The Big Small

Originally Aired: January 11, 1953

Dragnet #186, "The Big Small," finds Sergeants Joe Friday and Frank Smith on the trail of a sophisticated check forger who has been systematically targeting Los Angeles merchants. The suspect is a deceptively innocent-looking woman in her sixties—small, well-dressed, with pure white hair styled in an old-fashioned bun. She uses letters supposedly from her son in the East as identification and wears expensive French perfume that seems oddly out of place with her otherwise modest appearance. When shopkeeper Miss Parkinson reports being conned for fifty dollars, she provides Friday with a detailed description but admits the woman's kindly demeanor made her seem completely trustworthy.

Despite their best efforts, Friday and Smith find themselves frustrated at every turn. The forger's modus operandi is carefully calculated: she hits different stores, uses different names on each check, and always passes checks for exactly fifty dollars. The detectives run the description through Records and Identification, alert merchants throughout the central area, check with informants, and have the handwriting analyzed, but every lead goes nowhere. As two weeks pass and the woman strikes twelve more times with an estimated take of over twenty-five hundred dollars, the pressure mounts on the forgery detail to catch this clever criminal.

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