Sam Sheppard

Who was Sam Sheppard?

Samuel Holmes "Sam" Sheppard was an American osteopathic physician and, toward the end of his life, a professional wrestler. He was convicted in 1954 of the brutal murder of his pregnant wife, Marilyn Reese Sheppard, at their Bay Village, Ohio home. He spent almost a decade in prison, mostly at the Ohio Penitentiary, before a retrial was ordered, where he was acquitted in 1966. To his death, he maintained his innocence in the murder.

The murder of Marilyn Sheppard and the controversial murder trial of Sam Sheppard in 1954 drew widespread, nationwide attention from the media, creating what the U.S. Supreme Court later described as a "carnival atmosphere" which denied Sheppard his right to due process.

In 2000, Sheppard's son, Sam Reese Sheppard, who was seven at the time of his mother's murder, sued the state of Ohio for his father's alleged wrongful imprisonment. After a ten-week trial, a civil jury returned a unanimous verdict that Sam Reese Sheppard had failed to prove his father had been wrongfully imprisoned.