Lawyer says neighbors killed Marilyn Sheppard

CLEVELAND - F. Lee Bailey, who won acquittal for Dr. Sam Sheppard at the doctor's second trial for murdering his wife, outlined a theory yesterday that two neighbors killed Marilyn Sheppard in the 1954 case that partly inspired ••The Fugitive•• TV series.

Bailey's version of the murder is at odds with the theory supported by the Sheppards' son, Sam Reese Sheppard, who has sued the state claiming his late father was wrongfully imprisoned for 10 years for his mother's death.

Bailey was called as the leadoff witness in the lawsuit trial. The lawyer, who also helped defend O.J. Simpson, was on the witness stand for much of Monday and Tuesday.

Sheppard's lawyers called Bailey to show the doctor's first trial in 1954 was unfair because of a flood of negative news reports.

A few years after Bailey took the case, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the first trial's verdict in a landmark ruling against pretrial prejudice from adverse media publicity. Sheppard's acquittal came at a 1966 retrial.

The doctor told authorities repeatedly that a bushy-haired intruder at the family home on Lake Erie early on July 4, 1954, beat his wife to death in her bed.

Sheppard said the attacker knocked him unconscious when he ran to help his wife. He caught up with the intruder on a beach behind the house but said he was knocked out again in another scuffle.

Under cross-examination, Bailey said Sheppard told him privately he had the impression - although he couldn't be certain - that he had confronted two people during the fatal attack.

Assistant County Prosecutor Steve Dever, part of the state's defense team, said during an argument without the jury present that Bailey's testimony is important because it showed Sheppard changed his story about the killing.

However Bailey said Sheppard was consistent.

"I think the bushy-haired man got a life of his own," Bailey said. "That was one feature of the assailant that Sam could remember."

Sam Reese Sheppard thinks a window washer for the family, Richard Eberling, was the murderer. Eberling was later convicted of stealing Mrs. Sheppard's rings in a 1959 burglary and was convicted in 1989 of killing an elderly widow; he died in prison.

Bailey said he adopted the theory that a couple in the Sheppards' neighborhood, Spencer and Esther Houk, were responsible for Mrs. Sheppard's beating death.

Bailey suggested in 1966 and still believes that Mrs. Houk might have delivered the fatal blows to Mrs. Sheppard after catching Houk having sex with her.

"Somebody was with her man and she didn't like it," Bailey said.

Both Houks have been dead for years. After Sheppard's 1966 trial, Bailey's theory of the murder was presented to a grand jury, which decided against indicting the Houks.

Houk was a butcher and mayor of the Cleveland suburb of Bay Village. The couple were the first people Sheppard called after his wife was killed.

But a witness claimed to have seen Mrs. Sheppard slip a house key to Houk without her husband's knowledge, Bailey said.

He also believed that the position of Mrs. Sheppard's clothing when her body was found, with her untorn pajama tops above her breasts and one leg out of the bottoms, indicates she was having consensual sex.

According to Bailey, Sheppard "talked about the possibility" that his wife had an affair with Houk but had no firsthand knowledge of one.

"He never told me that he caught her at it," Bailey said.

Bailey also recounted how he had Eberling testify in Sheppard's 1966 retrial that the window washer cut himself and bled in the Sheppard house. Sheppard did not recognize Eberling as the killer when Eberling took the stand, Bailey conceded.

"That did not happen," Bailey said.

–compiled by staff and wire reports