Word: sheppards
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Until last July 4, life was good to Ethel Niles Sheppard. A schoolteacher from Paris, Ill., she married an osteopath in 1915, worked hard to help him start a hospital near Cleveland, even washed the hospital linen herself. Her three sons also became osteopaths, and her family flourished until the wife of her youngest son Sam was murdered last July 4. In August Sam Sheppard was arrested at his mother's home after dinner (she had served his favorite dessert, cherry pie), and she never saw him again...
...Ethel Sheppard stayed away from her son's trial for murder and read no news accounts. Instead, she heard daily reports from members of her family. She could not help seeing, sometimes, disturbing headlines. During the trial she suffered a slight stroke, was hospitalized twice. She believed in Sam's innocence, wrote him many notes, sometimes talked with him over the prison phone. She sent him inspirational reading, including a booklet called How to Achieve Poise...
...tabloid New York Post, which likes murder stories and plays them big, last week chided the New York Times for its coverage of the Sheppard murder trial...
...From the time the case began we picked up our copy of the Times a little nervously each day, wondering on what obscure page we would find the Sheppard story. In the beginning there were whole days when not a word appeared, or when we could find only a lost, lonely paragraph. We know some small children are taught that nothing is news until it appears in the Times; could they have begun to wonder whether the rest of us were imagining the story? But answering reassurances came to us in jingle form...
...trial dragged on, however, our suspense mounted. Although the Times lengthened its Sheppard dispatches, it still relegated them to the back page, or some drab equivalent thereof. What, we mused, would the Times do on judgment day? . . . Each day that the jury remained out, the suspense increased. Elsewhere, millions of Americans might be asking each other what the jury would do; we kept asking ourselves what the Times would do . . . Finally the decisive hour struck . . . All the other gazettes blared the news of the verdict; our special suspense ended when our eyes reached the lower left-hand corner...