CRIME: Forty Seconds of Fury

On July 4 at 5:50 a.m.—the exact time may be important—Mayor J. Spencer Houk of Bay Village, a suburb of Cleveland, was awakened by a phone call from his friend, Dr. Samuel Sheppard: "For God's sake, Spence, get over here quick. I think they've killed Marilyn." In seven minutes Houk reached Sheppard's house. The young doctor was shaken and bloody. His wife, Marilyn, 31, four months pregnant, was dead. Last week Dr. Sheppard was indicted for the murder. "I am not guilty," he insisted. "How could I commit such a terrible and revolting crime?"

Strange Holiday. Sam and Marilyn Sheppard were school sweethearts until he went to Indiana and later to Los Angeles to study osteopathic medicine. She attended Skidmore College for two years, wrote him tearstained, loving letters: "Life seems impossible without you." He replied: "I will never be happy until I see you again." In 1945 they were married. In 1951 Sheppard began to practice with his father and two brothers, all osteopaths, at the family's 200-bed Bay View Hospital.

Sam and Marilyn had a good life. They bought a tree-shaded house on Lake Erie for $31,500 and paid off the mortgage in 2½ years. He had a jeep, a Jaguar and a Lincoln Continental, shared an aluminum boat with Mayor Houk. Marilyn taught basketball to schoolgirls and taught Sunday school at the Methodist church. The busy, popular couple liked bowling, golf, fishing, water skiing and sports-car races. They had one son, Little Sam, or Chip, now nearing seven.

On July 3, after a picnic, they had neighbors in to dinner. Later Sheppard put a corduroy jacket over his T shirt and fell asleep on a studio couch. The others watched a TV movie, Strange Holiday. After midnight Marilyn began yawning, and the neighbors went home.

Suspect No. 1. At dawn on July 4 Marilyn's bedroom was red with blood. Her pajamas had been pulled open and her hands had been bruised.

Sheppard told a dazed, disconnected story. Asleep on the couch, he had heard or sensed a cry from Marilyn. He ran upstairs to the bedroom and was "clobbered" by a blow on the head from behind. He recovered, chased a man, whom he described as burly and bushy-haired, to the lake. "It was like catching up with a steamroller," he said later. He said that he was knocked out again, revived and staggered indoors to telephone.

Cleveland detectives noted that the intruder, if any, had left no fingerprints. Chip was not awakened and Koko, the Irish setter, was not heard to bark.* A police time-motion study calculated that Sheppard could have run upstairs in six seconds, and it would have required 40 seconds to strike the 27 blows that had been inflicted on Marilyn's skull. Moreover. Cleveland detectives figured that Marilyn died between 3:10 and 4 a.m. Sheppard phoned to Houk some two hours later. In the meantime, tests disclosed, a trail of blood leading from the bedroom to a basement sink had been wiped away.