He had a beer and a fag going, the latter adding to the curtain of cigarette smoke, and was glancing around somewhat conspicuously, watching for me to come in the front or side entrance. When I came in the side way, his eyes caught me, and lit up. His grin was missing a bicuspid. Despite his youthful apparel, he looked older than just nine years later—more like a weathered forty-some than early thirties. The sunken-cheek skinniness that before had suggested youth shouted druggie now.
Cigarette dangling in a smile as thin as he was, he waved me over with two hands, as if bringing in a small plane at an airfield.
I joined him. A pretty shag-hair brunette waitress in a Harbor Inn T-shirt with no bra and black hot pants came over quick, took my order for a beer, and walked away slow. I watched her go. There was no law against it. Some men my age felt like this whole sexual revolution and youth culture thing had passed them by. They didn’t have Hugh Hefner and Playboy on yearly retainer.
“I bet she’s a dyke,” Weed said, by way of greeting.
“Why is that, Gary?”
“She’s got short hair. All the dykes got short hair.”
“I’ll file that one away. How have you been? Incarcerated mostly, I would guess.”
He grinned. That missing tooth gave him charm. Not really.
“Funny you should say,” he said. “Guess who my cellmate at the state pen was?”
“Robert Stroud?”
He frowned stupidly. “Who?”
“Inside joke.” I should have known Birdman of Alcatraz references would be too hip for the room. Maybe if I’d said Burt Lancaster. “Who was your cellmate, Gary?”
“Frenchy Foor. Armand Foor?”
The back of my neck tingled.
Weed was saying, “Frenchy was Doc’s muscle boy in stir. But I bet Dr. Sam wishes different about now.”
The jukebox started in on “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” Bowling-machine players were yelping and yowling, and the drone of conversation, working up over the jukebox blare with occasional highlights of laughter and shouts, seemed to ride the tide of cigarette smoke.
“What are you getting at, Gary?”
He leaned forward, sharing his missing-tooth grin again. “I know all about Frenchy snitching on Doc. About the story he’s ready to tell that would put Doc back inside.”
“Doc,” as you probably figured out, was what Sheppard had been called by his fellow prisoners.
“What story is that, Gary?”
He frowned, as if I’d hurt his feelings. “You know what story. How Doc was gonna grease some wheels to get Frenchy transferred to Marion Correctional—the honor camp? And then Frenchy would strong-arm some guy to write a confession about killing Doc’s wife, then fake a suicide. That story.”
My beer arrived. I smiled at the waitress. She smiled back—I was old, but looked like money. At least in here I did.
“Let’s say,” I said, “that story does seem familiar. Trumped up, but familiar. Why does that make stopping by the Harbor Inn worth missing The Tonight Show?”
His eyes narrowed. “Just answer me one simple question.”
“Do my best.”
Now the eyes glittered. “That ten-grand reward the Sheppard family put up—is it still available? They stand behind that, after all this time?”
I shrugged. “I think so. I could easily confirm it with a phone call.”
Another grin. “Why don’t you go do that. There’s a booth around the corner. Then we’ll get into the long and short of it.”
Shook my head. “No, Gary, I don’t think so. You tell me what you have in mind, and I’ll decide whether calling Sam Sheppard’s brothers is worth the trouble.”
Gary thought about it. That took a while. Then he leaned his skinny frame forward and said, “I’m still tight with Frenchy. I can get word to him to take back that story—it’ll mean the Frenchman servin’ the rest of his time, almost two years … but he would do that for me.”
“Is that right.”
He shrugged. “There’s no obligation ’less Doc gets off. Once he’s cleared, that ten grand would be the payoff. But I need five up front.”
I sipped the beer, gave him an easy smile. “If Dr. Sam doesn’t get off, do we get a refund?”
He’d clearly not thought that through.
