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- [00:01]
A
Ouch. This knee is killing me. But I can't stop training. The marathon is in two weeks. Let's get on ZOCDOC and find a doctor to take a look at that for you. Okay, Here's a review. Dr. Craddock really takes his time. No, I don't have time. What about Dr. Charles? His patients say he can help find a quick fix. And he's in network.
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B
Great.
- [00:21]
A
Now we're talking. Ah, book it. Booked. One mile down, 19 to go.
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C
Bring it on.
- [00:27]
D
You've got Options. Download the ZocDoc app today. Did you know that the most innocent man in America isn't just a character played by Harrison Ford in a movie? On the 4th of July, 1954, a pregnant woman was murdered in her bed in a quiet lakeside suburb outside of Cleveland. Her husband, a young surgeon, insisted he's not the killer and almost nobody believed him. You've probably seen the movie the Fugitive. Harrison Ford on the run for a murder he didn't commit, chasing down a one armed man. What almost no one remembers as that story was inspired by a real case. What gripped the whole country in 1954 was a single awful question. Could a respected young surgeon really have bludgeoned his pregnant wife to death and then invented a bushy haired intruder to cover it all up? Welcome to Crime Scene, the show where we tell the stories behind the world's most unforgettable crimes. This week on the show, the case of Sam Sheppard, a murder on the 4th of July that quickly snowballs into a tabloid sensation with a fugitive hook so good Hollywood couldn't resist. From Sony podcast and the binge. This is a story we're calling murder on the 4th of July the story of the real fugitive. Hey, everyone. Welcome to Crime Scene. My name's Jonathan Hirsch, and each week over three acts, we are going to dive into the most shocking and complex true crime stories of our era. And each week I'm joined by my friend and fellow documentarian, Cooper Maul. Hi, Cooper.
- [02:09]
C
Hey, Jonathan.
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D
Don't forget this show is a part of the binge, the true crime network that I head up. You hear Cooper on from time to time. We bring you a new limited series podcast each month. Go to getthebinge.com to find out more. Okay, Cooper, here's the thing that gets me about this one. Most people know about the movie with Harrison Ford, but what people don't realize is that this murder, which happened on the 4th of July, appropriate for the timing of this episode with a real doctor and a real murder, is A true mystery that has never been solved. That is fascinating in and of itself.
- [02:41]
C
Yeah, let's get into it.
- [02:42]
D
All right. It's the Saturday night of the 4th of July, 1954. We're in Bay Village, Ohio. It's an affluent suburb hugging the shore of Lake Erie, just west of Cleveland. It's the kind of place where a doctor's family could practically run the local hospital. Small town. Sam and Marilyn shepherd are high school sweethearts. They've been married for nine years. At this point, Sam was 30, an osteopathic surgeon. Charismatic, athletic, the youngest son of a Cleveland medical dynasty. And Marilyn was 31. She was known to be warm. She was well liked. She was also four months pregnant with her second child. Their seven year old son Chip was asleep upstairs. That night, the couples had the neighbors over, Don and Nancy Ahern, for drinks and a movie. Sam was worn out from a long day in the emergency room. He dozed off on the daybed downstairs. The Hearns left at around midnight and Marilyn saw them out. And then she went up to bed. Sometime between 3 and 5 in the morning, Sam says he was woken up by his wife's screams. He ran upstairs into the dark. He found a man there with bushy hair assaulting his wife. Marilyn had been savagely beaten to death in bed. She was struck more than two dozen times in the head and face. Her skull was fractured. Someone said the room looked like red paint had been flicked around. Sam was struck on the back of the neck and knocked out. When he came to, his wife was dead. He checked on their son, who was unharmed. Then he heard a noise and chased someone exiting the house down to the beach. They found him at the water's edge and Sam was knocked unconscious again. He woke up soaked at the edge of Lake Erie, his T shirt and watch gone. At about 5:50am Sam called his neighbor, who happened to be the mayor of Bay Village. In the phone call, he said, my God, Spencer, get