Dr. Kirk was quite startled by Holmes’ abrupt departure. I explained that Madame Tussauds was a repository for unpublished documents and rare books as well as a wax museum. First established at the Baker Street Bazaar in 1835, the entire collection had been moved to Marylebone Road in 1884, and it was still an easy walk from 221B Baker Street.

“We will catch up with Holmes in short order.”

“But why on earth would he want us to go there now?”

“Although he will never admit it,” I told Kirk as we trotted down the steep stairway and emerged onto the street, “Holmes has always been fascinated by the Madame’s wax creations, especially her detailed reproductions of infamous criminals. I imagine he found a piece of information or some intriguing display in her collection that he wants to show us.”

As promised, our brisk walk soon found us at the museum, but Holmes was nowhere in sight. Dr. Kirk and I entered the building and continued around to the area where I knew we would find life-size figures of the world’s most well-known criminals. Madame Tussauds exhibition is constantly changing, of course, but on this occasion, we found ourselves gazing at Great Britain’s most controversial serial killers of the 1800s, including body snatchers William Burke and William Hare, nurse-gone-wrong Catherine Wilson, and arsenic poisoner Mary Ann Cotton. It was an attention-riveting group to be sure, and I almost missed seeing Holmes waving for us to join him from the far end of the hallway.

He ducked back through an open doorway as Dr. Kirk and I started up the long hall.

“Holmes! What the devil is going on!?”

We followed my elusive friend through the doorway into what turned out to be a rather large reading room, lined with floor-to-ceiling wooden bookshelves and furnished with heavy library tables and chairs. We found Holmes seated at one of the tables. He waved us over with one hand, while continuing to stare through a magnifying glass at a photograph.

“Hello there, Holmes. What have you discovered?”

“Hello Watson. Dr. Kirk. As you may know, this museum is home to a large collection of unpublished documents and materials related to unsolved and controversial crimes. As you may not know, however, Madame Tussauds has provided me with a key to the museum’s inner sanctum.

“Last night I visited this library to determine if Tussauds had indexed the original research materials Dr. Watson procured from the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Indeed, they had. Elated, I spent hours pouring through notes and transcripts from interviews conducted in 1981[1] with early suspects Esther and Spencer Houk – the neighbor Dr. Sam had called on the morning of July 4 — as well as Coroner Samuel Gerber and his lab technician Miss Mary Cowan. This afternoon when Dr. Kirk mentioned the unidentified tooth chip, I remembered reading Esther’s strange rambling tale about her chipped tooth and having all her teeth removed about one year after the murder.”

It became evident that Holmes had read through a great deal of material on the previous evening and had inserted small pieces of paper on the pages he wanted to find again. As Dr. Kirk and I settled into chairs opposite Holmes at the library table, Holmes pushed the curious photograph aside and began thumbing through one of the transcripts. He didn’t even look up as he began to read the recorded conversation between the interviewer (D) and Esther Houk (E) regarding her chipped tooth.

“E: ‘And, boy, I cussed him out about that tooth. Actually, I had been living on coffee and cigarettes. And all the fillings in my mouth fell out. I always had poor teeth.’

“D: ‘All the nervousness . . .’

“E: ‘Not necessarily the nervousness; it might even have amounted to malnutrition. Oh, all the fillings started falling out like popcorn. And I always did have poor teeth; I had a lot of fillings. And he said at that point, that there was nothing left to do right now but to pull the others. And it was about a year later.’

“D: ‘Well, some of your tooth chips were supposed to be under Marilyn’s bed, you know.’

“E: ‘I know, I know. I was trying to figure where . . . one of my teeth probably . . . I think one of my teeth was chipped. When we were first married, we were horsing around – as a matter of fact his folks were right there – and we were kidding back and forth, and Spen said something as a joke. . . and I turned, I started to walk away from him, then all of a sudden I turned around like that, and he had his arm out like this, and I must have run into his fist.’

“D: ‘And chipped your tooth?’

“E: ‘Yeah. That was when we were first married, and his folks were right there and everything. And he anticipated my moves, and I just ignored it, and suddenly he had his arm out like that, and it did chip.’[2]

Holmes stopped reading and addressed Dr. Kirk.

“Her strange tale and over-explanation of the subject did catch my attention, as I say, but it’s all just talk at this point. I found other parts of the transcripts to contain more useful information.”

“Still, I believe such talk can be quite revealing,” I said. “It has been suggested that Spencer Houk, the local butcher and mayor of Bay Village, had been having an affair with Mrs. Sheppard, and that his wife’s jealousy led to murder.”

“Perhaps,” mused Holmes, pulling a cigarette out of his case, “Mr. Houk was evidently quite the man about town, and Mrs. Houk seems to have become quite disillusioned with the old boy over the years. In fact,” recalled Holmes, thumbing through the transcript once again, “During her 1981 interview, Mrs. Houk said that Spencer disappeared during a party with ‘some blonde’ when they were first married.

