CRIME: Of His Peers

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From his jail cell Dr. Samuel Sheppard sent out a statement this week castigating the jury that convicted him of killing his pregnant wife, Marilyn. His trial, one of the most perplexing in recent years, took 43 days, and the transcript ran to 9,534 pages, totaling more than 2,000,000 words. The surprise was that any twelve people could come to agree on a verdict.

No compromise was possible between Sheppard's defense and the state's version of the crime. The prosecution contended that he beat Marilyn to death deliberately because he loved another woman and then faked evidence of a burglary to escape punishment. Sheppard blamed a "bushy-haired intruder" who overpowered him.

He professed love for his wife—despite her frigidity and his infidelity—and for their son "Chip," 7. "I didn't do it," he insisted. "I couldn't do it to any animal or any human. I couldn't have possibly done such a thing." The jurors took up their task in a locked room, crowded with a table, twelve wooden chairs and 214 court exhibits, some ugly with blood. For five days the seven men and five women—all had been married and one was a college graduate—debated the evidence. They dismissed the legal oratory as "just dramatics." A juror explained: "We were not moved by these arguments. We examined our own consciences and the weight of evidence." They read passages from the transcript again and again, took some 30 written ballots. Until the last day, two jurors voted not guilty.

In the end, after 39 hours and 23 minutes of deliberation, they rejected both Sheppard's story ("fantastic") and the prosecution's picture of a deliberate murder. Sam Sheppard did not plan to kill his wife, they decided, but, once he began to beat her, he continued purposefully and maliciously until she was dead. The verdict: murder in the second degree. The penalty: life imprisonment, with parole possible in ten years. The handsome young osteopath rose stiffly in court for sentencing. Leaving, handcuffed, he glared angrily at the jury.