over here. I think they've killed Marilyn. Cleveland homicide detectives Robert Chotki and Patrick Garou worked the case. They arrived at the scene at about 8:05 that morning. A couple hours later, Sam was devastated by what he claimed was the senseless murder of his wife. To be fair, though, things didn't completely add up. There was no clear sign of forced entry. The family dog wasn't barking when this happened. Drawers had been pulled open in a strangely tidy way with nothing obviously taken. Sort of reminded me of the Sugarland murders case, where there was a similar kind of altercation that Appeared to look staged, where everything was kind of moved around, but moved around in a very intentional type of way. Sam's T shirt that he wore to bed that night was missing. From the moment it began, it was clear to these investigators and the coroner that Dr. Sam Shepard wasn't providing a complete picture of what had happened that night and that he potentially had a motive. Other things started to emerge, but the detectives would quickly find out that Sam apparently had been having an affair. A lab technician at the hospital that he worked at named Susan Hayes. The detectives would confront him about the affair, but he denied it. When his lover insisted that they were indeed seeing each other, it made Sam appear all the more guilty. All roads pointed to Dr. Sheppard. Or did they? Because alongside what would appear to be damning pieces of evidence, there were what you might want to call counter forensics. What I mean BY that is Dr. Sheppard had documented injuries on his neck and spine, injuries that would be hard to fake or self inflict. And given the brutality of the crime itself, the faint smear of blood on his clothing belied the saturation you'd expect. He's soaked with blood. He wasn't. And the victim? His wife, had her teeth damaged in a way that suggested she'd bitten her attacker's hand. But Sam's own hands had no matching bite wounds. It didn't matter, because by then, the case had left the police station and moved onto the front page of the newspaper. The Cleveland Press, the biggest paper in town, didn't just cover this case, it tried it in print. So on July 21, just a few weeks later, on the front page, it gave an order to the coroner. It said, why no inquest? Do it now. Dr. Gerber is the name of the corner. That same day, Gerber called the inquest, seemingly at the behest of the press. A few days later, another headline barked, quit stalling and bring him in. And on July 30, came the one that really did him in. Why isn't Sam Shepard in jail? Hours later, nearly a month after the murder, Dr. Sheppard was arrested. So the trial of State of Ohio vs. Samuel Shepard opened on October 18, 1954, before Judge Edward Blythen. It ran nine weeks, one of the longest trials in American history. At this point, around 50 reporters jammed the courtroom on a daily basis. The jurors weren't sequestered. Their names and addresses were in the papers. They got letters from strangers demanding a guilty verdict. The prosecution leaned on these two pillars. The first, the motive point that we discussed earlier.
- [08:29]
B
The affair State says that his motive for murder was his love for another woman, that he wanted to get rid of his wife so he could marry this other woman.
- [08:43]
D
The second thing that the prosecution leaned on was the science, or what passed for it. The coroner testified that he could see in a blood stain on Marilyn's pillow the impression of a surgical instrument, a doctor's tool that he held up on the pillowcase for the jury to see. Sam testified for days, but he came off as clinical and pedantic. His lack of warmth would cost him in the public's mind, which is where this case was clearly being adjudicated. Right. On December 21, 1954, after four days of deliberation, the jury found Sam Shepard guilty of second degree murder, which spared him the electric chair. But his sentence would end up being a life in prison. He was 30 years old. His son Chip went on to live with relatives. And then the rest of the family started to fall apart. Sam's father died of cancer. His mother died by suicide. Within weeks of the conviction, whoever the Shepherds had been, that was over. Okay, Cooper, I cannot get over how the Cleveland press went after a suspect. One newspaper editor in particular, Louis Seltzer, he really went for the jugular. Seltzer doesn't really cover this case. He prosecutes it. The press runs front page editorials. Not here's what you need to know, but actually demands about what they want to see happen.
