Ladies and gentlemen, the story you are about to hear is true.
The names have been changed to protect the innocent.
Dragnet.
You're a detective sergeant.
You're assigned to homicide detail.
An elderly man is threatening an entire neighborhood with a shotgun.
He says he's going to use it to kill a man.
Your job, take it away from him.
It was Tuesday, June 15th.
It was hot in Los Angeles.
We were working the day watch out on homicide detail.
My partner is Frank Smith.
The boss is Captain Lawman.
My name is Friday.
We were on our way out from the office.
It was 1146 A.M. when we got to unit 1F14.
The police car standing by.
Hi, Joe.
Lloyd, what do you got?
Take a look at the sign.
Yeah, I will not live in the same neighborhood with a dog poisoner.
Looks like he painted it himself.
And there's a weekend figure he did.
How'd you get the complaint?
Came in, see the man.
When we got here, the guy was sitting up there with his shotgun.
Told us to leave him alone.
We figured maybe you'd be a little better equipped to handle it.
It might not work out that way, but we'll give it a try.
Anything we can do to help out?
Just be here.
Right.
You make a move for a gun and I'll have to kill you.
What else while you're doing this?
My business.
Well, that gun makes it ours.
You think that if you want to, it doesn't make any difference to me.
I didn't ask you out here.
Yeah, well, now that we made the trip, don't you think you ought to tell us?
No.
Something to do with that sign?
Might have, yeah.
Well, you better tell us about it.
I don't see how it's going to help.
You won't know unless you try, will you?
All right.
I'll tell you what.
You come up here with a porch.
We'll talk.
Make it slow.
Don't try to be smart.
I can hit both of you with one shot.
Yeah.
Might not kill you, but it'd make you pretty sick.
That's good.
Hold it right there.
Now, just stand still.
All right.
You want to tell us what this is all about?
I don't.
It's been 14 years since somebody killed her.
Well, that's not much of a reason to sit out here and threaten everybody who walks by your
house, is it?
It's not much for me.
Why?
Because I know that they will show up.
Who will show up?
Whoever done it.
They'll walk down the street, and when they do, I'm going to get them.
Well, you know we're not going to let you do that.
I don't see that there's much you can do to stop me.
If you know who killed your dog, why don't you come downtown and make a complaint like
you should?
Evidence.
What's that?
We're going to have evidence.
Yeah, well, you must have a lot of it to be ready to kill a man.
We'll see.
Who do you think poisoned your dog?
I don't know, but he'll be by.
Anybody else live in that house with you?
No.
There's nobody inside, huh?
I told you there ain't nobody.
Used to be Queenie, but not now.
This is a picture of her.
Beautiful.
I'm going to tell you something, old timer.
What?
You can sit there and think you got this thing under control, but you haven't.
It's not a picture.
It's a picture of her.
It's a picture of her.
It's a picture of her.
It's a picture of her.
It's a picture of her.
It's a picture of her.
It's a picture of her.
It's a picture of her.
It's a picture of her.
Here, down the street, take the 3, and get him.
Yes, sir.
Take him down the street quickly, or he'll take it easy.
And you can't just stop him.
Yeah, but that'll solve it like the way you can imagine.
Here, here.
Right himself.
Speقl know I know that thing.
Anyway, let's turn back.
I can go into that place.
I've got the gun.
If I tell him not to think I'll break in,
then I'll just kill Kinda- Girl.
What OURE gonna say on this?
Come on.
Bring your gun up in the firing position, and I'll show you how I'm going to stop you.
Yeah, well that's right.
Good work, babyав
All I'm trying to do is to pay back.
I don't want to hurt anybody else.
Look, mister, why don't you tell us who you think poisoned your dog and why?
We might be able to do something for you.
Cause I don't think it'd help.
Well, why don't you give it a try?
He was poisoned.
I saw it come home.
I saw it crawl right up that log.
On her stomach.
It's breaking her hind legs.
Yeah.
You wouldn't understand what she meant to me.
She was like a person.
Someone to talk to.
She was a lot of company.
This book here, written by a man who knew.
He understood.
Yeah, well, all that may be fine, but you got no right to sit out here with that shotgun.
This man knew about dogs.
Odd McIntyre.
Who's that, sir?
Old McIntyre?
I want you to listen.
This will explain just what I'm doing here.
Hold it. Hold it right there.
I'll drop this book and kill you.
Now, I want you to listen to this.
I want you to listen carefully.
Brothers and sisters,
I bid you beware of giving your hearts to a dog to tear.
