Roy Bean is remembered as the Law West of the Pecos, the hanging judge whose motto was hang them first, try them later. Yet he never executed a single person. This episode follows his improbable life from poverty in Kentucky through a killing in Chihuahua, a horseback duel in San Diego, a jailbreak using knives smuggled inside tamales, and a lynching he survived only because the rope stretched.

After Civil War blockade running and two decades of petty scams in San Antonio, Bean was effectively paid to leave town and landed in a railroad camp of 8,000 workers, where an overwhelmed Texas Ranger had him appointed Justice of the Peace. We examine how he ran his saloon-courtroom in Langtry with a single 1879 law book, why his rulings were designed to keep money circulating back to his bar, and how he later turned his notoriety into national spectacle.

• How the lack of telegraphs and shared records let a man outrun murder charges by crossing county lines
• The inquest on a dead man, fined exactly the forty dollars found in his pocket
• Illegal divorces, five-dollar weddings, and jurors expected to buy drinks at every recess
• Stopping Jay Gould’s private train with a false danger signal and briefly panicking the New York Stock Exchange
• The 1896 championship prizefight staged on a Rio Grande sandbar beyond any nation’s jurisdiction