- [10:13]
C
Yeah, and in journalism, we're taught that's like a line that should never be crossed, right? I mean, that's correct. A newspaper is supposed to be a neutral witness to the process, not necessarily a player in it. Right?
- [10:27]
D
Yeah.
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C
And I think the second it starts issuing demands like this, it's not really covering an investigation anymore. It's running one of its own out in the public. So. So this is like a trial by fire with none of the rules that are supposed to protect the accused.
- [10:45]
D
And the timing, I mean, that tells you everything. Take this inquest, right? An inquest is a public hearing that's run by the coroner to establish how somebody died and to start to ferret out who could be responsible for it. This is on July 21st. The Cleveland Press demanded. Why no inquest. Do it now, Dr. Gerber. And that very day, Gerber convenes this inquest. It was staged in a pack school gymnasium with spectators and cameras. Sam was grilled for hours while his own lawyer was barred from speaking and removed from the room.
- [11:20]
C
That's so crazy to me. So by the time anyone is being picked for this jury, this entire city is kind of already seen the prosecution side as entertainment in some kind of way.
- [11:30]
D
Absolutely. And he's being questioned in an environment where you'd imagine that a lawyer would need to be present.
- [11:36]
C
Yeah, it's backwards. And I keep coming back to the jurors chosen for this case. I mean, how would they be able to walk into this courtroom with an open mind? They can't unsee the weeks of headlines that told everyone he was guilty already.
- [11:51]
D
Totally. This case anticipated a lot of the changes we would ultimately see that we now take for granted in these high profile trials. Sequester juries, changes of venue, gag orders that limit public discussion of a case among trial participants. A lot of those legal safeguards, they exist because of what went wrong in this exact case.
- [12:15]
C
Sam Shepard's name actually comes up on the rule that protects people who come after him.
- [12:21]
D
Sam Shepard goes to the Ohio State Penitentiary believing the system has buried him alive. What he doesn't know yet is that two things are coming for him in that cell. A scientist who can read blood and a 28 year old lawyer who is about to put that entire 1954 trial, not Sam, on trial. Coming up, the Supreme Court calls his trial a Roman holiday and a brash young lawyer reopens a case the whole country thought was closed. Here's something kind of alarming.
- [12:59]
E
Apparently three out of four homes in the United States have toxic chemicals in their tap water. And the problem is contaminated water still looks completely clear. We're talking about things like chlorine, lead, forever chemicals, even microplastics. And a lot of standard pitcher or fridge filters. Don't remove most of it. That's why Aquatru caught my attention. Aqua Tru is a countertop water purifier that's tested and certified to remove 84 contaminants from your water using a patented four stage reverse osmosis purification system. And the nice thing is there's no plumbing or complicated installation. You just plug it in and use it. Aqua Tru has been featured in places like Business Insider and Popular Science and has even been named best countertop water filter by Good Housekeeping. Plus, 98% of customers say their drinking water is cleaner, safer and healthier. Head to aquatru.com and get 20% off your purifier using promo code Crime Scene. Aqua Tru even comes with a 30 day best tasting water guarantee. That's aquatrue.com, a Q u a t r u.com promo code crimezine. You know what no one tells you about habits. They're not usually tied to one big moment. They're tied to all the little moments. Waiting for your coffee, sitting at a red light, finishing a meal, watching tv. Your brain starts associating those moments with reaching for something. That's why I think Fume is such an interesting idea. Fume is a flavored air device designed to help people quit smoking and vaping by replacing the habit itself. There's no nicotine, no batteries, and no vapor. It's just a simple weighted device that gives your hands and mouth something else to do when those familiar routines kick in. I've noticed that habit even when I'm not thinking about cravings, when I just need something to fidget with. As an ex smoker, that's something I've noticed about cravings. Like it sometimes is just about having something to fidget with when I'm in between tasks, scrolling emails, sitting on a call. And that's kind of a point. Those are exactly the moments where old habits tend to sneak back in. The flavors seem really great too. They're intentionally lighter than vaping, more like flavored water compared to soda. Crisp mint is a strong flavor and great for heavier users, while raspberry is a little tangy. And on the sweeter side, Fume has already helped over 700,000 people take steps towards better habits. And now it's your turn. When you grab a journey pack, you'll get a free gift just for using our code crimezine. Head to tryfume.com that's T R Y F U-M.com and use code Crime Scene to claim your free gift today.
