Some call it an affront to human dignity. Others say it's an expensive waste of time. And some swear it's the only way to save a vilified reputation.

Macabre or not, scientists and law enforcement officials are increasingly turning to an unlikely spot for new evidence: the graveyard. Digging up the dead in search of clues to solve old crimes has grown more popular as scientific testing -- especially DNA analysis -- has become more accurate and reliable. While it's not quite fair to paint the practice as a raging trend, enough corpses have been unearthed in the name of justice to arouse the public's morbid curiosity and to raise new questions about the efficacy of scientific testing. Not coincidentally, orders to exhume and examine corpses are usually issued in attempts to solve the more bizarre, persistent mysteries.

The First Trial of the Century

If you guessed O.J. and Nicole, you'd be off by several decades. But the case was eerily similar, involving a camera-friendly couple and a storybook marriage torn asunder by cross-charges of social climbing and womanizing. In the early morning hours of July 4, 1954, Marilyn Sheppard, four months pregnant, was found bludgeoned to death in her bed. Her husband Dr. Sam H. Sheppard recounted hazily that he was roused by Marilyn's cries as he dozed on a daybed downstairs. He said he was accosted by a stranger -- a bushy-haired man -- who left him lying unconscious in the shallow water on the couple's beachfront property, his cervical vertabra fractured. But police investigators didn't buy his story and fingered Dr. Sheppard as the murderer, alleging his injuries were faked or self-inflicted. He was convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.

The Sheppard murder inspired a film and television series, "The Fugitive," in which Dr. Sheppard was reconfigured as an escaped convict on an epic quest to find his wife's true killer. In reality, Dr. Sheppard spent ten years in an Ohio prison before F. Lee Bailey -- then a young, inexperienced defense attorney, sprung him from jail and successfully made the now-ironic argument that his client was previously denied a fair trial due to excessive publicity. Dr. Sheppard was finally released from prison and died of liver disease in 1970 at the age of 46, after years of hard drinking following his release. His son Samuel Reese Sheppard, however, maintained that his father died of a broken heart.

Samuel Reese Sheppard convinced officials to exhume his father's corpse from a Columbus, Ohio cemetery. Authorities plan to run DNA tests on the body and on additional crime scene evidence recently unearthed from a California garage: bloody batting from Marilyn Sheppard's mattress and scrapings from bloodstains on a door at the crime scene. If the DNA testing -- which was only a fledgling science at the time of the murder 43 years ago -- produces no match, it may indicate that an intruder was in fact the murderer as Dr. Sheppard claimed. Samuel Reese Sheppard says this will finally clear his father's name. Prosecutors argue the tests will reveal too little too late.

Dead Bodies Tell No Lies?

• In 1997, an Atlanta jury convicted Jan Barry Sandlin in the 1971 beating death of four-month-old Matthew Golder. Sandlin had posed the infant's stepsister, Tracy Rhame, in a crib and then blamed her for pushing Matthew to his death. When the infant's remains were exhumed recently, authorities found the fatal injuries were caused by beating, not a fall.

• Forensic experts in India exhumed a body found in a makeshift grave in Kashmir, believing it to be the remains of a British man kidnapped and held hostage by militants there nearly two years ago. While the remains are badly decomposed, surviving relatives hope that DNA tests may help identify them, ending months of worry and uncertainty for them.

• In an unsuccessful bid to clear an historic controversy, distant relatives of John Wilkes Booth were recently denied a request to exhume and test a body buried in Maryland's Green Mountain Cemetery since 1869. The identity of the body has been in question since a man named David E. George claimed to be Booth before committing suicide in 1903. In denying the request, the judge cited the probability that three infant siblings are buried on top of the coffin, and that DNA testing would not likely provide a match with the distant remaining relatives.