1966: Acquitted at Retrial: The Murder Case Hollywood Insisted Had Nothing to Do With The Fugitive
Sam Sheppard had already served ten years in prison for the 1954 bludgeoning murder of his pregnant wife, Marilyn, when his conviction was thrown out over what reviewers called a circus-like trial. At his 1966 retrial, defence lawyer F. Lee Bailey tore into the prosecution witnesses, dismissing their case as "ten pounds of hogwash in a five-pound bag." On this day in 1966, after a sequestered jury deliberated for 12 hours, Sheppard walked free.
The case outlived the verdict. The television series The Fugitive, and the 1993 film that followed it, were long rumoured to be drawn from Sheppard's ordeal: a doctor wrongly convicted of killing his wife, hunting the real intruder himself. Its creator always and firmly denied any connection to the case.
Yet the denial has never mattered. Whatever the truth of the resemblance, Sheppard's story and The Fugitive remain fused in the public mind, one of those rare cases where the culture has simply decided the link is real, and no amount of official disavowal has ever managed to pull them apart.