- [15:54]
C
Okay, Jonathan, so when we left it, it's 1954. Marilyn shepherd had been bludgeoned to death in her family bedroom.
- [16:02]
D
Yeah.
- [16:02]
C
The Cleveland Press has convicted her philandering husband on the front page and a jury has made it official. Sam is doing life for a second degree murder. And Sam is around 30 now, and his parents are gone and his son is being raised by relatives. As far as the state of Ohio is concerned, this case is. Is closed.
- [16:23]
D
It's not closed yet. So it's about to become what people would later call the retrial of the century. First, though, let's dig into how we got here. In early 1955, the defense hired a man named Dr. Paul Leland Kirk, criminologist out of UC Berkeley and one of the founding figures of modern blood spatter analysis. Kirk went to the actual bedroom. He spent months working on the blood. What he concluded directly challenged the prosecution story the spatter pattern indicated the killer was left handed. Sam Sheppard was right handed. There was a large blood stain on the wardrobe door that matched neither Sam nor Marilyn, meaning a third person had been bleeding in that room. The weapon was something cylindrical, like a pipe or a flashlight. Not a surgical instrument at all. Kirk filed all of this in 1955 as the centerpiece of a motion for a new trial. A court looked at it and denied that motion, and the evidence would sit ignored for more than a decade. Meanwhile, two people reached out to Sam in prison. First, Ariane Teban Johannes was a glamorous German divorcee, and she started to write him. She followed the case from Europe. The second was a lawyer, a young, aggressive Boston attorney named F. Lee Bailey. In 1961, he took the case. Bailey made a legal pivot that changed all of this. He didn't argue that Sam was innocent. He argued that the 1954 trial itself was unconstitutional, that you cannot get a fair trial in a courtroom, that newspapers have already turned into a circus.
- [18:06]
F
We filed what is called a petition for a writ of habeas corpus which asks that he be released because his constitutional rights had been violated. And it came on before federal Judge Carl A. Weinman in southern Ohio. He found that the judge who heard the case was a prejudiced man, had not been fair to Sam at all. Furthermore, that he didn't keep control of his courtroom.
- [18:29]
D
Then in 1964, a federal judge agreed, calling the original trial a mockery of justice and the Cleveland press the most insidious violator of shepherd's rights. After nearly a decade behind bars, Sam walked out on bond, and days later, he married his pen pal, Ariane. But he still wasn't cleared. Ohio appealed, and Bailey took it all the way up the chain. On June 6, 1966, the United States Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 in what was known as Shepard v. Maxwell. It held that Sam had been denied a fair trial, faulting the judge for failing to control the massive and pervasive and prejudicial publicity, for not sequestering the jury, for not controlling the reporters and not moving the trial. The court called the original proceeding a Roman holiday, which is an old phrase for a spectacle staged for the crowd's entertainment with the victim as the show. Two years after he walked free on bond, Sam Shepard was getting a second trial. He was now 42. He'd gone to prison, a celebrated surgeon. A decade later, he came out with his health failing, his fortune drained and his name basically a national punchline.
- [19:47]
B
I've been waiting for 12 years to be retried. And I wish to be retried because Mr. Bailey, Athlee Bailey of Boston is going to vindicate me and prove my innocence in court.
