He was Richard George Eberling, born December 8, 1929.
He grew up in foster care in Ohio and built a window cleaning business, which in 1954 included the Sheppard house in Bay Village. In July of that year Marilyn Sheppard was beaten to death there. Her husband, Dr Sam Sheppard, was convicted of her murder in a trial conducted amid extraordinary publicity.
That conviction did not stand. In 1966 the United States Supreme Court quashed it in Sheppard v. Maxwell, holding that the press coverage had denied him a fair trial, and it remains the leading American authority on prejudicial publicity. He was acquitted at the retrial and died in 1970.
Eberling came to notice in 1959 when he was found with items stolen from the Sheppard house. Decades later he was convicted of the murder of Ethel Durkin, an elderly woman whose fortune he had come to control, and was sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in prison on July 25, 1998.
From prison he made and withdrew statements about the Sheppard killing, and Sam Sheppard's son brought a civil action in 2000 seeking a declaration that his father had been wrongly imprisoned and that Eberling was responsible. The jury found against the estate: it did not accept that Eberling had been shown to be the killer.
So the position is this, and the entry states it precisely because so much writing on the case does not. Sheppard's conviction was quashed and he was acquitted, which is settled. Eberling was convicted of one murder, which is settled. That Eberling killed Marilyn Sheppard has never been established, and a jury that heard the argument declined to find it. The figure of five is attribution.
The murder of Marilyn Sheppard is formally unsolved.