He Walked by Night

He Walked by Night is a 1948 blackandwhite police procedural film noir, directed by Alfred L. Werker and Anthony Mann. The film, shot in semidocumentary tone, was loosely based on newspaper accounts of the reallife actions of Erwin MachineGun Walker, a former Glendale California police department employee and World War II veteran who unleashed a crime spree of burglaries, robberies, and shootouts in the Los Angeles area during 1945 and 1946.

On a Los Angeles street, Officer Rawlins, a patrolman on his way home from work, stops a man he suspects of being a burglar and is shot and mortally wounded. The minor clues lead nowhere. Two police detectives, Sergeants Marty Brennan Scott Brady and Chuck Jones James Cardwell, are assigned to catch the killer, Roy Morgan Richard Basehart, a brilliant mystery man with no known criminal past, who is hiding in a Hollywood bungalow and listening to police calls on his custom radio in an attempt to avoid capture. His only relationship is with his little dog.Roy consigns burgled electronic equipment to Paul Reeves Whit Bissell, and on his fifth sale is nearly caught when he shows up to collect on his property. Reeves tells police that the suspect is a mystery man named Roy Martin. The case crosses the paths of Brennan and Jones, who stake out Reeves office to arrest and question Roy. He suspects a trap, however, and in a brief shootout shoots and paralyzes Jones. Jones wounds Roy, who performs surgery on himself to remove the bullet and avoid going to a hospital, where his gunshot wound would be reported to the police. With his knowledge of police procedures, Roy changes his modus operandi and becomes an armed robber. During one robbery he fires his semiautomatic pistol, and the police recover the ejected casing. Lee Jack Webb, a forensics specialist, matches the ejector marks on the casing to those recovered in the killing of Officer Rawlins and the wounding of Sgt. Jones, connecting all three shootings to one suspect. ........

Source: Wikipedia