Radio Archeaology

It was a warm Monday in August when a 12-year-old girl named Ruth Ann Snyder walked into Room 45 of the LAPD burglary detail and announced that everything had been stolen. Sergeants Joe Friday and Ben Romero drove her home to College Avenue, where her 78-year-old grandfather was keeping watch from the middle of the dining room rug, the only thing the thieves had left behind. The two had just retur...

Matt Dillon’s old friend Nate Tatum has just walked away from a poorly paid marshal’s badge, and he rides into Dodge City half expecting trouble to follow him. Dillon quietly asks Kitty to watch for any stranger who might be carrying a gun for money, but that same night Nate is shot in the back on Front Street, right outside the rooming house of Bonnie Van Diemen, a newcomer from Abilene scraping...

It was Tuesday, November 3rd, and chilly in Los Angeles when Sergeant Joe Friday and his partner Ben Romero of Central Robbery pulled up to Stendahl’s Bakery on Silver Avenue just before midnight. A gunman in a light blue baseball cap had walked in on a Swedish family scrubbing the shop floor, taken $24 in paper money, and then, for no reason anyone could understand, shot the father, Lars, in the...

When young Lemmy Woods is shot in the back and sent home tied to his horse, Doc Adams arrives too late to save him. The boy dies before he can name the men he was trying to leave behind, and Doc simply can't let it rest. Against Marshal Matt Dillon's warning, Dodge City's gentle healer starts telling everyone in town that Lemmy talked, turning himself into the bait. Kitty calls him...

A socially prominent Los Angeles businessman wants his wife dead, and he's willing to pay $1,000 to make it happen. After two men turn him down, Sergeant Joe Friday steps into the role himself, going undercover on Skid Row as a down-and-out drifter named Kelly from Phoenix. From a meeting in the grandstands at the midget auto races to a chilling walkthrough of a Venice beach house, Charles St...

It's too hot a day in Dodge City for anybody to be running, but Sally Bogan is flying down the boardwalk like the devil himself is chasing her. When Marshal Matt Dillon stops her, she confesses a secret not even her husband Ben knows: at 17 in San Francisco she married Jeff Lightley, second mate on a clipper that went down in a typhoon four years ago. Now Jeff is standing in the street, very...

Sergeants Joe Friday and Ben Romero of the LAPD’s Forgery Detail draw the assignment nobody wants: catching a soft-spoken, sweet-faced woman known only as “Grandma.” For nine and a half years she has worked just three months of the year - April, October and December - cashing personal cheques of $2 to $100 at meat markets, groceries and department stores across Los Angeles. The tally stands at 1,2...

Marshal Matt Dillon and Chester are riding back into Dodge when they cross paths with a drifter driving an old rancher’s horses down a dry wash, a discovery that leads them straight to Amos Granby’s ransacked house and the old man hanging dead inside. The drifter, who gives his name as Joe Trumbull, has no gun, no explanation, and not a mark of guilt to hold him on except the fact that he was ther...

It was Friday, August 17th, and hot in Los Angeles when Sergeant Joe Friday and his partner Ben Romero picked up the robbery detail no cop wants: a store clerk shot dead because he didn't empty the till fast enough. Burt Matthews died in front of a co-worker who could describe the gunman's build and his nervous twitch, even the way the getaway taxi's doors swung open, but not much e...

When old-timer Luke Burris is beaten half to death just outside Dodge City, his son Jess begs Marshal Matt Dillon to arrest the man responsible. But Luke wants no part of it. A frontiersman to his bones, he settled his own scores long before there was any law to call on, and he isn’t about to start relying on one now. As Dillon tries to reason with a man who trusts nothing but his own two hands, t...

It was a chilly Sunday morning when Sergeants Joe Friday and Ben Romero were called out to a Hollywood apartment where Marla Hutchins told a strange story. Her doctor, treating her twice a week with hypnotherapy for chronic headaches, had come by the night before, given her three sleeping capsules, and left her to sleep. By morning her jewelry box was emptied and her mink coats were gone. The only...

A telegram from an old friend in Arizona warns Marshal Matt Dillon that Coney Thorne, freshly released from prison, is riding for Dodge City with murder on his mind. Years earlier, Dillon had arrested Thorne for a stage holdup he never believed the man committed - but the courts convicted him anyway, and five hard years behind bars have given Thorne plenty of time to nurse his grudge. When Thorne...

