Just then, the fingerprint man came up and said, “No signs of forcible entry, so far anyway.”
Gerber grunted. “Doesn’t surprise me. Of course, these suburban types don’t even lock their doors. Sheppard’ll use that to say there was a break-in.”
As we headed out, I said to Eliot, “Maybe after this you can sell some of those alarm systems out here.”
“This isn’t how I hoped to build a business.”
Mrs. Dodge, who was near the steps to the landing, talking to a dark-haired teenage boy, smiled and nodded to us as we passed. Thank you for coming!
Outside the crowd hadn’t thinned any. We edged through and strolled to the Ford.
“Gerber’s going to railroad that poor son of a bitch,” I said. “I didn’t see a damn thing in there that wasn’t circumstantial evidence at its thinnest.”
“Agreed,” Eliot said.
We’d been driving in silence for a while, heading back, when I said, “Somebody ought to do something about that smug little prick.”
“Gerber? Well, at least he’s pinning it on the right man.”
“What? How can you say that?”
Eliot shrugged. “It’s a typical domestic homicide. Crime committed at home, a spontaneous act. Victim’s body isn’t concealed. Death made to look like it’s part of a robbery or rape. Partial removal of victim’s clothing, but victim rarely left completely naked. Victim positioned to suggest a sexual assault’s occurred. Real offender receives nonlethal injuries. Crime is reported to a friend or neighbor. Blunt force trauma, usually to head and particularly the face. Straight out of the FBI manual, Nate.”
“Maybe. But I still say Gerber’s a smug little prick.”
He didn’t argue with the point.
CHAPTER
3
Eliot and I, with the help of two Cleveland police detectives who had worked the Torso Murders, were successful in arranging a hearing at the Soldiers and Sailors Home in Sandusky, Ohio, re: Lloyd Watterson. No longer would the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run be given free passes to commit homicide, when he was in the mood.
In some respects, this was a great success for Eliot, despite how long it took to well and truly put this maniac away. But for many years the Torso Murders would be considered his greatest failure (as it had no official outcome), far overshadowed by the efforts he and his Untouchables made battling Capone in Chicago.
A small irony, though it resonated in a large way with me, came from a phone call I received at Rancho Paisano the day after I’d relived for Perry Mason’s creator my tour through the Sheppard murder house with Cleveland’s former public safety director.
The call, from my friend and A-1 partner Lou Sapperstein, was to pass along the sad news about another good friend of mine.
Eliot Ness was dead.
A few days later a brief memorial service was held at a funeral home in tiny Coudersport, Pennsylvania, where Eliot Ness had been involved in the latest—the last—of his attempts to make it big in the business world. His law-and-order acumen had made him a natural to be the face of a company marketing a watermarking process designed to battle forgery and counterfeiting problems.
But the top man had been a huckster planning to leave investors holding the bag, and Eliot—recently diagnosed with heart problems—fought hard to save the company. The stress proved too much. He died on his kitchen floor, where he’d collapsed, near a bottle of Scotch he’d just bought.
I didn’t attend the Coudersport service. Betty Ness told me many in the little town turned out for it—Eliot in a short time had become well known and well liked in the community.
I did go to Cleveland on May 20 for the bigger service at the Presbyterian Church of the Covenant. Betty and Bobby Ness were present as well as longtime Ness friends, including his onetime assistant, Robert Chamberlin, who had once rented him a small house on the Lake Erie shore. An honor guard from the Cleveland PD was in attendance, and the reverend spoke of Eliot’s public service, courage and integrity, “his youthful and vital spirit, his warmth and understanding and his concern for people.”
Did I shed a tear or two for my old friend?
It’s possible.
* * *
Less than a week later, I was sitting with Flo Kilgore in a banquette in New York’s famed if overrated Stork Club. I had just told her about attending Eliot’s memorial service back in Ohio when she shook her head and laughed a little.
