Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame: The Storytellers by Greg Oliver & Steven Johnson

Author:Greg Oliver & Steven Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2019-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

II. The Fugitive

At the age of twenty, Roger Vest found himself lying prone on the floor of an Ohio high school gymnasium, being kicked by one of the most celebrated convicted murderers in the country. The ambush surprised Vest because Dr. Sam Sheppard, the inspiration for The Fugitive on film and TV, wasn’t even part of his match. But, as Vest recalled, Sheppard was equally surprised by what happened next.

“I got tossed out of the ring and when I went out, I was laying on the gym floor and Sam comes up and kicks me hard as he could in the middle of the back,” said Vest, who was in a tag team match with partner J.D. “Killer” Kent. “J.D. didn’t take to that very well. In the scuffle, he took out a TV camera. He either tackled Sam or threw him into the camera, and the camera went down.”

Such was the scene when national reporters and TV crews descended on Waverly, Ohio, on August 9, 1969, to witness the wrestling debut of Sheppard, a Cleveland osteopath who spent ten years in prison for the brutal murder of his wife, Marilyn, a crime he said he didn’t commit. During the next eight months, Sheppard would travel the country, elope with his manager’s twenty-year-old daughter, drink heavily, get flattened by wrestlers who resisted his fingers-in-the-mouth nerve gimmick, and die. It was a bizarre case study of wrestling’s infatuation with notoriety that left everyone scratching their heads, wondering what that had all been about.

“I’ve done some crazy stuff,” said Jeff Walton, veteran publicist for the Los Angeles wrestling office, who was on Sheppard detail during an October 1969 tour. “This was the craziest, in terms of trying to rein him in, and you couldn’t rein him in because he had been in jail for I don’t know how many years. He was a free man now, and he was going to do whatever he wanted to do and with whom he wanted to do it with.”

Sheppard was O.J. Simpson before the advent of cable news. In December 1954, a jury sentenced the physician to life in prison for bludgeoning his pregnant wife just before dawn on the Fourth of July that year. Sheppard claimed he was innocent, insisting that the real culprit was a mysterious bushy-haired man who knocked him unconscious during a skirmish at the family’s suburban Cleveland home.

He spent a decade behind bars while his lawyers, notably F. Lee Bailey, later part of O.J.’s defense “dream team,” argued that Sheppard was the victim of a hit job by the Cleveland media. His story was considered the basis for The Fugitive, the Emmy Award–winning show about a doctor falsely accused of murdering his wife. In 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Sheppard’s conviction, saying a “carnival atmosphere” had prevented him from getting a fair trial. In a retrial, a second jury found him not guilty.

Sheppard thus bounced from one carnival atmosphere to another. He returned to practicing medicine, but was named in two wrongful death suits for accidentally cutting arteries of patients, who bled to death.

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