- [19:59]
D
The second trial opened in the fall of 66, and this was a totally different experience from the first. The defense attorney, F. Lee Bailey's strategy was a masterclass in restraint. He kept Dr. Shepard off the stand entirely. He didn't call his ex mistress Susan. He took two things that had destroyed Sam in 54, that cold testimony and the hot affair, and he simply removed it from the room. Then Bailey went to work on the piece of evidence that had defined the first trial. That pillow with the surgical instrument imprinted on it. He asked the coroner to describe it, to produce a single tool anywhere that could leave that mark. And in a shocking courtroom moment, Gerber admitted that he had traveled all over the country looking for that exact instrument and had never found it. This is from the summary of the blood spatter finding that was presented at the trial. He said, quote, the murderer was left handed. A third person's blood was on that closet door. The weapon was cylindrical like a flashlight, not a surgical instrument, and a flashlight like the dented one that was pulled from the shallows of Lake Erie near the shepherd home. After Marilyn murder in 1954, it took the jury four days to convict Dr. Shepard. This time, the contrast couldn't have been sharper. Twelve years later, after a day of deliberations, a jury found Sam Sheppard not guilty.
- [21:28]
B
And from the top of the courthouse, a group of female inmates in the jail there shouting encouragement, cheering Sam Shepard, his wife Ariana, found not guilty by a jury of seven men and five women.
- [21:45]
D
So after a decade, he was officially a free and innocent man. But it's not like Dr. Shepherd was just handed his life back. At this point, you wonder about people in these situations. He struggled to return to normalcy. A patient died under his care, and he became embroiled in a malpractice suit. His wife Ariane said that sober, he was a gentleman, but that alcohol and pills made him dangerous. Stealing from her, threatening her, throwing bottles. They divorced in 1969. And then comes this chapter that is almost too on the nose to be real. In August of 1969, Sam Shepard, the man who'd spent a decade insisting he was a victim, made his debut as a professional wrestler. They billed him as Killer Sam Shepard. He leaned all the way into it. The macabre Persona that the public had pinned on him, he now sold as this act. Under the lights, he wrestled more than 40 matches. His trainer and manager was a man named George Strickland. And after a motorcycle trip to Mexico, Sam married his manager's 20 year old daughter, Colleen. But his third marriage wouldn't last very long. Neither would he. Okay, do we need a minute to react to the fact that Sam Shepard became the wrestler killer Sam Shepard?
- [23:11]
C
It's unbelievable. I mean, there's part of me that just wants to be like, my God. I mean, way to capitalize on the way everybody like screwed you over.
- [23:19]
D
Right.
- [23:20]
C
But at the same time, it's just such a bad look.
- [23:22]
D
And also maybe a trauma response. I don't know. It's pretty intense. So back to the story at hand here. Before we go any further, I did want to flag something that I think is very interesting. This case outlives the story in a way Shepard v. Maxwell is taught in basically every American law school. Now, it is the case that says a judge has an affirmative duty to protect a defendant from the press.
- [23:47]
C
Yeah. And all of that now just seems so obvious. But like you said before shepherd, it wasn't. A judge could just kind of let the circus happen. And now after shepherd, we have kind of this modern toolkit, if you will, gag orders, juries being sequestered, way tougher jury screenings, and change a venue if you prove you can't get a fair trial where this crime happened, or too many people in that town are under the influence of things like the press, et cetera.
- [24:18]
B
Yeah.
- [24:19]
D
And I think it's easy for all of us to sort of tie this to the present and what we've seen since then. Right. Like when the OJ Simpson trial was swallowing the country in the 90s, the precedent that folks leaned on was Shepard v. Maxwell as the framework for how to protect the legal process. And that meant that the judge in OJ's case could sequester the jury for months, which is what they did, and clamp down on what lawyers could say to the cameras, even though they were right out front and covering the whole thing. And in the courtroom, it at least provided some protections, the kind of things that Sam Shepard never got.