Then he blurted, “Hell no! It’s a guarantee, like. But you wouldn’t have to pay the other five grand—you know, the balance. I mean, think about it—if that story got out, in an official type way? From the cops or a DA? Doc’d have not only his wife’s murder hangin’ around his neck forever—but a evil setup to frame and kill a guy, too! Who wants that?”
“No.”
His eyes narrowed again. “Nobody wants that, you mean?”
“No. I mean, no as in no. No deal.”
He looked astounded. “It’s a genuine offer!”
The jukebox helped out with “Don’t Bring Me Down” by the Animals.
“I’m sure it is,” I said. “But the ten-thousand-dollar reward is for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the real killer. That’s not what you’re offering. It wouldn’t even lead in that direction. All it does is make some lying fucking con stop lying for a while.”
His eyebrows went up. “What if it’s not a lie? What if Doc really wanted to put Frenchy in motion like that?”
“No,” I said.
I got up, waved the waitress over and gave her a five, which I told her to keep. She liked that and she liked me. What generation gap?
“That’s just for mine,” I told her. “Brian Jones here is on his own.”
She reared back and grinned. “You know who Brian Jones is?”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
She’d never guess my son, who was about her age, was in a rock combo, and that I’d picked up a few things by osmosis.
I was almost out the door when I felt the hand on my arm. I looked back at Weed, who smelled of it.
His smile wanted to be nasty but it was only desperate. “You’re makin’ a mistake, Heller.”
I shook my head sadly. “When you were younger, Gary, you used to call me Mr. Heller. Sign of the times, I’m afraid.”
Back out in the warm night, I stood and watched the winking, vari-colored lights on the Cuyahoga River, and beyond. Crickets were trying to be heard but boat whistles would frequently stomp them out. The deal Weed offered had too many bad possibilities attached to it—for one, it might be a sting, designed to make Lee Bailey look like he was buying off a witness. And ten grand didn’t sound worth Frenchy serving out two years more of a sentence, even without splitting with Gary.
Tomorrow I would call Bailey and report the meeting—if nothing else, it indicated Frenchy was likely in league with Weed, giving the story he was trading to the prosecution the whiff of a scam—a playing-both-ends-off-the-middle type of scam, at that.
But Bailey also needed to know—if he really was thinking of calling his client to the stand—what kind of shape I’d found Sam Sheppard in tonight.
* * *
I’d finished my inquiries in under a week on my July Cleveland trip, but in late October I returned for the Sam Sheppard retrial. Lee Bailey wanted me around in case something unexpected came up during the proceedings where I might be needed. Though he had no plans to call me as a witness, I was being held in reserve, should what I’d seen and heard in 1954, 1957, and earlier that year require my testimony.
I sat in on several meetings with Bailey and his client, whose wife was back in the country and often at his side. She was prominently around to make a lie of the truth of their separation/divorce conflict, which had leaked to the press, thanks to the big mouths of both. Out of their earshot, Bailey had taken to referring to the couple as “the bitch and the blockhead.”
The Sam/Lee tension came from money squabbles, which I talked to Sam about in the hallway outside the Statler Hilton suite where Bailey was staying.
His eyes flaring with indignation, Sam said, “That mercenary bastard mad
e me sign over the movie rights to my book!”
A ghostwriter was still working with Dr. Sam on an “autobiography” that would be published after the new trial allowed a final chapter to be written. Producer Robert Evans had paid $125,000 to make The Sam Sheppard Murder Case out of it.
I put a hand on Sam’s muscular shoulder. “Have you forgotten Lee has represented you since ’61 for no fee? And look what he’s done for you.”
He nodded, his baby face in a pout. “But you have to admit, Nate, the man has an overwhelming greed for money.”
I just nodded back. That was the last I tried to reason with him on the subject.
But I did say, “For now, you need to put any hard feelings aside. With the trial starting next week, you two have to come together. You’re outnumbered—you two are on one team, with the state of Ohio, and particularly the city of Cleveland, on the other.”
