Samuel Sheppard

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Samuel Holmes Sheppard , also called Sam Sheppard (born December 29, 1923 , † April 6, 1970 ), was an American doctor and osteopath and a victim of a miscarriage of justice . In 1954 he was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of his pregnant wife Marilyn Sheppard on the night of July 3 to 4, 1954, but was acquitted after 12 years in a retrial because the crime could not be proven.

case

On July 4, 1954, the police received a call. The young doctor Samuel Sheppard, from a small suburb of Cleveland , Ohio , reported that a burglar had brutally murdered his wife Marilyn. The murder took place in the bedroom of the Sheppard couple's mansion in Bay Village , Cleveland.

Although the couple Don and Nancy Ahern, who were friends with the Sheppards, could not detect any suspicion during a visit the previous evening, the suspicion fell on Samuel Sheppard, especially since the doctor and coroner Samuel S. Gerber who was investigating the case, on Marilyn's blood-stained pillow Sheppard believed he recognized the imprint of a surgical instrument. Gerber consulted the specialist pathologists and toxicologists Lester Adelson and Irving Sunshine as experts. On July 4, Adelson performed the autopsy of the pregnant Marilyn Sheppard as Gerber's deputy. Most of the blood type and blood type determinations had been made by Mary Cowan, a laboratory worker. After the indictment, largely based on this, Sheppard was sentenced to life imprisonment in a high-profile trial in the United States, despite the submissions of Sheppard's attorney Corrigan against the results of the trace investigations. The motive for the murder was believed to be the medical technology assistant Susan Hayes, who worked at the Bay Village Hospital and was Samuel Sheppard's lover (in the meantime, the witness Nancy Ahern had reported that Marilyn Sheppard knew about her husband's relationship with Hayes). A follow-up examination of the traces carried out by the scientific criminalist Paul Leland Kirk at the request of Corrigan on January 22, 1955 could no longer change the judgment.

After eight years in prison, Samuel Sheppard's case was reopened after journalists brought facts to light. In 1964 he married Ariane Tebbenjohanns, who also financed the retrial. In 1966 he was released. Again he and his story became a media spectacle.

In 1968, Ariana Sheppard filed for divorce on the grounds that she feared he would cause her "great physical harm".

In 1970, at the age of 46, Sheppard died of liver disease.

America's history turned back to the arrest of Richard Eberling, who used to work as a window cleaner for the Sheppards. The mentally ill man murdered a woman in 1987. The murder resembled that of Marilyn Sheppard in some details. 1990, 20 years after Sheppard's death, tried coroner to identify and DNA specialists, the real culprit with the help of latest high-tech methods. The third trial in January 2000 that Sam Sheppard Jr. and whose attorney Terry Gilbert had tried Ohio State to obtain an acquittal not only for lack of evidence but for proven innocence, ended without the plaintiffs' acquittal. This was justified by the court with the argument that in the state of Ohio only an accused could personally initiate such a process, but not the bereaved in his interest.

Adaptations

The television film Dr. Sam Sheppard: Convicted of Innocence treats events from the point of view of Sam Sheppard Jr. The television series On the Run and the film of the same name are loosely based on its story. This case is also the subject of an episode of the True Crime Scene series .

In his novel "Mr. Peanut" from 2010, the American author Adam Ross takes up the story of Sam Sheppard in a storyline.

literature

  • Jürgen Thorwald : The hour of the detectives. Becomes and worlds of criminology. Droemer Knaur, Zurich and Munich 1966, pp. 172–199.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Samuel Sheppard in the Find a Grave database . Retrieved January 7, 2015.
  2. ↑ Jürgen Thorwald : The hour of the detectives. Droemer Ag, Zurich 1966, p. 172 ("In Cleveland [... began ...] a crime affair which, in the truest sense of the often misused word, developed into one of the 'most sensational' cases in recent American criminal history.") And p. 192 f.
  3. ↑ Jürgen Thorwald (1966), pp. 176-184 and 192 f.
  4. ↑ Jürgen Thorwald (1966), pp. 187 and 192–199.
  5. ↑ USA / FALL SHEPPARD Dollars from Düsseldorf in Der Spiegel , June 13, 1966
  6. ↑ Jürgen Thorwald: The hour of the detectives. Droemer Ag, Zurich 1966, p. 199: "As far as traces of blood were concerned [...] the Sheppard affair was definitely included in the gallery of mistakes, which taught [...] to research new ways and possibilities."
  7. ↑ DIVORCE: ARIANE SHEPPARD - DER SPIEGEL 50/1968. Retrieved February 29, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Sheppard, Samuel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sheppard, Sam; Sheppard, Samuel Holmes (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American osteopath and victim of a miscarriage of law
DATE OF BIRTH December 29, 1923
DATE OF DEATH April 6, 1970