He was slowly shaking his head. “Why are you telling me all this?”
“I haven’t told you anything but ‘maybe.’ With Lord dead, the name of his accomplice—very possibly an unwilling, unwitting one—died with him. And what I can tell you for sure is that I have no intention of risking a manslaughter rap, or having a very successful private investigation agency go down the tubes because of my efforts on your behalf.”
His cheeks were getting red, the baby-faced man on the verge of a tantrum. “What if I come forward with what you’ve told me?”
“I’ll deny it.”
Through clenched teeth he said, “Or … or would you just kill me, too? Or maybe have one of your Chicago mob buddies do it for you.”
“No need.” I got up to go, nodding toward the pill containers and bottle of Scotch. “You’re doing a good enough job of that yourself.”
He watched from the front doorway, still in his T-shirt and shorts, a ghost haunting his own house, as I walked to the car, got in and drove away.
* * *
I encountered only a few of the players in the Sheppard affair over the coming years, but I kept track of several, and checked up on a few before writing what follows.
F. Lee Bailey (as promised) sent a fifteen-page letter to Bay Village police chief, Fred Drenkhan, in which he detailed the evidence supporting his theory that Marshall and Mildred Dodge murdered Marilyn Sheppard. This led to a new investigation and the convening of a grand jury in 1966, with Marshall Dodge testifying. No indictment resulted. Nor did any connection between the drug dealer deaths in Huntington Park and the Sheppard case come to light.
Bailey and Sam Sheppard then filed separate civil suits for damages on Cuyahoga Coroner Samuel Gerber and Cleveland Press editor Louis Seltzer. Both suits were dismissed in 1968, the dismissals upheld in 1970.
Bailey’s theory about the Dodges did make its way into the film based on Sam’s ghostwritten biography, Endure and Conquer, a movie initially planned to be titled The F. Lee Bailey Story, with serious talk of Bailey starring as himself. The resulting fictionalized film, The Lawyer, directed by Sidney J. Furie of Ipcress File fame, starred a dynamic Barry Newman as the Bailey-like lawyer (spun off into a TV series, Petrocelli). Dr. Sam, however, was not impressed—he disliked the film intensely, much like his response to The Fugitive on TV.
The two-part final episode of The Fugitive aired in August 1967. More than 78 million people tuned in to see Richard Kimble finally catch “the One-Armed Man,” making it the most-watched TV series episode of that time.
For a while, Sam Sheppard—like Marshall Dodge—sold used cars for a living, as he sought to have his medical license restored. When it was, he joined the Youngstown Osteopathic Hospital. His career, and his marriage to Ariane, seemed back on track—in a Sunday-section article, anti–comic book shrink Dr. Frederic Wertham wrote of the success of this unusual marriage, and explained why it would surely last.
But two wrongful death malpractice suits in 1968 found Dr. Sam “resigning” from the hospital by year’s end, with a third malpractice suit following in 1969. Sam had already been served with divorce papers, which aired Ariane’s charges of his drug and alcohol abuse, as well as her fears for her safety. The latter resulted in a restraining order against Sam Sheppard where his soon-to-be-ex-wife was concerned.
For a while Dr. Sam opened an office as a general practitioner in a strip mall in a suburb of Columbus, referring any surgical patients to other physicians. Always a physical fitness buff, Sam began to work out with a new friend, professional wrestler George Strickland. Sam had been a wrestler in high school and college, and now he began a new secondary career—as a professional wrestler. His stage name “Killer” Sheppard was, he said, black humor. He aimed to be “the cleanest, meanest, damnedest wrestler you ever saw.” His signature move? The Mandibular Nerve Press, inserting two fingers into his opponent’s mouth and pressing two nerves beneath the tongue, “inducing a temporary paralysis that would render a foe helpless.”
In October 1969, he married Strickland’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Colleen, in Mexico. Dr. Sam now practiced medicine, on a limited scale, out of the living room of his father-in-law’s ranch-style home, where he and Colleen also lived. His relationship with his brothers became strained to say the least, but now and then he saw his long-haired son, Sam Reese Sheppard (no longer “Chip”).
On April 6, 1970, Sam Sheppard died on the kitchen floor, the way Eliot went. His rambling last words included a claim that he knew who killed his wife, and could prove it. He provided no details.
