Popular Crime

by Bill James

  3) He would have to be one cold son of a bitch to go downstairs and start calmly looking through drawers after having beaten a woman to death. Even hardened criminals aren’t that cold and dispassionate. When they kill somebody, they mostly get out of the house as fast as possible.

  So the theory that the dumping of the drawer contents occurred after the murder is totally untenable, while the theory that the dumping of the drawers occurred before the murder is largely untenable as well. It is difficult enough to believe that the intruder enters the house, pokes around in the front room in the dark with his flashlight, doesn’t make any noise, finds the steps and tiptoes upstairs without Sheppard waking up or his dog barking. If the rifling of the drawers occurs before the murder, that increases the time that the burglar is in the house, and it increases the noise that he has to make. Three things that seem improbable have to happen there:

  1. That Sheppard doesn’t wake up when this man breaks in, when he looks around, when he goes into the study, when he dumps stuff on the floor of the study, when he comes back out, or when he climbs the stairs right next to where Sheppard is sleeping,

  2. That the intruder doesn’t notice Sheppard sleeping on the couch, and

  3. That the dog doesn’t bark.

  It’s not impossible, but it’s a reach.

  Does the savage beating of Marilyn Sheppard occur before Sheppard awakens, or after?

  It can’t occur before Sheppard awakes, because he hears Marilyn’s scream. According to Sheppard, he hears Marilyn scream, gets up and immediately races up the stairs, where he is knocked senseless by the intruder.

  If Marilyn had been struck one blow, two blows, three blows … no problem. She was struck twenty-five to thirty-five times … blood flying everywhere. The majority of these blows can’t have been struck before she screamed, or she would have been dead at the time she screamed. Most of them have to have been struck afterward. Sheppard doesn’t report hearing repeated, bone-crushing thuds while he is racing up the stairs, nor is there time for that to have happened, since the intruder, having heard Sheppard running up the stairs, goes over to meet Sheppard at the top of the stairs.

  Then, apparently—by now certainly alerted that there is a man in the house—the burglar/rapist/murderer returns to the bedroom, and completes his vicious assault on the unconscious woman, who by now can certainly not be either a threat to him or a potential rape victim. What kind of sense does it make?

  When I first read Sheppard’s account of the crime, what most bothered me about it is that he is just sooo vague about the details. We expect him to be out of it … it’s the middle of the night, he’s asleep, it’s dark, and he’s hit on the head. We expect him to be foggy on the details—but he is so vague on the details that one can’t avoid the feeling that he is being deliberately evasive. He doesn’t know what time the assault began, nor when it ended … doesn’t have a clue. He doesn’t know anything about the assailant … doesn’t know whether it was a man or a woman, two men, three men, an armada … he doesn’t know. He doesn’t have any description of the assailant … no height, weight, shoe size, hair, clothing, nothing (the famous description “bushy-haired man” was introduced into the case later by other people, and Sheppard sort of vaguely signed onto it). In his first interviews with police he is apparently not even sure that the assailant is human; he keeps describing it as “this form” … I was chasing this form down the stairs toward the lake. I guess it must have been a human if you say so. (An appeals court judge, years after the crime, ridiculed Sheppard’s lawyer for refusing to say that the murderer was human.) Despite two brave physical confrontations with the murderer, he is unable to get any information about him. Despite losing his own shirt under conditions which he is unable to explain, he is unable to rip a shred of cloth off the murderer that might give us a hint about the clothes he was wearing. If he was wearing clothes.

  When you break it down into parts, you see that Sheppard has four reasons why he doesn’t know anything:

  1) He is asleep when the event begins,

  2) It is dark,

  3) He is knocked unconscious, and

  4) He is later choked into unconsciousness.

  Being knocked out twice during the assault is … well, it ties the record. I know of a lot of crime stories in which a witness is knocked unconscious; I can’t really think of another one in which he is rendered unconscious twice, having gotten up in between and chased the intruder several hundred feet. But this list of explanations for his inability to observe anything about the murderer understates the case. It’s not just that he is asleep, he is really asleep. He is so soundly asleep that he doesn’t wake up when the murderer breaks in, pokes around the house, dumps the contents of a few drawers on the floor, and then walks up a staircase which is two feet from where he is sleeping; the day bed backs up against the staircase.

