He attended Cleveland Heights High School where he was an excellent student and was active in American football, basketball, and track; he was class president for three years.

Although several small Ohio colleges offered him athletic scholarships, Sheppard chose to follow the lead of his father and older brothers and pursued a career in osteopathic medicine.

Some items from the house, including Sam Sheppard's wristwatch, keychain and key, and fraternity ring, appeared to have been stolen.

[5] The family dog was not heard barking to indicate an intruder, and their seven-year-old son, Sam Reese "Chip" Sheppard, was asleep in the adjacent bedroom throughout the incident.

Some newspapers and other media in Ohio were accused of bias against Sheppard and inflammatory coverage of the case, and were criticized for immediately labeling him the only viable suspect.

[12] The local media ran salacious front-page stories inflammatory to Sheppard that contained no supporting facts or were later disproved.

During the trial, a popular radio show broadcast a report about a New York City woman who claimed to be his mistress and the mother of his illegitimate child.

[citation needed] The defense further argued the crime scene was extremely bloody, yet the only blood evidence appearing on Sheppard was a bloodstain on his trousers.

[17] However, criminologist Paul L. Kirk later said that if the beating had broken Mrs. Sheppard's teeth, pieces would have been found inside her mouth, and her lips would have been severely damaged, which was not the case.

[19]Sheppard ran back downstairs and chased what he described as a "bushy-haired intruder" or "form" down to the Lake Erie beach below his home, before being knocked out again.

[26] On February 13, 1963, while F. Lee Bailey was pursuing the appeals process, Sheppard's former father-in-law, Thomas S. Reese, died by suicide in an East Cleveland, Ohio, motel.

Bailey's petition for a writ of habeas corpus was granted on July 15, 1964, by a United States district court judge who called the 1954 trial a "mockery of justice" that shredded Sheppard's Fourteenth Amendment right to due process.

The State of Ohio was ordered to release Sheppard on bond and gave the prosecutor 60 days to bring charges against him, otherwise the case would be dismissed permanently.

Tebbenjohanns endured her own bout of controversy shortly after the engagement had been announced, confirming that her half-sister was Magda Ritschel, the wife of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels.

In his closing argument, Bailey scathingly dismissed the prosecution's case against Sheppard as "ten pounds of hogwash in a five-pound bag".

[35] After his acquittal, Sheppard worked with ghostwriter Bill Levy[36] to write the book Endure and Conquer,[37] which presented his side of the case and discussed his years in prison.

[40] Sheppard wrestled over 40 matches before his death in April 1970, including a number of tag team bouts with Strickland as his partner.

On May 10, 1968, Sheppard was granted surgical privileges at the Youngstown Osteopathic Hospital,[44] but "[his] skills as a surgeon had deteriorated, and much of the time he was impaired by alcohol".

[55] Sheppard's body remained buried until September 1997 when he was exhumed for DNA testing as part of the lawsuit brought by his son to clear his father's name.

[57] After the tests, the body was cremated, and the ashes were interred in a mausoleum at Knollwood Cemetery in Mayfield Heights, Ohio, along with those of his murdered wife, Marilyn.

[62] During the civil trial, plaintiff attorney Terry Gilbert contended that Richard Eberling, an occasional handyman and window washer at the Sheppard home, was the likeliest suspect in Marilyn's murder.

[66] In his testimony in the 2000 civil lawsuit, Bailey stated that he rejected Eberling as a suspect in 1966 because "I thought he passed a good polygraph test."

[69] Throughout his life, Richard Eberling was associated with women who had suspicious deaths and he was convicted of murdering Ethel May Durkin, a wealthy, elderly widow who died without any immediate family.

[citation needed] Durkin's body was exhumed and additional injuries were discovered in the autopsy that did not match Eberling's previous claims of in-house accidents, including a fall down a staircase in her home.

[75] The jury deliberated just three hours on April 12, 2000, before returning a unanimous verdict that Samuel Reese Sheppard had failed to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that his father had been wrongfully imprisoned.

[76] On February 22, 2002, the Eighth District Court of Appeals ruled unanimously that the civil case should not have gone to the jury, on the grounds that the statute of limitations had expired, and that a claim for wrongful imprisonment abated with Sam Sheppard's death.

[78][79] A 2002 book theorizes that Marilyn Sheppard was murdered by James Call, an Air Force deserter who passed through Cleveland on a multi-state crime spree at the relevant time.

Pages 444-451 show multiple, comparative photographs of Major Call's Luger pistol with the blood-stained pillowcase of Marilyn Sheppard.

During the original trial, the blood stain patterns were suspected of having been made by a surgical instrument, which F. Lee Bailey disproved during the 1966 retrial.

[80] In 2012, William Mason, then Cuyahoga County Prosecutor, designated the Cleveland–Marshall College of Law Library at Cleveland State University as the repository for records and other materials relating to the Sheppard case.