Pills and booze were blamed, the official verdict “liver failure.” He wore sunglasses in his casket, his medical instruments beside him. Richard Sheppard and a “visibly shaken” Lee Bailey were among the pallbearers. Sam’s son was in Europe, unable to attend, and so was Steve Sheppard, studying psychiatry in London.
Ariane attended as well, and embraced the third Mrs. Sheppard, two of Sam’s three wives crying together.
The second Mrs. Sheppard, as of 1977, lived in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, then moved to New Jersey a year later, and back to Germany in 1979. In the early ’80s Ariane was in Rocky River again, in a rented home where she lived with her mother. In an on-air 1984 interview on a Cleveland newscast, she said at the time of the retrial, Sam was already “far gone with drug and alcohol addiction,” and made bitter by his time in prison. Still, Ariane claimed never to have doubted her late ex-husband’s innocence.
Steve Sheppard became a psychiatrist in California. (EDITOR’S NOTE: At this writing, Dr. Stephen Sheppard, 97, lives in Oakland, California. His brother, Dr. Richard Sheppard, is deceased.)
Dr. Lucas Hardmann practiced in Sweden for a while, then in 1975 opened a clinic in Southern California. He moved to San Jose and worked as an anesthesiologist, dying in 1987 of a heart ailment. The only contact he had with Dr. Sam after the second trial was by way of a telegram to his old friend, encouraging him to resume surgery and tennis. Luke’s friend Dr. Paul Robinson continued his father’s family practice in Kent, Ohio.
Sharon Kern remained in California, and by century’s end was a mother twice, and a grandmother four times. I have no idea what became of pretty onetime babysitter Jane Carter, but I hope she’s had a very nice life. The Lords left Bay Village and moved to Clearwater, Florida. I don’t know what became of them, after that. Marshall Dodge also wound up in Florida, and married for a third time; he died in 1981. Mildred, still in Ohio, died a year later. She had become a kind of buff on the case, obsessively filling a trunk with magazine and newspaper articles and books on the subject.
Their doctor son, Jerry, died in Vietnam in 1968.
F. Lee Bailey became the top criminal defense attorney in America, his clients including Ernest Medina (of the Mai Lai Massacre), kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst, and yet another accused wife killer, O. J. Simpson. I witnessed many remarkable masters of cross-examination in my years, including Clarence Darrow, but Bailey was easily the best. (EDITOR’S NOTE: Mr. Bailey is, at time of publication, a polygraph and investigative consultant in Maine, having been disbarred in Florida and Massachusetts over monetary matters that he disputes.)
Dr. Samuel Gerber, elected Cleveland’s coroner thirteen consecutive times, led a largely distinguished career. A star ever since Eliot’s Torso Murders case, Gerber was first to link alcohol consumption to traffic accidents, and was a pioneer in the study of crib death, as well as a founding member of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. He is, however, remembered more for his mean-spirited blacklisting of Dr. Paul Kirk from that organization, Kirk’s “blood splatter” forensics work having helped clear Sam Sheppard. The highest honor in the criminalistics section of that professional organization is now named for Kirk, who died in 1970.
Thirty years to the day after Eliot’s passing, Gerber died in 1987 in Cleveland Heights, best known today for his dogged and often unethical pursuit of Sam Sheppard for Marilyn’s murder. The state-of-the-art Coroner’s Center that hous
ed labs, offices, morgue and college auditoriums was torn down at the end of the ’90s to make way for a parking ramp.
Louis Seltzer remained unrepentant—even proud—of his role in the first Sheppard trial. “Mr. Cleveland” self-published his autobiography; he died in 1980, the Press dying two years later.
Erle Stanley Gardner retired from the Court of Last Resort in 1960, the organization withering without his participation and leadership. While The Court of Last Resort television series lasted only one failed season, Perry Mason enjoyed nine successful ones—Gardner on camera playing a judge in the final episode. Raymond Burr returned as Perry Mason for twenty-seven TV movies that ran from 1985 until the actor’s death in 1993. Gardner never again became involved in the Sheppard case, but in interviews spoke out against the miscarriage of justice perpetrated by Gerber and Seltzer. He died March 11, 1970, on his ranch.
