Samuel Holmes and Marilyn Reese Sheppard were high school sweethearts at Cleveland Heights High School. Sam was president of his senior class and quarterback of the football team. Marilyn followed him to Los Angeles where he was attending medical school, and they were married there in 1945.

After graduation, the couple returned to Cleveland, buying a three-story Dutch Colonial home on Lake Erie. Sam's father and two brothers were osteopaths. The family ran small, private Bay View Hospital, a 110-bed facility housed in a converted mansion.

The couple settled into a comfortable suburban life with their infant son, Sam Reese, nicknamed Chip. Sam worked long hours at the hospital and Marilyn taught Sunday school and coached basketball at Bay Methodist Church. They had a wide circle of friends. At the time of the murder, Marilyn Sheppard was four-months pregnant.

There are conflicting views of the couple's marriage. Sam Reese Sheppard recalls an idyllic home. Friends paint them as affectionate and happy, even cuddling at a barbecue the night before Marilyn's death.

However, others portray the Sheppards marriage as deeply flawed. Sam Sheppard at first denied and then admitted having an affair with a lab technician, Susan Hayes. Members of the Cleveland press corps said she was hardly the only one.

Doris O'Donell, a newswoman who covered the case in 1954, told Court TV that Sheppard was a serial adulterer with a bad temper. At the time of the murder, the Sheppards were rumored to "swing" with other couples and attend "key parties" in Cleveland, she said.

Ohio prosecutors maintain Sam Sheppard wanted to divorce his wife but knew that his family would never accept it.

After the murder of his wife, Sheppard spent a decade in jail before winning an acquittal at a 1966 retrial. Many people still considered him guilty, and returning to private life proved difficult.

Sheppard married Ariane Tebbenjohanns, an East German woman he had corresponded with while in prison. He tried to revive his medical practice, but, according to his attorney F. Lee Bailey, he had not been able to keep abreast of medical innovations while in prison and was rusty as a surgeon. When a patient of his died because of a mistake he made during a difficult procedure, his medical license was revoked. His career was over.

Sheppard began drinking heavily and in 1969 took up professional wrestling. He had learned some moves while in prison and wrestled under the name "Killer Sheppard." His son says this decision was proof of just how unhappy and demoralized his father was.