“I realize,” I said, “that I’m consistently a laugh riot, but I fail—”
She raised a gloved hand. Flo and I had been friends and occasionally more than that since she was a girl reporter and I a fledgling private eye, both holed up in a small hotel in Flemington, New Jersey. I’d been there to testify at the Bruno Richard Hauptmann trial, which she was covering for Hearst.
“It’s just the bittersweet irony of it,” she said. “Your friend is probably about to become famous. I ran an item in my column just last week.”
Flo’s “Voice of Broadway” for the New York Journal-American was widely syndicated by King Features. Though it was mostly show-business fluff, the column occasionally got into politics and organized crime—she’d started out working the crime beat, after all.
She was saying, “That memoir of his that’s coming out soon? Desilu just bought it for TV.”
The Untouchables, written with sports writer Oscar Fraley, had been something of a desperation move by the money-strapped Eliot, who had never been one to boast about the Capone days, much less try to profit from them.
“Well, I hope his family makes a few bucks.” I lifted my vodka gimlet. “To absent friends.”
She raised her martini glass. “Absent friends,” she said.
In her early forties, Flo was a pretty thing with a heart-shaped face and big blue eyes, somewhat compromised by the weak chin her ex-pal Sinatra liked to make nasty jokes about. Her hair wasn’t short nor was it long, but back from her high forehead, and typically a pink hat with a cloth rose perched on it. A string of pearls caressed her neck, her trimly curvy shape shown off nicely by a black dress with a scoop neck and an absurdly large pink ribbon, like she was a package waiting to be unwrapped.
I wouldn’t have minded.
“Say,” I said, “didn’t you cover the Sheppard murder trial?”
Her smile was pixie-ish. “Well, there’s an icebreaker for you. You know darn well I did. It got play all over the place. Of course, after the guilty verdict, the Cleveland News didn’t run my column about it.”
“Why?”
“Oh, I said the trial was a major miscarriage of justice.”
“Was it?”
She shuddered. “It’s the first time I was ever scared by the jury system … and I mean scared.”
We’d already had lunch—her the chicken a la king, me the fried scallops and oysters. Not bad, but highway robbery at these prices. You could make a sawbuck disappear faster than Mandrake the Magician, tip not included.
She was narrowing her girl reporter eyes at me. “What brings the Sheppard case to mind? That’s very old news.”
I gave her a brief rundown on Gardner’s interest in the case, and how I’d be heading back to Cleveland soon to poke around some. I was only in New York for a few days to check in with the A-1 branch in our Empire State Building suite of offices. And, of course, to see her.
She sipped her martini through a tight little smile. “To pump me, you mean.”
I gestured around us to the mirrored walls and the various famous faces, bathed in the flattering low lighting. “That sounds a little dirty, for a classy joint like this.”
She was lighting up a cigarette with a silver lighter that probably cost around what my first car did. “Well, if you’re about to dig back into the Sheppard mess, I can give you a rundown on the trial, if you like. I was there for most of it, and when I wasn’t, a stringer covered for me.”
“You had to go back weekends for the show,” I said.
Flo nodded. She was a regular panelis
t on the Sunday night game show, What’s My Line? I would never have told her, but I found that program about as compelling as watching flypaper catch flies. If there had been anything else on worth a damn, I wouldn’t have tuned in.
“Before and during that trial,” she said, “the local press and radio and television blanketed that town with distortions and exaggerations and outright lies. You know who Louis Seltzer is?”
“Editor of the Cleveland Press, isn’t he?”
“He is. A self-important little tyrant. He was convinced Sam Sheppard was guilty and made no secret of it. He tried that case in the pages of his paper and found for the prosecution. And, of course, where did the real jury come from? From the citizens of Cleveland who were already tainted by this scurrilous drivel!”
“The jury could have found Sheppard guilty of first-degree murder,” I pointed out, “which likely would’ve meant a death sentence. They settled instead on second-degree, and life in prison.”
Long lashes batted over the baby blues. “Nate, those prosecutors only proved Dr. Sam guilty of one thing—failure to keep his trousers zipped. And if every man, and woman, who committed adultery got life in prison, we’d have no room for the real criminals.”
