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Ned Kelly was born in rural Victoria in the mid 1850s, the third of eight children of Red Kelly, an Irish convict transported for stealing pigs. The family were selectors, poor farmers working bad land under heavy installments while police looked after the interests of wealthy squatters. Red drank himself to death when Ned was 12, leaving the boy head of a watched and hungry household. As a child he had pulled a drowning boy from a creek and been given a green silk sash for it. As a teenager he was pistol whipped by a constable and given three years of hard labor over a horse he believed was borrowed.

This episode follows the feud from the disputed Fitzpatrick incident of 1878, which sent Kelly's mother to prison and Ned and his brother Dan into the Wombat Ranges, to the killing of three policemen at Stringybark Creek and the law that made the gang outlaws anyone could shoot on sight. It then tracks the bank raids staged as public theater, the last stand at Glenrowan in 1880, and the argument over whether he was a champion of the poor or a killer with a gift for publicity.

• At Jerilderie the gang locked the police in their own cells and wore their uniforms around town, and at one raid Kelly burned the bank's mortgage records.
• Police jailed about 30 suspected sympathizers for months on renewed remand orders without trial, which turned the press and public against them.
• The Glenrowan plan to wreck a police train failed when a schoolteacher Kelly released flagged it down with a lantern and a red scarf.
• The armor, beaten from plow moldboards, weighed nearly 100 pounds and stopped more than two dozen bullets, but left the legs exposed. Kelly fell to a shotgun blast to the thighs.
• He was sentenced to hang by Sir Redmond Barry, the judge who had jailed his mother. Barry died 12 days after the execution.

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He was born Doroteo Arango in Durango in 1878, a sharecropper's son bound to the hacienda system and its inherited debts. In 1894, at 16, he shot a landowner he said had assaulted his sister, stole a horse, and fled into the Sierra Madre. Years of cattle theft, arrests, and work as a mule skinner taught him the mountains and the movement of supplies. In 1910 Abraham Gonzalez recruited the outlaw now called Pancho Villa to Francisco Madero's uprising against Porfirio Diaz, and within a year Villa had helped take Ciudad Juarez against Madero's own orders.

This episode follows Villa from a firing squad wall and a Mexico City prison cell to command of the Division del Norte, the governorship of Chihuahua, and the occupation of Mexico City alongside Emiliano Zapata. It also follows the fall: Alvaro Obregon's trenches and machine guns at Celaya in April 1915, the raid on Columbus, New Mexico, a year of evading John Pershing's expedition, a government-funded retirement, and an ambush in Parral in July 1923.

• General Victoriano Huerta ordered Villa shot over a horse, and a last-second telegram from Madero's brothers stopped the firing squad. In prison a Zapatista officer taught him to read and write properly.
• He escaped on Christmas Day 1912 and crossed back into Mexico in April 1913 with just seven men, who grew into the most feared army in the country.
• As governor he printed his own currency, threatened merchants who refused it, built more than 50 schools, and funded pensions for soldiers' widows and orphans.
• The 1916 Columbus raid killed 18 Americans and brought 5,000 U.S. soldiers into Mexico, the first American expedition to use airplanes and motor trucks, and they never caught him.
• In 1926 his grave was opened and his head stolen. His remains were moved to the Monument to the Revolution only in 1976.

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John Gerard was born in 1564 into Lancashire nobility at a time when keeping the Catholic faith in England was treated as a threat to the crown. When he was five, his father, Sir Thomas Gerard, was jailed for plotting to rescue Mary, Queen of Scots, and the boy was placed with Protestant relatives while a secret Catholic tutor went on teaching him. He left for France at 12 to get the education barred to him at home, was arrested at Dover on his return for lacking a travel permit, and spent more than a year in the Marshalsea before Anthony Babington posted his bail in 1585.

After joining the Jesuits in Rome, Gerard landed in Norfolk in November 1588, three months after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and survived by refusing to look like a priest. This episode follows his years as the fashionable, gambling, falcon-flying Mr. Thompson, the network of safe houses and priest holes he helped build, his capture in 1594, and the night of October 4, 1597, when he crossed the Tower moat on a rope with hands wrecked by torture.

