THE FUGITIVE SEASON ONE

Dr. Richard Kimble and his wife Helen were seen in a park in Chicago jogging. Richard and Helen began to have a playful argument and while they were laughing, some people observing them saw it differently. At the end of their run, Helen brought up the subject of having a baby. Richard made a joke about it in case she was not serious, and she ran ahead and went home. He pulled a muscle in his leg trying to catch her and stopped to buy her a rose on the way home. When he got home, the apartment was dark and an intruder attacked him with a baseball bat.

Dr. Kimble tried to capture him, pulling off the man’s prosthetic arm in the process, but when he saw Helen obviously struggling to breathe, he went to her aid and the one-armed man fled.

Lt. Philip Gerard was unable to find a suspect matching a description or find any forensic evidence to support that an intruder was even in the house. Helen Ross Kimble had just come into a twenty million dollar trust fund and there was no prenuptial agreement so Richard Kimble was arrested for the crime as he was the only person who appeared to have a motive for the murder.

The jury agreed with Lt. Gerard and Dr. Richard Kimble was sentenced to die by lethal injection. On the way to death row in a van with Lt. Gerard, there was a traffic accident and Kimble managed to escape when Gerard was knocked unconscious. He quickly recovered and chased Kimble, but he was able to escape by running through traffic and jumping off of a bridge and on to a moving truck.

Lt. Gerard is obsessed with finding Kimble, not only because he failed to prevent his escape, but for a far deeper reason. His first wife Lenore died in a traffic accident and the man responsible for the traffic accident, Jackson Menzies III, was very wealthy and beat the rap by paying off a judge and a DA. Gerard is convinced that Kimble, like Menzies, wants to use his wealth to escape punishment and is determined not to let that happen. His obsession takes its toll on his relationship with his daughter and his new wife.

Richard Kimble, the fugitive, refuses to just run and hide. He searches relentlessly for the One Armed Man, sneaking into hospitals to search patient’s records, hoping to identify the One Armed Man who killed his wife so savagely. He also uses the internet and one day he gets a hit on an article about a One Armed Man in Miami who beat someone savagely in a bar but was let go after being arrested - Fred Johnson.

Kimble travels to Miami and finds the place where Johnson was known to stay but finds out he won’t be back until later in the week when a package for him is to be delivered.

Kimble waits but misses Johnson by minutes because he had an encounter with Gerard on the top of a high-rise under construction. He told Gerard that the man who killed his wife is in Miami.

Gerard replied, “I know, I’m looking at him.” In order to escape Gerard, Kimble jumped off the building and into a safety net. He followed Johnson to the bus station and missed him getting on a bus. However, he found out the bus was headed to Savannah and tracked him there. The two had a face to face confrontation and Johnson tried to kill Kimble. Kimble escaped but not before taking what was in Johnson’s package. The package had passports with different names on them. He sent them to Lt. Gerard with a note saying that “This is the man who killed my wife.”

Gerard investigated further and discovered that Fred Johnson’s real name is actually Ben Charnquist and he died of a drug overdose in 1993. He tells this information to Kimble’s attorney. Kimble later called his attorney, Abe Eisenberg, who suggested Kimble turn himself in. It is clear he believes Kimble’s life on the run has him seeing things that are not there. Kimble angrily insists Charnquist is alive and he has seen him twice.

  Kimble has picked up allies on his travels. His biggest supporter is his sister Maggie. She will do anything to help prove her brother’s innocence.

Another one of his supporters is a computer geek and loner who he met in Myrtle Beach SC by the name of Chuck Brixius. Chuck has a past history of mental illness but is very smart. He hid Kimble from the police when Kimble took ill in Myrtle Beach. Kimble found out that Chuck put together a website called drrichardkimble.com. Using the passport Kimble has kept, Chuck posts the picture of Ben Charnquist so that people could look for him and let Kimble know where they might have seen him.

Kimble has a brief romantic encounter with Jenny Butler, a widow in Bodega Bay CA. While he contemplated staying with her, circumstances in the form of two escaped convicts who recognize him, lead him to believe any kind of normal life will be impossible and they reluctantly part.

