On July 4, 1954, Marilyn Sheppard, the wife of a handsome thirty-year-old doctor, Sam Sheppard, was brutally murdered in the bedroom of their home in Bay Village, Ohio, on the shore of Lake Erie. Sam Sheppard denied any involvement in the murder and described his own battle with the killer he described as "bushy-haired."

Did Sam do it? It's rare for a murder mystery to endure for over half a century. Almost always, if the the mystery is not fully resolved at the trial, subsequent admissions, previously uncovered clues, or more sophisticated forensic tests reveal what the trial did not. Not so with the Sam Sheppard case. Facing two different juries, twelve years apart, Sam Sheppard was found guilty by one jury, not guilty by the next.

Even over the past decade, partisans continued the debate. A third jury in 2000, asked to consider awarding the Sheppard family damages for wrongful imprisonment, sided with county prosecutors. In 2001, a book on the Sheppard case concluded that Sam was clearly innocent. Two years later, another book on the case argued just as forcefully that the first jury got it right: Sam was guilty as charged.

Apart from the large unanswered question of guilt, the Sheppard case deserves to be considered among the nation's most famous because it produced a landmark U. S. Supreme Court decision on fair trial rights and launched the career of a flamboyant young defense attorney named F. Lee Bailey. The case is also is remarkable for the unlikely collection of notable figures that touched the case, including columnist and quiz show star Dorothy Kilgallen, Cleveland Browns quarterback and NFL Hall-of-Fame member Otto Graham, and chief Nazi propagandist, Joesph Goebbels. The case also was widely associated with a popular early 60s television show, The Fugitive.

The evening of Saturday July 3 had been a pleasant one at the home of Sam and Marilyn Sheppard. Friends from their neighborhood, Don and Nancy Ahern and their two children, joined the Sheppard family for drinks and a casual dinner. From a screened porch, the Sheppards and Aherns finished dinner and watched the sun set over Lake Erie. Don Ahern brought his two children back home, put them to bed, and drove back to the Sheppards. After Marilyn tucked their seven-year-old son, Chip, into his upstairs bedroom, the two couples sat down to watch the movie Strange Holiday on one of the two available television channels. Marilyn sat on Sam's lap until Sam, having had a long and trying day in the emergency room at Bay View Hospital, moved to a daybed in the living room and fell asleep. Shortly after midnight, Marilyn showed the Aherns to the door.

At 5:40 the next morning, Spencer Houk, the mayor of Bay Village, was roused by a phone call. On the line was his friend Sam Sheppard. "My God, Spence, get over here quick," Sam exclaimed, "I think they have killed Marilyn." Houk quickly dressed and, with his wife Esther, drove the short distance to the Sheppard home, where they found the bare-chested Sheppard in his den leaning back in a swivel chair and holding his neck.

Asked what had happened, Sheppard offered a mumbled and--on the face of it--improbable account. Sheppard said that he was sleeping downstairs on the daybed when he heard Marilyn shout, "Sam!" According to his story (which he repeated later to police officers), Sheppard ran up the dimly lit stairs to their bedroom where he saw a white "form" standing next to his wife's twin bed. He grappled with the form, but was hit on the back of his neck and lost consciousness. When he came to, he took Marilyn's pulse and determined her to be dead. After checking Chip's room next door and finding his son sleeping unharmed, Sheppard ran downstairs, where he saw the form again--this time running out the back door leading to the Lake Erie shore. Sam chased the form down the stairs toward the lake, again battled with the tall "bushy-haired" form. Sam described what happened after he "lunged or jumped and grasped" the form on the beach: "I felt myself twisting or choking, and this terminated by consciousness." When he revived in the breaking dawn, wet and somehow now missing his t-shirt and watch, he went back into the house and called Mayor Houk. Sheppard remained vague about many details: he didn't know how many intruders were in the bedroom when he first was injured, and he couldn't even be certain of the sex of the fighting "form" (calling the intruder a "biped" in one interview). He attributed his inability to be more specific to the effects of having been knocked out.

