Rudy Solari Frank Sutton Pamela Tiffin Brenda Vaccaro George Voskovec Jessica Walter Jack Warden Fritz Weaver Robert Webber Tuesday Weld Jack Weston William Windom Lana Wood Production Development The series was conceived by Roy Huggins and produced by Quinn Martin. One popular belief is that the series was based in part on the real-life story of Sam Sheppard, an Ohio doctor accused of murdering his wife. However, Huggins repeatedly denied basing the series on Sheppard. Although convicted and imprisoned, Sheppard claimed that his wife had been murdered by a "bushy-haired man". Sheppard's brothers hired F. Lee Bailey to appeal the conviction. Bailey defended Sheppard and won an acquittal in the second trial. Coincidentally, the show's music supervisor, Ken Wilhoit, was married to Susan Hayes, who had had an intimate relationship with Sheppard prior to the murder and testified during the first trial in 1954. The show presents a popular plot device of an innocent man on the run from the police for a murder he did not commit, while simultaneously pursuing the real killer. It had its antecedents in the Alfred Hitchcock movies The 39 Steps, Saboteur, and North by Northwest. The theme of a doctor in hiding for committing a major crime had also been depicted by James Stewart as the mysterious Buttons the Clown, who never removed his makeup, in The Greatest Show on Earth. Writer David Goodis claimed that the series was inspired by his 1946 novel Dark Passage, about a man who escapes from prison after being wrongly convicted of killing his wife. Goodis' litigation over the issue continued for some time after his 1967 death. The plot device of a fugitive living on the run from the authorities was loosely inspired by Victor Hugo's 1862 novel Les Misérables. The Richard Kimble character was inspired by the novel's protagonist, Jean Valjean, an ex-convict living a life as a fugitive and having numerous aliases, as well as helping people around him. The character of Lt. Gerard, who hounds Kimble throughout the series, is also loosely inspired by a character from the same novel, a relentless police inspector named Javert, who is obsessed with capturing the fugitive. Other shows, such as Route 66, had employed the same anthology-like premise of wanderers finding adventure in each new place to which they came. The Fugitive, however, answered two questions that had bedeviled many similar series – first, why the protagonist