  And it is not just that it is dark, it is really dark because he keeps running by light switches without turning on the light. This bothers everybody about his story … why doesn’t he turn on the light? He’s sleeping, he hears Marilyn scream, he knows something is wrong, the light switch is right there, it wouldn’t cost him one second to turn it on; he doesn’t do it. Why? Wouldn’t you? Later he wakes up, he’s chasing this guy through his house … no lights.

  And the intruder doesn’t have any trouble seeing everything! The intruder has no trouble with the lights or with the layout of the Sheppard house. The intruder is able to bash Marilyn twenty-five or more times in the head—in the dark. Although it is pitch dark, the intruder, hearing Sheppard running up the stairs, is able to go right to the top of the stairs, find Sheppard and punch his lights out—in the dark. The intruder is able to find the drawers and dump them on the ground, find the medical bag which he takes a little ways from the scene of the crime. The intruder, racing through Sam’s house in the dark being chased by the doctor, is able to find the back door, run outside, find the steps leading down to the lake, run down them in the dark, apparently without falling, and then gain the advantage on Sam once more as soon as Sam reaches the bottom of the steps.

  (The preceding paragraphs are printed here exactly as they were written after I had read Paul Holmes’ first book on the Sheppard case, The Sheppard Murder Case, but before I looked into Retrial: Murder and Dr. Sam Sheppard, also by Holmes. In the second book, Holmes piles on yet another explanation for Sheppard’s inability to remember anything that might help identify the intruder(s). In a lawsuit filed against the state of Ohio, Sheppard claims that “as a result of (his) injuries, (he) suffered traumatic amnesia, and still so suffers; as a result of said amnesia (he) is unable consciously to recall the identity of the person or persons causing the said murder, even though (he) did observe said person or persons.” He wants a hypnotist allowed into the prison to help him free the details from the darkened basement of his mind.

  The first book, written seven years after the crime, never suggests that Dr. Sheppard’s failure to describe the assailant(s) has anything to do with amnesia. This issue arises only in the second book. I don’t know how this looks to you, but imagine how it looks to me. Having already ridiculed Dr. Sheppard for offering an improbable array of reasons for not remembering anything, I now find that, years after the crime, he comes forward with yet another explanation. It makes a total of five: sleep, darkness, two concussions and now amnesia as well. He is damned lucky he can remember that he was ever married.)

  It is a genuinely stupid story that Sam tells, and nobody believes it—not the police, not the judges, not the jury, not the media, not even his friends and neighbors, who line up to testify against him. The only people who believe him are his family and his lawyers and a couple of newspaper guys.

  And yet, the forensic evidence does tend to acquit him. Blood spatter analysis was in its infancy in 1954, and the police did not make any effort to analyze the blood spatter patterns in the room where the murder occurred. After the trial, however, Dr. Paul Kirk examined the murder room, and
concluded that the murder had to have been committed by a left-handed man.

  In 1959 Cleveland police arrested Richard Eberling for burglary. Eberling made a living washing windows and doing odd jobs; he had washed the windows at the Sheppard house a few weeks before the murder. He was arrested when it was learned that he was stealing from the houses where he worked, sneaking in and going through drawers.

  Eberling was a large, powerful man—right-handed, unfortunately, but you can’t have everything. During the questioning after his (1959) arrest, the police for some reason started talking to Eberling about the Sheppard murder, and one of them asked Eberling if he could explain why his blood was found at the scene of Marilyn Sheppard’s murder. The cop was bluffing, but Eberling somewhat stunningly produced an immediate explanation as to why his blood was at the scene: he had cut himself on a window while washing windows there, and had dripped blood all around the house before he got it bandaged up.

