Chiefs (1983)

Starring: Charlton Heston, Keith Carradine, Stephen Collins

Three different police chiefs in three different eras become involved in a growing mystery -- who is the mass murderer behind the killing of transient youths in and around the fictional southern town of Delano over a forty year period? In this three-part, six-hour miniseries, Charlton Heston, in his return to TV acting after fourteen years (his career in television goes back to 1949), is one of the town's founding fathers and he has stayed on as a powerbroker as, successively, cotton farmer Wayne Rogers, racist Brad Davis, and college educated Billy Dee Williams become police chiefs over the years in this adaptation of Stuart Woods' novel. Keith Carradine replaced an ailing Andy Griffith as Foxy Funderburke, a disgruntled local harboring a forty year grudge, and received an Emmy Award nomination as Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series. The production itself was nominated as Outstanding Limited Series and for art direction and set decoration.