The Sam Sheppard Case
Samuel Holmes "Sam" Sheppard was an American neurosurgeon initially convicted for
the murder of his wife, Marilyn Reese Sheppard.
On the
night of July 3, 1954, Sheppard and Marilyn were entertaining neighbors at
their lakefront home on Lake Erie. While they were watching the
movie Strange Holiday. Sam
fell asleep on a daybed in the living room. Marilyn walked the neighbors out.
In the
early morning hours of July 4, 1954, Marilyn was bludgeoned to death in her bed
with an unknown instrument. The bedroom was covered with blood spatter and
drops of blood were found on floors throughout the house. According to Sheppard,
he was sleeping soundly on the daybed when he heard the cries from his wife. He
ran upstairs where he saw a form in the bedroom and then he was knocked
unconscious. When he awoke, he saw the person downstairs, chased the intruder
out of the house down to the lakeshore where they fought. Sheppard has knocked unconscious again. He
awoke with half his body in the lake.
At 5:40
am, Sheppard called his neighbor. When they arrived, Sheppard was found
shirtless and his pants were wet with a bloodstain on the knee. The authorities
found Sheppard disoriented and in shock. The family dog was not heard
barking to indicate an intruder, and their seven-year-old son, Sam Reese
"Chip" Sheppard, was asleep in the adjacent bedroom during the whole
ordeal.
During the
investigation it was revealed at trial that Sheppard had carried on a
three-year extramarital affair with
Susan Hayes, a nurse at the hospital where
Sheppard was employed. The prosecution argued that the affair was Sheppard's
motive for killing his wife. The autopsy also showed Marilyn was
pregnant with a four-month-old male fetus.
Other
issues brought up at trial showed no sand in his hair when Sheppard claimed to
have been sprawled at the beach, and his missing T-shirt, which the prosecutor
speculated would or should contain some of Sheppard's blood. Prosecutor John J.
Mahon made these assertions despite no T-shirt was ever found or presented as
evidence.
On
December 21, after deliberating for four days, the jury found Sheppard guilty
of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to
life in prison. On January 7, 1955, shortly after his conviction, his
mother, Ethel Sheppard committed suicide by gunshot. Eleven days later,
Sheppard's father, Dr. Richard Sheppard, died of a bleeding gastric ulcer and stomach cancer. Sam Sheppard was permitted to attend
both funerals but was required to wear handcuffs. In 1963, Sheppard's father-in-law, Thomas
S. Reese committed suicide.
Sheppard's attorney, William Corrigan spent six years
making appeals but all were rejected. On July 30, 1961, Corrigan died and F. Lee Bailey took over as Sheppard's chief counsel. July
15, 1964 a U.S. district court judge
called the 1954 trial a "mockery of justice" that shredded Sheppard's
Fourteenth Amendment rights to due process. The State of Ohio was ordered to
release Sheppard on bond and gave the prosecutor 60 days to bring charges
against him. Otherwise, the case would be dismissed permanently. The state of Ohio appealed the ruling to aU.S. Court of Appeals Court for the 6th Circuit. On March 4, 1965, the
Circuit Court reversed the federal judge's ruling. Bailey
appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case in Sheppard v. Maxwell.
On June 6, 1966, the Supreme Court, by an 8-to-1 vote, struck down the murder
conviction and said that the trial judge, Edward J. Blythin, who had died in 1958, was biased
against Sheppard because Judge Blythin had refused to sequester the jury, did not order the jury to
ignore and disregard media reports of the case, and told newspaper
columnist Dorothy Kilgallen shortly before the
trial started, "Well, he's guilty as hell. There's no question about
it."
Sheppard
served ten years of his sentence. Three days after his release, he married
Ariane Tebbenjohanns, a German divorcee who had corresponded with him during
his imprisonment. They divorced October
7, 1969.
Jury
selection for the retrial began October 24, 1966, and opening statements began
eight days later. Media interest in the trial remained high, but this jury
was sequestered. The prosecutor presented
essentially the same case as was presented twelve years earlier. Bailey
aggressively discredited each prosecution witness during cross-examination. In
his closing argument, Bailey scathingly dismissed the prosecution's case
against Sheppard as "ten pounds of hogwash in a five-pound bag". The
trial was very important to Bailey's rise to prominence as a criminal defense
lawyer.
After his
acquittal, Sheppard helped write the book Endure and Conquer, which presented his
side of the case and gave insight into his years in prison.
Six months
before his death, Sheppard married Colleen Strickland. Towards the end of
his life, Sheppard was reportedly drinking "as much as two-fifths of
liquor a day" (1.5 liters). On April 6, 1970, Sheppard was found dead in
his home in Columbus, Ohio. The official cause of
death was Wernicke's encephalopathy (biochemical lesions
in the brain caused by thiamine a deficiency). He was buried in Forest
Lawn Memorial Gardens in Columbus, Ohio.
Sheppard's
son has devoted considerable time and effort towards attempting to clear his
father's reputation.
After ten
weeks of trial, 76 witnesses, and hundreds of exhibits, the case went to the
eight-person civil jury. The jury deliberated just three hours on April 12,
2000, before returning a unanimous verdict that Samuel Reese Sheppard had failed
to prove that his father had been wrongfully imprisoned.
The
television series The Fugitive and the1933 film of the same name
has
been cited as being loosely based on Sheppard's story. This claim has always
been denied by their creators.