Sergeants Joe Friday and Ben Romero catch a case that starts quietly: an elderly Los Angeles couple, Walter and Kate Apperson, hasn't been seen in four days. Their next-door neighbour, barber Clarence Stokely, insists the pair never travels without saying a word - and something about the untouched house, the porch light burning for three straight nights, and a half-empty bottle of cyanide in...

Marshal Matt Dillon and his deputy Chester ride past the Henry homestead one quiet morning and get a rifle shot for their trouble. Ellen Henry has never taken kindly to visitors, not since her husband Ethan died five years back and left her to scrape by alone. Her son Luther should be the one holding the place together, but he is more often found drinking away his afternoons at the Long Branch tha...

Detective Sergeant Joe Friday and his partner Ben Romero catch a narcotics detail that hits close to home: a foggy Monday morning break-in at St. Christopher's Hospital pharmacy. A young intern is found bleeding on the floor, and $10,000 worth of morphine and cocaine has vanished without a trace. No prints, no witnesses, and a nun who insists on doing a little detective work of her own before...

In Dodge City, an old man named Charlie spends his days parked outside the Dodge House, spinning yarns to anyone who'll sit still long enough to listen. His favourite subject is a legendary gunfighter called Rio Joe, a man Charlie swears he once stood shoulder to shoulder with. Most folks roll their eyes and walk on, but young Chester takes Charlie's side when a couple of toughs start pu...

It was a warm September night when Sergeants Joe Friday and Ben Romero of the LAPD Homicide Detail caught a case unlike any other on the books. Betty Dixon, a divorced mother of one, was found stabbed to death in her Los Angeles home by her sixteen-year-old son, who had come home late from a double feature his mother had insisted he stay for. There was no forced entry, nothing stolen, and no sign...

When old Luke Burris was beaten half to death by Smed Moley and left by the creek, his son Jess did what his father never would - he rode into Dodge and asked Marshal Dillon for help. Luke was frontier stock, the kind who had carved a life out of hard land before there was any law to speak of. He knew who had done it. He just was not about to say so. Men like Luke settled their own trouble, and he...

Officer Eugene Brewer, eight years on the force, a good record all the way, had simply disappeared somewhere along the Imperial Highway near the San Pedro cut-off. His cruiser was found idling on the shoulder, lights still on, radio still working, with no sign of a struggle, no blood, and no footprints anywhere nearby. Two truck farmers had noticed the headlights sitting still in the dark but assu...

Dodge City is enjoying a rare quiet spell - green prairie, fine weather, and the trail herds not yet arrived. Marshal Matt Dillon and Chester take a moment to savour it. Then a commotion in the street pulls them up short. Lafe Sutter has his son Packy by the arm, furious that the boy rode into town alongside Jason Royle - a quiet, book-reading sheep man Lafe despises. The beating is interrupted, b...

Sergeant Joe Friday and his partner Ben Romero are two months deep into a forgery case that keeps slipping through their fingers. A well-dressed, middle-aged man has been working the small shops of Los Angeles - meat markets, liquor stores, grocery stores, delicatessens - cashing worthless cheques for $15 or $20 at a time, always with the same story, always the same careful handwriting. Their prim...

When the westbound stage rolls into Dodge City short a strongbox and short a passenger, Marshal Matt Dillon already has his suspicions. Franklin Reeves - a wealthy New Yorker with a fiancée named Laura on that very stage - is frantic, though Kitty Russell at the Long Branch will later offer a rather different account of how Reeves came to be engaged. The outlaw who stopped the coach, a stranger wi...

It was Christmas morning in Los Angeles, and Detectives Joe Friday and Ben Romero were already at a churchyard crime scene before sunrise. The victim: a woman with no identification, lying in the rain-soaked grounds of San Andreas Cathedral. The only clues were a cheap fountain pen, a door key that fit no lock anyone could find, and a cast of boot prints from the wet earth nearby. By the time they...

When the Pueblo Gang rides into Dodge City, Matt Dillon already knows their history. Stage holdups from Colorado to the California border. Men shot in the back. A reputation that travels faster than the law. Dillon warns them plainly: one wrong move and all three of them are done. But in Dodge, a man can’t be jailed on suspicion alone  and so the Gang sits down to eat, and Dillon walks away to wai...

For more than a month, lone women across the western stretches of Los Angeles had been beaten, robbed, and left on the pavement. The attacks came at night, the descriptions were hopelessly vague, and the two men behind it had vanished into the dark each time. Detectives Joe Friday and Ben Romero of the LAPD's Robbery Detail knew they had to stop waiting for a break and manufacture one. With f...