• Some priest holes measured as little as one meter tall and half a meter wide, and searchers would occupy a house for days hoping to starve out whoever was hidden.
• In the Tower he was hung by manacled wrists for hours to make him reveal the whereabouts of Henry Garnet, leader of the English Jesuits, and he gave up nothing.
• Nicholas Owen, the builder of many priest holes, masterminded the escape, and Gerard persuaded his own jailer to come down the rope with him.
• In May 1604 he said mass at the Duck and Drake Inn for Robert Catesby and others who had just sworn themselves to the Gunpowder Plot, a fact that later made him a prime suspect.
• He outlasted a nine-day search inside a hiding place, wrote a refutation of the charges that was printed and scattered around London, and left England disguised as a footman of the Spanish ambassador.

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Joseph Bolitho Johns was born in the 1820s, probably in Cornwall, the son of a blacksmith who died young. Smallpox scarred his face and poverty sent him into the mines as a boy. In 1848 he was caught with three loaves of bread, a piece of bacon, and some cheese, argued with the court instead of bowing to it, and received ten years of penal servitude. After Pentonville, Dartmoor, and the prison hulks, he was shipped to Western Australia aboard the Pyrenees, arriving at Fremantle in 1853 with a ticket of leave.

This episode follows his turn from conditional freedom in the Avon Valley, where he trapped stray livestock for reward money, to a string of escapes that embarrassed the colony. A horse branding charge in 1861 and a ten-year sentence in 1865 for killing a steer, a crime he denied for life, set him against the system for good. Fremantle Prison answered with a cell lined with jarrah sleepers and a thousand nails, and Governor John Hampton mockingly promised forgiveness if he ever got out of it.

• After breaking out of the Toodyay lockup he stole back the horse held as evidence, took the magistrate's new saddle, and cut his brand from the hide so he could not be charged with horse theft.
• Aboriginal tracker Tommy Windich ran him down in the bush, and a later plan to trek overland to South Australia ended nearly 300 kilometers northeast of Perth.
• Set to break limestone in the prison yard, he let the rubble pile hide him from the guard and used the sledgehammer on the wall, slipping out in March 1867.
• He stayed free for nearly two years, then was caught in February 1869 in the cellar at Houghton Winery, where the owner had just invited a party of police in for a drink.
• Governor Frederick Weld honored Hampton's promise in May 1871. Johns died in the Fremantle asylum on August 13, 1900, and his tombstone carries the Welsh word for freedom.

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Mary Broad was born in Cornwall around 1765, a farmer's daughter. In 1785 she and two other women robbed Agnes Lakeman on a road near Plymouth, taking goods that included a silk bonnet worth 12 pence. The sentence was death, commuted to seven years of transportation. She waited aboard the prison hulk Dunkirk, gave birth to a daughter named Charlotte, and sailed with the First Fleet in May 1787. In New South Wales she married William Bryant, a fellow convict and mariner put in charge of the starving colony's fishing, and later flogged with 100 lashes for selling part of his catch.

On March 28, 1791, the Bryants, their two small children, and seven other convicts slipped away in a small open boat with a compass, a quadrant, and a chart obtained from a Dutch ship's captain. This episode follows their 69-day, 5,000 kilometer voyage up the Australian coast, through the Great Barrier Reef and the Torres Strait to Kupang on Timor, a feat compared to William Bligh's open boat journey. It also follows the collapse of their cover story and the terrible voyage back to England in chains.

• William's sentence had expired in March 1791, but with no ship home, freedom in the colony meant little more than the right to starve.
• In Kupang the party posed as shipwreck survivors until the Dutch governor learned the truth and jailed them.
• They were handed to Captain Edward Edwards, who had just lost HMS Pandora on the Great Barrier Reef while hunting the Bounty mutineers.
• William and their son Emanuel died in December 1791, and Charlotte died in May 1792 on the last leg home. Of eleven escapees, only Mary and four men reached England.
• James Boswell took up their defense, Mary was pardoned in 1793, and he paid her a pension of 10 pounds a year. After 1794 she disappears from the record.