I grinned at her. “Maybe we’d get lucky and they’d put us in the same cell.”
She took some smoke in and let it out. “If you’d been in that courtroom, lover, you’d know what a farce that trial was.”
“So take me there.”
“Where?”
“That courtroom. That trial.”
* * *
All right.
It was small and ugly, those chambers, and crowded with press, which this Judge Blythin blithely allowed. He was starstruck around the likes of Bob Considine, that Scotland Yard inspector, Fabian … and of course, moi. Sometimes it was so noisy you couldn’t hear!
When they brought the defendant in for the first time, I could tell he was working hard to maintain his dignity. He was in a dark blue suit, white shirt, black tie, black socks and shoes. Might have been going to a cocktail party. Broad-shouldered, tall, athletic-looking. Handsome but in a soft, pampered-baby way. You could see why some could say he was a ladies’ man.
He didn’t let the presence of the press throw him, at least not that it showed. He sat staring straight ahead as the photographers crouched or climbed on chairs to get their shots, and the newsreel boys brought their cameras around. Did all right for himself—till later, when he took the stand.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
His brothers and their wives were always in court, very proper, very dignified. When the trial got into lurid territory, they seemed out of place, like they’d wandered in thinking this was church only to find out it was the circus.
Sheppard’s attorney, Bill Corrigan, a white-haired, fatherly, almost elderly gent with a reputation as the city’s leading defense lawyer, tried for a change of venue and got nowhere. The jury came from a list of seventy-five that had been made available to Cleveland’s three newspapers. For a month these jurors, knowing they were in the pool, had been exposed to the press. Marilyn Sheppard wasn’t the only victim who got bludgeoned—Seltzer and his competition bashed Sam Sheppard every bit as bad.
When the trial got under way, Dr. Sam sat straight and emotionless as Prosecutor Mahon, another white-haired paternal figure, told the jury how thirty-five vicious blows had ended the life of the defendant’s wife. He enticed them with talk of Sharon Kern, the Bay View lab tech who’d been Dr. Sam’s partner in adultery.
Then Sam’s story of that terrible night was retold in a way that made it seem even more ridiculous than it was.
Oh, dear! Another martini, please! And extra olives.
The defense painted a different picture of the Kern relationship. It was over—Marilyn was pregnant, again, and so Sam had ended the affair, his wife forgiving his infidelities as he became a loving husband again. These recent months had been their happiest.
The first witness for the prosecution was Dr. Lester Adelson, the deputy coroner, a cocksure little mustached man in an askew red bow tie. He set up a screen and subjected the jury to color slides of the dead Marilyn Sheppard, pointing out and explaining her ghastly injuries. Contused abraded this, ragged lacerations that. Darling Nate, it was a horror show!
Corrigan did a number on this testimony, though, establishing the autopsy was perfunctory and error-ridden, that many tests usually conducted in homicides were skipped. And they had failed to identify the murder weapon!
The next-door neighbor that Dr. Sam called that morning—Marshall Dodge? Mayor of Bay Village, the hometown butcher? He looked terrible—tired and washed out. Skin hung on him like he’d lost weight in a hurry. His eyebrows were black and overgrown, coming to curled points like the devil in a cheap movie.
This Dodge character spoke slowly, haltingly, not recalling much of anything. Much of what he said tallied with Dr. Sam’s story, but he roused the courtroom with the claim Dr. Richard had come down from the murder scene to ask his brother, ‘Did you do this, or did you have anything to do with it?’ The response had been ‘Hell, no!’
But the notion that the defendant’s own brother thought it possible Sam had killed his wife hung like a dark cloud over the proceedings.
I’d interviewed Dr. Richard the week before, when he told me how close the family was, how they worked side by side and lived close to each other—that he knew what Sam was like, and that he was incapable of violence.
Next came Dodge’s scrawny wife, Mildred, who’d gone along with her husband when Dr. Sam called saying something terrible had happened to Marilyn. She went up to see the awful crime scene, then came down and offered Sam a glass of whiskey, saying it might help. Sam said, ‘No, I don’t want it. I can’t think clearly and I have to think.’
