Interview of Gregg McCrary

In Cleveland, he met Boland, along with Bill Mason, the Prosecuting Attorney for Cuyahoga County, and Steve Dever, his chief trial attorney.� They then showed him his task: to go through all the available informationand it was considerable.

The transcript from the first trial was 6,000 pages long, and the second trial transcript ran to 1,500 pages.� The records from the Bay Village Police Departments investigation filled seven 5-inch thick binders--some 2,100 pages.� Then there were 1,600 images from the coroners office, a 400-page transcript of the coroners inquest, and seven books devoted exclusively to the Sheppard case.� Despite a loss of some of the evidence along the way, there were still over one hundred exhibits to consider.

As he read it over from his perspective as a long-time investigator, McCrary discerned that Marilyn had been a low-risk victim, but had been in an unhappy marriage.� Sam had lied to police about having an affair, and Marilyn had told a third party that she wanted out of the marriage.� Those were fairly clear signals of a potential domestic homicide.� Added to that were problems with matching the crime scene to Sams account of what had occurred that night. � Blood was not where it should have been, notes McCrary, and it was where it should not have been.

Also, crime scenes are high-risk environments and offenders typically spend no more time than necessary there.� Offenders who remain for a longer time often have a legitimate reason for being at the scene and are therefore not worried about being interrupted or discovered.� This offender, he observed, had spent an inordinate amount of time at this crime scene. �� A constellation of red flags emerged that indicated that the scene had been set up to appear to be an intruder homicide.� They included:

• Perpetrating the crime posed a high degree of risk
• The point of entry made no sense for this type of crime
• There was evidence of overkillmore effort than was needed to do the job
• If burglary appeared to be the motive, the items taken from the scene were inappropriate for that scenario

Yet the intended effect was not quite achieved.� When you look at the case closely and distill it to its essence, McCrary says, you can see that its nothing more than a staged domestic homicide.

After looking at everything available, he felt confident that Sheppard was the offender, and his testimony was admitted into the trial.