  By this time more than 25 people had confessed to murdering Marilyn Sheppard, and the police were pretty well inured to such confessions. The police had zero interest in proving that they had screwed up the Sheppard case, and in any event, Eberling never confessed. The incident passed quietly. Eberling was never mentioned in Paul Holmes’ classic 1961 book about the Sheppard case, and was never mentioned at Sam Sheppard’s re-trial in 1966.

  In the 1980s, Richard Eberling murdered an elderly woman, beat her to death. Public interest in the Sheppard case was such that there were still people trying to figure out what had really happened, and some of those people now turned their attention to Richard Eberling. In 2001, after Eberling’s death, James Neff wrote a book essentially arguing that Eberling had committed the murder.

  In the late 1990s Sam Sheppard’s son, Samuel Reese Sheppard, sued the city of Cleveland for wrongfully prosecuting his father, when they could have and should have known that the evidence pointed strongly toward another man. Attorneys for the city of Cleveland elected to defend the case by in essence re-trying Sam Sheppard for the murder once again, arguing that Sheppard did commit the murder, and that it was the second trial, the 1966 trial, which was the miscarriage of justice.

  Cleveland won. The jurors once more found Sheppard’s story unbelievable, and sided with the city of Cleveland.

  My theory is that Richard Eberling did indeed commit the murder—and that he was hired to do so and assisted in the act by Sam Sheppard. I am not aware of any clearly established fact in any of the books about the case that is inconsistent with this theory. The bushy-haired man seen hanging around in front of the Sheppard house at 2:30 that morning and seen walking away from the scene about 4:15 was in fact Richard Eberling. At 2:30 he was waiting in Sheppard’s front lawn for Sam Sheppard to come quietly to the door and signal for him to come in. This also would explain many of the nagging problems with the case:

  1. Why there was no sign of forced entry, leading to a dispute about whether the Sheppards habitually locked their front door.

  2. Why Sam Sheppard chose to sleep on the couch, although his guests the previous evening reported that he and Marilyn appeared to be getting along well that night.

  3. Why Sheppard’s jacket was reported by the first police officer on the scene to have been neatly folded in the middle of the day bed.

  4. Why the “break-in” occurred on a night when the Sheppard’s houseguest, Dr. Lester Hoverston, happened to be absent. Dr. Hoverston had been staying with the Sheppards for several days, but happened to be away that night.

  5. Why Sheppard “fell asleep” while entertaining guests the previous evening.

  Sheppard knew nothing at all about the murderer because he knew everything about him, knew exactly what he looked like and knew who he was.

  He slept on the couch so that he could get up in the middle of the night and let Eberling in, and he put the plan in motion on that day because he knew that Dr. Hoverston was out of town.

  The police could find no evidence of a break-in or robbery because there wasn’t any break-in or robbery.

  The police could find no real evidence showing that Sheppard committed the crime because he didn’t commit it in person.

  The police didn’t find Eberling at the time because they didn’t look for him. They knew that Sheppard was lying through his teeth, so they didn’t look any further.

  Sheppard had bruises on his face after the crime, as if he had been struck by a left-handed man. He had been. He had instructed Eberling to make it look good. (Eberling was not left-handed, but his right hand had probably been disabled by Marilyn’s bite.)

  Sheppard’s night shirt/undershirt was missing after the crime because, when Eberling whacked him across the back of the neck with the lead pipe or whatever it was, he left a recognizable blood pattern on the shirt, in Marilyn’s blood. Sheppard threw the shirt in the lake to get rid of evidence that might have helped the police piece together what had actually happened.

  On reading about the case, it bothered me that Sheppard fell asleep on the couch the previous evening while friends were still visiting. Mockery of Justice tries to make it appear that this was not unusual behavior for Sheppard, but I’m skeptical. I don’t know about you, but if I fell asleep on the couch while we were entertaining friends, my wife would kill me.

