DNA Tests May Have Finally Resolved ’54 Sheppard Case

An enduring mystery in crime--the 1954 Sam Sheppard murder case that inspired the TV series “The Fugitive”--may have been resolved Tuesday. New DNA testing of 42-year-old evidence from the Ohio slaying suggests Sheppard was telling the truth when he said that an intruder, and not he, bludgeoned his pregnant wife to death.

The intruder became the mythical “one-armed man” on TV.

The DNA test results, presented to the Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office in Cleveland on Tuesday, found the blood and semen of a third person on crime scene items. The findings supported the physician’s story that a shadowy “bushy-haired” figure had attacked his wife, Marilyn, in her bed as Sheppard snoozed nearby on a couch on July 4, 1954.

Largely because of circumstantial evidence, and because no credible evidence of an intruder ever surfaced, Sheppard, then 30, was found guilty. The conviction was overturned 10 years later in a key U.S. Supreme Court ruling that prejudicial publicity had made the trial a “carnival.”

At a second trial in 1966, in which he was defended by F. Lee Bailey, Sheppard was acquitted. But doubts about his innocence persisted. He died an alcoholic in 1970, guilty of murder in the eyes of many.

“I feel Dad is definitely exonerated,” said Sam Reese Sheppard, the Sheppards’ only son, in a phone interview from San Francisco. “The truth has finally prevailed. Since I heard the results I’ve bounced back and forth between anger and relief. At least now Mom and Dad can be remembered as the people they truly were.”

Exactly who the killer was, however, DNA can’t say--at least with any certainty.

Earlier this year an Ohio judge, hearing a civil case in which Sheppard’s son is seeking a declaration of innocence for his father, ordered that a blood sample be drawn from Richard Eberling, who had washed the windows in the Sheppards’ home around the time of the murder. Eberling, 67, is serving a life sentence in Ohio for murder in another case.

Eberling, who denies having killed Marilyn Sheppard, was identified as a suspect through a six-year private investigation by lawyers and investigators working with Sam Reese Sheppard.

The DNA tests found that Eberling could not be ruled out as the source of blood from the crime scene because he shares a key genetic marker with blood and semen taken from it. But the DNA analysis falls short of declaring a match between Eberling’s DNA and that extracted from evidence.

The testing was conducted by Mohammad Tahir, DNA technical manager at the Indianapolis-Marion County Forensic Services Agency. Tahir extracted DNA from a bloodstain on Sam Sheppard’s pants, from a blood drop on a wood chip taken from the basement stairs in the Sheppard home and from vaginal swabs taken from Marilyn Sheppard. Testing of the swabs indicated semen.

DNA analysis shows that the blood and the semen came from the same person, Tahir said. And those samples, in turn, are consistent with a key DNA marker in Eberling’s blood, Tahir said. But there are also unaccounted-for markers in the crime-scene samples, which makes it impossible to tie them directly to Eberling, Tahir said.

At the time of the murder, police postulated that the blood leading from the crime scene was Marilyn’s and fell from a dripping weapon carried by Sam Sheppard. But blood testing was in its infancy, and the blood was never positively identified as the victim’s.

The test results released Tuesday conclude that the blood from the wood chip and the pants are inconsistent with Marilyn’s. This is significant because they could not have been Sam Sheppard’s blood, either. According to all contemporaneous reports, Sheppard had no cuts or wounds on his body that could have bled. And if the blood was not his, the semen could not have been his either.

Eberling’s attorney, David Doughten, dismissed the findings announced Tuesday.

And those in Cleveland who have long been convinced of Sheppard’s guilt also said they were unswayed by the new findings.