So wrote Kipling in an excellent elegiac.
I happen to be a dog lover who does not believe in that warning.
Eight of the happiest years of my life were spent in the almost constant companionship of a devoted dog.
When he was taken from me, curly but with merciful swiftness,
it was a terrific heart wrench.
For two days I grieved inconsolably.
For weeks I walked the streets at night trying to get hold of myself.
Yet now, when time has dulled the page,
I can truthfully say that the joy and understanding my dog brought into my life
more than compensated for the sorrow of his passing.
For my dog taught me many things as enduring as the ages.
Outside of the divine relationship and the human,
I know of no influence so ennobling as our relationship with a dog.
My dog's name was Junior.
He was a Boston Bulldog weighing 24 pounds with a blazed muzzle,
white collar, and feet tipped with white.
His coat was a glossy brown of an autumn leaf.
He had a lovable lop ear that perked with quizzical abandon.
He was full of joyous life and never, never outgrew his fantasies.
I picked him up in a Fifth Avenue dog shop in much the same manner that one buys a drink in.
I thought he was cute looking.
He was then four weeks old and prodded sideways with mock seriousness.
I took him home in my overcoat pocket.
From that day on for eight years he played a big part in my life.
He came to understand me better than most of my human associates did.
He knew his time for play and my time for work.
He did not trespass.
His only illness displayed the heroic courage that characterized him until his death.
One evening his mistress and I came home after the theater,
and when we opened the door we missed his welcoming rush and bark.
We found him lying on the floor of the bathroom in a pool of blood.
When I bent over him there was a feeble thump of his tail as much as to say,
don't worry.
His eyes were glazing and I knew that he was in a desperate state.
We worked over him several hours and finally in a wobbly manner he stood up,
walked unsteadily to the bedroom and picked up his play ball as if to say,
you see, I'm all right.
In a half hour he had another hemorrhage.
With uncanny instinct he rushed into the tile bathroom so as not to injure the carpet.
Fortunately he recovered quickly from his attack and in two days seemed as well as ever.
Dogs are unerring in reflecting the characters of their masters and mistress.
To Junior I represented the play spirit, the wrong man Flapdoodle.
He was somewhat of a roughneck in his relations with me,
but with his mistress he was always gentle and careful.
One of the important lessons Junior taught me was to have more faith in my fellow beings.
I for years knocked about as a newspaper reporter and had acquired that veneer of cynicism
that is typical of the craft.
That rather smart, aliqui attitude of having to be shown.
Now, I am the average human being, as likely to urge the rest,
but I found that with Junior, because of his implicit faith in me,
I never kept it trickery.
I could not bear to abuse that rare confidence.
And this set me to thinking that if we humans displayed the same faith in our fellows,
we should be less likely to have that confidence abused.
I come to the final chapter of Junior's life with tears that are shed on a shame.
As I have said, he was my constant companion for eight happy years.
My longest absence from him was when I was in Europe.
The quarantine regulations are so strict that it is quite unfair and selfish to take a dog there.
Junior, like all good dogs, was faithful to the end.
He died obeying my command, which made his loss all the more tragic to me.
I left him after his evening walk and was away until shortly after midnight.
Upon my return, his breathing was, it seemed to me, especially joyous.
It was so joyous, in fact, that it indirectly led to his death.
Shortly before I arrived, a servant had taken him out for a walk,
but he was so glad to see me, and he loved so to go out late at night without a muzzle or a leash on,
that I humed with him and we went out again together.
At that hour, there was very little traffic on Fifth Avenue, and Junior ran far ahead of me.
He had been trained to wait at curbings when unleashed until he received the command, go.
Then he would race across the street like a flash.
At the corner of 44th Street and Fifth Avenue, I stepped to the curb, looked both ways for signs of traffic,
and seeing none, shouted, go.
Junior was off at about.
At the instant, a party of reckless joyriders in a heavy touring car swung madly around the corner,
and both wheels on one side passed over his body.
There was a jeer of derision that the car shot north with the taillights gleaming red in the night.
Junior staggered to his feet, and as I lifted him in my arms,
he looked up with his soft, pleading eyes, begging for the help I could not give.
Hailing a taxicab, I hurried to my hotel a few blocks away, but before I reached there,
he had died without even a quiver of pain.
He lies buried today in the picturesque little dog cemetery on the sloping hills of Hartsdale, New York.
Above him are the green grass, the whispering trees, and a stone carved with this inscription,
Junior, faithful to the end.
