Sam Reese Sheppard is back in Cleveland, back in the old rust belt city which has been beating him up for decades. Sam sits in a tight blue suit within the morning warmth of a plain wood-framed house on a quiet street lined by half-nude trees and banks of fallen leaves. It is October. It is 45 years to the day since Sam's father was first tried for murdering his mother.
A life of harrowing moments and grim circles. This morning Sam Reese Sheppard's civil case against the city of Cleveland was scheduled to begin. Sam had walked from Washington to Cleveland to highlight both the case and his ongoing campaign against the death penalty. The walk finished 18 hours ago to the studied indifference of the Cleveland media. Instead of being in court he is sitting here, telling his story, kicking his heels.
The city outside has kicked Sam Reese Sheppard again. One evening not too long ago he had come home from a long training walk in Oakland, California where he lives. His head was clear and calm after 21 miles of rhythmed solitude until he replayed a phone message. "Sam, they're going to dig up your mother's body. I'm sorry. Talk to you tomorrow."
And the old feelings gripped him again, grief eating another piece of him as the city of Cleveland calculatedly postponed the long anticipated civil trial by launching a fishing expedition through the remains of his mother and brother. The city prosecutor was giving a press conference about the exhumations before any official contact came from the city. Same old story.
If your name isn't Sam Reese Sheppard the further you go from Cleveland the hazier the details get. The case of Dr Sam Sheppard and the murder of his wife Marilyn nearly half a century ago was the sensation of the era, the precursor of the O.J. Simpson hysteria, the font of the legal precedent which shapes media coverage of trials, a case which, in the faces of Barry Scheck and F. Lee Bailey, has even shared some of the same cast as the Simpson show.
It filtered down to us through the happy prism of Hollywood schlock too. The Fugitive was a distorted version of the events which live in Cleveland's history like a tumour, a story which still twists the city's gut to this day.
The Sheppards were beautiful people literally and figuratively. College sweethearts, they settled and lived on Lake Road in leafy Bay Village in the western Cleveland suburbs. A house on Lake Erie, the expansive life of 1950s baby-boomers. Blue skies.
On the night of July 4th, 1954 Marilyn Reese Sheppard, four months' pregnant, was murdered in her bed, bludgeoned feverishly with a blunt object. The Sheppards had been entertaining neighbours the previous evening and Dr Sam Sheppard, the police surgeon for the city of Cleveland had fallen asleep on a daybed downstairs.
The subsequent chronology is Cleveland rote: A shout wakes Dr Sam . . . he climbs the stairs . . . notices a form brushing past him in the darkness . . . in the main bedroom he leans forward to look at his wife . . . he suffers a blow to the back of the neck . . . comes to in the middle of a bloody crime scene.
Dr Sam places his fingers on his wife's neck. No pulse. Wheels away to check on his seven-year-old son . . . hears noise downstairs . . . gives chase towards the lake . . . catches up with the criminal identifying him later as bushy haired . . . gets knocked out again and lies in the darkness at the edge of Lake Erie for some time.
Next morning, young Sam Reese Sheppard, seven years old then, was awoken by an uncle. His mother was dead. His father was already a suspect. Police were plodding through the house.
Forty-five years on, the memories still come back to him in random shards. That day he was led out of the front door of the family house. Cameras popped and dazzled him. He understood enough then to know that his life was virtually over.
The city of Cleveland lost its reason. The media ran haywire. Dr Sam Sheppard's popularity and good looks provoked as much resentment in adversity as they has stirred admiration in good times.
Headline-makers and editorialists stole Marilyn Sheppard's christian name and used it as a weapon against her husband. Who Will Speak for Marilyn? asked a front page editorial, one of many to accuse Dr Sam Sheppard of murder.
The city coroner, a long-time enemy of the Sheppard family, issued a report pronouncing not merely cause of death but his belief that Dr Sam Sheppard had killed his wife. He announced also that he believed that Marilyn Sheppard had been bludgeoned to death with a "surgical instrument".
