AFTER 50 YEARS

Fifty years ago this Sunday, a pregnant Mar ilyn Sheppard was sadistically beaten to death as she slept in the Bay Village home she shared with her husband, Dr. Sam Sheppard.

Sam Sheppard, a respected surgeon from a family of doctors, told police he heard the faint cries of his wife while he slept on a daybed downstairs. Upstairs, down the hall from his mother, slept 7-year-old Sam Reese Sheppard.

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Sheppard said he ran up to the bedroom, heard the sounds of someone downstairs and chased an intruder to the beach, where they fought. After lying unconscious for some time at the edge of the water, he later discovered his wife's body and called for help.

But the police and Cuyahoga County Coroner Sam Gerber before conducting any real investigation dismissed Sheppard's account as unworthy of belief. Encouraged by a frenzied local and national media spearheaded by powerful Cleveland Press editor Louis Seltzer prosecutors focused solely on Sam Sheppard as the suspect.

Without much apparent evidence other than the fact that Sheppard was home at the time, had a reputation for womanizing and the police didn't believe his account of the encounter with an intruder, Sheppard was rushed to court within three months in a trial called by appeals courts a "mockery of justice," a "Roman holiday" infused with a carnival atmosphere. Before the trial started, the judge told celebrity reporter Dorothy Kilgallen that Sheppard is "guilty as hell."

Indeed, Sheppard was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. But the U.S. Supreme Court, in a landmark ruling, determined that the trial and surrounding press coverage so tainted the jury that Sheppard's right to a fair trial was violated. He was retried and acquitted 12 years later in a more respectable atmosphere, where a judge insisted on a "fair trial."

The toll on Sheppard and his family was devastating. His mother committed suicide after the first verdict, and his father died from the stress shortly thereafter. Sheppard died at age 46, a result of prison, alcohol abuse and depression. The Sheppards' only son, Sam Reese Sheppard, still lives with the emotional pain and trauma from that horrible day. Yet, ironically, many policemen, prosecutors and judges made names for themselves by putting Sheppard behind bars and went on to successful careers.

For a half-century, no case has generated as much chronic worldwide attention. The numerous books, television documentaries and, of course, the connection to the long-running television series "The Fugitive," have permanently established the case as a cultural phenomenon. The interest hangs on not because this murder was any more brutal or devastating to the victims and survivors than the many murders that happen daily, but because of the lingering mystery of what really happened that fateful morning, and whether truth and, ultimately, justice were served.

And there is where I come into this story. Growing up in Cleveland, I always wondered about this case. On our family trips to Cedar Point, my mother would point out the house where the infamous crime took place. I remember her saying, "This is where a doctor killed his wife."

In 1989, I met Sam Reese Sheppard at a prison reform conference at Cleveland State University and was moved to offer my help in reinvestigating this case from a new perspective, long removed from the generation that had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

Because there had been a revolution in investigative techniques since 1954, we suspected that much evidence had never been properly analyzed or considered. We were also curious about the window washer, Richard Eberling, a creepy character who later claimed he had cut himself and bled in the Sheppard home around the time of the murder, had a stolen ring belonging to Marilyn Sheppard and had just been convicted of the murder of an elderly Lakewood woman, Ethel Mae Durkin.

During the next 10 years, we succeeded in forcing open the coroner's vault of evidence, which produced a trove of physical evidence, including blood and semen stains, hairs, and clothing. We interviewed witnesses, found police records never disclosed, reconstructed the crime scene, exhumed the doctor's body, and enlisted some of the country's most noted forensic scientists to study DNA, and even the psychological profile of the killer. With this new technology, we could show that another individual's blood was in various locations of the crime scene, and even on Sheppard's clothing. Although it is impossible for this article to report all of the findings, we believed we cracked open the case, demonstrating it was impossible for Sheppard to have murdered his wife and that Richard Eberling was the likely killer.

Yet, no matter how successful we were in exposing the shortcomings and biases of the original investigation, we were met by a wall of opposition, often nasty, from a new generation of politicians and prosecutors who felt we were out to disparage the reputations of their predecessors. While there were some in the "system" who wanted to join our efforts to discover the truth, in the end, it was the same old story: the reluctance of government to admit a mistake.

In 2000, we fell short of an almost impossible task: to prove Sam Sheppard's innocence in a court of law 46 years after the murder. The prosecutors, now defenders, spared no resources to win that civil trial. They resurrected the character assassination of Sheppard, even floating the old story of his affair. The woman, now in her 70s, said the affair had ended in California six months before the murder and that Sheppard had told her he loved his wife and would never leave her. They attacked Sam Reese Sheppard, preposterously arguing that his search to clear his father 's name was all about money and publicity.

Fortunately, an abundance of scientific reports and transcripts are now available to historians and scholars to judge this case on the actual evidence without the hidden agendas.

Now, a half-century later, if there is a lesson in the Sheppard case, it is this: The criminal justice system in this country, though noble in its principles of fairness, is still subject to deep flaws. As the prison population surpasses the 2 million mark, and hundreds if not thousands of innocent people have been released because of errors, we need to remember the victims of injustices that occur with too much regularity. And we must never blindly follow public officials, elected leaders, or even coroners, assuming they are trustworthy or work in the interest of fairness.

When the verdict in the Sheppard civil trial was announced, I felt as if a brick slammed into my chest, knowing from the deepest recesses of my soul that Dr. Sheppard was innocent. Yet I can only imagine the feelings of a real victim the Sheppards' son whose life was forever changed by the murder of his young mother and unborn brother, his father's wrongful incarceration and the litany of mistakes, vendettas and indifference to truth that persists in the year 2004, just as it did in 1954.

Gilbert, a Cleveland attorney, represented the Sheppard family in the 2000 civil trial.

© 2004 The Plain Dealer. Used with permission.