So Lovely & So Bruised

Hearst Reporter Dorothy (What's My Line?) Kilgallen is a practitioner of an old and dying school of U.S. newspaper reporting; she is the leading U.S. sob sister. Last week, covering the Cleveland trial of Dr. Sam Sheppard (TIME, Aug. 30), charged with the murder of his wife Marilyn, Sob Sister Kilgallen demonstrated why she deserves the title--and perhaps why such reporting is a-dying out. Wrote Reporter Kilgallen:

"The Sheppard trial suddenly became terrible when they brought Marilyn Sheppard into the courtroom ... It was all done with seven slides in glorious Technicolor and a cocky unsentimental little medical examiner with a Phi Beta Kappa key spinning from his vest chain and a red bow tie, notably unsuitable for corpse-pointing, askew under his chin. It will take many sessions of court and a multitude of distractions to erase the first brilliantly colored picture flashed on the big white screen in the darkened courtroom at that dreadful matinee. No wonder Dr. Sam cried and would not look. She was beautiful. So lovely, and so bruised. So gentle looking with her eyes closed, sleeping under the vermilion gashes.

"It was strange. No picture ever printed of Marilyn Sheppard, of the many taken when she was smiling and wide-eyed and alive, has shown her to be as lovely as she was in death--discolored and slashed and broken. No wonder at all that Dr. Sam cried. He could remember well, without looking. Her face was oval, her skin the very fair kind with fine pores. Where there were no wounds, it had a peach-like tint, faintly damp with the dewiness of the newly dead.

"Her eyebrows were light brown and delicate, her mouth pale pink, generously curved, perfectly and definitely cut like the mouth on a Roman statue. Whatever her eyes had seen before the first blow struck, they were closed now and could mirror nothing. Her face was not distorted at all; it was in remarkable repose considering how she died. But the wounds on her forehead and cheeks were too numerous and too gaudy, like the wounds of St. Sebastian in the cheap plaster statues seen in the churches of little Italian towns. Marilyn's slayer was an extravagant slayer, wasteful of blows."

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