Dragnet - Big Show

·29 min·2 clips

The bus driver says Mrs. Lewis boarded at Tucson with the baby, not Dorothy Miller.

1. Dragnet's "Big Show" follows Sergeant Friday and Ed Jacobs through a Los Angeles bus-depot case centered on a seven-week-old baby and Mrs. Marjorie Lewis. 2. Captain Stein sends Juvenile Division after the 11:05 a.m. report that a woman left the infant in the depot waiting room. 3. Mrs. Lewis tells Friday that Dorothy Miller, a Tucson woman, handed her the baby and said she would return after getting luggage. 4. She describes Dorothy Miller as about 20, dark-haired, dark-eyed, and small, and says they rode the bus together from Tucson to Los Angeles. 5. Betty Stone searches the baby's valise and finds a paid receipt for Santa Maria Hospital in Tucson. 6. The receipt names Dorothy Miller and gives the officers a paper trail back to a Tucson maternity ward. 7. Tucson police confirm a June 24 birth date and report that the hospital described Dorothy Miller as blond, about 29 or 30. 8. That description does not match the young dark-haired woman Mrs. Lewis described in the depot. 9. Friday and Jacobs then question the bus driver, who says Mrs. Lewis boarded at Tucson holding the baby. 10. The driver says he remembers an elderly woman, not a young mother sitting beside Mrs. Lewis, and he does not remember Dorothy Miller at all. 11. The officers confront Mrs. Lewis in her hotel room after her husband, Army Captain Walter Lewis, arrives from overseas. 12. Under pressure, she admits there is no Dorothy Miller and that she invented the name. 13. Mrs. Lewis says she went to Tucson to have her baby under a different name and keep the truth from Walter Lewis. 14. She explains that Walter had been overseas almost two years and that she spent that time alone in a two-room apartment near Santa Barbara. 15. She says she started drinking, going to parties, and losing track of the affair that led to the pregnancy. 16. When Friday asks about the child, she calls him "my own baby" and says she could not keep him. 17. The episode uses Jack Webb's clipped narration and time stamps like 11.48 a.m., 7.55 a.m., and 10.38 a.m. to mark each turn. 18. It mixes police interviews, hospital records, hotel-room confrontation, and sponsor breaks for Fatima cigarettes. 19. Listeners who like classic procedural drama with a marital secret will get the most from this case. 20. Listeners wanting action chases or light comedy will probably skip it.

As heard by us

An abandoned baby and two Dorothy Miller descriptions shape a Dragnet case built on patient, practical police work.

A seven-week-old baby left in a bus depot waiting room gives Dragnet a case that moves by careful accumulation rather than sudden breakthrough.

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Why you'd press play

You follow an abandoned baby's trail from a bus depot to a mismatch in two Dorothy Miller descriptions.

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