A Living, Walking Argument against the Death Penalty Sam Sheppard's Son Stages His Protest, Step by Step across 1,600 Miles

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OF ALL the characters in the O.J. Simpson tragedy, Sam Reese Sheppard thinks most about the children. "They have to be hurting and confused," he said of Sydney Simpson, 9, and her brother Justin, 6. "It's a devastating thing to have your universe change so profoundly and so suddenly."

Sheppard knows. He was 7 when his aunt awakened him early on the morning of July 4, 1954, and whisked him out of his suburban Cleveland home - past policemen in the hallway, past his father sitting bruised and stunned in the den, past news photographers snapping pictures of the little boy still clad in his pajamas.

Upstairs, his mother, Marilyn, 31 and four months pregnant, …