The Fugitive

Richard Kimble rides into Tucson, Arizona under the name James Lincoln. He checks into a hotel and finds a job as a bartender at the Branding Iron. He meets Monica Welles (Vera Miles), the piano player who escaped from her stalking jealous husband (Ed Welles) played by Brian Keith.

While working as a handyman in a backwater community in Missouri, Kimble has a few run-ins with a young girl named Jenny Ammory who is a pathological liar who speaks to a rag doll she calls 'Nyet' which she keeps at a nearby pond. Jenny uses Kimble as an excuse when she's late for school when she claims that a man attacked her. When Kimble shows up making a routine delivery of supplies to the school, Jenny identifies him as the man who attacked her. As Jenny's teacher, Emily Norton, speaks to Kimble about Jenny's compulsive lying, Jenny runs home and tells her mother she saw her teacher and the local handyman making out in the barn. Kimble gets roughed up by his co-workers while Emily gets fired and both are advised to leave town. Kimble goes to a school hearing on Emily and tries to clear her by catching Jenny in a lie. But his plan backfires when the skeptic townspeople believe Jenny and decide to form a lynching party to track Kimble down.

In West Virginia, Kimble arrives at a local coal-mining town where he is roughed up by the redneck locals, and then chased by a sheriff's posse. Hiding in the mountains, Kimble meets Cassie, a young woman living in a remote cabin with her grandmother. Cassie tells Kimble she get him to safety because she knows the area, when she is really wanting to keep him around for her own selfish reasons. Meanwhile, Gerard flies to West Virginia after learning from the sheriff that Kimble has been spotted in the area and teams up with the posse to try to find Kimble.

Kimble, working as an apprentice sailmaker in Santa Barbara, California, falls in love with Karen, the daughter of his stern but compassionate boss Lars Christian. But earns scorn from Karen's jealous and overprotective brother Eric. When Lars suffers a heart attack his last wish on his deathbed is to implore Kimble to stay with Karen. Meanwhile, Gerard flies to nearby Los Angeles when he hears about the arrest of a one-armed man for armed robbery and lets the story hit the newspapers, hoping it will flush out Kimble.

After finding that the one-armed man is not the same man he saw fleeing his house the night of Helen's murder, Kimble flees from Los Angeles, barely escaping Gerard's dragnet. Tired of running, Kimble hopes to lie low in Santa Barbara and finally confides his secret to Karen. But Gerard tracks Kimble to Santa Barbara from a single clue that Kimble leaves behind at the L.A. County Jail: a match with the word "SAILS" printed on it. When Kimble discovers that Gerard has arrived in town looking for him, with the assistance of Eric, Kimble and Karen flee by sailboat and hope to end the running by faking his and Karen's death in a sailboat accident during a storm at sea.

Kimble finds work as a cut man for boxer Joe Smith. Joe confides in Kimble that he wanted to be a doctor, but he chose boxing because he felt that being a black man would be an obstacle in the world of medicine. When Kimble discovers that Joe is suffering from memory loss, both he and Joe's wife, Laura, fear that Joe might have brain damage from his boxing. Meanwhile, a police detective, named Henry Stone, goes undercover as a sports writer to investigate Joe's manager, Lou, for possible mob ties. But when a disgruntled boxing worker tips off Stone that someone might be wanting Joe to throw his next fight, the detective investigates Kimble.