In The Heat Of The Night

When Virgil Tibbs joins the Sparta, MI, police, resentment festers in Chief of Police Bill Gillespie. But when a local co-ed is brutally murdered, Gillespie and Tibbs join forces only to discover a tangled web of guilt and deception.

Police Chief Bill Gillespie and Chief of Detectives Virgil Tibbs are at odds when Tibbs suspects that Gillespie's friend, Sonny Mims, killed his wife because of his involvement with Pauline, the dead woman's cousin. Gillespie believes that the killing was the result of a drunken random shooter while Bubba Skinner has a more personal interest in the case since he has been dating Pauline.

Emotions run high when Ty Hayes (Randy Brooks), a black businessman, comes to Sparta to buy the town's newspaper, and it is suspected that he is romancing the paper's married white owner, Evie Summers (Nana Visitor). Bubba's (Alan Autry) redneck cousin, Mace Trapnell (Brad Leland), is incensed at the situation and vows to kill Hayes if he sees him with Evie again.

Two missing youths, a sample of pure cocaine and Virgil's reluctance to forget his grudge against a high school classmate somehow seem tied together. Wealthy local-boy Richie Epson (Bill Sadler) returns to Sparta, but Virgil cannot forget an old wrong, and Gillespie's friend, John Reeve (Lou Walker), is shot amid suspicion of major cocaine smuggling.

Virgil narrowly escapes death at the hands of Richie Epson's henchmen, but Gillespie still does not have enough evidence to prove the former hometown boy is a major drug supplier. Meanwhile, the Chief is concerned that his godchild Barbara (Jill Carroll) has lost her sense of good judgement by getting involved with Steve Vincent (Michael Spound), Epson's assistant.

The Sparta jail is filled with women when the six wives of bigamist James Jeffson visit bearing gifts of food only to become suspects when the man dies of poisoning. If that were not enough, Gillespie is caught in the middle of a fight between a cellmate's domineering sister and his fiancée.

An escaped convict and his girlfriend leave a trail of bodies in their wake as they travel through Mississippi, and eventually take Althea and Scooter, the grandson of one of their victims, as hostages in a desperate bid for freedom.