In the early hours of Independence Day, 1954, Don and Nancy Ahern left the Lake Drive home of their hosts, Sam and Marilyn Sheppard. The couples, who lived just a few houses from each other in Bay Village, a tony suburb 15 miles west of Cleveland, had spent the evening socializing over dinner and drinks. Sam was, with good reason, exhausted. An osteopathic surgeon, he had performed a routine operation at Bay View Hospital that afternoon. Shortly after it ended, a young boy was brought into the emergency room after being hit by a telephone company truck. Sheppard cut open the boy’s chest, which was covered with tire marks, and massaged his heart until he lost feeling in his fingers, trying in vain to get it beating again.

Sheppard returned to the dinner party but was later called back to the hospital to consult on a broken leg, so—after chewing on cloves to mask the two martinis on his breath—he returned to Bay View. When he finally got home for good, Sheppard was subdued. After dinner and a dessert of blueberry pie, the couples settled into the living room. Don listened to the Indians–White Sox game on WERE, while the others watched the movie Strange Holiday, in which Claude Rains returns from a camping trip to find that the U.S. government has been overthrown by fascists. Sam sat in a chair with Marilyn in his lap for a bit, then he moved to a daybed, where he dozed off.

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Around that time, another neighborhood couple from the Sheppards’ social circle was attending a party. Otto and Beverly Graham were arguably the most recognizable pair in Cleveland. As quarterback, Otto had led the Browns to a championship game appearance in each of his eight pro seasons. The popular 15-minute television show he and Beverly hosted three nights a week at 6:45 on WXEL, At Home with the Grahams, had just aired its last episode. They were handsome and graceful—but even that grace couldn’t keep Otto from splitting the seat of his pants during their night out. He returned to Winston Drive to get a new pair, then got sidetracked by the TV and was late returning to the party.

A mile away Marilyn saw the Aherns out the front door at 12:30 a.m., almost the precise moment that Hank Majeski delivered a walk-off single in the bottom of the 15th inning, giving the Tribe a 5–4 win and preserving their 41⁄2-game lead over the Yankees in the American League. Marilyn locked the door and went to bed, leaving Sam on the sofa.

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The morning of July 4, Otto was up early. He was driving in search of a newspaper when he saw several police cars outside the Sheppards’ house. Asking an officer what happened, he received a staggering reply: Marilyn had been murdered, bludgeoned to death in the night.

Graham being Graham, he was let into the house and taken to the upstairs bedroom where the crime occurred, even though the scene hadn’t been secured. “If you had stood there with a brush and splattered a can of red paint at the walls, you would have some idea of what the room looked like,” Graham said in the 2004 book OttoMatic, written by his son Duey. “Only the outline on the bed where Marilyn’s body had lain and the spot of wall sheltered by her killer were bloodless.”

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The nature of the murder—the Sheppards were a good-looking couple, junior high sweethearts expecting their second child—lent itself to sensationalism, as did the setting. Bay Village, at least the lakefront area, was a posh enclave with a hint of a seamy side. In a chapter of her memoir subtitled “Summer, Sex, Suburbia,” Cleveland News reporter and Bay Village native Doris O’Donnell mentioned talk of “couple swapping,” a rumor both my parents, who lived in the decidedly non-swinging part of the town when I was born, also said was prevalent.

Sheppard would ultimately be charged with his wife’s murder. He said that a “bushy-haired” man had broken in and committed the crime, much like Dr. Richard Kimble would blame his wife’s death on a one-armed intruder when The Fugitive premiered on TV, in 1963. (While the show’s creator claimed that the events in Bay Village weren’t the basis of the show, Daniel Melnick, the ABC executive who was responsible for bringing The Fugitive to the network, said in 1993, “There’s no question about it. . . . [The] inspiration was the Sam Sheppard case.”)

“If you had stood there with a brush and splattered a can of red paint on the walls, you would have some idea of what the room looked like.”

The investigation and subsequent trial, a media circus that drew reporters from all over the country, dominated nationwide headlines for the rest of 1954. It was a six-month period during which the Indians made a run at baseball history and Graham—the bushy-haired quarterback who was briefly a suspect in the slaying—made a run at gridiron redemption. Imagine the scene in Cleveland now: the Cavs shooting for a repeat and the Indians off to a first-place start on their quest for another pennant, all with a trial the magnitude of O.J. Simpson’s taking place at the Cuyahoga County Courthouse on Lakeside Avenue. That was Cleveland in the last half of 1954.

There’s one more significant player in this story: the city itself. In the 1950 census Cleveland was the seventh-largest city in America, a once-thriving rust belt metropolis. But its population was trending downward, as citizens—and industry—headed for the suburbs and points beyond. There was a palpable sense that the city was on the brink of decline, a darkness encroaching.