Guilty as Hell: An Enduring Murder Mystery

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Marilyn and Sam Sheppard

From Shakespeare to Agatha Christie, murder, real and fictional, has served as an engine of fascination. The act of killing a human being is both intimate and extreme, a slice of horror, a breach of moral decency, often an intriguing mystery.

Crime buffs have lately been glued to the Dickensian saga of Alex Murdaugh, a South Carolina lawyer convicted of murdering his wife and son. That case was a stew of power and theft, lies, suspicion and mayhem, and resulted in a media frenzy. It has parallels to a crime that created a comparable sensation in 1950s, a case referred to as “the country’s most enduring murder mystery.”

On the evening of July 3, 1954, Doctor Sam Sheppard and his wife, Marilyn, had a neighbor couple over for dinner at their elegant home, which sat on the shore of Lake Erie west of Cleveland. Afterward, Sam fell asleep on a daybed. Marilyn saw the guests off and went to bed upstairs, where the young couple’s seven-year-old son, Chip, was already asleep.

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

When police arrived, Sheppard told them he had awakened to hear his wife’s cries for help. Running upstairs in the dark, he dimly perceived the form of a man. They struggled; the assailant knocked Sheppard unconscious. When he came to, Sam heard someone downstairs. He chased a “bushy-haired man,” out of the house and down to the shore. They grappled again and Sam was knocked out again. Awaking to find himself lying partly in the water, he returned to the house and called for help.

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

Gerber had reasons to jump to this conclusion. The husband is a suspect in most domestic murders. And Gerber disliked the Sheppard family, who ran a 100-bed hospital in town. Sam, along with his brother and father, was an osteopath. Some physicians looked on such practitioners as quacks, and Gerber had earlier vowed of the Sheppards “to get them someday.”

Cleveland newspaper editors, who initially speculated that a jewel thief or drug addict might be the culprit, quickly came to share Gerber’s suspicion. Reports that Sheppard had hired a defense lawyer were offered as evidence of his guilt. The papers began to press the authorities for action.

Two weeks after the murder, Gerber finally held an inquest in a school gymnasium. Two hundred spectators filled the seats. They cheered when Gerber had Sheppard’s lawyer removed for trying to add to the record. Gerber questioned Dr. Sam for five hours with no legal counsel present.

Sheppard testified that he was not a philanderer. Prosecutors produced a lab technician named Susan Hayes who swore to having had an affair with him. The doctor’s love life, a possible motive for murder, turned public opinion against him. By July 30, The Cleveland Press was demanding in a front-page editorial, “Quit Stalling and Bring Him In!” That night, Sheppard was arrested.

Reporters from all over the country gathered to cover the trial. Before the proceedings began, the judge told popular columnist Dorothy Kilgallen privately, “He’s guilty as hell. There’s no question about it.”

The investigation had been plagued by oversights. The press was allowed to tramp through the murder scene. Clues were overlooked. Examination of blood evidence was haphazard. Few fingerprints were taken.

The trial was a travesty. Sheppard took the stand to tell his story of what happened, but the jurors, never sequestered, were exposed to the feeding frenzy of publicity.

One telling piece of evidence was the lack of blood on Sheppard. In spite of the gory scene, Dr. Sam’s pants showed only a single spot. Another was the fact that although prosecutors claimed that his injuries were fake or self-inflicted, a neurologist testified that they were real.

These and other facts suggested a reasonable doubt of Sheppard’s culpability. But after a 43-day trial and 5 days of deliberation, the jury declared him guilty of second degree murder. He was immediately sentenced to life in prison.

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

While he was behind bars, The Fugitive became one of the most popular shows on television. Details of the plot—a wrongfully convicted doctor searching for his wife’s murderer—paralleled the Sheppard killing, but the writers denied that the Cleveland crime had inspired the story.

In 1962, the young lawyer F. Lee Bailey took up the Sheppard case. He contended that publicity had robbed the doctor of a fair trial. He won his case in federal court two years later. The state appealed to the Supreme Court. In an 8-1 decision, the high court ruled for Sheppard and scathingly condemned the “carnival atmosphere” of his original trial.

Ohio prosecutors indicted Sheppard again. The second trial lasted only two weeks and featured half as many witnesses. When the verdict came in, Sheppard carried an unloaded pistol into the courtroom. If convicted again, he planned to pull the gun and die in a shootout. Having spent a decade behind bars, “I wasn’t going back.” Sheppard did not need to pull his pistol—he was acquitted on November 16, 1966.

Although others were named as suspects, no one else was ever charged with the crime. One question has remained without a definitive answer to this day: Who killed Marilyn Sheppard?

Sam Sheppard tried to resume his medical career, but he remained a notorious figure in Cleveland and could no longer earn a living. He drank himself to death in 1970 at the age of forty-six. Near the end of his life, he became a professional wrestler. He wore a white lab coat into the ring and took the nickname “The Killer.”