the ranch. And that Sam had come to the decision that Marilyn was the right one for him, and that he'd try to make a fresh start. Nancy said Marilyn had told her she thought that was all over now. Then Sam's own mother took the stand. And she testified that Marilyn had confided in her that she "did not have a pleasant time" on that California trip, because of Sam's dates with Susan Hayes. Marilyn's father, Thomas Reese, testified too. Sipping water, speaking softly. He said Sam had asked to spend some time with him on his boat. And Reese had told him, "under the circumstances, I thought it best that I not see Sam until the air is cleared."

And then there was Dr. Richard Hexter. He was the outside doctor Chief Eaton had called to examine Sam that first morning. On the stand, he gave a long, very technical description of the swelling around Sam's right eye: the upper and lower lids, the fluid in the tissue. And when he finished, Gerber asked him, "Would you call that a black eye?" The room laughed. And Hexter said, "That's rather technical, isn't it? Yes, it is a black eye." Corrigan stood up and asked that the record show the audience had laughed. Gerber told him to sit down and keep quiet. Hexter testified that he'd found no sign of any neck injury. A black eye, swelling of the face, a sore spot on the ribs. That was all. That same Monday, Captain David Kerr, the homicide chief, flew home from his vacation. And before he even got on the plane, he told the Press that Sam Sheppard should be arrested. "If there had been an immediate arrest," he said, "the case would have been solved in four hours." And Chief Story said his men had evidence that, quote, "flatly contradicts" some of what Sam had said under oath. That afternoon, the coroner adjourned his inquest. Not closed. Adjourned, indefinitely. He made no finding. Not a word about who killed Marilyn Sheppard.

Part 10Bring Him In

On Tuesday, the twenty-seventh of July, an American Airlines flight from Los Angeles landed in Cleveland, by way of Chicago. On the passenger list was a woman named Susan Hamilton. Of course, it wasn't Susan Hamilton. It was Susan Hayes. Assistant Prosecutor Thomas Parrino was sitting right beside her. And on the same plane was Jim Vail of the Cleveland Press, the only Cleveland newspaperman on board. Two weeks earlier, she'd told the district attorney in Los Angeles, under oath, that she and Sam were just casual acquaintances. She told Vail she'd been confused, and hadn't wanted to get involved. "I didn't want to lie," she said, "but I was confused." When the plane landed, a homicide squad car was waiting. It took her straight from the airport to Central Police Station. And that night, in Chief Story's office, she talked. For about three hours. To the chief, to the head of homicide, to the detective chief, and to three assistant prosecutors. A Press photographer outside got a picture of her through the window of the lit office. Out on the street, a couple of teenagers climbed up on a fence rail to watch.

When it was typed up, she signed every page. Here is what her statement said, according to the police and the prosecutors who described it to the papers. She said the watch wasn't the only gift. The county prosecutor said there'd been a signet ring, and a suede jacket, among other things. She said Sam had talked about marriage, but said his situation made it impossible. She said that in the three months before the murder, he'd written her at least four letters. And she said that out in California, in March, while they both stayed at the home of a Los Angeles osteopath for more than a week, they had been intimate. Every one of those points ran against what Sam had said under oath at Normandy School four days earlier.

The next day, the Cleveland Press put it across the top of the front page. "DOCTOR LIES, SUSAN CHARGES." "I've told the truth now," she told the paper. "I never realized how good it is to get something like that off your chest. I know things are going to be rough." The same day, the police announced something else. Using scientific instruments in the house, they'd found a trail of tiny blood spots, leading toward the basement steps and a side door to the yard. There was a wash basin down in the basement. And there was blood on the doorknob of Chip's room. Sam had testified that he'd gone into Chip's room that morning, to make sure the boy was all right. And he had denied washing up anywhere. Sam's lawyer, William Corrigan, went down to Central Police Station that same day. He offered full cooperation. And he gave Chief Story two theories of his own about who might have done it. One pointed toward a friend of Sam's. The other, toward one of Marilyn's relatives. The police checked them. They said they found nothing to support either one.

And the Press wasn't done. That day's editorial asked, "Why Don't the Police Quiz No. 1 Suspect?" It called Sam, in its own words, a man "proved under oath to be a liar." Two days later, on Friday the thirtieth of July, the editorial ran at the top of page one, with Sam's photograph beside it. Its headline was five words long. "Quit Stalling and Bring Him In!" It said Sam had been surrounded by an "iron curtain of protection." His family, his friends, Bay Village officials, his lawyers. "This is murder," it said. "This is no parlor game." Sam's mother answered that same day. "I resent the implication that this family knows something and is keeping it covered," she said. "If anyone in this family did something wrong, the rest of us would certainly want to see justice done."

At City Hall that morning, Cleveland's mayor, Anthony Celebrezze, gave Bay Village an ultimatum. His homicide squad wanted Sam arrested. Either Bay Village made the arrest, or Cleveland would pull its police off the case. And Celebrezze accused Mayor Houk and Chief Eaton of drawing, quote, "a protective cloth about an individual." Chief Story put it more simply. "If this was a Cleveland case," he said, "I would have made an arrest on the Fourth of July." And so it came down to Spen Houk. The mayor who'd picked up the phone that Sunday morning. Sam's friend. The man he co-owned a little aluminum boat with. Houk told the Press, "I won't shirk it. If the evidence warrants, an arrest will be made." But he also said he might not sign the warrant himself. He was going to be a witness in the case. Chief Eaton wouldn't say whether Sam should be arrested. But, he said, "If a warrant is issued, I couldn't refuse to serve it." That night, Chief Eaton drove a murder affidavit over to the home of Gershom Barber, the president of the Bay Village City Council. He got there about a quarter past nine.

Barber signed the warrant. About an hour later, at Bay Village City Hall, Sam Sheppard stood in front of Barber. He didn't have a lawyer with him. And he was charged with the first-degree murder of his wife, Marilyn. Twenty-six days after the phone rang in the mayor's house. But the story of that summer has one more scene. And I want to tell it to you, because it's the one that'll carry us into Part Two. Four days after the arrest, on the third of August, Chief Story's detectives went back into the house on Lake Road. And this time they brought something new. A fluorescent lamp, the papers said. A "black light."