Three weeks after the murder, Dr Sam Sheppard was arrested. He made a mistake which swung the opinion against him still further. He denied the fact of a three-year affair. When the lie was exposed, Cleveland knew it had its man. A man who would lie about his sexual indiscretions would lie about anything.
At trial, a staggering catalogue of police error, evidence suppression and official vindictiveness was overlooked. By Christmas of 1954, Dr Sam Sheppard was beginning a life sentence.
The family shattered like a cursed mirror. On January 7th, 1955 Ethel Niles Sheppard, Dr Sam's mother put a gun to her head and shot herself. Less than two weeks later her husband, Dr Richard Sheppard, died of suddenly worsened stomach cancer. In 1963 Thomas Reese, father of Marilyn Reese Sheppard, killed himself using a shotgun.
By then Sam Reese Sheppard was beginning his own journey, sorting out his own feelings.
"Sure. I resented my father. It's part of survivors' guilt, the whole psychological dynamic. Subconscious stuff. You are a child. You are rejected. You're angry. My dad left me. My Mom left me. That was my response. You tend to repress it. I was an angry young man for a number of years but went on with my life. Which has not been a cakewalk."
He was raised by an uncle who kept him cloistered from the world. He remembers snatches. Being shielded from the news and from episodes of The Fugitive. Later, years later, living with a woman he sat down with her one night to watch a TV movie about the case. It shook her to the bone.
Another relationship foundered on his psychological unpreparedness for the introduction of children to his life. Too much grief and anger to pass on. He lives alone now.
"My story of murder and mayhem was never much of a dategetter I'm afraid."
Childhood was punctuated by visits to the prison which held his father. The episodic viewings of a man crumbling from the inside out were added to the raw experiences of 1954.
"Excruciating," he says. "I was a little child. My Dad had had an affair and felt bad about it, but he loved my mother. In prison I was the only reason he kept going, he had nothing to live for. He would hang strong and put on a good face for me."
"As I got older I realised the facts of his life. Every visit he had a body search, people literally sticking their hands up his ass. The deterioration in him, the humiliation of prison, the misery, it was so horrifying. Not just for him, for everyone, but he was my father and he put a face on it for me."
It is impossible to briefly catalogue the damning list of bad police practices, official connivings and media libels which had to be dragged into open court before Dr Sam Sheppard was acquitted on appeal in 1966.
Lifting the lid revealed a network of small-town interests acting in concert. The business went deep. Police suppressed or lost evidence relating to fresh marks of a break-in in the basement of the family home. In 1959, a man called Richard Eberling who had run Dick's Cleaning Service, a window-cleaning operation which the Sheppards used, was arrested in possession of some of Marilyn Reese Sheppard's jewellery. He volunteered to police that he had cut himself in the Sheppard house three days before the murder and had trailed blood through the house and failed to clean it up. Apparently nobody bothered to clean it up.
Police declared themselves happy that Eberling had brought the subject up and provided a good explanation to boot. They released Eberling, as Sam Reese Sheppard puts it, "to go kill little old ladies." Eberling went on to work at City Hall in Cleveland and become something of a city celebrity in the 1970s, living in a mansion and entertaining lavishly until he was arrested and convicted for beating a woman to death and was linked with at least two other murders. A series of bludgeoned heads.
Sam Reese Sheppard visited Eberling in jail in 1990, talking with him for almost five hours. Eberling appears to have confessed to the Sheppard murder to other inmates, but to Sam Reese Sheppard he limited himself to revealing tantalising details of his knowledge of the case. Eberling died last year and in death he has moved right into the dock.
Five years ago, the Sheppard team gained a court order to have some of Eberling's blood drawn for DNA testing. Sam Reese Sheppard also had his father exhumed for the same purpose in 1996, re-interring his father this time in Cleveland beside his mother.
The DNA from Eberling and Dr Sam Sheppard would appear to have settled the case. Defence and prosecution were agreed that Dr Sam Sheppard hadn't suffered any wounds on the night of the murder and hadn't been covered in the blood spatter which would have marked the murderer. There was a third person present.
Yet the city of Cleveland opted this month to exhume the body of Mariyn Reese Sheppard also, and the media circus began again.