CRIME: Forty Seconds of Fury

On July 4 at 5:50 a.m.—the exact time may be important—Mayor J. Spencer Houk of Bay Village, a suburb of Cleveland, was awakened by a phone call from his friend, Dr. Samuel Sheppard: “For God’s sake, Spence, get over here quick. I think they’ve killed Marilyn.” In seven minutes Houk reached Sheppard’s house. The young doctor was shaken and bloody. His wife, Marilyn, 31, four months pregnant, was dead. Last week Dr. Sheppard was indicted for the murder. “I am not guilty,” he insisted. “How could I commit such a terrible and revolting crime?”

Strange Holiday. Sam and Marilyn Sheppard were school sweethearts until he went to Indiana and later to Los Angeles to study osteopathic medicine. She attended Skidmore College for two years, wrote him tearstained, loving letters: “Life seems impossible without you.” He replied: “I will never be happy until I see you again.” In 1945 they were married. In 1951 Sheppard began to practice with his father and two brothers, all osteopaths, at the family’s 200-bed Bay View Hospital.

Sam and Marilyn had a good life. They bought a tree-shaded house on Lake Erie for $31,500 and paid off the mortgage in 2½ years. He had a jeep, a Jaguar and a Lincoln Continental, shared an aluminum boat with Mayor Houk. Marilyn taught basketball to schoolgirls and taught Sunday school at the Methodist church. The busy, popular couple liked bowling, golf, fishing, water skiing and sports-car races. They had one son, Little Sam, or Chip, now nearing seven.

On July 3, after a picnic, they had neighbors in to dinner. Later Sheppard put a corduroy jacket over his T shirt and fell asleep on a studio couch. The others watched a TV movie, Strange Holiday. After midnight Marilyn began yawning, and the neighbors went home.

Suspect No. 1. At dawn on July 4 Marilyn’s bedroom was red with blood. Her pajamas had been pulled open and her hands had been bruised.

Sheppard told a dazed, disconnected story. Asleep on the couch, he had heard or sensed a cry from Marilyn. He ran upstairs to the bedroom and was “clobbered” by a blow on the head from behind. He recovered, chased a man, whom he described as burly and bushy-haired, to the lake. “It was like catching up with a steamroller,” he said later. He said that he was knocked out again, revived and staggered indoors to telephone.

Cleveland detectives noted that the intruder, if any, had left no fingerprints. Chip was not awakened and Koko, the Irish setter, was not heard to bark.* A police time-motion study calculated that Sheppard could have run upstairs in six seconds, and it would have required 40 seconds to strike the 27 blows that had been inflicted on Marilyn’s skull. Moreover. Cleveland detectives figured that Marilyn died between 3:10 and 4 a.m. Sheppard phoned to Houk some two hours later. In the meantime, tests disclosed, a trail of blood leading from the bedroom to a basement sink had been wiped away.

“You,” a detective told Sheppard, “are Suspect No. 1.” Only Love. Mayor Houk, an old friend, did not order an arrest. “I figured,” he said later, “that Sam couldn’t have done it.” Sheppard’s osteopath brothers hospitalized him, saying that his neck was broken in the struggle with the intruder. Checkups disclosed a black eye, mouth cuts and a possible spinal injury, but no broken neck. In subsequent appearances, Sheppard wore a leather collar. He refused to take truth-serum or lie-detector tests, but offered a $10,000 reward. “Marilyn, my wife,” he said, “was the only woman I ever loved.”

Then a laboratory technician named Susan Hayes, who had worked at the hospital, admitted having an affair with Sheppard in Southern California last March. Some other women reported affairs or flirtations with Dr. Sam. Trouble between Marilyn and Sam was hinted in family letters dating back to 1950. “Remember,” said a letter writer trying to console Marilyn, “men are little boys who hate to grow up.”

Short Liberty. “Somebody is getting away with murder,” headlined the Scripps-Howard Cleveland Press, which demanded that police give Sheppard the third degree. On July 30 Sheppard was arrested, questioned in relays by twelve detectives. In his cell, he took to reading a Bible, switched to sports-car magazines, then history books, and back to the Bible. After five days the questioners gave up.

Last week Sheppard was released on $50,000 bail. Carrying a gold-framed photograph of Marilyn, he went to his father’s house. He was there the next night, eating his favorite dessert, cherry pie, when the grand jury indicted him and police came to arrest him again. He took some oranges and bananas back to jail.

By now the Sheppard case has become a Cleveland classic. Thousands of tourists crowd around his lakefront house, roped off by police. Thousands of arguments revolve around the trial, due in the fall. “You know,” Sheppard said last week, “a guilty man would not go through what I have gone through without breaking.”

*In Silver Blaze, Sherlock Holmes remarked upon “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” But, said a Scotland Yard inspector, “the dog did nothing in the night-time.” “That was the curious incident,” replied Sherlock Holmes.