Story said it was the first time local police had ever used the device. Now, the black light wasn't new. The idea goes back to 1903, to an American physicist named Robert Wood. He made a special glass that blocked almost all visible light but let ultraviolet light through. They still call it Wood's glass. And Wood himself worked on real police cases in the 1920s and '30s, including the bombing on Wall Street in 1920. Under that kind of light, a lot of things glow. But blood doesn't. Blood soaks up the ultraviolet. So under a black light, a spot of blood shows up dark against a lighter surface. If you've seen blood glowing bright blue on a TV crime show, that's something else. That's a chemical called luminol. Different tool. Different story. We'll get to it. Under Story's black light, the detectives found a trail. Blood, leading out of the bedroom, through the house. And Story told reporters what he thought it meant. The killer, he said, had wandered through the house, then washed his hands, and then faked the burglary. Because the rifled desk and the dumped-out medical bag didn't have any blood on them. But then he said something else. Something you don't hear a police chief say very often, four days after an arrest. "The additional blood stains are indicative in tracing the movements of the slayer and are consistent to some extent with the story given by Dr. Samuel Sheppard of running around the house after the murder." "I am not saying," Story added, "that Dr. Sam is the killer or that he had blood on him." And then he told his men to stop talking to reporters. "We don't want to telegraph our punches," he said. "We are holding back evidence for presentation at the trial."

So that's where we'll leave it, for now. In twenty-six days, a city had made up its mind. Not in a courtroom. In the newspapers, at City Hall, and in a school assembly room full of neighbours. And at the end of it, a man who said he'd fought his wife's killer twice in the dark was sitting in the county jail, charged with being that killer. And so much was still open. Where was the weapon? Where was the T-shirt? Were the lights on at two-fifteen in the morning, or weren't they? Why did two watches stop an hour apart? And what was the blood in that house really saying? In Part Two, we'll go inside the county jail. We'll go into the courtroom, for one of the most famous murder trials in American history. And we'll meet a scientist from Berkeley, California, who'd come to Lake Road and read that blood for himself. This has been Part One of The Murder of Marilyn Sheppard.

Part 11Outro

Thank you for listening to Forgotten True Crime. If you are new here, this is an independent podcast, written, produced, and recorded by me, Trevor Shelby. Please remember to subscribe so when part two drops, you will be the first to know. Thank you all again. Just know you are unique, you are special, and you are loved.

Episode 2Part 2

Part 1Cold Open

Tuesday. The twenty-first of December, 1954. Four days before Christmas. Downtown Cleveland. The Criminal Courts Building. A courtroom twenty-six feet wide and forty-eight feet long. Every seat in it has been spoken for, for weeks. Inside the rail, where the lawyers usually work, there's a long table for the reporters. The front row behind it belongs to television and radio. Then the out-of-town papers and the magazines. And half of the very last row has been set aside for one family.

The jury went out on Friday. They deliberated through Saturday. Through Sunday, over the defense's objection. At noon on Monday, the judge sent them to lunch and mentioned, almost in passing, that the courtroom clock had stopped. Monday night, at about ten o'clock, a bailiff knocked on the jury room door and asked if they were close. A juror came back and said they were very close to agreement. And they'd like to sleep on it.

And now it's Tuesday afternoon. Four thirty-three. The defendant sits at the table with his lawyers. Thirty years old. A doctor. His name is Sam Sheppard. The judge, Edward Blythin, looks out at the room, and tells everyone in it that whatever happens next, there is to be no demonstration of any kind. Nobody leaves until he says so. Then he turns to the jury box. "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, have you arrived at a verdict?" The foreman stands up. A man named James Bird. "We have, your Honor." He hands the folded paper to the bailiff. The bailiff carries it up to the bench. And Judge Blythin unfolds it, and reads it out loud. "We the jury in this case, being duly impanelled and sworn, do find the defendant, Sam H. Sheppard…"

Part 2Show Introduction

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Forgotten True Crime, the true crime podcast where we tell the stories of crimes that happened long ago. If you're a true crime fan, make sure you subscribe to the podcast. That way, when we have new episodes, you'll be the first to know. Also, check us out on our YouTube and Facebook pages, "Forgotten True Crime." And visit our blog, Section29.com, where we post the cool things we find for every episode. For this one, The Murder of Marilyn Sheppard, Part Two, I've got the word-for-word trial transcripts from 1954 and 1966, the federal court rulings, the Cleveland newspaper coverage, and the police files. The links to all of that are in the description below. Parts of this story may contain opinions and speculations and should be taken as such. What I'm going to do today is tell you this story the way I've come to understand it, built out of the court record, the sworn testimony, and the newspapers. Where I'm reading between the lines, I'll tell you I'm doing it. And where something comes from a secondary source, a book or a later article instead of the record itself, I'll tell you that too. These stories depict violent crimes of all types and may be a trigger for some listeners. Listener discretion is advised. And a word about this one before we go in. Along with the murder itself, this part of the story includes two deaths by suicide in the families involved. I'm going to name them plainly when we get there, and I won't dwell on the details. If you're struggling, please stay with me to the end of the episode, where I'll give you a number you can call or text any time.

This is Part Two. If you haven't heard Part One, go back and start there. I'll wait. For everybody else, here's where we left off. On the Fourth of July, 1954, Marilyn Sheppard, thirty-one years old and four months pregnant, was beaten to death in her bed, in a house on the lake in Bay Village, Ohio. Her husband, Dr. Sam Sheppard, said a bushy-haired man did it, and that he fought him twice, once upstairs and once down on the beach. For twenty-six days, the investigators circled him. His family closed ranks. The newspapers got louder. Then a young woman from his hospital stepped off a plane from California and told the police about their affair. And on the night of July thirtieth, Sam Sheppard was charged with first-degree murder. Four days later, police went back into the house with a black light.

So this is the second half. And let me tell you, it's every bit as wild as the first. A county jail, and a weekend where everything Sam said started to change. A courtroom the newspapers ran like their own newsroom. A coroner, and an instrument nobody ever found. The young woman from California, on the witness stand. A scientist from Berkeley with a suitcase full of blood samples. A pen pal from Germany. A famous lawyer from Boston. A doctor who climbs into a wrestling ring. And a son, who was asleep down the hall that night, and who spends most of his life trying to find out who was in that house.

Some of you know how this ends. Some of you think you do. Either way, I promise you there's more to it than you've heard. So let's go back to that courtroom. But first, we have to go back to the jail.

Part 3The County Jail

The County Jail sat right behind the courthouse in downtown Cleveland. And on the night of Friday, July thirtieth, 1954, they put Dr. Sam Sheppard in a cell. The jailers told reporters he slept well, and ate everything they put in front of him. And starting the next morning, the detectives came in. In teams. In relays.