He nodded again, the pout gone, but red coming into his cheeks. “You’re right, Nate. Twelve years ago they put me away when I hadn’t done a damn thing. Put me away in the face of evidence that I had a fractured neck!”
Now I had both hands on his shoulders. “Take it easy, man. Suppose they do convict you? That doesn’t seem likely, but even so, you’ll immediately be eligible for parole.”
“You think they’d give that kind of break to me?”
“I do. It would be better for them, easier for them, than dealing with an F. Lee Bailey appeal. So cool it, okay?”
He sighed. “Okay.”
“And for God’s sake, lay off the booze and pills. Get it together before you testify.”
“At least,” he said, mostly ignoring my advice, “that’s one thing that money-grubbing bastard and I can agree on—that I’m going to testify on my own goddamn behalf!”
Bailey had been loudly letting the press know that his client would take the stand and exonerate himself through his own lips.
Later Bailey, warned by me of his client’s attitude and generally flaky condition, said, “I told you he was a blockhead. Jesus Christ, I’ve spent fifty grand making fifty-plus trips to the fair city of Cleveland since 1961, all out of my own pocket. You may have noticed the conspicuous absence of Sam’s brothers—he’s alienated both of them with his paranoia and talk of Mafia contacts he made in prison who he can turn to.”
“Lee, you know what I’d do if I were you?”
“What’s that?”
“Walk out on him and let him find some public defender or ambulance chaser to take over. Is this worth it, just for a little front-page publicity and the cover of Time?”
Bailey gave me a funny look, then smiled his sly smile. “Point taken.”
On October 24, Sam Sheppard returned to the dreary gray courthouse and the second-floor courtroom where he’d been sentenced to life just shy of twelve years before. I was in the gallery with the kind of reserved seat a reporter would kill for.
Oh, there were reporters all right, but Judge Francis J. Talty—a young-looking magistrate in his mid-forties—was putting up with no press circus this time around. All news cameramen and photographers were ordered to remain outside the building. Only fourteen seats were assigned to the press, with just two non-local media reps allowed, AP and UPI. And the lawyers were under a gag order not to give interviews till after the trial.
The carefully selected jurors—seven men and five women—were sequestered at a hotel for the duration, with no TV, no radio, and all outside calls supervised.
When the prosecution began presenting its case, the witnesses for the state were mostly a rerun of the ’54 trial, with the notable absence of Sharon Kern. The prosecutors weren’t playing the Other Woman card this time—instead, the murder motive seemed to be a spontaneous argument over Sam’s general infidelity that turned homicidal.
I skipped the jurors’ visit to the crime scene. I’d been there before and, anyway, the house had been remodeled and refurnished by new tenants, so the old World War Two saying came to mind: “Is this trip really necessary?”
The prosecution’s first witness was former homicide cop Robert Schottke, who now worked robbery detail. He repeated his previous testimony, including Sam lying to him about his affair with Sharon Kern. This made Sam a philanderer and a liar without making the Other Woman the motive.
Then Bailey had at him.
“Sergeant Schottke, when you interrogated Sam in his hospital room, you knew he was there because of possible serious injuries. That his neck had been X-rayed. Did you make inquiry as to just how badly he had been hurt?”
“No, I did not.”
“You know that if these injuries were serious beyond the point where they might have been self-inflicted, then Sam could not be guilty?”
“Yes.”
“Then it appears, does it not, that you accused the doctor of murder without troubling yourself to determine whether, in his condition, he could be the guilty one.”
The detective only managed a nod. If he had been a crisply professional Joe Friday on the stand in 1954, he was now the faintly ridiculous Jack Webb of the ’60s Dragnet.
Butcher-turned-car-salesman Marshall Dodge testified and so did his ex-wife, Mildred. Marsh limped to the stand, his skin looking as gray as his hair, and timidly answered the prosecutor’s questions, doing his best to mirror his 1954 testimony. This included the bombshell of brother Richard asking Sam if he “had anything to do with this.”
