Neurosurgeon, Professional Wrestler, Prominent Figure in a Murder. Sam Sheppard received worldwide recognition after being tried and convicted of the 1954 murder of his four-months pregnant wife Marilyn in a Cleveland suburb. It unleashed a fifty-year odyssey that shattered his well-known family and finally culminated in a foolhardy trial to force the State of Ohio to pay millions in compensation for false imprisonment. In a trial with worldwide scrutiny and attention, he was convicted of second-degree murder, serving ten years in prison before his conviction was overturned in a second trial by the United States Supreme Court in 1966. Days after he was convicted, his mother shot herself to death; 11 days later his father died of a hemorrhaging ulcer; and finally, Marilyn Sheppard's father committed suicide. Sheppard had to sue to get his medical license reinstated, and after being reinstated, his malpractice insurance was canceled after numerous malpractice lawsuits, thus his livelihood was destroyed. Born Samuel Holmes Sheppard, he was the youngest of three sons born to Dr. Richard Allen Sheppard. He attended Cleveland Heights High School where he was an excellent student active in football, basketball and track and was class president for three years. Although several small Ohio colleges offered him athletic scholarships, he chose to follow the lead of his father and two older brothers into osteopathic medicine. He enrolled at Handover College in Indiana to study prepositional courses, followed by supplementary courses at Western Reserve University in Cleveland and finished his schooling at the Los Angeles Osteopathic School of Physicians and Surgeons. He completed his internship, received his degree and became a resident as a neurosurgeon at Los Angeles County General Hospital but returned to Ohio to joined his father's growing hospital and family practice. After marrying Marilyn, the couple settled into a residence in Bay Village, a fashionable Cleveland suburb located on a cliff above the Lake Erie shore. This residence became a murder scene. While working in the prison hospital, he was an exemplary inmate at Ohio State Prison in Columbus. Sheppard became involved in a long-distance correspondence with a German divorcee. Upon release from prison on a technicality, he promptly married his German pen pal in 1964. After losing his profession, his German wife filed for divorce in 1969 charging that while under the influence of alcohol and drugs, Sheppard had stolen her money and physically abused her. After the divorce, he settled in Columbus and worked as a pro-wrestler in an attempt to support himself. He married for a third time to the 20-year-old daughter of his wrestling manager but a year later he was found dead in the couple's home. The cause of death was ruled as liver failure related to alcoholism. Initially being buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Gardens , his body remained there until September of 1997 when he was exhumed for DNA testing for a lawsuit brought by his son in an attempt to clear Sheppard's name. After the tests, the body was cremated, and the ashes were inurned in a mausoleum with his wife. All newspaper articles mentioned the Sam Sheppard Case was the inspiration for the television series "Fugitive" and an accompanying movie, which Roy Huggins, creator and screenwriter, has vehemently denied. Richard Eberling, a convicted murderer of an elderly woman, was present in the murder house the day before the murder washing windows. Another suspect of Marilyn's murder, Eberling died in a prison hospital in Ohio always maintaining no involvement. Sheppard, who died nearly penniless at age 46, went to his grave claiming the deed was the work of a "bushy-haired" man. Members of the Cleveland Police Department, the Prosecution spearheaded by County Coroner Dr Gerber, and the jury that convicted him all went to their graves believing that they had the right man.