  If the neighbors had stayed too late this would start to interfere with the murder plot. Once the neighbors leave, Marilyn has to put a few things away, go on upstairs, get ready for bed, maybe take a bath, perhaps read a few minutes or relax in bed before she falls asleep—and she needs to be soundly asleep before you can commence to killing her. You need 90 minutes there. If the guests stay until 1:00 and Eberling is planning to come about 2:00, that’s a problem. What do you do? Sheppard fell asleep on the couch—or pretended to—a little before midnight, thus clearly signaling to the neighbors that it was time to go home.

  Cooper and Sheppard, in Mockery of Justice, report on the 1993 discovery of a 1954 police report which reports finding spots of blood on the steps down into the basement, apparently a continuation of a blood trail leading from the scene, and also finding traces of blood on and inside a red leather chair in the doctor’s study. Police now know—only Dr. Kirk knew at the time—that the blood trail had to come from an open wound, since blood dripping from a weapon or from bloody clothes would congeal too quickly to leave such a blood trail.

  Cooper and Sheppard interpret this, of course, as evidence of Sheppard’s innocence. To me, it seems like obvious evidence of Sheppard’s complicity in the crime. If, in fact, the killer went down to the basement to wash himself off after the crime, as Sheppard and Cooper suggest that he did, and if he sat in the red leather chair in the study after committing the crime, this, to me, powerfully suggests that he had no fear of being discovered. He had no fear of being “discovered” because the witness was a co-conspirator.

  Sheppard had known Eberling, according to Eberling’s 1980s recollection, since October of 1953. Sheppard, looking for someone to kill his wife, somehow realized that Eberling was a criminal. Many times, probably most of the time, when a man tries to hire a hit man to murder his wife, he winds up negotiating with an undercover cop wearing a wire, or he talks to some guy in a bar who comes forward after the crime and says “Sam Sheppard offered me $2,000 to run over his wife with a pickup truck.” Sheppard was either smart or lucky, or maybe both. He was smart enough to pick the right guy to talk to, smart enough to get Eberling to talking about things he’d be willing to do for money before mentioning what it was he had in mind. He was lucky, in a perverse meaning of the term, that the police assumed that Sheppard had committed the crime himself, and never really looked for an accomplice.

  It could be asked why Sheppard hired someone to commit the crime, rather than do it himself, but this is very common behavior for a murderer, and doesn’t really need to be explained. Sheppard would have known that, if he committed the murder with his own hands, the police could prove he committed it. What he didn’t anticipate was that, even thou
gh he didn’t commit the crime with his own hands, the prosecutors could prove he did, anyway.

  It could be asked why Sheppard didn’t arrange the murder, if he was going to arrange the murder, at a time when he was out of the house, as he was often called away in the middle of the night. (In 1954 small hospitals didn’t operate emergency rooms. Doctors made emergency house calls.) But a) he had to arrange the murder on a day when Les Hoverston would be out of town, and b) Sheppard never knew in advance when he would be called away. And c) for Marilyn to have been murdered an hour after Sheppard was called away from the house in the middle of the night would have been extremely suspicious, and would immediately have led police to search for an accomplice.

  One final thought. Did you ever look at how similar the Sheppard case and the 2002 Scott Peterson case really are? In both cases, a very attractive young wife was murdered. In both cases, she was pregnant. In both cases, the murder occurred on a major holiday—the Sheppard murder on the 4th of July, the Peterson murder on Christmas Eve.

  Both cases erupted immediately into major national stories. In both cases the husband was the primary suspect from the outset of the investigation. In both cases the husband was soon learned to have been involved with another woman.

  In both cases the husband was fairly quickly convicted of the murder. In both cases the husband was convicted, in my judgment, largely because he acted like a creep and said things that didn’t make sense, rather than because of the evidence. There was little or no physical evidence against Sam Sheppard and, in my view, there is essentially no physical evidence against Scott Peterson.

  In the case of Sam Sheppard, the nation began, years later, to question whether he had in fact committed the crime, and eventually public sentiment turned in his favor. This has not yet happened to Scott Peterson, and perhaps it never will, unless the Lifetime channel is able to put together a successful series about a heroic fertilizer salesman on the run from the police.