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Frances Glessner Lee was born in Chicago in 1878 into the International Harvester fortune and raised to run a household. Her brother went to Harvard while she was taught at home. A childhood bout of tonsillitis, first mistreated and then cured by surgery, left her fascinated by medicine, and she spent summers in the White Mountains of New Hampshire following country doctors on their house calls. Marriage, three children, and a divorce in 1914 came first. Only after she inherited the family money was she free to follow the interest she had carried for decades.

This episode traces how she and her friend George Burgess Magrath, a Boston medical examiner, set out to replace untrained elected coroners with medical professionals. In 1931 she endowed the first Department of Legal Medicine in the country at Harvard, then designed the training herself. Her answer to detectives who could not read a room was the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, introduced in 1945: twenty dioramas at 1 to 12 scale, each a meticulously staged scene of murder, suicide, or accident.

• Coroners of the era were often local politicians with no medical training who moved weapons, rolled bodies, and trampled evidence.
• Each diorama cost between $3,000 and $4,500 to build and included working mousetraps, rocking chairs that rocked, and calendars with correct dates.
• Trainees had 90 minutes to study one scene without touching it, catching details such as a cherry red victim in a room where the stove was off and the windows open.
• In October 1943 she was appointed a captain in the New Hampshire State Police with full authority, and became the first woman in the International Association of Chiefs of Police.
• Eighteen of the twenty models are still used in homicide seminars at the Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore.

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Habeas corpus means produce the body: the state must bring a prisoner into open court and justify the detention to a judge. It is often credited to the Magna Carta of 1215, but that charter offered a principle, not a procedure. The working machinery traces to the Assize of Clarendon in 1166 under Henry II, and similar tools appeared independently across medieval Europe, from Aragon's manifestation of persons in 1325 to a Polish royal privilege of 1430. Wherever central power grew, people found they needed a piece of paper that could force a ruler's agents into the light.

This episode follows the writ from those origins to the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, passed by Whig leaders who feared Charles II would lock them in the Tower of London, and then to its recurring weakness: governments suspend it when they feel threatened. Lincoln, Grant, and Franklin Roosevelt did so, as did Canada and the Philippines. The story ends with two twentieth century attempts to place the protection beyond a government's reach, one through the United Nations and one written into the constitution of India.

• Biscay's charter of 1526 required that a person be summoned to the oak of Guernica and given 30 days to answer before any arrest.
• Charles II was so angry at the 1679 act that he dissolved the body that passed it, remembered since as the Habeas Corpus Parliament.
• Grant suspended the writ during Reconstruction because local judges sympathetic to the Ku Klux Klan were using it to free arrested Klansmen.
• In 1952 lawyer Luis Kutner petitioned for a United Nations writ on behalf of William Oatis, an American journalist jailed in Czechoslovakia, who was released a year later.
• B.R. Ambedkar wrote the power to issue the writ into Articles 32 and 226 of the Indian Constitution, a safeguard tested in the Rajan case during the Emergency.

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William Francis Sutton Jr. was born on June 30, 1901, in the Irishtown section of Brooklyn, the son of a blacksmith, and left school after the eighth grade. Over a 40-year career he stole an estimated $2 million and spent more than half his adult life in prison, yet the public came to see him as a folk hero. He robbed banks in costume, arriving just before opening as a postman, police officer, or messenger, and he kept the pistol or Thompson submachine gun he carried unloaded. The papers called him Willie the Actor and Slick Willie.

This episode follows the escapes that built the legend, the fixation on one Philadelphia bank that undid him, and the strange respect he commanded among mobsters who shared none of his scruples. It also follows the cost of his fame: the young man who spotted him on a New York subway in 1952 was shot dead weeks later. Sutton left Attica on Christmas Eve 1969, became a bank security consultant, and died in 1980 at 79, attached forever to a maxim taught to medical students that he insisted he never coined.