- [25:02]
C
Yeah. I mean, and these protections really are all the more important today given how ever since oj, the amount of coverage and misinformation present just seems to have become endless. Right. I mean, today it's every person with a phone and social media and all these things, like the safeguards that were created after Sam's case have to work almost overtime now. You know, I think about trials like Debt Be Heard or Karen Reed where you hear these stories of the juries being able to just go home and sit on social media and see everybody's hot take on the trial and still
- [25:41]
D
with or without those protections. At the end of the day, this is a case where we do not know right now, as of this recording, who killed Sam Shepard's wife. But there is a unbelievable third act to this story beyond the trial itself. While Sam Shepard was still behind bars, a version of his story had already become a hit TV show. An innocent doctor on the run hunting the real bushy haired killer. Decades after his death, it would come back as a Hollywood blockbuster. America fell in love with this story. But the truth, it turns out, is even stranger. And almost no one connected the fantasy to the broken man in the wrestling ring. Coming up, the doctor who became a wrestler dies before Hollywood turns his nightmare into a blockbuster and his son spends a lifetime trying to clear his name.
- [26:45]
G
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- [27:11]
D
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- [27:15]
C
Wasn't that delicious?
- [27:16]
A
So good.
- [27:17]
D
Your bill, ladies.
- [27:18]
A
I got it.
- [27:19]
C
No, I got it.
- [27:21]
D
Seriously, I insist.
- [27:23]
C
I insisted first. Don't be silly.
- [27:25]
D
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- [27:33]
F
Okay.
- [27:33]
D
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- [27:35]
C
Rock, paper, scissors.
- [27:36]
G
Shoot.
- [27:36]
C
No.
- [27:38]
D
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- [27:46]
C
Okay, to catch everybody up. Sam Shepard was convicted in 1954, then freed by the Supreme Court in 1966 to become a wrestler who married a 20 year old. But the murder of his first wife was never actually solved.
- [28:03]
D
That's correct. In 1963, while Sam was still in prison, a show called the fugitive premiered on ABC. David Jansen played Dr. Richard Kimball, a physician wrongly convicted of murdering his wife, who escapes prison and spends the series hunting the real killer, a one armed man. It was a massive hit and sounds vaguely familiar.
- [28:28]
H
After a while, I cooled off and I drove home. About a block from the house, I almost hit a man. Man with one arm. He was running. I found my wife beaten to death. To be unmotivated, a Vagrant, a prowler, the police, never. That was over two years ago.
- [28:45]
D
In 1993, it became the blockbuster movie with Harrison Ford that most of us have seen. That film is the version that people picture today when they hear the title, right? The real man never saw a frame of that. He had been in his grave for more than two decades by the time the box office fell in love with the innocent fugitive all over again.
- [29:09]
G
I didn't kill my wife.
- [29:12]
D
So you're probably wondering, how does the real story compare to the blockbuster? Put them side by side, and the gap is really the whole point. In the movie, Richard Kimball is unambiguously innocent. The audience watches the murder happen. The one armed man is real. Kimball is good. And by the end, the system admits they've caught the wrong man. He's vindicated before the credits roll. America loved that story so much that they bought it twice, once on television and then at the box office. The real version offers none of that comfort. Sam Shepard sat in a cell for 10 years. The third person, potentially the assailant, has never found. He's not exonerated, he's acquitted, which is not the same thing. And in place of a triumphant ending, he got addiction, a malpractice suit, and a wrestling gimmick built on the word killer. The show's creator, Roy Hutchins, always denied that it was based on Shepard and pointed instead to Les Miserables and a desire to build a hero who behaved like a Western hero. But the connections kept surfacing anyway. Someone in the orbit of Susan Hayes, the mistress of Sam Shepard, even worked as a music editor on the Fugitive. The case kept leaking into the fiction, whether people wanted to admit it or not. And this is sort of the dissonance at the center of it. America loved this morally simple version of the story, the innocent fugitive as entertainment, while the actual man lived quite a messy life. He got out of prison only to succumb to alcoholism. And he was free, but kind of not. On April 6, 1970, he was found dead in his home of liver failure. Was 46 years old by the end. He'd reportedly been drinking as much as 2/5 of liquor a day. But his story wasn't over because there was someone in the house that night. We