A Murder that Mattered: Sam Sheppard, the Supreme Court, and Free Press/Fair Trial

Abstract

A Murder that Mattered: Sam Sheppard, the Supreme Court, and Free Press/Fair Trial ALBERT B. LAWRENCE In 1954, Bay Village, Ohio, was a quiet, developing suburb west of Cleveland on the shore of Lake Erie.1 It was the kind of safe town where residents left doors unlocked and didn’t hesitate to leave their young children alone for a few hours.2 The village’s largest employer was the Bay View Hospital, and among its most prominent citizens were the family that owned it, Dr. Richard A. Sheppard and his three sons, Richard, Stephen and Sam, all osteopaths. They also had a private practice in a nearby clinic.3 The youngest of the brothers, Samuel Holmes Sheppard, had grown up in the leafy suburb ofCleveland Heights. In 1954, he was not yet thirty years old, but he was the hospital’s chief neurosurgeon and was in charge of the emergency room. All of the Sheppards lived near the mansion that the father had converted to a 110-bed hospital in 1948. Sam, his wife, Marilyn, and their seven-year-old son, Samuel Reese Sheppard, known as “Chip,” occupied a lakefront home about a mile from the hospital. They were expecting a second child in five months.4 On Independence Day, 1954, the peace and calm ofthe small village was shattered by reports of a murder. Dr. Sam, as he was known in the community, summoned a neighbor, the village’s mayor, with the alarming news that Marilyn had been killed. She was found in a second-floor bedroom, partially dressed, her face bloodied by about two-dozen gashes across her head. Sam told police he had fallen asleep in the downstairs living room the night before, heard Marilyn call his name and ran upstairs, where he was hit by an unknown assailant. When he came to, he ran downstairs and saw a darkened figure ofa man, chased him outside and down about thirty wooden steps to the lakeshore, where Sam was knocked out again. When he regained consciousness a second time, the sun was rising and his lower extremities were washing in the surf of the lake, he claimed.5 When his brother, Stephen, arrived, he was FREE PRESS/FAIR TRIAL: THE SAM SHEPPARD CASE 161 concerned that Sam might be in shock and might have a broken neck, and he immedi­ ately drove Sam to the family hospital in a private car, shunning the emergency medical personnel that were standing by.6 An autopsy indicated that Marilyn had struggled with her assailant. She had been cut thirty-five times, her nose broken, her skull fractured and her eyelids swollen shut. A male fetus was removed from her uterus. Homicide was ruled the cause of death.7 News Coverage of the Murder and Investigation The sensational murder was front-page news the next day in all three Cleveland papers. Photographers managed a picture of Sam in his hospital room, and the publicityfriendly coroner, Dr. Samuel Gerber, allowed representatives of the Cleveland Press and Plain Dealer inside the Sheppard home to photograph the crime scene only a few hours after the murder was discovered.8 Coverage was initially sympathetic to the Sheppards, but things soon turned ugly.9 Even though the police chief had not objected, local news­ papers became suspicious when they learned from a prosecutor that Sam had been rushed to the hospital by his brother. When the family hired a lawyer, they became even more dubious.10 Stephen Sheppard recalled in a memoir of the case that, two days after the murder, “We were subjected to a noisy, jostling, semi-good-natured, semi-hostile, babbling engulfment by newspaper photog­ raphers and reporters. The photographers pointed their lenses at us and popped their flashbulbs while the reporters—men and women—crowded around us with shouted questions and flying pencils.”11 Soon, it became a national story, and “men and women all over the United States were saying the same thing: ‘Sheppard did it himself!’—a judgment based largely upon information disseminated by Ohio newspapers, television reports, and radio broadcasts,” according to one chronicler of the case.12 Sam was questioned for more than fifty hours by police...