The Big Pipe

Originally Aired: February 23, 1954

Dragnet #236, "The Big Pipe," Sergeant Joe Friday and Officer Frank Smith investigate the brutal murder of an accountant found beaten to death in a downtown Los Angeles office building. The victim, Mrs. Fitzgerald, is discovered by building cleaning woman Miss Joyce at 7 a.m., lying dead behind her desk in an office ransacked with papers strewn across the floor. The murder weapon is a 15-inch piece of lead pipe, wrapped in brown paper at one end and bloodstained at the other.

Despite the chaotic scene suggesting robbery, valuable diamond rings remain on the victim's fingers and over two hundred dollars sits untouched in her purse. Miss Joyce reveals crucial information she learned from reading discarded letters in the wastebaskets during her lonely nighttime shifts: the victim had been locked in a bitter legal dispute with her estranged husband, Oscar Fitzgerald. In threatening letters torn up and thrown away, he warned his wife about trying to "railroad the thing through" and promised to come to her office. Friday and Smith head to Fitzgerald's downtown men's club to question him about his whereabouts and his threatening correspondence.

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