I hadn’t planned on writing anymore about The Fugitive, but someone asked me whether the TV show was based on the Sam Sheppard case and, after giving my answer, I looked into it a little bit more. My answer hasn’t changed, but why waste that research?

The short answer is that Roy Huggins, who created The Fugitive, as well as many other TV series such as Maverick, The Rockford Files, and 77 Sunset Strip, always maintained that his idea for the show was not derived from the Sheppard murder case, and I tend to believe him.

Even though Wikipedia confidently claims: “Though Huggins disclaimed the similarities, the show was based in part on the case of Sam Sheppard, as well as other influences including Les Misérables.” Wouldn’t be the first time Wikipedia got something wrong.

The longer answer is— 

On the evening of Saturday July 3, 1954, Dr. Samuel Sheppard and his wife Marilyn entertained their neighbors in their home in Bay Village, Ohio. Sheppard fell asleep on the couch in their living room, so Marilyn saw the neighbors out. Later that night Marilyn was bludgeoned to death in her bed. Sheppard’s story was that he was woken by his wife’s cries, so he ran upstairs and tried to defend her but was knocked unconscious by the “bushy haired” assailant.

The Ohio “news” papers immediately convicted Sheppard and pressured the police to arrest the doctor. Well, it was Ohio, the armpit of America, what can one expect?

The October trial, in which Dr. Sheppard was convicted of second degree murder, was conducted in a “carnival atmosphere” as a later appeal decision put it. Dorothy Kilgallen held her nose and traveled to Ohio to cover it in daily installments. When she arrived in town, presiding Judge Carl Weinmann called her into his chambers and demanded to know why she had made the trek all the way from New York City.

Well, it’s a good story, she began, and “you have the mystery of who did it.” 

“Mystery?” said the judge. “It’s an open and shut case.” 

“What do you mean?” asked Miss Kilgallen.

“Well, he’s guilty as hell. There’s no question about it.” 

Presumably Judge Weinmann had the sense to make that conversation off the record, which may be the only sensible thing he did during the trial, as Kilgallen did not include it in her trial coverage.

But she did swear to it in an affidavit during the appeals process, which went all the way to the Supreme Court, which threw out the conviction and granted Dr. Sheppard a new trial.

In 1966.

That was after media whore F. Lee Bailey had taken over the case beginning in 1963.

Dr. Sheppard was acquitted in his retrial.

Please note that other than Kilgallen’s daily filings from the trial in 1954, the Sam Sheppard case was not particularly national news until 1963 when F. Lee Bailey took over for the defense. And she covered it not from the angle of Sheppard being unjustly accused but as a whodunit. 

Meanwhile, somewhere around the late 1950s or early 1960s Roy Huggins came up with an idea for a TV series about an innocent man who was tried and found guilty of his wife’s murder. En route to his execution, he escapes and every week he keeps searching for the true culprit while the authorities are on his tail and he can’t remain in one place for too long.

He mentioned it to several folks over the years, but nobody in authority was interested, so he dropped it.

In fact, he dropped out of the TV business altogether and went back to get a graduate degree.

Then he was told that Leonard Goldenson, the president of the ABC television network, was coming to town and wanted to see him, given that he had been the driving force behind Maverick and other successful shows. Huggins initially wanted to refuse because he didn’t have anything to pitch and he was too busy with his schoolwork, but he was told he couldn’t turn down Leonard Goldenson.

So he remembered his idea for the innocent man convicted of murder and pitched that.

During his pitch, one of the key members of Goldenson’s entourage got up and said he had a plane to catch. Code words meaning he hated the idea. But Huggins soldiered on to the end.

At which point Goldenson said that was the best idea for a TV series he had ever heard. When could he start?

But Huggins said he couldn’t work on it because he was buried in schoolwork. Did Goldenson have a producer in mind?

Eventually Huggins turned it over to Quinn Martin and the rest is history.

So why do I believe Huggins’s version?

As I said, up until 1963 when F. Lee Bailey took over the Sheppard case, that murder case was not in the national news for the most part, and when it was, it wasn’t portrayed as an innocent man convicted of murder. 

While I don’t have a clear timeline of the creation of The Fugitive, the fact that it debuted in September of 1963 means it almost certainly was planned well before then, at least in 1962. And Huggins claims he had the idea several years before that.

And if you want to see where Huggins might have gotten the idea of an innocent man on the run from authorities who believe him guilty, why look no farther than the films of Alfred Hitchcock, who exploited that device in many of his best work such as The 39 Steps, Saboteur, and North by Northwest. All Huggins added was the innocent guy was convicted and sentenced to death.

As far as the parallels to the Sheppard case. Well, both Sheppard and Richard Kimble were doctors whose wives were killed. Sheppard claimed a “bushy haired” man killed his wife; Kimble claimed it was a “one-armed” man. And they were each convicted. But Sheppard wasn’t sentenced to death like Kimble, nor did he escape. The parallels are very few indeed.

Note that the each of the parallels is something that could easily have been dreamed up independently. That Kimble was convicted (and sentenced to death) made his predicament that much more dire. That he had caught a glimpse of the actual assailant gave him someone to chase after. And that he was a doctor opened up a wealth of dramatic possibilities: he didn’t speak like the common laborers he ended up working with, he would be faced with revealing his medical skills or letting innocent people suffer or die, etc.

In my opinion, instead of the Sheppard case influencing The Fugitive, I suspect it may have been the other way around, with The Fugitive laying the groundwork for the public to believe that Sheppard was an innocent man.

Because when you look at the case, and here I’ll defer to the Wikipedia article on Sam Sheppard, the problem with the first trial was all the negative publicity—as I said, it was Ohio—and a seriously prejudiced judge. In the retrial, the jurors may very well have been thinking they had Richard Kimble on trial, not Sam Sheppard.

Because I’m not so sure he wasn’t guilty. I’m not convinced he was guilty either. I simply don’t know.

But as far as the Sheppard case being the source for The Fugitive— 

Oh, one more thing.

Is it possible that Huggins had read some of the coverage of the Sheppard trial at some point and subconsciously that played a part in the germination of his idea?

Sure it’s possible.

But so what?

As I said, the similarities between the two cases are tiny and if Sheppard and Kimble weren’t each doctors might not even have been noticed.

Oh, and yet one more thing.

I’ve watched a few more episodes of the show and I have to give the writers credit. They found more inventive ways to vary the formula of the show than I had given them credit for. On the other hand, while I found many of the episodes to be engrossing, very often the denouement seems rushed and unconvincing. They need to quickly find a way to change a key character’s point of view to be sympathetic to Kimble in order to help him to escape, and the change often comes much too suddenly. But there are time constraints.

And then along comes an outstanding episode entitled “Nightmare at Northoak” that upends all that I just wrote. A few more episodes of that calibre and I might write about this show again.

 

Oh yes, there’s still one more thing.

I couldn’t help but notice the contrast in the way over-the-top coverage by the Ohio papers of the Sam Sheppard case versus the restrained coverage that the Lebanon Daily News gave to its coverage of the Carrie Layser murder case. That’s a tribute at least in part to the reporting by James Shellhamer, the father of my classmate Maryann, who wrote most of the articles.