Samuel Reese Sheppard has spend some 40 years trying to clear his father's name. The CBS TV movie "My Father's Shadow: The Sam Sheppard Story" will go a long way toward doing that.
The movie, which airs Tuesday at 8 p.m. on Ch. 2, recounts what remains one the more infamous crimes in 20th-century America. On July 24, 1954, a pregnant Marilyn Sheppard was raped and brutally beaten to death. And brutally may be an understatement. Her head was bashed in with some 35 blows and when she bit her assailant, he pulled away - pulling out her teeth.The attack left her bedroom literally soaked in blood.
Her husband, Dr. Sam Sheppard, told police he was asleep downstairs on the couch. He told police he saw a "bushy-haired stranger," who knocked him out before fleeing.
The doctor's story was not believed. And, as portrated in the TV movie, he was pretty much railroaded into a conviction - only to be freed 10 years later because of that unfair trial and acquitted on retrial.
The Sheppard case was the basis for the TV series and movie versions of "The Fugitive." But unlike the one-armed man who killed Dr. Kimble's wife, no one was ever brought to justice for the real crime.
"My Father's Shadow" is a compelling retelling of the tale, told largely from the perspective of Samuel Reece Sheppard. Only 7 when his mother was murdered, he lost his father as well when the doctor was sent to prison.
The younger Sheppard (played as an adult by Henry Czerny) struggles with his father (Peter Strauss) and his father's legacy. And the movie takes a rather unflinching look at the doctor, who was an arrogant, womanizing jerk even before he went to prison - and all that and an alcoholic after he got out.
But being a jerk shouldn't be the basis for sending someone to prison with a death sentence.
Without giving too much away, the younger Sheppard turns up a great deal of evidence - seemingly incontrovertible evidence - that his father was innocent. Which makes this a shockingly tragic tale because of all the lives it ended or destroyed.
Marilyn Sheppard and her unborn child were only the first to die. Not long after the murder, Sam Sheppard's mother committed suicide. His father died shortly thereafter of gastric ulcers. In 1963, Marilyn Sheppard's father killed himself.
Sam himself lived only four years after he was finally acquitted in a 1966 retrial. His name and reputation poisoned by the publicity, Sheppard drank himself to death in 1970 at the age of 46.
And Samuel Reese Sheppard, haunted by grief and the guilt that went with being just down the hall when his mother was killed and not being able to prevent it, has lived a difficult life. As portrayed in the movie, whether it's Sheppard as a 7-year-old being taunted by classmates or as a fortysomething-year-old trying to put his life in order, you can't help but empathize with him.
None of this is new. It's been reported on in the press, and it was chronicled in Samuel Reese Sheppard's 1995 book "Mockery of Justice: The True Story of the Sheppard Murder Case."
But those don't have the impact of a visual representation - and this TV movie will be seen by millions of viewers. Particularly a movie as well made as this one.
Even the conceit of having the grown-up Samuel Reece Sheppard talk to the ghost of his father works in "My Father's Shadow," clearly portraying the son's anguish and the reasons he is determined to clear his father's name.
It's a gripping tale that just might do the trick.
TUBE NOTES: The WB made its own ratings history on Monday when an episode of "7th Heaven" pulled a 6.0 rating - the first time the new network has ever crossed the 6-rating barrier. (That indicates that 6 percent of the nation's TV-equipped households were tuned in to the show.)
In total viewers, "7th Heaven" beat not only NBC's "Suddenly Susan" and "Conrad Bloom" but Fox's "Melrose Place."
The WB's previous high was a 5.9 for last spring's season finale of "7th Heaven."
- "Baywatch" babe Carmen Electra is joining the cast of the WB's "Hyperion Bay." She'll play the daughter of computer mogul Bordon Hicks (recurring guest star Victor Slezak) and a nemesis for Dennis Sweeney (series star Mark-Paul Gosselaar).
And, if you haven't checked out "Hyperion Bay" lately, this is a show that gets better every week.