Killer

Josephine has been found guilty of murdering a small child, and the punishment is on its way. Then, as she is driven away from court, an accident frees her, and the question is now what the police can do at all. A vulnerable teenager is somewhere out there, and nobody knows whether she is a danger to others or to herself.

It is a hard episode to watch and a harder one to solve, and the show knows it. But the accident that frees her is the sort of chance event that makes the job impossible, and the episode does not waste time blaming it. The work is the thing: tracing a girl who does not want to be found and may not even know what she would do if she was. The search has to balance catching her with not breaking her, and the officers involved are never allowed to forget that the girl they are hunting has already killed. Anna Cropper's Pat Nolan, Gillian Bailey's Jo Taylor, Christine Hargreaves and Hugh Martin's Taylors and Jane Sherwin's Mrs Sadler form the human wreckage around the case.

Stratford Johns' Barlow, Frank Windsor's Watt, Norman Bowler's Hawkins and Walter Gotell's Cullen all get a share of the responsibility, with David Lloyd Meredith's Evans doing the ground work. Elwyn Jones and Arnold Yarrow wrote it, Paddy Russell directed, and it went out on 20 September 1972.

There are no easy positions on offer. Everyone in the story is trying to do the right thing, and the episode does not pretend to know what that is. The viewer is left with the same dilemma as the officers: protect a girl who has already killed, or treat her as what the law says she is. It is an uncomfortable hour of television, and it earns the discomfort honestly.