So did his lawyer. William Corrigan had told Sam not to talk about the murder. Not to anyone. And then Corrigan basically moved into the jail. He'd show up at eight in the morning. His co-counsel, Arthur Petersilge, would come and sit with Sam and read him the newspaper. The detectives would get a few minutes, and then Corrigan would be back at the door asking to see his client again. Corrigan didn't apologize for it. He told one reporter, "They can talk to my client for the next 30 years. They're not going to learn anything. My client didn't do it." The homicide captain, David Kerr, put it a little differently.

"Corrigan seems to be running the jail." And Sam stuck to the script his lawyer gave him. He was happy to talk about medical school in Los Angeles. About becoming a neurosurgeon. About the hard operations he'd pulled off. But every time they got near the Fourth of July, he said the same thing. "On advice of counsel, I will not discuss this with you." Late Saturday night, two detectives thought he was about to crack. They told the paper he seemed nervous. He was gulping. And then a deputy sheriff stuck his head in, and said this man has to have some sleep.

Cleveland's police chief, Frank Story, wanted everyone to know they were being careful. And he said something that's going to be worth remembering: "Third degree methods are not permitted in this country. A conviction which resulted from such methods might be reversed by the Supreme Court."

On Monday morning, August second, they brought Sam across to the courthouse. Corrigan had filed for a writ of habeas corpus. His argument was technical. The arrest warrant had been signed by the president of the Bay Village council, a man named Gershom Barber. Corrigan said only the mayor could do that. And the mayor, Spen Houk, had stepped aside because he was Sam's friend.

Sam came in wearing a white sports shirt, blue slacks, and his neck brace. The room was packed. More than a hundred people, mostly lawyers and courthouse staff, even though the judge had said no curious spectators. His father and his brother Richard sat in the back row. Before it started, Richard leaned over the table and told him, "I just want to let you know that we're in the back of the room and here with you, Sam." And then something happened that nobody in that courtroom was expecting. Corrigan called Mayor Houk to the stand, to prove the mayor had been in town that day. Fine. But then the prosecutor, John Mahon, got up to cross-examine. And he asked Houk about the morning of July fourth. Did you see Marilyn Sheppard? Yes. How did you find her? "She was horribly beaten about the head, lying in bed."

Now, if you heard Part One, you might remember: at the inquest, Houk's story was that he stayed downstairs with Sam while Esther went up. Now he was saying he'd seen her. That same day, the detective chief, James McArthur, told the Press that Houk had previously "failed" a lie detector test, and that police would be questioning him again. Houk, for his part, said he hadn't changed his story at all. And for the record, Spencer Houk was never charged with anything.

As for the writ, the judge, Frank Merrick, didn't even want to hear arguments. He pointed to a 1941 state law that gave a council president the powers of a magistrate, and he said one sentence. "The writ is refused. The prisoner is ordered remanded to the custody of the sheriff."

Before they took him back to the jail, they walked Sam next door to Central Police Station for the first time. He was photographed and fingerprinted, like any other prisoner. And then he went back to his cell, handcuffed to the deputy sheriff who'd been working his case since the first week, Carl Rossbach.

And that same day, the Press reported something else. According to the paper, over the weekend, in between all of Corrigan's visits, Sam had finally admitted something to the detectives. That he had been intimate with Susan Hayes. He'd denied it under oath at the inquest. The paper said he told detectives he'd lied because he was being a gentleman. And now that she'd given her own statement, he said, "I am no longer under restraint on that subject."

The next day, August third, the police went back to the house with their black light. We talked about that at the end of Part One. And over the next two weeks, the papers kept digging. They wrote about the trail of blood they said police had followed through the house. About the furniture police carted out of it. And they started running stories linking Sam to other women. Years later, the Supreme Court would describe it this way: the newspapers named a number of other women who were allegedly involved with him. Then the grand jury met. On August seventeenth, 1954, the grand jurors of Cuyahoga County handed up what's called a true bill. Case number 64571. The State of Ohio versus Sam H. Sheppard. And this is what the indictment said. That Sam H. Sheppard, "on or about the 4th day of July 1954, at the County aforesaid, unlawfully, purposely and of deliberate and premeditated malice killed Marilyn Sheppard." Murder in the first degree. In Ohio in 1954, that could mean the electric chair.

Three days later, he was brought into court and arraigned. And the court's clerk wrote it down in the old, formal language. Asked how he pleaded, the defendant "saith he is not guilty; and puts himself upon the country." That's the old way of saying: let a jury decide. "Defendant is ordered held without bail."

His lawyers asked for bail anyway. The hearing stretched over four court days in September. And on September twentieth, the journal says the court, having heard all the evidence, "denies said motion. Defendant excepts." So Sam Sheppard went back to his cell. And he waited for his trial. It was set to begin in the middle of October. Two weeks before an election. In a city where, by then, just about everybody had already made up their mind.

Part 4The Circus

About a month before the trial, the court called seventy-five people from around the county as possible jurors. It was a list of names. And all three Cleveland newspapers printed it. With every person's home address. So, the letters started coming. And the phone calls. From strangers, and from friends, every one of them about the case. Every person on that list got them. Sam's lawyers tried to show the judge how bad it was. They sent people out to poll folks on the street about whether Sam was guilty. One of the papers ran an editorial saying that the poll "smacks of mass jury tampering."

On Monday, the eighteenth of October, 1954, the trial of Sam Sheppard opened in the Criminal Courts Building in downtown Cleveland. The judge was Edward Blythin. The defense asked him to put the trial off and let things cool down. Overruled. They asked him to move the trial somewhere else, out of Cleveland. He held off on that one. The journal says he was holding it "pending effort to impanel a fair and impartial jury." And here's something else that was going on. The general election was two weeks away. Judge Blythin was on the ballot, running to keep his seat. And the man leading the prosecution, John Mahon, was on the ballot too, running for judge.

