Dead Hunter is a decent, albeit modest entry of the popular, vintage semi-documentary TV police series Highway Patrol. An elderly businessman is visited by an apparent friend with whom he has had financial dealings, and who has just cheated him in a bogus investment venture. The older man rightly sizes up his friend and breaks off all connections with him, business and personal.
The younger man leaves his now ex-business partner's rustic home, drives off, then quickly comes up with a scheme to salvage at least the generous inheritance he had been just been informed by the old man was in his will, which he was now planning to cut him out of altogether. A quick thinker, the soon to be perp schemes to kill his friend with a rifle by shooting him in the back.
When the deed is done, the killer soon calls the Highway Patrol to report his murder as a hunting accident. His early dealings with detective, Dan Mathews, go well enough, but then things begin to turn against him, due mostly to poor planning on the perp's part.
The story he told the police had a few holes in it, and as the killer was apparently not an experienced criminal he soon began behaving badly; and in short time the highway police had guessed, rightly, what he was up to and where to look for him.
While the killer in this episode is not, to say the least, a sympathetic character, the actor who portrays him, Joe Haworth, gives a realistic performance of a flawed and not truly evil man who got into crime way over his head; and what skills and guile he might have possessed in the business world were not up to what was required of him to literally get away with murder. In the second half of the story I found myself feeling sorry for him.
The younger man leaves his now ex-business partner's rustic home, drives off, then quickly comes up with a scheme to salvage at least the generous inheritance he had been just been informed by the old man was in his will, which he was now planning to cut him out of altogether. A quick thinker, the soon to be perp schemes to kill his friend with a rifle by shooting him in the back.
When the deed is done, the killer soon calls the Highway Patrol to report his murder as a hunting accident. His early dealings with detective, Dan Mathews, go well enough, but then things begin to turn against him, due mostly to poor planning on the perp's part.
The story he told the police had a few holes in it, and as the killer was apparently not an experienced criminal he soon began behaving badly; and in short time the highway police had guessed, rightly, what he was up to and where to look for him.
While the killer in this episode is not, to say the least, a sympathetic character, the actor who portrays him, Joe Haworth, gives a realistic performance of a flawed and not truly evil man who got into crime way over his head; and what skills and guile he might have possessed in the business world were not up to what was required of him to literally get away with murder. In the second half of the story I found myself feeling sorry for him.