With respect, I believe both The Master and John W. Kennedy have things a little confused.
For a start, Girard did not capture the one-armed man.
Rather, he was arrested in Los Angeles after going berserk in a tavern. This had prompted a human interest photo which was sent out over a wire service, with a caption about how it had taken several men to subdue one one-armed drunk.
Kimble sees the photo and recognized the drunk as “his” one-armed man, the one he saw near his house on the night his wife was killed, and with whom he has since had several near-miss encounters. Desperately tired of running, he decides to go to Los Angeles and surrender to authorities. He figures if he does this in a sufficiently public fashion, they just might give in to his demands to confront the one-armed man. He figures that maybe, just maybe, he can get the man to confess or somehow incriminate himself.
Just as Kimble is about to give himself up at the Criminal Courts he is spotted by a courtroom reporter played by Diane Baker. Years before Baker’s father, a prominent banker in Kimble’s hometown in Indiana, went to jail for embezzlement. Baker and her family were shunned by most of their old friends, but the Kimbles had stood by them. Baker, a teenager then, had developed a crush on Dr. Kimble.
She pulls him aside and talks to him. Hearing his plan, she suggests that she try confronting the one-armed man for him.
Girard has also seen the photo. He believes that Kimble is guilty, but, unable to deal with his guilt, has developed a delusion that the one-armed man is guilty instead. Anticipating Kimble’s move, he too heads to Los Angeles.
While searching for Kimble, Girard stumbles on the fact that a courthouse employee is from Kimble’s hometown. One night he goes to Baker’s apartment to question her. Baker says she barely remembers Kimble, and doubts she’d even recognize him if she saw him. In the meantime, he is slipping out her back door.
A sleazy bail bondsman played by Michael Constantine (later the principal on Room 222), gets the one-armed man released on bond. He refuses to disclose for whom he is working.
Kimble and Baker decide to break into Constantine’s office at night and search for a record of who put up the money for the one-armed man’s bail. They find that the office has been ransacked and Constantine is dead on the floor. They do, however, find a record of who contacted Constantine to get the one-armed man released. He used the name of Kimble’s brother-in law.
This was the end of part one.
Part two commences a week later. Baker, Kimble, Girard and the one-armed man have all traveled seperately to Kimble’s hometown. The epsiode opens with Baker coming to Kimble’s sister’s house and telling her that she has seen Richard and that he is well. She also confesses that she is in love with him.
Girard steps into the room with Kimble and introduces him to Baker in a sarcastic tone. After all, he says, just last week she had said she wouldn’t recognize him if she saw him.
Girard admits that the business about the bail bondsman is mysterious. Kimble thought that his brother-in-law might have believed he get influence over the one-armed man by getting him released, but his brother-in-law says that someone must have assumed his name. In a previous season the brother-in-law was played by James B. Sikking, the father on Doogie Houser and Lt. Hunter on Hill Street Blues. Now he is played by Richard Anderson, later the boss of Ironsides and The Six Million Dollar Man.
Anderson’s family are friends with the family of the town’s engineer. He is played by J. D. Cannon, later Dennis Weaver’s boss, Peter D. Clifford, on McCloud. Anderson has a son the same age as Cannon’s, and the two boys take marksmanship lessons from Cannon as part of a boy’s club he leads.
Cannon was a kid from the wrong side of the tracks who was put through engineering school and given his job with the city after becoming a hero in the Korean War. It was Cannon who used the name of Kimble’s brother-in-law and contacted the bail bondsman. The one-armed man tracks him down, but mistakenly believes he is really Kimble’s brother-in-law.
It turns out that Cannon was not really a hero in the war, and for years he has been ridden with guilt for the way he has been living a lie. He rationalizes that he has only been doing it for the sake of his invalid wife. She is played by Louise Latham, the actress who played Tippi Hedren’s mother in Marni.
Cannon and Latham’s son is adopted. The night Kimble’s wife was murdered, Kimble and she had a terrible argument over his desire to adopt a child. He stormed out in anger. Terribly distraught and afraid of losing her husband, she began to have second thoughts about her objections to adoption, and she called Cannon to ask about his experiences as an adoptive parent.
Cannon came over to talk. While they were upstairs in her bedroom, they heard a noise downstairs. It was the one-armed man who had broken in to see what he could steal. They went down to confront him, but Cannon froze in panic and watched helplessly as the one-armed man killed Kimble’s wife.
The one-armed man believes that Cannon (who, it will be remembered, he believes is Kimble’s brother-in-law), was having an affair with Kimble’s wife. He tells him he will expose him to the world if he does not pay him blackmail.
Cannon has far less money than Kimble’s real brother-in-law, and is unable to raise the money the one-armed man demands. He confesses to his wife, telling her that he has remained silent all this time to protect her. She tells him that is a crock, and the plain fact is that he is a fake and a coward.
Seeking to vindicate himself, Cannon convinces himself that it would be heroic to kill the one-armed man.
Kimble and Girard are gradually figuring out what is going on. An important clue is when they find a gun shell of the kind Cannon uses for his hunting and shooting club left where he and the one-armed man had a clandestine meeting. The two men track Cannon to a recently closed amusement park where Cannon and the one-armed man are to meet. There Kimble and the one-armed man have a tremendous stuggle atop a tower. The one-armed man falls to his death after admitting to Kimble that he killed his wife, and did so because he thought that her screams could cause him to be captured after he broke into the house.
Sure now of what really happened, Girard tells Cannon that he could clear Kimble’s name but, coward that he is, he won’t. Cannon then admits everything.
The scene shifts to a few weeks later. Kimble and his new love, Baker, are walking down a street in his hometown. A police car pulls over and two patrolmen get out. As they approach, Kimble freezes. The policemen go past them without paying them any attention, and Kimble and Baker resume walking.