A tip from Chuck leads Kimble to an associate of Charnquist named Nicholas Armanesco Kimble tracked him down, only to have him run away when he saw him. Kimble chased him but Charnquist found him first and demanded something from Nick. Nick told him he didn’t have it and Charnquist shot him and ran away. Kimble found Nick dying. His last words to him were that he knew he didn’t kill Helen because he was driving the car that night for Charnquist. He died in spite of Kimble’s best efforts to save him. After being questioned by the police, Kimble met Nick’s father at the police station. Having experienced the violent death of a loved one, Kimble offered his assistance to Henry, who asked Kimble to stay with him because he was with his son when he died.

Henry’s house got ransacked and Kimble realized that Charnquist broke in looking for something. He explained everything to Henry about Charnquist and about how he killed his wife. Henry called the police to tell them that he suspected that Charnquist killed Nick and they wouldn’t listen, but they have belatedly realized who Richard Kimble was because he left a thumbprint on Nick’s leather jacket. Kimble narrowly escaped and followed Henry to the dock to confront Charnquist, where a furious Henry threatened to kill Charnquist in revenge for his son. Kimble begged him not to because without Charnquist, Kimble was as good as dead. Henry lets down his guard and Charnquist injured him and escaped, disappearing on the docks. The police were not interested in Charnquist, but Henry helped Richard to escape by taking him out of San Francisco in his boat. On the boat was a ship inside a bottle and Henry explained earlier that Nick used to make them as a hobby.

Kimble has come across a supporter of Ben Charnquist’s though. He tracked Ben Charnquist to New Orleans and discovered that this psychopathic killer has a wife by the name of Renee Charnquist. It turned out that Renee came into a lot of money from the insurance company when Ben “died.” However, the insurance company wasn’t completely certain that Ben Charnquist died and if he’s alive, they want their money back. The insurance investigator that Kimble encountered was a man by the name of Buddy LaRue. Unfortunately, Kimble was hoodwinked by Renee and her “southern charm.” She had Kimble convinced she didn’t have any money or contact with Ben, but that proved a lie. Renee met up with Ben and told him about Buddy LaRue and about Kimble. He asked her where the money was and she said it was spent.

However, Kimble found the money in her apartment later that evening before he went to meet LaRue. LaRue unfortunately met the same fate as Helen. Warned by Renee, Ben showed up at his hotel door and beat him to death. Kimble arrived at the Charnquist crypt expecting to see Buddy LaRue and found Ben instead, with a gun poised to kill him. A fight ensued and Kimble got the gun away. He locked Ben in the crypt and called the police but when the police got there Ben was gone. Renee disappeared. She was last seen putting a very large sum of money in a safety deposit box.

Kimble has a very angry and bitter father in law Matthew Ross, who opposed his marriage to Helen from the beginning. Now he blames him for her death. Impatient with Gerard’s failure to bring him in, he decided to take matters into his own hands and hired a bounty hunter to find Kimble and kill him once and for all. The bounty hunter was unsuccessful because Gerard showed up in the nick of time and shot the bounty hunter but Kimble got away. Gerard uncovered a murder-for-hire plot between Ross, the bounty hunter Carl Vasick and, of all people, his boss Chief McLaren! Instead of exposing the plot, Gerard used this incident to blackmail McClaren into giving him a promotion to Captain in charge of the Fugitive Task Force, which is made up of primarily FBI Agents.

He hopes he can now concentrate his efforts on apprehending Kimble with no distractions.

Eve Hilliard is an FBI agent on the task force who had hoped to have Gerard’s job. She has heard rumors and has doubts about Gerard’s motives.

Kimble has one other big supporter, his sister in law Becca Ross, Helen’s older sister. It was Becca who introduced Helen to Kimble when Helen picked her up in the emergency room after she sprained her ankle. From the moment their eyes met, there was a spark between them. Becca suggested to Helen that she fake an injury and come back into the ER and Helen looked behind and saw Dr. Kimble watching them leave and realized she didn’t have to.

Months after Kimble’s escape, Becca Ross was contacted by a man who called himself Smith282 and he claimed he saw Ben Charnquist kill Helen Kimble. Becca got in touch with Richard and they met in a hotel and waited for Smith282 to contact them. In the instant email, Smith282 said they were there to kidnap Helen. He said Ben thought he could walk up behind her and knock her out. Helen turned around and saw her and decided to fight back. This enraged Ben Charnquist and he picked up a baseball bat and started to swing and didn’t stop. He agreed to testify for $50,000.00. Kimble and Becca said they’d give him half now and half after he testified. Becca provided the money, telling Kimble Helen’s trust fund had defaulted to her on his conviction but she knew it really belonged to him because Helen would have wanted it that way.

