u/EVWorldEditor

I've been obsessed with North by Northwest for years, and I recently fell down a rabbit hole: what would Roger Thornhill's actual NYPD arrest paperwork look like if it were real?

So I researched 1958 NYPD booking procedures and built one.

Some of the details I tried to get right:

• Precinct jurisdiction — Thornhill is accused of stabbing Townsend at the U.N. General Assembly building, which in 1958 fell under Midtown South. That's where the booking originates.
• The charges — Murder in the First Degree under Section 1044 of the New York Penal Law, which was the actual statute in 1958 (it was later reorganized in the 1967 revision). Criminal Flight as a second charge, since he fled jurisdiction to Chicago.
• The alias problem — The desk sergeant would have listed "George Kaplan" as a known alias, with a handwritten note: "verify w/ CIA??" — because of course the CIA would never confirm or deny.
• Arrest location — Grand Central Station, Track 7, arriving via the 20th Century Limited from Chicago. That was the real train on that route in 1958.
• The DWI prior — Thornhill's Glen Cove drunk driving arrest from the first act shows up as a prior on the sheet, because priors always follow you.
• Attorney notation — His lawyer is listed as "V. Larrabee," called from the precinct. Arraigned next morning before Judge Trent in Manhattan Criminal Court.
• Bail denied — For a Murder One charge involving a U.N. diplomat, there's no way a judge sets bail in 1958.

The whole document is stamped "Released Under the Freedom of Imagination Act, 2026" — my way of saying this is a creative exercise, not a forgery.

I'm working on a larger collection of these for a project I'm calling South By Southeast — an unauthorized imagining of what a sequel to Hitchcock's film might look like. Other documents in the set include FBI files, a CIA report, and a period newspaper front page.

What details would you have included? And for the Hitchcock scholars here — did I get anything wrong about the timeline? I've been going back and forth on whether the U.N. murder happens on September 26 or 27, 1958.