CLEVELAND — Like two juries before them, eight people will be asked to decide this week whether Dr. Sam Sheppard was an innocent man wrongly accused of his wife's 1954 beating death or an adulterous husband who killed Marilyn Sheppard in a moment of fury.
What's at stake may be the judgment of history in one of the nation's landmark legal cases, a sensational murder trial made even more famous by "The Fugitive" TV series and movie it inspired.
Attorneys are scheduled to begin closing arguments Tuesday in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court in the wrongful imprisonment lawsuit that Sam Reese Sheppard, the couple's son, has filed against the state of Ohio through his father's estate.
The trial is the climax of over a decade of work by Sheppard to clear his father's name and solve his mother's murder.
In a symbolic way, Sheppard said, the civil case also is aimed at holding all authorities accountable when they put innocent people in prison. His father spent nearly a decade behind bars before being freed and later acquitted.
For Sheppard to win, his lawyers must convince at least six jurors the majority of evidence shows his father was innocent.
The past two months of testimony and years of legal wrangling have been emotionally wearing for Sheppard, but he said he felt he achieved his goals even before the jury begins deliberating.
"My dad was innocent, there's no doubt about that," Sheppard said. "I solidly believe that we've proven that. Even if it doesn't happen in the courtroom, it certainly will for posterity."
County Prosecutor William Mason views the trial as an attempt to finally get to the bottom of the murder mystery — but his conclusion differs from Sheppard's.
"I think we've put on very compelling evidence that Dr. Sheppard probably is the suspect and the guy who committed the murder," Mason said.
Marilyn Sheppard's slaying and Dr. Sheppard's odyssey through the criminal justice system riveted America in the 1950s the way the O.J. Simpson murder trial held the nation's attention in the 1990s.
The victim was unlikely — a suburban housewife killed in her bed in a wealthy suburb along Lake Erie — and so was the accused — a handsome, well-to-do doctor who drove a Jaguar and socialized with Cleveland football hero Otto Graham. When Sheppard was found to have had an affair with a lab technician at his hospital, interest only increased.
The case helped inspire "The Fugitive" TV series and movie and led to a precedent-setting U.S. Supreme Court decision on the effects of pretrial publicity, ensuring it a place in pop culture and legal history.
Marilyn Sheppard was bludgeoned to death in her upstairs bedroom early on July 4, 1954, as her son, then 7, slept in his room nearby.
Dr. Sheppard contended he was sleeping downstairs at the time.
He said he awoke to his wife's cries and ran to help her but was knocked unconscious by a bushy-haired intruder.