They met Smith282 in Baltimore MD and he told them where they could find Charnquist to have him arrested. Kimble grudgingly gave him the $25,000.00 after berating him for doing nothing to try and stop Charnquist for killing Helen. He left after telling them where they could find Charnquist to have him arrested.

Becca and Kimble waited and called the police telling them there was a disturbance in a bar and there was a guy with a gun. Kimble had called Gerard earlier and told him to come to Baltimore and do his job and arrest the man who killed Helen. Charnquist was taken into custody but in the police car he gave the police officers a number and they looked very confused when they saw the computer screen. Gerard did go to Baltimore but Charnquist was not in custody. Kimble later called him and Gerard said he wasn’t in the police station and further told him that he thought the One Armed Man was simply a figment of his imagination. He also believed that Kimble was in actuality Smith282 and that Kimble was mentally disturbed based on what a profiler told him. Becca and Kimble tracked down the police who arrested Charnquist and they denied ever having anyone in their car.

When they later spoke to Smith 282 on email, they told him what happened and he broke the communication and Kimble didn’t hear from him again.

Before Becca and Kimble said their goodbyes, Becca made a startling revelation. She showed Kimble the original email from Smith282 and it said that Becca was the original target. They changed who they were going to kidnap because she bumped into an old friend who convinced her to have dinner with him. She felt responsible. She never believed Richard was ever guilty and she even testified for the defense at his trial.

In the final two episodes of the season, Eve Hilliard was temporarily replaced by an agent by the name of Dennis Gagamiros who seemed to want to find out as much as possible about Ben Charnquist. He seemed puzzled that there didn’t seem to be much of a record on him.

Meanwhile, with the failure to catch Charnquist, Becca hired a famous but unethical lawyer, Walter Dinwiddie, who suggested to Kimble that he leave the country while he researched the case and win an appeal. Unfortunately, Gerard had Becca’s phone tapped and arrested her for aiding and abetting and froze her bank accounts. Kimble barely escaped arrest in the airport. Meanwhile, Ben Charnquist tracked down Maggie’s kids who were vacationing with their father and he slipped the son Stuart a note for Richard, threatening the children unless Kimble turned himself in. Maggie’s ex-husband called Dinwiddie and told him. Dinwiddie also told Kimble that because Becca had been arrested her funds were frozen and he couldn’t take a case like his pro buono. And he passed a tip from a private investigator on where to find Charnquist in New Mexico. Kimble tracked him to a strip club. Inside the strip club we saw Ben Charnquist giving diamonds to someone and getting money for it. Charnquist walked into the men’s room where he was attacked by Kimble who beat him savagely. Once he got Ben on the floor, he gave him an injection. When a frightened Charnquist asked what it was, Kimble responded, “Lethal injection!

Kimble’s plan was to deliver Charnquist to Chicago. He called Gerard who put Ben on the phone so Gerard could hear his voice. He said he was bringing the One Armed Man to Chicago. Agent Gagamiros was very interested in this. Kimble ended up hopping a train with Charnquist. Kimble had injected Charnquist with a drug that slowly paralyzed him. By the time they got to Chicago Charnquist was having a hard time moving but managed to hit Kimble over the head with a pipe in the train yard to get away. Kimble knew he’d run into a hospital which Charnquist did. Kimble went in and told them that Charnquist was his brother and he suffered from Cerebral Palsy and this sometimes happens where he gets disoriented. Kimble explained to Ben that he’s the only person who knows what he injected him with and by the time they figure it out he’ll die because only Kimble can give him the antidote in time.

Charnquist reluctantly agreed to leave with Richard Kimble. However, as they got into a cab, a nurse recognized him. Kimble called Gerard to tell him to meet them at an abandoned warehouse. Gerard told Gagamiros to get back up and meet him there. However, when Gerard got there, backup didn’t arrive and when Gagamiros got there, Gerard rolled down his window to ask where the back up was, Gagamiros put two bullets into Gerard.

Gagamiros then walked up some stairs to find Kimble and Charnquist, when he saw them it was apparent that Gagamiros and Charnquist recognized each other and Gagamiros raised his gun and pointed it at Kimble and fired.

END OF SEASON ONE

Full details of Season 1 episodes can be found at

dr-richard-kimble.com