Crime Classics — 1954
25 episodes broadcast in 1954.
Missouri, 1866 -- out of the border war's blood feuds ride the Younger brothers, and Thomas Hyland reports on why some of them grew no older.
Bombay, 1856: brother turns against brother in colonial India, with a waiting tiger to settle accounts.
Glasgow, 1857 -- lovely Madeleine Smith is tried for feeding her inconvenient lover arsenic: maid or murderess, which?
Manchester, Vermont, 1817: the Boorn brothers face the gallows for a murder -- in a nip-and-tuck race against the reappearance of the supposed victim.
England -- the amazing career of jailbreaking rogue Jack Sheppard, who robs a party guest of her jewels and gives her a story for life.
Rome, 44 BC: on the Ides of March, silken-clad Brutus and the conspirators wait with twenty-three knives for the arrival of Julius Caesar.
France under Louis Napoleon, 1869 -- youthful Jean-Baptiste Troppmann murders his way toward fortune, leaving a missing family and fresh graves behind.
1821: a well-told tale of piracy and murder aboard the good ship Jane, and why she became flotsam.
Suffolk, England, 1676 -- during a game of croquet, Roger Nems takes a mallet to the head, yet contrives even in death to win the game.
New Hampshire, 1842: Thomas Hyland reports on Brad Ferguson, a tiger, and what happened then.
Colonial India -- an aged husband, a young wife, and the murderous scheme built around an elephant called Old Sixtoes.
March 24, 1954
Francisco Pizarro: His Heart on a Golden Knife
Scotland, 1707: escape artist Robby-Boy Balfour makes a mockery of a great prison's reputation.
April 7, 1954
A General's Daughter, Czar's Lieutenant and the Linen Closet: a Russian Tragedy
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Imperial Russia -- a general's daughter, a Tsar's lieutenant, and a hidden romance that ends in the frozen Neva.
Manchester, England, 1826: fireman James Evans, expert at putting out blazes large and small, extinguishes a human torch and wins a bride.
Rome, 1500 -- Cesare Borgia navigates a court of poison and plots to accomplish his most difficult murder yet.
Vermont, 1850: a beautiful widow turns the tables and casts her own spell on three gypsies in a backwoods fandango.
Nuremberg, 1820 -- hapless Bunny Baumler can do nothing right, except bludgeon four people to death in a beer hall.
Knaresborough, Yorkshire, 1758: a skeleton dug from a cave points to Eugene Aram -- but is he the wrong man for the gallows, or exactly the right one?
France under Louis XIV -- from her favorite duelling chamber, the Marquise de Brinvilliers makes a lethal habit of poisoning everyone who displeases her.
A condemned prisoner plots to cheat the noose with a friend's help, in a grimly funny account of Mr. Jonathan Jewett's peculiar end.
Mexico City, 1940 -- the life and murder of exiled revolutionary Leon Trotsky, from Siberian prisoner to an assassin's ice axe.
A canvasback Baltimore prize-fighter's adventures in love and murder end on a hot summer night.
The Ottoman court -- a bizarre tale of murder and mayhem around Ali Pasha, with a mother consigned to the dungeon.
London, 1888: the yearlong series closes on Whitechapel, where a killer who calls himself Jack the Ripper is seen through the eyes of a young woman.
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