Ah, he is a great columnist, old Magendire.
Yes.
Now then, we'll all just wait.
For what?
For the man who poisoned McQueeny.
They're expecting him, are you?
You be by.
This is going to be something different for you two.
How's that?
You won't have to look for the man who killed him.
Friday, see you in a minute.
Yeah, why.
What have you got?
We checked the old man through R9.
Did you find anything we can use?
No, no record.
How about the neighborhood?
Perkins and Henry checked, talked to the people on the street.
Well?
The news we can find out he's pretty near a hermit, doesn't have much to do with anybody.
No close friends?
No, none that anybody knows about.
He gets one piece of mail a month, evidently some kind of check.
We talked to the manager at the grocery down the street.
Collins does all the shopping there.
What do you have to say about that check?
It's from an insurance company, some kind of annuity.
Anything else?
No, the rest of the book's empty.
Where do we go from here?
Find some way to get that gun away from him.
Any ideas?
Well, if we could find the poisoner, it might give us a break.
If there is a poisoner?
No, Lloyd, I believe him.
Anyway, it won't do any harm to shake the neighborhood.
If we pick the guy up, maybe the old man will settle down.
It's a big job.
Yeah, well, that's a big gun.
12.07 p.m.
We contacted the office and made arrangements for additional cars to start a thorough search of the area.
There was just an outside chance that the dog poisoner might still be in the neighborhood somewhere.
The crowd on the sidewalk had gotten larger and the uniformed officers were having trouble keeping order.
While I was talking to the office, a middle-aged woman broke through the lines and ran toward the porch and Peter Collins.
Pete!
Pete Collins!
I hope right there, lady.
He's a friend of mine.
Yeah, well, he won't be if he pulls the trigger on that gun.
What are you trying to do, Pete Collins?
What?
What are you doing to our street?
I don't know what you mean.
We were all sorry when Queenie died.
Wasn't anybody on the street that didn't want to do something?
That's nice of you.
You sit here with that gun, trying to turn this street into a shooting gallery,
and none of us are with you.
You know why I'm doing it.
That don't make it right.
We had a meeting last night.
All the people in the neighborhood tried to think what to do about getting another dog.
I don't want no other dog.
Grow up.
Put that gun away and grow up.
You get out of here right now.
You get out of here and tell your friends that I don't need them.
None of them.
You go tell them that, will you?
All right, come on.
I'll be over here.
Joe?
Yeah?
Just talked to the office.
They're sending out more men with gas guns.
Anything on the poisoner?
No, still looking.
Lady, what do you know about him?
Well, he lived next door for 16 years.
He lived alone all that time?
Yeah.
I think he was married before he moved here.
Yeah.
All he had was that old dog.
Just the two of them.
You have any idea who might have poisoned the dog?
We'd all like the answer to that one.
Ma'am?
McQueen is not the first one.
There have been 13 others.
There's hardly a dog on the block that hasn't gotten sick.
We've done about everything we could.
It isn't easy.
What do you mean?
The way the law is.
What?
We checked into it.
Oh, dear.
The way the law reads, in order to prove poisoning,
you've got to see the person throw the bait.
Yeah.
None of us got time to sit around the back fence
and watch people walking down the alley.
But even if you do see the person throw the bait,
you can't just go in and arrest him.
All right.
The law says you've got to have part of the bait.
That's hard to do.
Mm-hmm.
Makes it almost impossible.
You've been to the authorities, have you?
Yeah.
SPCA, police.
They've all done what they could.
Dogs keep right on dying.
We've even thought of maybe hiring somebody on our own.
You know, sort of a special cop.
Yeah.
It seems a shame, don't it?
Ma'am?
Poor old man.
How could anybody get low enough to poison his dog?
That's what he wants to know.
Joe.
Yeah.
You better leave, lady.
Oh, yeah.
I guess there's nothing more I can do for you.
Yeah, what do you got?
Well, this man here, his name is Bentley Mocker.
Yeah.
Uniformed men picked him up in an alley
a couple of blocks from here,
throwing this over the back fences.
Meat, huh?
Yeah.
William?
That the man?
That the man who poisoned Queen?
All right, put that gun down, Collins.
I'm gonna kill him.
How about it, Joe?
Collins, put it down.
No!
Stand clear!
Better get these people out of here.
Right.
What are we gonna do?
No choice now.
Yeah.
1224 p.m.
In spite of the precautions,
it began to look as if we wouldn't be able to take Collins' gun away from him
without physical violence.