Now let me show you the room. It was twenty-six feet by forty-eight. Normally, inside the railing, you'd have the judge, the jury, the lawyers, and the witness. That's it. This time, the court set up a long temporary table in there, right behind the lawyers, for about twenty reporters. One end of that table was less than three feet from the jury box. The court gave out every seat behind the railing for the whole trial. Television and radio got the front row. Out-of-town newspapers and magazines got the next two. The families got one row in the back, split down the middle: Sam's on one side and Marilyn's on the other. The press took over every other room on that floor too. They put in private telephone lines and telegraph equipment. And radio station WSRS set up its broadcast booth on the third floor, in the room next to the jury room. That's where the jury waited during recesses, and later, it's where they'd deliberate. Out in the hallway there were flashbulbs and newsreel cameras. And every time a possible juror walked in or walked out, somebody took their picture. Then they started picking the jury. One person at a time, they'd take the stand, and the judge would explain what was at stake. To every one of them, he said it the same way: in a first-degree murder case, if the jury finds the defendant guilty and doesn't recommend mercy, the penalty "will be death in the electric chair." Nearly all of them said they'd read about the case. Years later, a court would go through every page of this transcript, and it found that every juror but one, the twelve who actually decided this case, had either read about it in the Cleveland papers or heard it on the radio. A prosecutor asked one woman, "Have you been affected in any way by the newspaper photographers and newspaper men around?" She said, "I'm afraid not." Then she added, "I think all the prospective jurors have been a little nervous."

On the second day of jury selection, a Cleveland radio station put on a live debate. The people debating were newspaper reporters. And they said on the air that Sam's lawyers were throwing up roadblocks, and that by hiring a big-name criminal lawyer, Sam had pretty much admitted he was guilty. The defense asked the judge to do something about it. He said "WHK doesn't have much coverage," and "we are not trying this case by radio or in newspapers or any other means." While that was going on, the front page ran a two-inch headline: "But Who Will Speak for Marilyn?"

By Monday, the twenty-fifth, Sam's lawyer, William Corrigan, had had enough. He stood up in court and said the newspaper coverage was "oppressive and depressive." And he pointed out that a very famous radio commentator, Bob Considine, was sitting right there in the room that morning. Then Corrigan told the court about the phone calls. They were about one man sitting in the jury box. According to Corrigan, a caller told the prosecutor that this man would never vote for death. And another caller told the defense the opposite. If this man got on the jury, the caller said, he "would burn Sam Sheppard." Then he read out loud from a column that had run on Friday, in a paper that, he said, went into the homes of every juror. The column asked, "Does Cleveland need mass psychiatry?"

On the first of November, twelve jurors were sworn in. Seven men and five women. Two alternates were sworn in with them. During the trial, the jury's picture would end up in the Cleveland papers more than forty times. The trial was barely underway when, on November third, it already lost a juror. According to the journal, Juror Number Six spoke to the court, and he was excused "on the ground of disability."

Alternate Juror Number Thirteen took his place. And that same day, the State asked to take the jury out to see the house. So the sheriff drove them out to Bay Village. Back out to Lake Road, and the house above the lake. Hundreds of reporters, cameramen and onlookers were already there waiting for them. The court let one member of the press go inside the house with the jury. And the time of the visit had been put out so far ahead of time that one of the newspapers was able to rent a helicopter, and they flew it over the house to take pictures of the jurors walking the grounds. A month later, Sam testified about the first time police took him back into the house, and the crowd that was there that day. He described it this way: "it might be similar to the visit that the jury made to the home, with the absence of the helicopter."

The next morning, the twelve of them sat down in that twenty-six-by-forty-eight-foot room, three feet from the press table. And the State of Ohio stood up to tell them what happened on the Fourth of July.

Part 5The State's Case

Thursday morning, the fourth of November. Assistant Prosecutor John Mahon stood up in front of the jury and told them what the State was going to prove. According to Mahon, Sam and Marilyn had been fighting over other women. That, he said, was why she was killed. And everything after that, the open drawers, the bag of jewelry thrown in the weeds, was a set-up to make it look like a burglar had been in the house. And then he gave them the detail he'd keep coming back to for the next six weeks. A burglar, Mahon said, doesn't take the shirt off a man's back.

For the defense, Fred Garmone told the jury the opposite. The last four months of that marriage, he said, had been the happiest of their lives. And the police hadn't solved this case with their wits. They'd tried to solve it, he said, "by the use of a whip."

Then the witnesses started. The coroner's pathologist, Dr. Lester Adelson, did the autopsy. He told the jury he found "an undisturbed approximately four-month pregnancy." And then the prosecutor asked him how many injuries there were. "I have 35 separate injuries noted in my autopsy." Don and Nancy Ahern, the neighbors who'd been at the house that last night, came next. Don told the jury that when they left, Sam was asleep on the couch in "his cord slacks and his T-shirt and the tan corduroy jacket." And Nancy told them that before she left, she locked the door to the lake porch, and she "put the night chain on."

Then came the mayor of Bay Village, Spencer Houk. He told the jury about the phone call, the first one, at dawn. "My God, Spen, get over here quick. I think they've killed Marilyn." And he told them about something that happened later in July, the day before the inquest.

Sam came to his office at City Hall. And Houk said he asked Sam if he'd ever had a better friend. And then he said, "Sam, if by any chance you did do this, come out and say you did." If it was done, Houk said, it was done "in a fit of rage."

According to Houk, Sam said he couldn't have done it. That he hadn't done it. But when Corrigan cross-examined Houk's wife, Esther, the defense got something back. She'd seen wet footmarks on the stairs that morning. And, she said, "There was a puddle of water on the porch on the lake side of the house."

Patrolman Fred Drenkhan, the first officer in the door that morning, read the jury what Sam told the police that day. Sam said he couldn't recall what happened to his T-shirt. "He did not know what happened to it." And the man he fought on the beach? "All that he could recall was that he appeared larger than he was with bushy hair and in dark clothing."

Bay Village's police chief, John Eaton, testified that he went over the house that morning and found no sign of "any forcible entry or any indication that anybody had tried it." And Larry Houk, the mayor's sixteen-year-old son, told the jury he was one of the boys combing the brush behind the house that afternoon. At about one-thirty he found a green bag. Inside was "a ring, a watch, key chain."

Then, on Tuesday the sixteenth, the State called the coroner. Dr. Samuel Gerber. The prosecutor showed him Marilyn's pillow. And Gerber pointed to a stain on the underside, the side that had been against the headboard. In the blood, he told the jury, there was an impression. "It is the imprint of what I believe to be a surgical instrument." Two blades, he said. With something like teeth at the end of each one.

The next day, Judge Blythin stopped and asked him himself. Did he mean that it couldn't have been made by anything other than a surgical instrument? "No, sir, I did not mean that." So it could have been made by some other instrument? "Similar to this type of a surgical instrument."

On Thursday, William Corrigan got his turn. And he took the pillow apart. Was there a chemical analysis of that stain? A microscopic exam? Gerber: "As far as I know, none were made." And had he testified that an instrument struck that pillow? "I didn't say an instrument hit this pillow." "I said there's an impression." And the weapon itself? All those agencies, all that searching. Gerber agreed: "No specific object or instrument was picked out as being the weapon."

