As helicopters flew overhead, the fetus of Sam Reese Sheppard's brother was taken from the crypt along with the coffin of his mother. In a remarkable and ghoulish development it transpired that the organs of the foetus had been removed 45 years ago for an autopsy, the results of which were never included in police files. The jar with the foetus of Sam Reese Sheppard's brother in it kicked about the coroner's office back then for some eight months before the family could recover it.
This month has brought back all sorts of pain for Sam.
"It was very, very painful and insulting and hurtful to be there. We were dealing with the remains, with the pain of that and the sight of my brother's foetus and this local prosecutor is out doing the Today show and everything else, marching around doing publicity for his case."
And it seems for a while as if nothing in Cleveland ever changes. Sam Reese Sheppard gives a shivery shake of his bald head and talks of the callous objectification of his grief which began in 1954 and has never ended.
"The coronor literally tore my mother's body apart. They drained her brain out, made a plaster cast, took all these horrific details and he put together a little dog and pony show with these infamous photographs that he would go around the state with, showing these photos. This man had my little baby brother on a desk in his office for a while. Like a trophy. That's war crimes stuff to me."
Dr Sam Sheppard was the last victim though. He died in 1970 at the age of 46, a husk of a man at the end. His son refuses to opt for victimhood over survival. Watching his father go was a gruesome experience which informed Sam Reese Sheppard too of the need to survive.
"Just seeing the way he died. He couldn't get insurance to practise medicine, he couldn't work, it was a slow humiliating demise. He couldn't go out without being vilified and abused. It broke him."
Dr Sam Sheppard sank into alcohol and pathos, near the end he could be found caricaturing himself pitifully with an involvement in professional wrestling.
"Just despair," says his son now. "That's all it was. We saw each other a couple of times at the end and he went down slow. It was hard to bear. For a time I had to keep him at arm's length because you can take people along with you. There were things I had to resolve."
Writing poetry one day, a specific memory returned to Sam. He was writing about visiting his dad in the dungeon of a room. There was a naked lightbulb and guards patrolled with drawn batons behind the backs of prisoners and visitors.
His father was studying letters Sam had brought when he looked up suddenly. A guard was standing behind Sam Reese Sheppard about to crack the boy over the head for bringing in contraband mail.
"I remember him shouting; `Sheppard you give us those papers.' My dad did. He handed them over. In writing about it I realised it and remembered it, the experience of him being about ready to crack me, my father's face. Fragments come through all the time from talking and writing."
Sam has kept moving. His walks against the death penalty are part of the weave of his life. Boston to New Orleans. Across Cleveland. Washington to Cleveland. He looks forward to a time when the case is closed, when he will just becone unavailable for six months and walk the Appalachian Trail or the Pacific Crest Trail. He who endures wins, his father used tell him.
Cleveland has endured a lot too. The city population shrank rapidly as the traditional industries died. In June, 1969 the badly polluted River Cuyahoga caught fire. Nine years' later the city defaulted on all bank loans. Cleveland became a joke city, lost its beloved football team for a few years and got it back again. In the 1990s the city has renewed itself, calling itself the new American city.
The Sheppard case refuses to go away though, it forms a loose thread of scandal and sociological wonder through half a century of Cleveland life. Journalists who cut their teeth in the rabid press coverage of 1954 are still entrenched in their positions, abusing the son just as they traduced his father. The city is still poised in its back-curled defensive position.
Moods change slightly though. This morning Sam Reese Sheppard was out and about and a couple of sanitation workers shouted to him. "Way to go Sam. Doin' it for the people." He felt honoured.
Sam Reese Sheppard is back in Cleveland. It gets a fraction easier every time. This afternoon he is going to meet the mayor. A BBC crew is in town to make a film about Sam's life. He suspects they will ask him to go to the westside, to Bay Village where he has never been able to bring himself to set foot. The family home was ripped down a few years back, but every paving stone may have the taste of the fearful old familiar.
The beeper belonging to Sam's friend Abe takes two messages during lunch. A guy who taught Dr Sam to wrestle in prison. Another man who was a friend of Dr Sam's. They want to make contact. Things to tell him. Forty-five years later and there are burrows waiting to be explored still.
His civil case against the city will come around in January now. He has promised to himself that he will usher in the millennium in far-away Paris, walking and unknotting his thoughts then, he'll face Cleveland again, fighting to have his father declared innocent as a prelude to a wrongful imprisonment suit.
THE standard of proof for such a claim is far higher than that required for the 1966 acquittal, but he figures they have got there. He will fight to the end, fight till the city pays enough money for him to pay the lawyers who have given him millions of dollars of pro bono work. If there's money after that he wants to establish the Marilyn Reese-Dr Sam Sheppard Foundation to help the children of victims, to fight wrongful convictions and to help with appeal funds. Sam is unencumbered with possessions and would like only the security of a little health insurance. Maybe his own place to live.
"Am I in it for the money?" he asks, before you can. "Forty-five years. My mother killed, my dad destroyed slowly before my very eyes. I'm in it for the money? I'm going to get ready for this trial and I know it will be nasty and tough and hurtful. It's about my mother and my father."
He looks at you dead on. Zen Buddhism has brought him some serenity but he carries still the wounded, distanced face of a man who has walked hopefully down too many blind alleys. He talks about the poems he writes and the songs he composes, the instruments of his solitude. A man who lays his head down without a hand to hold. Mercifully he sleeps too heavily to dream, he says.
Who does he spill his thoughts to?
"My journal and my guitar." he says. And stumbles a little on the starkness of it. "That has been a hardship."
thumphries@irish-times.ie