On the rainy evening of September 27, 1882, an elderly miser named Joseph H. Higgins was ambushed at the doorway to his isolated cabin in Bath, Maine. He was robbed and left for dead, lingering several days before succumbing. His murder remains unsolved. In our final episode of Season One, Company D uses modern technology to try to do the impossible: solve a 143-year-old murder mystery.

A cantankerous old man, rumored to be a wealthy miser, and who has strained relations with his dysfunctional family, is found battered and bloody on the floor of his isolated house in Bath, Maine. The old man’s wallet is missing, his locked valise is opened and empty, and the premises have been cleared of all the cash he allegedly hoarded inside. What happened to Corporal Joseph Emery Purrington’s elderly father on the rain-soaked night of September 27, 1882, has remained a mystery for more than 143 years. Until now.

Josiah A. Temple became a substitute for Captain William Watson of Company D after he quit service and was then drafted. Watson paid Temple to take his place. Temple joined the Seventeenth Maine Infantry and set out on a life filled with contradictions. He was a lawyer who defrauded his clients. He was a politician who lied. He was a moral reformer accused of abusing women. Temple was a troubled personality, losing nearly his entire family in childhood, and a man who failed miserably to live up to the ideals he espoused.