On the nineteenth, Detective Robert Schottke of the Cleveland police took the stand. He told the jury that on the afternoon of the murder, he'd said it to Sam's face. "The evidence points very strongly towards you and that in my opinion you are the one that killed your wife." And Sam, according to Schottke, said, "Don't be ridiculous." "I have devoted my life to saving other lives and I love my wife."

Dr. Lester Hoversten, the old friend who'd been a house guest that summer, testified that he went to see Sam in the hospital. And he said that before he left, Sam's brother Steve "advised Sam to go over the sequence of events as they happened, so that he would be sure to have his story straight." When Corrigan pressed him, Hoversten gave it again, a little differently.

Steve had said, in words to that effect, that Sam should review what happened "so that you will have your story straight when questioned." And then gave an example: you were upstairs, you went downstairs. And on cross, Hoversten also told the jury what Sam said to him that day, with his face swollen and his neck stiff. "My God, I wish they had killed me instead of Marilyn because Chip needs Marilyn as a mother more than he needs me as a father."

And one more. The State called the Sheppards' housekeeper, Elnora Helms. But on cross, she helped the defense. That spring, she said, the family dog, Koko, had been in heat. And she'd had "blood all over the stairway, all over the kitchen, all over the hall, everywhere, because she had the free run of the house."

By the end of November, the State had put up witness after witness, and the jury had sat through almost a month of testimony. But Mahon was saving one name for last. Her name was Susan Hayes.

Part 6Susan Hayes

While the State was putting on its case, the trial outside the courtroom kept right on going. On November twenty-first, a nationally known commentator, Bob Considine, went on Cleveland radio and compared Sam to a perjurer. When the defense asked the judge to find out whether any juror had heard it, he said no. "It is a matter of free speech," he said, "and the court can't control everybody." Three days later, an eight-column headline said Marilyn had called Sam a "Jekyll-Hyde," and promised a "bombshell witness" was coming. No such testimony was ever produced.

Then, on the morning of Wednesday, December first, the State called the witness everybody had been waiting for. Susan Hayes. Twenty-four years old. She'd been a lab technician at Bay View Hospital, where Sam worked. Before she'd said much more than her name, William Corrigan was on his feet. He asked the judge to tell "this young lady" that she didn't have to say anything "that will incriminate her or disgrace her." Blythin refused. She was "presumed," he said, to know her constitutional rights. One of the prosecutors, Saul Danaceau, objected to what he called "this showmanship." Corrigan shot back, "This is no showmanship." Danaceau: "That is all it is, and nothing else." And Corrigan: "I am merely defending a man." The judge asked for quiet. Then the prosecutor, Thomas Parrino, took her through it. She said she and Sam had been intimate going back to before she left Bay View in late 1952. Where? "In his automobile and in an apartment above the Fairview Clinic." In March of 1954, she said, Sam came out to California. She stayed with him at the home of a doctor friend in Los Angeles, for about seven days. Asked which room she stayed in: "The room with Dr. Sheppard." Asked if it was the same bed: "Yes." And where was Marilyn that week? "Dr. Sheppard said that she was in California, up north visiting friends." While they were out there, she lost her watch. "Dr. Sheppard later replaced the watch." Before he left California. In January of 1954, she said, he gave her a ring, at her home. And asked whether he ever told her he loved her: "He did." Then Parrino asked whether Sam had ever talked about his marriage. She remembered him saying "that he loved his wife very much, but not so much as a wife. He was thinking of getting a divorce, but that he wasn't sure that his father would approve." But, she added, "It was never discussed actually, but it was mentioned."

Then Fred Garmone stood up for the defense. Back in July, when the authorities in Los Angeles first questioned her, hadn't she denied all of it? "Yes, I did." And she'd stuck to that for two weeks? "Yes." Then Detective Schottke and the prosecutor Parrino flew out to California. A reporter from the Cleveland Press came out with them. And Garmone asked her whether Schottke had told her, "You might as well tell us what we are after because we have talked with the Millers." The Millers were the couple whose house they'd stayed in. Her answer: "Yes." Wasn't it after that, Garmone asked, that she changed her story? "No, that is not true." She told the jury that when she landed in Cleveland, she didn't go home. She was put in a hotel, in the protective custody of a policewoman. For about seven days. "It's a guess, I don't really know." And had her picture been taken that morning? "When I came into the courtroom." And where was she kept during the recess? "In Judge Blythin's office, I believe." Garmone got two more things on the record. In all the surgeries she'd watched, had Sam ever lost his temper? "No, that's right, he didn't." And the letters he wrote her? "He signed the letters with love."

That afternoon, the State rested. And think back to the afternoon of July fourth. Detective Schottke told the jury that when he asked Sam about a nurse in Los Angeles, and a wrist watch, Sam told him, "That is not true." Sam would get his own chance to answer that. But first, there was one more Sunday night.

On Sunday, December fifth, Walter Winchell, the gossip columnist and broadcaster everybody in America knew, went on the air in Cleveland, on radio and on television. He reported that a woman under arrest in New York was claiming she had been Sam's mistress, and that he'd fathered her child. Monday morning, Corrigan was furious. Everywhere you go in this city, he told the judge, people are talking about the Sheppard case. "Here are 12 people that are living in this community being exposed to that whole thing all the time. Fair trial?" So Blythin brought in the jury, and asked whether any of them had heard the Winchell broadcast. Juror Number Two: "I did." Juror Number Thirteen: "Yes." Would it have any effect on their judgment? Both of them said, "No." And that was it. Blythin asked the jury "to pay no attention whatever to that kind of scavenging." And the trial went on.

Three days later, the defense called its most important witness. Sam Sheppard.