haven't talked about since the beginning of this his son Chip, who wasn't about to let it go. Chip was seven when he lost both of his parents in a single stroke, his mother to murder and his father to a prison sentence. He grew up as the son of the most notorious Convicted killer in Ohio. And he could never make himself believe it. He didn't believe his father had bludgeoned his mother in the next room while he slept. So clearing Sam's name was never really about only his father. It was the way to force the real question back into the front of people's minds, which is, if Sam didn't kill Marilyn, who did? Chip spent his adult life on a single mission to get a court to formally declare his father innocent and to name the person who actually killed Marilyn. He chased it through books, exhumations, a lawsuit, and forensic science his father never really lived to see. And as that science improved, it kept circling back to the figure Paul Kirk had pointed out without a name in 1955. A third person bleeding in that room. By the 1990s, investigators and Chip's own forensic team had settled on a suspect. Richard Eberling. Was Eberling the bushy haired man his father had described? He didn't really fit it. He would later be said to have pulled on a wig and makeup that night. A disguise that would explain the figure Sam grappled with in the dark. Eberling was a window washer who worked at the Sheppard home before the murder. Five days after the murder, a Cleveland detective named Aldebert o' Hara interviewed him. And then he was never seriously pursued after that. That became one of the most criticized failures of the original investigation. Years later, the reasons to look harder started to pile up. In 1959, Eberling was arrested for theft, and police found a ring belonging to Marilyn Shepard. Among his things, he said he'd found it in a drain while washing windows at the Sheppard home. He had documented history of stealing from homes that he worked at. He proceeded to tell me and talk as if he were actually present at the murder. I felt very definitely, yes, that this guy could have been murdered. By 1995, a forensic team hired by Chip's lawyers had built a case against Eberling on paper. He knew the shepherd house intimately, including the basement entry investigators believed the killer had used. His alibi for that night had never been verified. And his story shifted over the years. He matched the available descriptions of the intruder. And then there was the detail that unsettled the profilers the most. Years earlier, unprompted, Eberling had volunteered an explanation for why his own blood might have turned up inside the shepherd home. The answer to a question no investigator thought to ask him. By the time the investigators came back to Eberling, he was already in prison for killing one of his own clients. In 1984, an elderly widow named Ethel May Durkin, a woman he worked for as a caretaker, died of injuries from a fall. Eberling was convicted of aggravated murder in her death and of forging her will to seize her estate. And the suspicion didn't stop with her. He was also suspected in the unsolved 1962 beating death of Durkin's sister. And here's the cruelty that Chip shepherd kept running into. Not guilty and innocent are not the same word. Right. A jury can refuse to convict a man and still never say that he didn't do it. His father, Sam, was acquitted in 1966, but Ohio never declared him innocent and never apologized. He died in limbo, free, yet still in the public mind. Possibly the man who got away with it. Chip tried to close the gap in all the ways unavailable to his father while he was alive. He filed a wrongful imprisonment claim, had both parents exhumed for DNA, and turned the old evidence over to an analyst. It pointed where Paul Kirk had in 1955, that blood that was neither Sam's nor Marilyn's, and semen confirming a sexual assault that was never tested in 1954. The profile was consistent with Richard Eberling, who died in prison in 1998, still denying it, though a fellow inmate said he confessed. But consistent with is also not a match. The samples were degraded, and that profile fit 6% of the population. So in a 2000 civil trial, the jury ruled against chip in three hours. No exoneration. Chip had always said it was never about the money. And in the end, he got neither the money nor the words that he spent his life chasing. Marilyn's murder to this day is officially unsolved. But I think the strongest thing anyone could say is that reasonable people looking at the same evidence over 70 years still disagree. Sam died without ever being exonerated. And the most famous innocent man in America turned out to be a real person who no one could prove innocent or guilty for a murder that happened in 1954 on the 4th of July. We're here at the end, Cooper. Let's step back from the evidence for a second. We've done three acts, and I genuinely can't tell you who killed Marilyn Shepard. Neither can anyone else.
- [36:41]
C
Yeah, Myself included.
