On November 15, 1983, Ethel May Durkin, an elderly widow in Lakewood, Ohio, suffered an injury at home that everyone took to be one more of her many falls. The only other person in the house was Richard Eberling. He had washed her windows since about 1960, and after years of her growing frailty he had become the man paid to coordinate her care. Two weeks earlier her cousin, who had been working as her caretaker, had quit, saying she could not work with him. Mrs. Durkin went to the hospital with a tube in her throat that kept her from speaking, and she died on January 3, 1984, without saying anything. On the strength of an examination, with no autopsy, her death was ruled an accidental fall.
She left Eberling about $750,000, and the will that did it was forged. In 1982 he had a woman named Patricia Bogar sign Ethel Durkin's name on a blank sheet of paper. Bogar had been promised ten percent. When the estate was settled and she came to collect, he refused, and reminded her of a fake burglary he had helped her stage. She went to the police and was given immunity. Five years after the death, Mrs. Durkin's body was exhumed. The full autopsy found she had been struck hard on the back of the neck and head, and the cause of death was changed to homicide.
In July 1989 a Cuyahoga County jury convicted Eberling and his longtime companion, Oscar "Obie" Henderson, of her murder. The court sentenced Eberling to life, to be served after thirteen years on the forgery and theft counts and five to fifteen on another, and ordered the two men jointly to repay $1,524,453.69 to her estate. The co-conspirators who testified against them received suspended sentences. The Ohio Court of Appeals affirmed the convictions on April 9, 1992. There was a second death in the family: Durkin's sister, Myrtle Fray, who had disliked Eberling and told her sister so, had been beaten to death in her bed. That killing was never solved.
His conviction revived an older question. Before 1954 Eberling had worked as a window washer and handyman at the home of Dr. Sam Sheppard in Bay Village, and on July 4, 1954, Marilyn Sheppard was beaten to death in her bed there. Her husband was convicted of the murder that year after a trial conducted in a storm of publicity. The United States Supreme Court overturned the conviction in 1966 in Sheppard v. Maxwell, on the ground that the coverage had denied him a fair trial, and a jury acquitted him at the retrial the same year. He died in 1970. Eberling was a sneak thief who admitted burglaries and was found to have had Marilyn Sheppard's rings. From prison he boasted to a fellow inmate that he had killed her and beaten her husband when he tried to stop him, and he agreed to meet the Sheppards' son, Sam Reese Sheppard.
In 2000 the son took the state to trial on a claim that his father had been wrongfully imprisoned, and the estate's case depended heavily on Eberling. Its lawyer planned to portray him as a multiple personality and a serial killer and to use DNA to put him in the house the night Marilyn died. On the eve of testimony, Judge Suster ruled most of that material inadmissible unless Eberling could be tied directly to the crime scene. The estate did put on Kathie Collins Dyal, a former home health aide for Ethel Durkin, who testified that one night at the Durkin house Eberling told her he had killed Marilyn Sheppard, hit her husband on the head with a pail and been badly bitten by her. Even Mason, on the state's side, called her the best witness the estate had put up so far. The jury rejected the claim. Marilyn Sheppard's murder has never been solved in any court, and Eberling, who died in prison in 1998, was never charged with it.