Part 7The Doctor Testifies

On Thursday, the second of December, the defense started putting on its case. And the first big witness was family. Sam's brother, Dr. Steve Sheppard, had examined him at the hospital that morning in July. He told the jury that some of Sam's reflexes were gone. And what that meant to him as a doctor: "It meant brain injury, certainly concussion, and probable spinal cord contusion." Then, on the morning of December ninth, two men who'd been driving through Bay Village that night took the stand. Leo Stawicki said he came through around a quarter after two, and saw a stranger standing by the road near a driveway. "He had a kind of a long face on him, with bushy hair." Was the man Sam Sheppard? "No, sir. He's too bald for the man I seen there." Mahon went after him on the reward. Hadn't he gone to the police the day after he read about the ten-thousand-dollar reward? "The reward don't interest me. I got enough money of my own." And Richard Knitter, driving home with his wife from a show in Cleveland, said he saw a man walking along the road. Time? "It was about ten to four." Short, bushy hair, he said, like a crew cut growing in. That afternoon, Sam Sheppard took the stand. He was on it for parts of four days. And on the second day, Corrigan walked him through the night of July third. "The first thing that I can recall was hearing Marilyn cry out my name once or twice, which was followed by moans, loud moans and noises of some sort." He went up the stairs. "I felt that I could visualize a form of some type with a light top." Something grappled him. And, he said, "I felt that I was struck from behind, and my recollection was cut off." Then the chase, down to the beach. He grabbed someone from behind. "I felt as though I had grasped an immovable object of some type." And what did he see? "A large, relatively large form; the clothing was dark from behind; there was evidence of a good sized head with a bushy appearance to the top of the head hair." Then Corrigan asked him about the days after the murder, and after his arrest. Sam told the jury that on the Fourth of July, Detective Schottke had looked at him and said, "I think you killed your wife." How did that hit him? "I was shocked upon shocked," he said. "I believe I said, 'Oh, God, no.'" And after his arrest, another officer, he said, would question him about small things, then turn on him: "Sam, why did you do it? Why did you kill your wife?" And while he was still on the stand, the papers ran a statement from the head of Cleveland's homicide bureau, Captain David Kerr. The headline: "'Bare-faced Liar,' Kerr Says of Sam." Kerr never took the witness stand.

Corrigan also asked him about the watch he'd bought Susan Hayes in California. Had he told Marilyn about it? "Yes, sir, I did." And then he added, "The only difficulty was that she insisted that I don't put it on my expense account and make my brothers pay for it."

On Monday the thirteenth, John Mahon got up to cross-examine him. He went straight to Susan Hayes. "You had some intimate relations with her, didn't you?" Corrigan objected. The judge said he could answer. "Yes, sir." And in California, at the Millers' house? They'd shared a bedroom? "Yes, sir." The next day, Tuesday, near the very end of the cross, one of the prosecutors told the court they were "asking of the one man, the only man who knows." And Corrigan said, "This is a court of law, and this is a trial for murder." Then Mahon put it to him straight. "Now, Doctor, isn't this the fact: That you beat your wife that morning?" "No, sir." And that after he'd killed her, he'd rushed down to the lake and gotten his injuries on those stairs or on the beach? "That is absolutely untrue, sir." And then: "And unfair."

One more question. At the inquest in July, under oath, he'd denied any affair with Susan Hayes. Did he tell the truth there? "I did not tell the truth in relation to Miss Hayes." Why? "I felt that Miss Hayes' reputation justified that answer, sir." "That is all, sir."

The lawyers closed on the fifteenth and sixteenth. One of Sam's lawyers, Arthur Petersilge, told the jury the defense wasn't even claiming a burglary. "We claim there was a man there," he said, "but whether he was there for a burglary or not, I don't know." The State's Saul Danaceau turned that around. Who else, he asked, could have faked the burglary but Dr. Sam? "Why would he fake it if he didn't kill his wife?" Fred Garmone asked the jury, "Can you, on that type of evidence, take away his life?" And John Mahon got the last word. He went back to the inquest. "If he would lie about that to save his reputation," Mahon said, "if an oath didn't mean any more to him than that, do you think he might lie in this courtroom from that witness stand in testifying here when his life is at stake?" On Friday, the seventeenth of December, Judge Blythin gave the jury the case. And twelve people went into the room next door to the radio station.

Part 8The Verdict

Friday, December seventeenth. Judge Blythin read the jury his charge. And he told them they would take five possible verdicts into that room. Guilty of first-degree murder. Guilty of first-degree murder with a recommendation of mercy. Second-degree murder. Manslaughter. Or not guilty. Two bailiffs were sworn in to keep the jury. For the first time in the whole trial, the jurors weren't going home at night. At 10:30 that night, the judge sent them to a hotel. They deliberated all day Saturday.

Saturday night, he asked for a show of hands: did they want to keep going, or start fresh in the morning? Everyone raised their hand for the morning. Sunday, they went back in, over the defense's objection. And one day near the end, while two bailiffs had them out at lunch, the jurors split into two groups and posed for newspaper photographers.

Monday at noon, the clock on the courtroom wall had stopped. And at ten o'clock Monday night, a juror came to the door and told the bailiff they were very close to agreement. And then, Tuesday. Four thirty-three in the afternoon. "We the jury in this case, being duly impanelled and sworn, do find the defendant Sam H. Sheppard not guilty of murder in the first degree…" "…but guilty of murder in the second degree."

Corrigan asked for the jury to be polled. One by one, twelve names. Twelve times, yes. Then the judge called him up. "Sam Sheppard, this jury has found you guilty of murder in the second degree. Have you anything to now say why the Court should not pronounce sentence upon you?" "I'd like to say, sir, I am not guilty, and I feel that there has been proof presented before this Court that has definitely proven that I couldn't have performed this crime." "All right. But the jury has found otherwise."

And Blythin sentenced him to the Ohio Penitentiary. For life. Corrigan was on his feet. "Aren't you going to wait until I file my motion for a new trial before you sentence the man?" "No." Then Corrigan started talking to the jurors directly, right there in the courtroom. Blythin had it put on the record. Corrigan said, "Probably I was wrong there, your Honor, and I apologize." And the judge said, "Your apology is accepted, sir. We have known each other too many years to have any matter break our friendship, I hope." Then Blythin thanked the jury. He called them "a splendid group of people." And he told them that if they didn't want to be pestered by the newspaper people, all they had to say was that they didn't want to be interviewed.

It would come out years later that while the jurors were locked away in that hotel, they had been allowed to make phone calls home from the bailiffs' rooms. Every day. Nobody kept track of who called whom. On January third, 1955, Blythin overruled the motion for a new trial. The defense had listed forty grounds. In a written memorandum, the judge said he was convinced there was "no merit in any of the complaints made by the defendant," and that Sam had been "accorded a fair trial by an unusually intelligent and impartial jury."

Four days later, on January seventh, Sam's mother, Ethel Sheppard, died by suicide. She was sixty-five. His brothers brought him the news at the County Jail. One of them told a reporter afterwards, "Sam was all broken up by the news. He broke down and cried."

