The Sam Sheppard Trial

On the morning of July fourth, nineteen fifty-four, Marilyn Reese Sheppard was killed in her bedroom in the family home in Bay Village, a suburb west of Cleveland. Her husband, Dr. Samuel Sheppard, told police he had been asleep on a downstairs couch, awakened by her screams, gone upstairs to find an intruder, struggled with the intruder, been knocked unconscious, and awakened on the beach. He had a broken neck vertebra and a chipped tooth. He said the intruder was bushy-haired.

The Cleveland Press and its editor, Louis Seltzer, decided before any trial that Sheppard was guilty. The paper ran front-page editorials with headlines demanding his arrest. "Why Isn't Sam Sheppard in Jail?" ran in late July. The coverage was relentless, presumptive, and extraordinarily influential on public opinion. The trial began in October nineteen fifty-four in an atmosphere the United States Supreme Court would later describe as a "Roman holiday" in which the press had functioned as a second prosecution.

The jury convicted Sheppard of second-degree murder on December twenty-first, nineteen fifty-four. He was sentenced to life in prison.

His lawyer, F. Lee Bailey, appealed for years. In nineteen sixty-six, the Supreme Court overturned the conviction in Sheppard v. Maxwell, ruling that Sheppard's right to a fair trial had been violated by the media atmosphere the trial judge had failed to control. A new trial was held. The jury acquitted Sheppard after one day of deliberation.

The television series The Fugitive, which premiered in nineteen sixty-three and featured a doctor wrongly convicted of killing his wife who escapes to find the real killer, is widely believed to have been inspired by the Sheppard case. The show's creator, Roy Huggins, denied any connection consistently and emphatically throughout his life. The record does not resolve the question.