The Bell Curve -- Joseph N. Bell

Scarcely a week goes by that there isn’t an obituary or the revisiting

of a news event that touches very directly on people or stories I covered

in more than 50 years of journalism. Mostly, I resist rehashing them

here, but every so often one comes along that is irresistible. Like the

Marilyn Sheppard murder case.

This is a story that has had legs -- second only to the Hearst

kidnapping -- for almost a half-century.

Sam Sheppard was a 32-year-old osteopath in a Cleveland suburb when he

was convicted in 1956 -- then 10 years later retried and found not guilty

-- of bludgeoning his wife to death. The crime spawned “The Fugitive” TV

series and movie, along with dozens of books and magazine articles.

It made the news a year ago when the efforts of Sheppard’s son to win

a wrongful imprisonment lawsuit that would have cleared the name of his

long dead father was rejected by an Ohio court. And it made the news

again last week when the Los Angeles Times devoted a full page to an

upcoming book that builds a forensic case against a new suspect.

I got involved in the Sheppard case when I was assigned by True

Magazine -- in those days a kind of blue-collar Esquire -- to profile a

Beverly Hills medical doctor named William J. Bryan Jr., who turned out

to be a kind of amalgam of Sigmund Freud, Billy Graham and P.T. Barnum.

In between running two medical hypnosis clinics, caring for assorted

movie stars and preaching as a lay minister, Bryan had gained

considerable national attention by helping break a major crime case by

hypnotizing the man who became known as the Boston Strangler. The

hypnosis session ended with the Strangler diving across a desk to attack

Bryan, all of which I listened to on an audiotape.

Bryan’s work on this case so impressed attorney F. Lee Bailey that he

hired Bryan to perform the same service with Sam Sheppard, for whom

Bailey had just won a second trial. Sheppard still claimed -- as he had

in his first trial -- that he had fallen asleep watching TV, had been

awakened by his wife’s screams and had been knocked unconscious by an

intruder when he went to her assistance. The blow had destroyed his

memory of whom he saw and what had taken place that night.

Bailey wanted Bryan to hypnotize Sheppard, regress him to the night of

the murder, break through the amnesia and find out if Sheppard had really

killed his wife and, if not, who did. Sheppard was agreeable, Bryan

recalled, only after he was assured that regardless of what the hypnosis

turned up, Bailey would continue to represent him.

So that’s precisely what Bryan told me he did. He didn’t, however,

stop there. He not only told me that Sheppard didn’t kill his wife but

also identified the people he claimed were the real killers --

information I didn’t really want since the people he accused were solid

citizens in the community, and I had no evidence beyond Bryan’s hypnosis

to connect them with the crime.

Although the judge refused to admit Bryan’s testimony in court,

Sheppard was acquitted anyway. Bailey then turned the hypnotic evidence

over to the local police. It was subpoenaed by a Cleveland grand jury

that dismissed it as “unfounded in fact,” a decision Bailey called a

“whitewash.” While Sheppard, destroyed by his 10 years in prison,

descended into a depression from which he died, a broken man, in 1970,

the case has continued to be exhumed periodically as fresh theories are

presented -- the latest in a new book called “Tailspin.”

Bryan has become a bit player in many of these exercises, but he left

an indelible mark on me. In those days, magazine articles weren’t done on

the basis of a lunch interview attended by a hired publicist. The week I

spent on and off with Bryan culminated with a session at his home in the

San Fernando Valley that caught graphically some of the bizarre

situations in which I found myself as a freelance writer.

I had several times challenged Bryan’s assertion that everyone could

be hypnotized, insisting I couldn’t be unless I gave mental permission.

So in this last meeting, he began playing with a dangling pendant as we

talked, and I went along to see what would happen, secure in the

knowledge that I was in charge.

After a few minutes of this, he asked me to extend my arm and shut my

eyes and told me my arm was encased in ice and rigid as a steel bar. When

he told me to open my eyes, I was horrified to find a large needle pushed

entirely through the fleshy part of my forearm. I hadn’t felt it go in

and my only sensation when I saw it was the desire to get it out as

quickly as possible -- especially after he told me it would neither hurt

nor bleed and would not become infected, a negative idea that made me

acutely uncomfortable. He turned out to be right on all three counts, but

once the needle was out, all I wanted to do was escape.

And I’ve still never told anyone who really murdered Marilyn Sheppard.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.