Three days later, he was taken to her funeral, handcuffed to the chief jailer. Days after that, he lost a bid to get out on bail. And the State sent him a bill for the cost of his own prosecution. And on January eighteenth, eleven days after his wife, Sam's father, Dr. Richard A. Sheppard, died at Bay View Hospital. He was sixty-four.

His sons said he'd lost his will to live. Sam Sheppard was thirty-one years old. He had a life sentence. And in the space of six months, he had lost his wife, his mother, and his father. But his family wasn't done. And four days after his father died, a man got off a plane from California.

Part 9The Man from Berkeley

His name was Paul Leland Kirk. He was a criminologist at the University of California, in Berkeley. And William Corrigan had called him. "I arrived on January 22, 1955," he'd say later. Corrigan met him at the old Hollenden Hotel. And then they went out to Lake Road. Kirk went through the house, and the bedroom, where the blood was still on the walls and the doors. He studied where the drops had landed. He tested them. And he came to some conclusions the jury never heard. From the way the blood had been thrown off the weapon, Kirk said, the killer had been swinging with the left hand. Back at the trial, the Cleveland police technician who'd examined the house, Henry Dombrowski, had been asked that exact question: right hand or left? He'd answered, "I did not draw any conclusions." And on the door of the wardrobe, he found one large spot of blood that, by his tests, hadn't come from Marilyn and hadn't come from Sam. Somebody else, Kirk said, had bled in that room.

In April 1955, the defense put Kirk's affidavit in front of Judge Blythin with a motion for a new trial. The State answered with affidavits of its own. And on May ninth, Blythin denied it. Then the appeals. July 1955: the Ohio Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction. May 1956: the Ohio Supreme Court affirmed it too, with two judges dissenting. November 1956: the United States Supreme Court refused to hear it. December 1956: it refused again.

By then, Sam was already in the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus. "Just a Number Now," one headline said, the week he went in. He was a surgeon with no patients. But in September 1956, a headline said he had saved an inmate's life on the prison operating table. Outside the walls, the case wouldn't stay closed. In the summer of 1957, a prisoner in Florida named Donald Wedler said he had done it. The headlines said he passed a lie test. Then Gerber and Detective Chief McArthur went down to see him, and came back calling his story a hoax. That same summer, a magazine's panel of investigators, which called itself the Court of Last Resort, wanted to give Sam a lie-detector test of his own. The governor called it off.

Now, here's something that happened in November of 1959, while Sam was in prison. A man named Richard Eberling was arrested for a string of thefts from homes where he'd been hired to wash windows. Among the things he'd taken were two rings that had belonged to Marilyn Sheppard. He'd stolen them from the house of Sam's brother, Dr. Richard Sheppard. He'd washed windows at Sam and Marilyn's house too. According to the Bay Village police, he told them that just days before the murder, he'd cut himself there, and bled in the house. The coroner, Dr. Gerber, interviewed him. And on November nineteenth, 1959, the state crime bureau gave him a polygraph. Among the questions: "Did you kill Marilyn Sheppard?" "No." "Are you positive that you deposited your own blood in the Sheppard residence prior to Marilyn's death?" "Yes." The finding: "we do not find evidence of deception." And that was the end of it. For now.

In the meantime, Sam had started getting letters from Germany. They were from a woman named Ariane Tebbenjohanns. They became pen pals. And in January 1963, while he was in prison, they announced they were engaged. There had been a change on the defense side, too. According to the PBS series NOVA's history of the case, William Corrigan, the lawyer who'd fought for Sam since that first summer, died in July of 1961. A young lawyer from Boston named F. Lee Bailey took over the case. And on April eleventh, 1963, Bailey went to federal court and filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus. His argument: Sam Sheppard had never gotten a fair trial. That same winter, Marilyn's father, Thomas Reese, died by suicide.

NOVA dates it to February 13th, 1963. And in September of 1963, ABC premiered a new show. A doctor is convicted of murdering his wife. He says a one-armed man did it. Nobody believes him. It was called The Fugitive. A lot of people have always said it was based on Sam Sheppard. NOVA says "most observers" think so. But the man who created it, Roy Huggins, always denied there was any connection. He told the Los Angeles Times in 1993 that the show had nothing to do with Sheppard. Either way, by the fall of 1963, Sam Sheppard had been in prison for nine years. And for the first time, he had a lawyer who wanted to put the whole trial on trial.

Part 10A Mockery of Justice

F. Lee Bailey's petition went to a federal judge in Dayton, Carl Weinman. And on July fifteenth, 1964, Weinman ruled. He found what he called "five separate violations" of Sam Sheppard's constitutional rights. The trial should have been moved, or delayed. The jurors were exposed to the publicity. The judge should have stepped aside. A lie-detector reference was allowed in. And the jury had made those phone calls during deliberations. And then the line that gave this case its name. "When these errors are cumulated," Weinman wrote, "the trial can only be viewed as a mockery of justice." One of the things Weinman put in the record came from a newspaper columnist, Dorothy Kilgallen. She'd covered the 1954 trial. And in a statement for Bailey's case, she said that on the first day, Judge Blythin had called her into his chambers and told her it was "an open and shut case," and that Sam was "guilty as hell." That was never tested in court. Blythin had died in 1958, so he never answered it. And the Supreme Court later said it didn't need to decide it. Weinman ordered Sam released on a ten-thousand-dollar bond. On July sixteenth, 1964, he walked out of prison. And according to most accounts, three days later, he married Ariane. It didn't last. In May 1965, the federal court of appeals reversed Weinman, by a divided vote. So Bailey went to the Supreme Court. On June sixth, 1966, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled, eight to one, that Sam Sheppard had not received a fair trial. Justice Tom Clark wrote the opinion. And everything you've heard about that courtroom, the press table three feet from the jury box, the radio station next to the jury room, the helicopter, the pictures, the phone calls, all of it was in there. The Court said that "bedlam reigned at the courthouse during the trial and newsmen took over practically the entire courtroom." And that "the carnival atmosphere at trial could easily have been avoided," because the courtroom was under the judge's control. The conviction was thrown out. Ohio could try him again, or let him go. Ohio tried him again. The second trial opened on October twenty-fourth, 1966, in the same courthouse, in front of a different judge, Francis Talty. And this time the judge ran the room. Only fourteen seats for reporters, none of them inside the railing. No cameras. No sketch artists. The election came around again in the middle of this one. On November eighth, the court had the jurors driven to their polling places to vote. Sam didn't testify this time. Susan Hayes never appeared. And Dr. Gerber took the stand again, to talk about the pillow.

