(2 of 3)
Toward that end, Bailey even used a hypnotist to help him pick and "psych" jurors, presumably by silent brain waves. Actually, the jury was impressed by his total grasp of details. Bailey was cool, quiet, subliminally brutal. He popped particular questions for particular jurors, stopped when attention flagged and played to the next juror. Bailey's innuendo based on investigation soon pictured Sheppard as the innocent victim of Marilyn's implied infidelity. The killer, argued Bailey at the trial, was a left-handed woman (Sheppard is right-handed), who was the jealous wife of Marilyn's lover.
Not content to stop with Sheppard's acquittal, Bailey has since informed the police just which neighbors he thinks were involved. With the blessing of Prosecutor John Corrigan, who wants Bailey to do his talking "where it counts," a Cleveland grand jury last week reopened the case for possible prosecution. Moreover, on the theory that "somebody owes Sam something," Bailey now talks of slapping a $150 million lawsuit on assorted Cleveland newspapermen for their 1954 role in jailing Sheppard. Even for Bailey, that project seems highly dubious; still, a big verdict would obviously enrich Sheppard, who could then pay his lawyer a big fee.
Brilliant Bind. Not that Bailey is interested in money alone. Last week he earned not a dime in the case of Life Prisoner Mary Hampton, who had falsely confessed to two Louisiana slayings during her boy friend's cross-country murder spree in 1960. Bailey won freedom for her and considerably more fame for himself by proving that the two slayings occurred while she was in Florida (where her boy friend now awaits execution).
In Freehold, N.J., this week, Bailey's trial style will be on display in the case of Dr. Carl Coppolino, who stands accused of two murders—that of a New Jersey neighbor, Army Lieut. Colonel William E. Farber, and that of his first wife in Florida. Bailey will focus hard on Coppolino's accuser: the colonel's widow, who was Coppolino's close friend before he married his second wife. However sordid that trial may be, Bailey may well top it in the extraordinary case of Albert DeSalvo, who is named in Gerold Frank's bestseller as The Boston Strangler. DeSalvo's trial next month is not for murder but on charges ranging from rape to robbery. It involves only those victims who have actually pressed charges. The police suspect DeSalvo of having assaulted at least 300 women, and he himself claims a lifetime score of 2,000.
It was Bailey who fingered DeSalvo last year as the strangler who terrorized Boston from 1962 to 1964 by killing 13 women, aged 19 to 85. For three years, the combined police forces of Massachusetts toiled so hard to catch the killer that at one time the state even hired a Dutch extrasensory perceptionist. As it turned out, DeSalvo was already locked up in a state mental hospital with another of Bailey's clients, to whom he compulsively confessed the stranglings. Though DeSalvo had another lawyer at the time, Bailey took over the case and called the police. As he tells it, he wanted to preserve DeSalvo as a one-man laboratory for the study of "irresistible impulse."