On cross, Bailey pounced, getting Dodge to admit he’d visited Marilyn Sheppard three times a week or more. The defense attorney hammered the usual questions: When Sam called and said, “They’ve killed Marilyn,” did Dodge know who “they” was? No. From this came the questions about Marsh and Mildred going to their neighbors without a weapon or any apparent concern that danger might await.
Dodge said of his odd, apparently reckless behavior, “I just … I didn’t give it any thought.”
Asked if he’d ever seen a Spang Bakery deliveryman at the Sheppard place, he said, “Quite possibly.”
Mildred coolly described the crime scene for the prosecutor: “Her hair was a tangled mess of dried blood, and it was lying in a large area of bloodstain, and her face was completely covered with blood. Her pajama top was up under her chin. A sheet was pulled up to about her hip, and her arm was extended out.”
Bailey got Mildred to confirm her husband’s nervous breakdown, and the coal fire she’d started in her fireplace on the early morning of the Fourth. Bailey asked her if she was aware that national weather reports put the temperature that night no lower than sixty-nine degrees Fahrenheit. She was not.
Dr. Samuel Gerber, now sixty-eight, took the stand knowing he would have to face Bailey, who in recent years had asked him repeatedly to debate the Sheppard case in public. Gerber had always declined. That would not be an option today.
The small, white-haired, well-dressed coroner—not the star witness of the prosecution, this time—was called basically to establish for the state a handful of key points, particularly that Marilyn’s pillow showed the impression, in blood, of an object used in the murder. The prosecutor was careful not to get into the controversial opinion Gerber expressed in the first trial—that the bloody impression was of a surgical instrument.
Bailey was eager to take down the man who, more than anyone—even more than Louis Seltzer himself—had been responsible for the wrongful imprisonment of Sam Sheppard.
Walking back and forth between the witness box and the panel of jurors, with his shoulders emphasizing already emphasized words, Bailey—a predator in a three-piece suit—stalked his prey.
“Doctor, when you interviewed my client on the morning of the murder, at Bay View Hospital, did you believe he had been injured?”
“Not seriously, no.”
“You examined him, then.”
“I took his pulse.”
“When you were practicing medicine, Doctor, did you make determinations and diagnoses without examination of your patient?”
“No, I did not.”
>
“Why didn’t you examine Dr. Sam Sheppard?”
“I didn’t think he was hurt very badly.”
Bailey’s quick tempo seemed to pull the witness in, causing him to answer the questions at that same tempo, without due consideration.
“Dr. Gerber, did you determine that he had no injury to the back of his head by taking his pulse?”
“No. I had no right to examine him further.”
“Doctor, did you tell a fellow doctor that you were going to ‘get’ the Sheppard family?”
This sudden shift seemed to startle the witness.
“No! Whoever said that is a liar. I deny it.”
Quickly Bailey selected the bloodstained pillow from the table of exhibits. Back in front of Gerber, he creased the pillow and asked, “How do you suppose this impression was made—by the folding of the pillow like this?”
“No, sir.”
“Would you explain to the jury how you are satisfied that it was not made in that fashion?”
“I’d be glad to. Do you mind…?” The coroner reached for the pillow.
Bailey bowed, just a little, as he graciously handed the pillowcase to the witness, saying, “Do whatever is necessary to explain it please, Doctor.”
“This impression of an object is similar to a pair of pliers, or something with two blades that opens in a fulcrum, or a surgical instrument.”
From my seat in the gallery, I could clearly see all of the prosecutors at their table lowering their heads, as if in prayer. Gerber had used that dreaded phrase, “surgical instrument.”
Bailey smiled at his victim. “You have indicated that the murder weapon might be a surgical instrument?”
“I have.”
“Do you have such an instrument available for us to look at, Doctor?”
“No, sir.”
“Doctor, could you tell us where we could find one of the instruments compatible with what you believe you may see there?”
The witness shrugged. “Any surgical store.”
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