Bailey cross-examined him. "And you testified then that it was a surgical instrument, didn't you?" "I did." "And you never produced one, did you?" "No, sir." Gerber said he'd hunted all over the United States for one. Bailey asked: so he didn't have an instrument in 1954 that would fit the pattern? "That is right." "And you don't have one today?" "And I don't have one today." It could be any number of objects, Gerber agreed, not connected with surgery at all. Paul Kirk testified too, about the left hand and the blood spot on the wardrobe door. The State brought its own expert to say you couldn't tell two spots came from different people. The jury heard both. And in his closing, Bailey told the jury that the State's case amounted to "ten pounds of hogwash in a five pound bag."

On November sixteenth, 1966, the jury found Sam Sheppard not guilty. He was forty-two. He'd spent almost ten years in prison. What came after went badly, and fast. He got his medical license back and went back to surgery, at an osteopathic hospital in Youngstown. According to the Cleveland Press, he later resigned from the staff there after two malpractice suits were filed against him. He and Ariane divorced. And then, in his mid-forties, Dr. Sam Sheppard became a professional wrestler. Most accounts give his ring name as "Killer" Sam Sheppard. His tag-team partner was a wrestler named George Strickland. In late 1969, he married Strickland's daughter, Colleen.

On the morning of April sixth, 1970, Sam Sheppard died at home, in the Strickland house outside Columbus where he lived. He was forty-six. He'd been sick for a few days with what he thought was the flu. F. Lee Bailey told reporters that day, "I knew he was dying." The coroner's autopsy, according to a 1974 report in Cleveland Magazine, found liver failure. Ariane, his ex-wife, told a reporter that day, "Maybe it's better this way."

He had been acquitted. But in the eyes of a lot of people, that never settled it. And there was one person who had never stopped trying to.

Part 11The Son

Remember the little boy who was asleep down the hall that night? His name was Samuel Reese Sheppard. Everybody called him Chip. At the second trial, in 1966, he was nineteen, and he testified for his father, briefly. He said he had only a faint memory of that night. He was seven when his mother was killed. He spent the rest of his childhood with his father in prison. And he was a young man when his father died. And then, for a long time, he didn't talk about it in public.

In the meantime, there was Richard Eberling. The window washer from Part Nine. At the 1966 retrial, he'd actually testified for the defense. He told the jury that a few days before the murder, he'd cut his finger on the storm windows at the Sheppard house, and bled there, and that his blood type was A. In 1984, an elderly widow Eberling worked for in Lakewood, Ethel May Durkin, died after a fall. In July of 1989, a jury convicted Eberling of her murder. He got life. And that fall, according to the NOVA history of the case, Sam Reese Sheppard went public for the first time, and started trying to find out who killed his mother. In March 1990, he went to see Eberling in prison. He worked with a writer, Cynthia Cooper. In 1995 they published a book about the case. They called it Mockery of Justice, Judge Weinman's phrase. And they made the case, publicly, that the man who killed Marilyn Sheppard was Richard Eberling. Eberling denied it. He was never charged with Marilyn's death.

Then came the science. In September 1997, Sam Sheppard's body was exhumed, for DNA. On March fourth, 1998, the family's lawyer, Terry Gilbert, announced the results. He said the DNA excluded Sam Sheppard as the source of blood found at the scene, and pointed toward Eberling. The State disputed that. Its lawyers argued the samples were old and could have been contaminated, and pointed out that the blood on that closet door was type O.

Eberling's was type A. Eberling died in prison on July 25th, 1998. A few weeks later, a fellow inmate, Robert Lee Parks, said Eberling had confessed to him before he died. And a woman named Kathie Collins Dyal said he'd told her the same thing, back in 1983. Eberling had always denied it. In October 1999, Marilyn's body was exhumed too. And on February seventh, 2000, forty-six years after the murder, the Sheppard case went to trial one more time. This time it was a civil case.

Sam Sheppard's estate, pushed by his son, sued the State of Ohio, asking a jury to declare that Sam Sheppard had been wrongfully imprisoned. To win, the estate had to show he was innocent. And the State of Ohio's lawyers argued the same thing the State had argued in 1954. That Sam Sheppard killed his wife. It went on for about ten weeks. On April twelfth, 2000, the jury came back. The form had two boxes. The plaintiff, the Estate of Samuel H. Sheppard. Or the defendant, the State of Ohio. The X was next to the State. And in February 2002, an appeals court affirmed. But it went further. It said the case never should have gone to trial at all. The time to file had run out, and the claim had died with Sam Sheppard in 1970.

So. Who killed Marilyn Sheppard? There are three answers people give. And I want to be clear about who gives each one. The first answer is Sam. That's what the State of Ohio argued in 1954, and again in 2000. A jury convicted him in 1954. That conviction was thrown out because the trial wasn't fair. And a second jury, in 1966, found him not guilty. The second answer is Richard Eberling. That's what Sam's son has argued, along with his lawyer, Terry Gilbert, the book Mockery of Justice, and the two people who said Eberling confessed. Eberling denied it to the end. He was never charged. And in 1959, he passed a state polygraph on that exact question. And the third answer is the Houks. The neighbors. The mayor and his wife, who were the first people in the house that morning. One week after the acquittal in 1966, F. Lee Bailey wrote a letter to the Bay Village police chief laying out his conclusion that the killer was no stranger, and naming Spencer and Esther Houk. They were never charged with anything. Both of them died in the early 1980s.

Here is what was actually decided. A jury in 1954 said Sam Sheppard was guilty. The federal courts said that jury never got a fair trial. A jury in 1966 said he was not guilty. And a jury in 2000 said his estate hadn't proved he was innocent. In the end, an appeals court said that case shouldn't have happened. And here's what was never decided. Nobody else was ever charged with the murder of Marilyn Sheppard. She was thirty-one.

She was four months pregnant. And after everything, the courts, the newspapers, the scientists, the books and the movie and the TV show, the question that started all of it is still open. Her name was Marilyn Reese Sheppard.

Part 12Outro

And that's the story of the murder of Marilyn Sheppard. Thank you so much for listening to Forgotten True Crime. If you enjoyed this one, make sure you subscribe, so you'll be the first to know when new episodes come out. And check us out on YouTube and Facebook, "Forgotten True Crime," and at our blog, Section29.com, where I've posted the transcripts, the court rulings and the documents from this episode. And before you go. This story included deaths by suicide. If you're struggling, or if you're worried about someone you love, please reach out. In the United States, you can call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, any time, day or night. You don't have to go through it alone.