At 6:00, Bay Village police officer Fred Drenkhan arrived at the Sheppard home. Drenkhan found Marilyn's body lying face up in her bed, with her face turned toward the door. Her pajama top was pulled up, baring her breasts. Her pajama bottom had been removed from one leg, leaving her pubis exposed. Her legs had been pulled beneath the wooden bar and the foot of her bed. Marilyn's face was all but unrecognizable. Over twenty curved gashes cut deeply into her face and scalp. Blood outlined her body, staining the cover and pillow. On the walls and closet doors were dozens of spots of blood. An autopsy would later determine her time of death at "about 4:30 A.M." The autopsy also showed Marilyn to have been pregnant with a four-month-old male fetus.

Investigating the rest of the home, Drenkhan found evidence of either a robbery or a staged robbery. Sheppard's black medical bag stood on end in the hallway, its contents spilled out on the wooden hallway floor. In the den, a high school track trophy of Sam's and a bowling trophy of Marilyn's lay scratched and broken on the floor. Drenkhan discovered the drawers of Sheppard's desk opened--but all in an oddly even way and nothing appeared to be missing.

While police continued their investigation of the Sheppard home, the best NFL quarterback of his time, Otto Graham of the Cleveland Browns, decided to stop by and see what all the ruckus was about at his neighbor's home. Otto's wife, Beverly, was a good friend of Marilyn's; while Otto sweated away in training camp, Sam Sheppard would take Marilyn and Beverly water skiing in Lake Erie. Even though the crime scene had not yet been secured, officers allowed Graham to inspect the Sheppard's bedroom. The Saturday Evening Post quoted Graham on what he thought as he viewed the blood-spattered room: "Oh my God. It looks like someone stood in the middle of the room with a great big can of red paint and a brush and flicked it all around. This wasn't a couple of blows. Oh no. Whoever did it, they had to be out of their mind."

Cuyahoga County Coroner Sam Gerber and an investigator arrived at the Sheppard home shortly before 8:00. As Gerber listened to Officer Drenkhan's report of his preliminary investigation of the crime scene, his suspicions of Sam Sheppard rose. Sheppard's account of events made little sense. The neatly pulled out desk drawers were not what he'd expect from a robbery. There did not appear to have been a forced entry. Gerber conducted his own investigation on the assumption that the crime was a domestic homicide. As a result, he devoted less effort to recovering fingerprint and blood evidence than might have been expected in a neutral investigation.

Completing his preliminary work at the Sheppard home, Gerber was driven to Bay View Hospital so that he might interview one of its newest patients, Dr. Sam Sheppard. Gerber interviewed Sheppard for just ten minutes. He gathered Sam's clothes, including his waterlogged shoes, belt, boxer shorts, and pants. On the trousers he spotted a large bloodstain on the left knee, suggesting that he had knelt in blood. Later that day, back in the Sheppard home, Gerber was overheard telling a detective, "It's obvious that the doctor did it." Gerber ordered two young detectives to visit Sheppard in his hospital room in the hope of gaining a full confession.The detectives did not achieve their mission: Sam stuck to his improbable story. When Detective Robert Schottke directly accused Sheppard--"I don't know about my partner, but I think you killed your wife"--, Sheppard insisted, "I loved Marilyn." Before the long day was over, Sheppard would have two more notable guests see him in his hospital room: future Hall-of-Famer Graham and Cleveland's most famous criminal defense attorney, Bill Corrigan.

On August 16, a grand jury met to consider evidence against Sheppard. They listened as Mayor Houk described a conversation with Marilyn in which she called her husband "a Jekyll and a Hyde." Susan Hayes, flown back to Ohio from her new home in California, described the intimate nature of her relationship with "Doctor Sam." Police investigator Inspector James McArthur told the jury that he saw premeditation in the many blows--with Sheppard's philandering providing the motivation. He told jurors that there was "some evidence" that Sam wanted a divorce, but Marilyn refused to give him one. On August 17, just one day after Sheppard has been released from jail on $50,000 bail, the grand jury returned a first-degree murder indictment against him and he was re-arrested.