The Big Picture

Originally Aired: December 7, 1950 Dragnet #78, "The Big Picture," finds Sergeant Joe Friday and Officer Ben Romero working the day watch out of Juvenile Bureau when a Minnesota businessman named Wayne Kenworthy walks into their squad room with a disturbing discovery. While attending a convention in Los Angeles, Kenworthy purchased an obscene photograph from a bartender on Alvarado Street, only to recognize the young girl in it as his neighbor's daughter from back home. The girl, seventeen-year-old Lois Brewster, came to Hollywood eight months earlier hoping for a movie career, but stopped writing home two months ago. What Kenworthy doesn't know yet is that Friday and Romero have tragic news: the girl's body washed ashore at Venice Beach just days earlier, an apparent suicide. Friday and Romero brief Inspector Bowling on what they believe is a familiar pattern—phony talent scouts luring young girls with promises of stardom, then exploiting them for the obscene photography trade. The detectives launch an intensive investigation to track down everyone in the distribution chain, from the bartender who sold the photo all the way up to whoever photographed and printed them. Their key lead is Joyce Fowler, Lois Brewster's roommate who disappeared around the same time, but locating her proves difficult as the case grows more urgent.