- [36:42]
D
This isn't the cop out. It's really the honest findings of this case.
- [36:46]
C
Yeah, I mean, there's basically two endings here, Jonathan. So either Sam was a cheating husband who staged a burglary and self inflicted his injuries, which two or three juries effectively believed here, or Richard Eberling was the bushy haired intruder. And an innocent man lost his wife, his freedom and his life to a system that never caught the real killer.
- [37:10]
D
Sam was definitely guilty of cheating and of lying under oath, but doesn't make him a killer, just makes him a complicated person.
- [37:19]
C
Yeah. And I think that's why the movie and television. Right. Kind of had to make him a pure hero.
- [37:26]
D
Right.
- [37:27]
C
Richard Kimball is this innocent, good person. And Sam Shepard, you know, was acquitted but imperfect. And I think American audiences want that first man. Right. But we got stuck with, in reality, the second.
- [37:43]
D
And we're here for the crime, of course. So looking at these juries that all reviewed the same murder and reached different conclusions across almost half a century, at some point you just kind of have to accept that you're not going to find the clear answer.
- [38:00]
C
Yeah. I think the honest ending to this case is that it doesn't have one. Right. It's just an accumulation of evidence that was never enough for people who needed it the most.
- [38:10]
D
Do you guys beg to differ on that point though? Because we have three juries to look at that all came to different conclusions. A discredited surgical instrument, testimony, blood that pointed to a left handed stranger, a window washer with the victim's ring, and a body count of his own and DNA that would exclude him but couldn't confirm him either. A confession that contradicted itself and was partly admitted to be a hoax. If you were on the jury, what would you do?
- [38:41]
C
I wanted the three juries.
- [38:42]
D
Three juries, what would you do? Each one tell us. We'd love to know what you think.
- [38:48]
C
Can't believe I'm saying this, Jonathan, but it's July already.
- [38:51]
D
We are in the heat of summer, so.
- [38:54]
C
But in Los Angeles, new month, new binge. And this month we have a title out called the Poetry.
- [39:01]
D
Okay.
- [39:01]
G
Yeah.
- [39:01]
D
I've been really waiting for this story to come out because it's about. It's kind of about a story that we all know, but in, in a way that will surprise you. So episode one of the Poet begins in 1977 in Wichita, Kansas. Folks are already kind of living in fear of the BTK killer, who was an active serial killer at this time. And that is when a woman named Ruth Finley gets a phone call from a man who threatens her life. This person continues to stalk her and terrorize her. He calls her names, he sends her poems, and he describes how, precisely how he plans to kill her. And he also, based on her account, starts to follow her in the streets. She approaches the police about it and they begin to believe that this might be the work in fact of the BTK Killer. If you want to hear the whole thing right now, you can subscribe to the binge to unlock the whole series early ad free. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts by searching for the binge channel and hitting subscribe. Or you can go to Patreon or you can also listen on Spotify just visit getthebinge.com to listen to. Yeah Hey y', all, thank you so much for joining us on Crime Scene. Just a reminder here, you can watch or listen to us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. This show is a production of Sony Podcast and the Binge. Thank you to everybody who makes this happen week in and week out. Also, we're journalists. We love journalism. These stories have been deeply reported, the ones that you hear on the show and you can find an extensive bibliography by going to the show notes of this episode and to every episode to learn more about the reporting that informed all of the great stories you hear on Crime Scene. And just one last note, you can get exclusive content from us and the binge over 60 jaw dropping true crime stories bingeable and ad free right now by signing up for our patreon@getthebinge.com so go to getthebinge.com to get access to to our entire catalog of stories, but also to get behind the scenes access to all of the stories that Cooper and I are working on. To join us in the conversation about these cases, go to getthebinge.com to learn more.
- [41:26]
I
Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. Now I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited Premium Wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made this $15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try at mintmobile. Com.
- [41:47]
C
Switch upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months or $180 for 12 month plan required $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees Extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes me slow when network is busy. See terms.