John Alexander Dickman went to the gallows in Newcastle in 1910, the first man in northern England executed for a murder committed on a train. The victim, Nisbet, was a colliery cashier shot and robbed on the North Eastern Railway, and Dickman's conviction rested almost entirely on circumstantial evidence and a disputed eyewitness identification. This film follows the case through the world of Edwardian gambling debts that gave Dickman a motive, the police tactics used to build the case against him, and the new legal provision that let him testify in his own defense, a right defendants had only recently gained. Historians and legal commentators pick apart the identification evidence and the trial's weaknesses, weighing whether the jury got it right or whether Dickman was convicted on a case that would not survive scrutiny today. The film uses period photographs, courtroom records, and location filming to reconstruct the killing and the trial, building toward the question that still divides historians of the case: guilty man or wrongful execution.