As he raised the shotgun, cocked it, and pointed it at Bentley Mocker,
all of the other officers in the vicinity were ready to stop him.
Collins, you use that gun, and I'm gonna use mine.
Put it down.
I'll shoot through you to get to it.
Yes, sir, you're gonna have to.
What's going on here?
You got no right to do this to me.
How about it, did you poison his dog?
He's crazy.
He'll kill me if he gets a chance.
Just answer me, did you poison his dog?
What if I did?
Answer the question, mister.
All right, I did.
I poisoned him.
You've been dropping poisoned meat all over this neighborhood, haven't you?
There ain't anything you can do about it.
14 dogs killed around here.
Did you do it?
Pests, that's how they are.
Good riddance.
That's the way it looks to you, doesn't it?
Sure, rootin' around in the yards, barkin' and yowlin'.
No good any of them.
You all through?
I could go on for hours about them.
Had my way, I'd get rid of them all.
I'm gonna tell you somethin', those dogs meant a lot to the people who lost him.
That old man sittin' up there on the porch, to him that dog was part of his life.
What gives you the right to sneak around back alleys and side yards and kill off a pet that belongs to a child or an old man?
I don't have to stand around here and listen to you.
No, sir, you don't.
Lloyd?
Yeah, Joe?
Take him downtown.
What for?
You got no law to hold me?
Yeah, well, maybe we can find one.
You mean the way you talk, you think dogs are better than humans?
In your case, they are.
Come on, let's go.
Frank?
Yeah?
Tell him to stand by with the gas.
Yeah, no other way, huh?
Now I'll make one more try.
Right, I'll bring up the heavy stuff.
All right, Collins, it's all over now.
I'm gonna tell you once more, put that gun down.
How long till I get one chance at that questionin'?
He's gone, he's downtown.
Now this is the last time, put it down.
I don't care anymore.
It's up to you, we've done all we can.
That man ought to die.
Put the gun down.
I don't care anymore, I just as soon shoot you.
Collins, it's all over.
Now put that gun down or we'll take it away from you.
Jump.
Jump.
Yeah.
Take a look.
What's the kid want here?
Well, look, a note, and Louis' coat.
Policeman, maybe this will help.
I'm gonna read it.
Did you read this?
Yeah.
Well, we'll give it a try.
Collins, there's a boy here wants to see you.
I don't want to talk to anybody.
You might want to see him.
Who is it?
What's your name, sir?
Davey.
Davey.
Oh, I know him, it's okay.
Let him come up.
Not as long as you got that gun.
Now how about it?
All right.
Break it.
Break it. Take the shells out.
And toss them down there on the lawn.
Now let that gun slide down the porch steps.
Come on.
All right, son, come ahead.
Davey, what did you want to see me about?
Ma said I should give you this note.
What's in it?
Well, now the quickest way to find that out is to read it, isn't it?
My dear Mr. Collins, as you well know, all of your neighbors are dreadfully sorry you lost your Queenie.
I know this one may never take her place, but please give her the chance.
Oh, yes, it's a little girl.
Your neighbor, Mrs. Tom Evans.
Want to see the puppy?
Well...
Come on, son, let's unzip your jacket here.
Here.
Okay.
There you are.
It's a little girl.
Just a puppy.
That's right.
Yeah, Queenie's collar doesn't fit too good.
I think I'll have to get another one.
No, I wouldn't worry about that.
Huh?
She'll grow into that one.
The story you've just heard is true.
The names were changed to protect the innocent.
On July 12th, trial was held in Division 68, Muncie.
Los Angeles Judicial District.
Peter Lawrence Collins pled guilty to violation of Section 417 P.C.
Drawing or exhibiting firearms, one count.
Extenuating circumstances and lack of a prior record led the court to be lenient.
The suspect was placed on probation for a period of three years.
Bentley Jones Mocker was treated as a criminal.
Bentley Jones Mocker was tried and convicted of Section 596 P.C.
Unauthorized animal poisoning and received sentence as prescribed by law.
Violation of Section 596 P.C. is punishable by imprisonment in the county jail
for a period not to exceed six months.
Or a fine of not more than $500.
Or both such fine and imprisonment.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are grateful to the McNaughts Syndicate, Inc.
for granting permission to read excerpts from O.O. McIntyre's article entitled
What My Dog Taught Me.
You have just heard Dragnet, the authentic story of your police force in action
and starring Jack Webb, a presentation of the United States Armed Forces Radio Service.