Mildred said Dr. Sam complained that his neck hurt. That he’d been hit at the top of the stairs, and then chased someone. He had a bruise over his right eye. She put a hand on his bare shoulder to comfort him, and his skin was dry.
On a note more helpful to the defense, she mentioned seeing a puddle of water on the porch, and wet footprints on the stairs. This tallied with Sam’s story of waking up on the beach.
Testimony from several friends indicated Sam had been in a good, relaxed mood on the evening of July third. That no one remembered ever seeing a fit of temper from him, or knew him to ever strike his wife or indeed anyone. The neighborhood children considered him a hero, and the Bay Village police knew and liked him.
Marilyn, on the evening before her death, had been in an upbeat mood, having confided to friends that the couple’s problems were behind them. Her big complaint? That she wanted more furniture in the house—Sam could be tight with a dollar—while he’d bought himself a little sports car.
When the Lords, their neighbor friends, left at 12:30 A.M., after a pleasant evening with the Sheppards, Sam was sleeping on the daybed in his corduroy jacket. Later that jacket was found neatly folded on one end of the couch. Hearing his wife’s screams, would Sam take the time to take off his jacket and carefully fold it before going to his distressed spouse?
Dr. Lucas Hardmann, a friend from when Sam and Marilyn had lived in California, was a houseguest who’d gone off on an overnight trip on July third, absent during the tragic events of early July Fourth. He’d once advised Sam not to send Marilyn a letter about wanting a divorce, but also said he’d never seen Sam in the company of another woman.
Visiting Dr. Sam at Bay View Hospital the day after the murder, Hardmann said his friend had burst into tears, saying, ‘My God, I wish they’d killed me instead of Marilyn. Chip needs his mother more than he needs me.’ The defense had to like hearing that, but prosecution witness Hardmann also reported hearing Dr. Steve say to Sam, ‘Let’s go over the sequence of events, so you can get your story straight.’
While he was staying with the Sheppards, Hardmann had gone out on several dates. In each case, when he returned, he found the Lake Road door un
locked. On one occasion Marilyn had told him specifically not to lock it, because the housekeeper was coming the next day.
Officer Drenkhan testified that the murder bedroom showed no sign of struggle or forcible entry—dust on the sill of a locked screen window was undisturbed. A small light in the dressing room across the way seemed to have burned all night.
Under cross, Drenkhan said that Dr. Sam, as Bay Village’s unpaid police doctor, had never lost his head. That he seemed an ‘honest, hard-working, even-tempered man.’ While he’d seen no pedestrians patrolling the neighborhood, the officer admitted the nearby public park gave easy access from the beach.
And Drenkhan reluctantly confirmed he’d heard Cleveland police officers and Dr. Gerber himself discussing such topics as the possible sterility of Dr. Sam—calling into question Chip’s parentage—and that getting a confession out of their suspect was all it would take to get a conviction.
Defense attorney Corrigan also brought out the ineptitude of the police investigation—for one thing, a cigarette butt that had been seen in the upstairs toilet bowl had disappeared. Marilyn had stopped smoking because of her pregnancy and Dr. Sam didn’t smoke at all.
The bald, elderly police chief of Bay View confirmed Dr. Sam had been whisked away by his brothers shortly after police had begun to arrive. Sam’s story of being robbed was called into question by the chief stating the defendant’s waterlogged wallet contained three twenty-dollar bills, three ones, a credit card and a thousand-dollar check.
The chief confirmed earlier descriptions of the murder scene, but added a disturbing note: blood had soaked through the window drapes to stain the wood beneath.
When the chief first went down to the beach in the morning mist, he found the waves high, every third or fourth one washing across the sand. The implied question was, If Dr. Sam had been unconscious on the beach, why hadn’t he drowned?
Dear! One more martini, if you please. And don’t forget the extra olives!
Do No Harm Page 4