“Ah yes, here it is. Likely an American expression, Mrs. Houk said she was ‘madder than a wet hen.’ She added, ‘Making a pass at an attractive woman seemed to Spen as natural as breathing. As a matter of fact, somewhere along the line he got the nickname in Bay Village as Lover Boy.’”

“Likely one reason,” I commented, “that led to Mr. and Mrs. Houk’s divorce in 1962.”

Giving me a nod and referring once again to the interview transcripts, Holmes continued relaying his marked passages.

“Here Mrs. Houk was asked point-blank if her husband was left-handed. She replied, ‘yes,’ and went on to explain that he might be considered ambidextrous, having started left-handed and grown up in an era when they trained kids to use their right hands. She said that her son Larry is also left-handed, and that she is right-handed.”

Pulling out ten pages of stapled, handwritten notes on lined, yellow paper, Holmes explained, “these notes report on the personal interviews held in Mrs. Houk’s apartment on March 1, 1981. I found this notation quite intriguing.”

“The three of us had been examining and discussing the letters and articles Esther had saved about the murder, when she suddenly said, ‘This case will never be solved.’ ”[3]

“The following exchange is from the interview transcript. “C” is the interviewer and “E” is Esther.”

“C: Esther you made a comment that the truth would never come out; we would never know what really happened. Why was that?

E: Sam is dead.

C: That’s the reason?

E. Yes. That is my opinion. It is not a statement of fact.

C: Because he is no longer here to say yes or no . . .

E: And he is the only one who knows what went on that night, and he was perfectly capable of . . .

C: Was there anything here [referring to her trunk filled with articles, letters and notes] that you think, somewhere in all this, that could unlock the truth?

E: No. If the truth could be unlocked, Lord knows it would have been unlocked many, many years ago. It wouldn’t have gone on this long. Nobody can unlock it now.”[4]

Dr. Kirk shook his head and removed his glasses, apparently deep in thought. He said nothing, so Holmes turned again to the interview transcript.

“Several pages later the interviewer asked Mrs. Houk if she knew her and Spencer’s blood type. She said she did not know Spencer’s blood type, but she said hers was A positive.”

“Stop!,” I cried, slapping my hand down loudly upon the table. “As we know, Dr. Kirk found a type O blood spot on the wardrobe door, most likely thrown from the killer’s bleeding hand. If her statement is true, Esther Houk could not have been the bleeding killer.”

“But, my dear fellow,” replied Holmes ominously, “even if her statement is true, that does not preclude her presence in the murder room!” 

I was still absorbing that comment when Holmes, unabashed, referred once again, to the transcript. “Now speaking of gratuitous offerings, here’s an interesting example,” said Holmes, opening to a tagged page in the transcript of Esther’s interview.

“As you may remember, when the Houks first arrived at the Sheppard home in response to Dr. Sam’s call that morning, Dr. Sam said, ‘Someone should do something for Marilyn,’ and Mrs. Houk immediately ran up the stairs into the murder room. Now during the interview, without being questioned about this behavior, she says, “I didn’t know she was dead,” and “I didn’t know what room she was in.” She then proceeds to explain that she knew where to go because she saw Marilyn’s arm extended from the side of the bed as she ran up the stairs.  

“But how did she know to go upstairs?” I wondered aloud, while carefully recording this new information in my jotter. I glanced at Dr. Kirk to see his reaction. I knew from my reading that Dr. Kirk had always suspected the Houks.

“Did they interview Spencer Houk?” asked Dr. Kirk, frowning.

Holmes nodded in the affirmative as he searched through piles of transcripts for the one labeled S. Houk.

“Yes, the most interesting discussion came when the interviewer asked Mr. Houk if he ever wondered, ‘Why did Sam call me first?’ Houk responded: ‘I thought of that many times and wish he hadn’t. You don’t know how many times I wished we weren’t even in Bay Village that night.’”

“Hmmm. A forensic psychologist would have fun with that statement,” Dr. Kirk suggested. “Sam didn’t call Houk that night; he called him after sunrise the next morning, around 5:45 a.m.”

“Yes,” I said, pondering that statement myself. “Why didn’t he say, ‘I wish we hadn’t been home that morning?’ Or ‘I wish we had gone to early church?’ Or, simply, ‘I wish our telephone had been broken?’”

“Good points, indeed, gentlemen,” said Holmes with a sly grin. “I think you also will find this next item quite interesting. I discovered these materials in an old file labeled, ‘Unanswered Questions,’ last evening.”

Holmes pulled out a typewritten document and several newspaper clippings, including one headlined, “Sheppard murder weapon found?” from The Chronicle-Telegram, Cuyahoga West, dated November 23, 1982. Reading from the typed document,[5] he revealed a startling tale:

“‘In November of 1982 Paul Vargo, Jr. was installing a new gas line in the backyard of the Vargo home at 29014 Lake Road – the same home that had been occupied by Esther and Spencer Houk in 1954. In digging a trench for the gas line, he unearthed what appeared to be an old fireplace tool. It was a pair of tongs with claws for picking up logs. It was made of brass or bronze and had no handle. The tongs had been buried about five inches under the ground and were coated with roots and dirt. Root fibers on the tool indicated it had been buried for an extended period of time. The Vargos turned the tongs over to Bay Village Police Chief Peter Gray.

