User Reviews

**SPOILERS** Both Sgt.Joe Friday and his partner Officer Bill Gannon's, Jack Webb & Harry Morgan, lunch was ruined when they were interrupted in eating it and called to this apartment building where the superintendent Alex Troy was found with his skull and face bashed in by a claw hammer.

Trying to find out who was with Troy the last few minutes of his life Sgt. Friday and Officer Gannon come up with a tenant the local supermarket box-boy 19 year old Terry Ridges, Brian Avery. Not only was Terry with Troy playing cards the evening he was murdered but also has blood stains on his t-shirt that in his laundry bin. The blood type-O positive-matched that of the dead man Alex Troy. As it soon turned out it wasn't Troy's blood but the blood of one of the other tenants hairstylist "Chet" Chesney Guthrie, Chet Sutton, who got belted in his nose with a hairspray can by Terry after asking for the $4.00 he owed him! As we soon find out poor and murdered Alex Troy had it a lot worse. Not only was he murdered but his killer got only $6.80 in nickels dimes and quarters off the guy after he killed him!

***SPOILERS*** It didn't take long for the LAPD to track down Troy's killer in that he left his calling card, his rent statement, at the scene of the crime! The apartment-house where Troy was the superintendent! And that piece of important evidence lead to Cottonwood Arizona where Troy's killer drifter Fred Tosca, James Oliver, and his feather brain girlfriend Camille Gearhardt,Jill Banner, was arrested by the local police chief Everett Snhoddy, Ben Chandler. It was both Fred & Camile's downright arrogance and sense of superiority that in the end did them both in. It was in fact Camile who in trying to avoid to testify against her boyfriend Fred, whom she claimed to be married to, who unwittingly gave the police all the rope they needed to hang the couple; The dead Alex Troy's wife wedding ring! It's that ring that was missing from Troy's apartment and by Camile having it on her put both her and Fred at the scene at Troy's murder!

The first episode of Dragnet 1967 where Sgt Joe Friday and his partner Bill Gannon are in charge of a murder investigation, a brutal claw hammer beating of an elderly man. In an apartment complex, someone playing cards with the victim attacked him with a claw hammer, multiple blows leaving his face unrecognizable. Friday (Jack Webb) and Gannon (Harry Morgan) realize that the murderer could have actually been a tenant living in the complex, it will be nabbing the creep that will cause them a lot of headache. One of the initial suspects, Terry Ridges (Brian Avery), is a smart aleck teenager who had Type O blood on his shirt, the same as the victim's but it is soon learned that his came from a homosexual fashion stylist (an angered response to paying a smaller fee for his hair "styling" the cause of a hair spray bottle striking the stylist), his mother's car stolen by the real culprit. This episode includes a sad interview with an elderly friend of the victim's as the two often visited their wives graves together. The killer and his immature teenage girlfriend both are interrogated by Friday and Gannon producing some memorable scenes (the teenage hoodlums disrespect them in the usual wise ass ways), after the two go on the lam. However, the meat of the story has the investigation within the apartment complex, as our detectives talk with people, drawing closer to their suspect as they can discover a name and his apartment, a torn rent receipt the true evidentiary link Friday needs to link his criminal to the murder. Nothing is more tragic than the amount the victim was killed for, a mere $6 and a stolen wedding ring belonging to his deceased wife! It establishes that murders can derive from senseless acts on the part of heinous individuals who do not respect the lives of those they kill...these happen everyday.

Entertaining episode. Somebody has clobbered an old man in his apartment with a hammer. EMT: "The first two killed him." Friday: "The last four changed his personality." The tenant appears to have been playing cards with some people, so which of them did it? Was it the gay hair dresser? That's right, a gay hair dresser lives upstairs. He could "do wonders" with Friday's hair but for Gannon, "Stick to your barber." He didn't do it.

The plot gets a little clotted somewhere around the middle, and involves a missing rent receipt and a stolen car. The suspects are nabbed in Cottonwood, Arizona, which is a nice little town in which people still argue about the authority of the Bureau of Land Management and its right to restrict cattle grazing. In nearby Sedona, a tony Southwestern paradise, Senator John McCain has an estate.

It's not as filled with humor as some of the episodes, but on the other hand Merry Andrews is present as "Policewoman Dorothy Miller." A shame she wasn't a better actress because she's awfully attractive.