• In December 1932 he took a guard hostage with a smuggled gun and went over a 30-foot prison wall on a 45-foot ladder.
• In 1945 he and 11 other convicts tunneled out of Eastern State Penitentiary, surfaced in daylight in front of a police patrol, and were all quickly recaptured.
• At Holmesburg in 1947, dressed as a guard and caught in a searchlight while carrying a ladder, he called out that it was all right and the light moved on.
• After clothing salesman Arnold Schuster described the capture on television, Albert Anastasia ordered his murder, and Schuster was killed outside his home on March 9, 1952.
• Sutton wrote that a reporter invented the line about banks being where the money is, and that he robbed them because he felt more alive inside a bank than anywhere else.

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Eugène François Vidocq was born in 1775 in Arras, the son of a prosperous baker, and was in trouble almost at once. At 13 he pawned the family silver, and the two weeks in jail his father arranged as a lesson served mostly as an introduction to the underworld. He robbed the bakery cash box, played a raw meat eating cannibal in a traveling carnival, fought at Valmy, dueled his own officers, deserted repeatedly, and posed as a Hussar captain in a roving band of con men. A forgery charge sent him to the galleys at Brest, and a decade of escapes and recaptures followed.

In 1809, aged 34 and blackmailed by people who knew his real identity, he offered himself to the Paris police as an informant. This episode traces what came next: 21 months spying from a cell in La Force, a staged prison break to protect his cover, and the founding in 1811 of the Brigade de la Sûreté, a plainclothes unit staffed with ex-convicts. Along the way he built the tools of modern detection, drew the contempt of aristocratic police chiefs, and gave novelists a character they could not resist.

• He once escaped a prison hospital disguised in a stolen nun's habit, and learned the street fighting style savate while locked up.
• Instead of brutal interrogations, he invited suspects to dinner, poured wine, and talked his way to confessions and new informants.
• His index card system recorded aliases, convictions, handwriting, and methods, and he was the first to make plaster casts of shoe prints, while his chemists developed tamper-proof paper and indelible ink.
• In an 1822 case he had the bullet removed from a murdered wife's head and showed it was too large for her husband's dueling pistols, then matched it to her lover's gun.
• In 1833 he opened the first known private detective agency. He died in 1857 at 81, having inspired Poe's Dupin and both Jean Valjean and Javert in Les Miserables.

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On June 29, 1892, police in Necochea, in Argentina's Buenos Aires province, found six-year-old Ponciano and four-year-old Felisa dead in their home. Their mother, 27-year-old Francisca Rojas, lay nearby with a wound to her neck and a ready accusation: a neighbor, Pedro Ramon Velasquez, had broken in and attacked the family. In an age when a surviving victim's word was the strongest evidence a court could ask for, the case looked settled. Then the neighbor's story held up, hers did not, and the local investigation stalled.

Word of the crime took until July 8 to reach La Plata, which sent Inspector Alvarez to break the deadlock. This episode follows his work, from an alibi check and a town rumor about a boyfriend's ultimatum to a brownish smudge on a bedroom door. Alvarez had trained under Juan Vucetich, a pioneer of the untested idea that friction ridges identify a person. What he did with that smudge ended one woman's lie and pushed an entire country to abandon the measuring calipers of the Bertillon system.

• Witnesses placed Velasquez out socializing with friends during the killings, collapsing the story of a home invasion.
• Alvarez learned that Rojas's boyfriend was reportedly willing to marry her on one condition: he wanted no part in raising her children.
• More than a week after the crime, on a scene long since trampled, Alvarez spotted a bloody fingerprint on a bedroom door and sawed out that section of wood to carry back to La Plata.
• When her inked prints matched the mark, Rojas confessed to killing her children and cutting her own neck to stage the scene.
• After the conviction, Argentina became the first country to abolish anthropometry and rely solely on fingerprint classification, using the filing system Vucetich designed.