“‘Chief Gray took the tool to the coroner’s office. According to Gray, Coroner Gerber turned white as Gray showed him the fireplace tongs. Gerber paced back and forth in his office, and he and Assistant Coroner Adelson tried to convince Chief Gray of Sam Sheppard’s guilt. Gray, accompanied by an FBI agent, compared the unearthed tool to the paraffin cast of Marilyn’s facial wounds. Both Gray and the agent felt the tool matched many of the wounds. Gray laid the tool on a life-size tracing of the bloody imprint on the pillowcase. The fireplace tongs matched the imprint perfectly, except that the tool was slightly smaller than the imprint, which would be expected with a hard object hitting a soft pillow and soaking its bloody track into material. Gerber told the press that he was 90 percent certain that the unearthed tool had absolutely nothing to do with the Sheppard case.’”

Dr. Kirk and I just stared at each other without comment. I felt angry, but I was far beyond feeling surprised at Gerber’s determination to prove himself correct at any cost. Holmes, of course, showed no emotion whatsoever as he continued to share his midnight findings.

“As you undoubtedly noticed, the article reported the tool had no handle. That would most likely make the tong portion less than one foot in length, thereby fitting Dr. Kirk’s characterization of the murder weapon. Ahh well, be that as it may, the erstwhile coroner said it had absolutely nothing to do with Sheppard case. Let’s move on.

“Given our expertise and belief in the importance of indisputable physical evidence, I think you will find the 1981 interview with Mary Cowan, Gerber’s laboratory expert, to be quite revealing – and quite damning.”

“What? In what way are her comments damning?”

“She clearly reveals her and Gerber’s completely subjective approach to analysis of evidence. Just listen. D is the interviewer and C is Miss Cowan.

“D: ‘What, out of all the evidence you looked at – all the blood stain work – did you feel was significant as far as determining the murderer?’

“C: ‘Uhh . . . hah.’

“D: ‘In other words, we spoke the other day about all the things Dr. Kirk suggested, such as the nail polish. . . ‘

“C: ‘Yeah, they were normal to the surroundings. And it was established, for instance, that she had that shade of nail polish and did use that shade of nail polish. Those were things you knew in case they were going to be relevant. . . As they say, you don’t search for evidence, you look at what is there. And it may or may not turn out to be evidence.’

“D: ‘So you look at everything, like the fibers under the fingernails and the nail polish and the . . .’

“C: ‘Yeah. And it’s not significant unless you get something from a suspect from which to compare.’

“D: ‘Well, I was just thinking about the blue fibers under the nails.

“C: ‘The color fibers are in a home, and you could spend a lifetime on one single case if you tried to identify every single item. It’s only when it’s relevant and you have material from a suspect with which to compare it.’

“Whoa! Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “So, her approach is to identify the suspect, then decide what evidence is relevant based on that suspect. My God! Whatever happened to the concept of using every piece of evidence to help you identify the suspect? How could she possibly think that fibers under the victim’s nails were not worth her time?”

“Calm yourself, my friend. There’s more.”

“D: ‘Well, I guess what I’m asking is, what were the significant pieces of evidence that you all felt tied in to Sam Sheppard? . . . From a laboratory standpoint, what pointed to Sam Sheppard above anybody else?’

“C: ‘There was nothing that pointed away from him. . .There was no evidence demonstrated of any outsider.’

“D: ‘And then all the things Kirk came up with, that he thought did indicate that someone else had been there, you felt were kind of far out?’

“C: ‘Right. He tried to solve it in the laboratory, and it can’t be done. You cannot isolate the laboratory from the rest of the investigation.’

“D: ‘I understand that. But I guess Kirk was saying the whole story can be told by the physical evidence. You don’t really agree with that?’

“C: ‘No. I always give my lectures, they’re always subtitled, “Debunking the Laboratory.”

Dr. Kirk half choked as he gulped back his astonishment. “What an extraordinary glimpse into the rationalization of one who knows she’s done wrong.”

“If only Mrs. Cowan had examined all the evidence with an open mind!” I lamented. Holmes, always a strong advocate for the value of the laboratory and physical evidence, glared up at the library’s dark ceiling. “Mary Cowan knew her job,” he spat. “It’s obvious that her boss, Coroner Gerber, directed her to ignore every piece of evidence that she could not connect with their one and only suspect – Dr. Sam Sheppard.”

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[1] Personal interviews with a number of key people were conducted in 1981 and 1982 by Duvall, Dalrymple and Chapman. The interviews were tape recorded with full knowledge of all parties and later transcribed.

[2] Personal interview

[3] Personal interviews with a number of key people were conducted by Duvall, Dalrymple and Chapman in 1981 and 1982. Handwritten and typed notes accompanied the transcripts.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Author’s personal communication with James Chapman regarding his discussion with Bay Village Chief of Police Peter Gray, March 16, 1983