At 33, brash, bright F. (for Francis) Lee Bailey is the hottest criminal lawyer in the U.S. Last month he got a Cleveland jury to acquit Dr. Sam Sheppard of killing his wife; this week comes the sex-tinged murder trial of Dr. Carl Coppolino in New Jersey; after that, the Boston Strangler. Only six years out of law school, Bailey already compares himself to "Clarence" (meaning Darrow), though his monumental self-assurance might not yet convince William Jennings (meaning Bryan).
By his own account, Bailey has an IQ of 170, though he did "abominably" in school while growing up in suburban Boston where his father is a newspaper advertising man and his mother runs a thriving nursery school. Not until Bailey dropped out of Harvard College after two years and went into the Marine Corps as a jet fighter pilot did he find his vocation. Since lawyers are not required in most military trials, Bailey was able to become legal officer for 2,000 Marines at Cherry Point, N.C., and he tried more than 200 cases. With credit for his time in service, he was then allowed to skip further undergraduate study and go straight to Boston University Law School.
Electronic Empire. Though Bailey was top man in his class at B.U. ('60), he graduated without honors because he refused to join the Law Review. Instead, he spent 60 hours a week running his own detective agency, which handled 2,000 cases for criminal lawyers while teaching Bailey his key skill—indefatigable investigation. After law school, Bailey attended Chicago's Keeler Polygraph Institute, then helped an elderly Boston lawyer defend an accused wife killer who had flunked a lie-detector test. Bailey was hired merely to cross-examine the prosecution polygrapher. But during the trial, his boss, 72, collapsed of a heart attack. Bailey, then 27, took over and won the case. After that, he was hired by the four suspects in U.S. history's biggest cash heist, the $1,551,277 Plymouth, Mass., mail robbery.* After one suspect had agreed to help postal inspectors bug the other suspects' phones, Bailey got the tipster to agree to tape-record his bugging conversations with the inspectors, who have not yet been able to get an indictment.
Bailey knows all about bugging and hypnosis as well as polygraphy. Along with electronic gadgets, his jet-age operation includes five office cars and five investigators headed by the former chief investigator for Boston's strangler bureau. Divorced and remarried (three children), he is rich in possessions: a Pontiac GTO, a Thunderbird, three sizable yachts, a 17-room ranch house and 80 acres in Marshfield near Boston. The whole empire is connected by two-way radios that keep the boss in constant touch as he swoops around the country in his Cessna 310 airplane.
Victim's Victim. Bailey's passion for preparation helped win the Sheppard case, which he tackled for sheer challenge at the urging of Sheppard's friends as far back as 1961. With no promise of a fee, he scoured 9,808 pages of briefs and testimony, won a Supreme Court reversal last June on historic grounds of "prejudicial publicity." Then he discarded the 1954 defense theory that Marilyn Sheppard's killer was a stranger. For. the 1966 retrial, he says, "we had to destroy Marilyn."