And what of everybody’s favorite suspect, Richard Eberling?
He and his pal Obie Henderson continued to ingratiate themselves in Cleveland social circles until finally Obie was hired by the Republican mayor as his personal assistant. Obie and his partner Richard were then hired to decorate the home of the mayor’s wife; the Eberling-Henderson interior decorating business skyrocketed, as they snagged richer and richer clients and hosted frequent over-the-top parties at the Hermitage. Finally, in 1973, they were contracted to restore the historic Cleveland City Hall; their arrogance and overspending, however, got them fired by the next mayor. Meanwhile, Eberling continued to pursue his “other” business—befriending and defrauding elderly women.
Eberling became a nurse’s aide for a widow, whose sister—who vocally disapproved of Richard—was brutally battered and strangled in her bed in 1962, a murder somewhat echoing Marilyn Sheppard’s. By the 1970s, Eberling was a trusted and well-paid presence around the mansion, where he devised a new will for his beloved charge, who in 1983 was found on her belly on the floor by ambulance attendants Richard had summoned. Identifying himself as the comatose woman’s nephew, Eberling reported that she had stumbled and taken a nasty fall.
Richard’s “aunt” died six weeks later in the hospital, never waking up. X-rays showed a fracture near the second vertebra, not unlike the one Sam Sheppard suffered in the early morning hours of July ’54. In July ’89, Eberling and Obie were convicted of her murder as well as on forgery and theft charges, and both were sentenced to life.
Having been the Sheppards’ window washer, and the thief who’d taken Marilyn’s rings (from Richard Sheppard’s home), Eberling was apparently inspired to tell various other inmates various other things about the Sheppard murder. He seems never to have directly confessed, but teased others (including Dr. Sam’s son) with his inside knowledge. He also concocted wild stories, such as Sam Sheppard and Marshall Dodge being homosexual lovers who killed Marilyn together. He died in prison of cardiac arrest in 1998. (EDITOR’S NOTE: A paroled Oscar B. Henderson died in 2016 in Texas.)
The late Eberling was nonetheless a major presence in a third Sam Sheppard trial. In 2000, Sam Reese Sheppard—who had grown from a long-haired hippie war protestor into a bald anti–capital punishment activist—sued the state of Ohio for wrongly convicting his father of his mother’s murder in 1954. Sam R. Sheppard’s attorney offered up Eberling as a real-life “one-armed man,” DNA evidence from the crime scene suggesting someone with a genetic profile closely matching Eberling’s had also been in the house.
But the defense bobbled the DNA evidence, with a heavily accented Pakistani expert who was tough to follow, with exchanges that didn’t explain the DNA science well enough, allowing the opposition to dismiss the testimony (in a vaguely racist manner) as “mumbo jumbo.” A former FBI crime profiler made the same points to the jury that Eliot had to me back in 1957, labeling the murder as displaying all the earmarks of a domestic homicide. The old circumstantial evidence of the dog that didn’t bark and the disputed neck X-rays of Sam’s injury were trotted out. The verdict, returned in under five hours, found for the state, in effect endorsing the original 1954 guilty verdict.
In the run-up to the trial, both Sam and Marilyn were exhumed for purposes of obtaining DNA samples for blood testing. Sam’s remains were then cremated, and at his son’s request, the doctor and his wife were reunited with their unborn child in a red-carpeted, marble-walled mausoleum.
Like the shell of a man who emerged after ten years of false imprisonment, Cleveland itself was no longer the “Best Location in the Nation.” Factory towns in America were not what they used to be. Hardly anybody shopped downtown anymore. The population was down fifty percent, since 1954. The Cleveland Indians were politically incorrect, and the “Mistake on the Lake”—a lake fed by a river that once notoriously caught fire—became best known as the home of the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame.
And maybe as the town where Eliot Ness failed to bag a butcher, and where a doctor once killed his wife on the Fourth of July.
Just ask anybody in Cleveland.
I OWE THEM ONE
Despite its extensive basis in history, this is a work of fiction, and liberties have been taken with the facts, though as few as possible—and any blame for historical inaccuracies is my own, mitigated by the limitations of conflicting source material.
My usual practice, in the Nathan Heller memoirs, is to use real names as much as possible. That remains true with the police, lawyers, reporters and other non-suspects in the Marilyn Sheppard murder. But the only suspects here who appear under their real names are Richard Eberling, Obie Henderson and Sam Sheppard himself.
While they have real-life counterparts who students of the Sheppard case may recognize, a number of players here are fictionalized, their names fictional as well, and the author has no intention of laying any crime at the feet of any of the real people. This novel, for all its research, is a work of imagination and has tried to bring to life various existing theories to this enduring mystery and explore a possible new one as well. Not every fact or clue is introduced or dealt with.
I changed my mind about the identity of the killer or killers half a dozen times during the research for this novel, and if you dig into the available information, you are likely to have the same experience. An ultimate resolution to this crime, at this point, is about as likely as definitively determining who Jack the Ripper was. What cannot be doubted, whether innocent or not, Sam Sheppard got a very raw deal from the justice system as it was dispensed in Ohio in the 1950s.
Those characters who appear here under their true names must also be viewed as fictionalized. Available research on the various individuals ranges from voluminous to scant. Whenever possible, actual interviews with the subjects, and transcripts of courtroom appearances, have been used as the basis of dialogue scenes, although creative liberties have been taken.
Flo Kilgore was introduced in the Heller novel Bye Bye, Baby (2011), as a composite of journalists Dorothy Kilgallen, Peter Hyams, James Bacon, and Florabel Muir, reflecting their respective roles in the investigation that followed Marilyn Monroe’s death. In Do No Harm, Kilgallen is the sole historical counterpart for Kilgore, although the fictional character does not entirely parallel the real person (Kilgallen, for example, was a Catholic and married only once). The Heller novel Ask Not (2013) explores the circumstances of Kilgallen’s death and possible murder, touched upon only briefly here. Reference on “Kilgore” came from Kilgallen (1979), Lee Israel; The Reporter Who Knew Too Much (2016), Mark Shaw; and Murder One (1967), Dorothy Kilgallen, which includes a chapter on the Sheppard case, in particular the first trial.
F. Lee Bailey material is drawn from his autobiography (with Harvey Aronson), The Defense Never Rests (1971), which includes a lengthy Sheppard section. Also consulted was the 1971 biography F. Lee Bailey by Les Whitten. Bailey’s later book, When the Husband Is the Suspect (2008), with Jean Rabe, also deals with the Sheppard case. In addition, I viewed the 1967 episode of Firing Line with F. Lee Buckley interviewing Bailey, a rather crackling exchange, as well as Baile
y’s stunningly effective cross-examination of Mark Fuhrman in the O. J. Simpson murder trial.
A major research tool was the 11/23/66 letter from F. Lee Bailey to Chief Fred Drenkhan of the Bay Village Police in which the attorney spells out the “Marshall and Mildred Dodge” theory, which prompted a grand jury inquiry. This is available online, at the Cleveland State University website, along with a Sam Sheppard timeline, a Who’s Who in the case, and transcripts of testimony from the first two trials.
Normally when I have researched a famous crime or mystery for the Nathan Heller memoirs, the books on the case at hand have ranged from excellent to lousy, with many stops in between. I have always been frank in these end notes, and have tried to guide interested readers to the best works on the subject. Unusually, the vast majority of books written on the Sheppard case are first-rate.
The seminal works are by Chicago Tribune reporter Paul Holmes, who covered both trials and published the first three books on the subject: The Sheppard Murder Case (1961); My Brother’s Keeper (1964), with Dr. Stephen Sheppard; and Retrial: Murder and Dr. Sam Sheppard (1966). Holmes developed the theory about “Marshall and Mildred Dodge,” which greatly influenced F. Lee Bailey, who has credited Holmes.
Dr. Sam: An American Tragedy (1972) by Jack Harrison Pollack is similarly excellent, a highly readable account that benefits from having been written after Sam Sheppard’s death. My favorite book about the case, however, is Summer of Shadows (2011) by Stephen Knight, who cuts back and forth between the Sheppard case and the Cleveland Indians’ race for the American League pennant. This unusual juxtaposition, which feeds an overview of Cleveland itself, makes for a unique read, and the book was a big influence here. I do have a complaint: there is no index, which makes its use as a research tool a frustrating one.
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