It Happened in Broad Daylight

is a 1958 German-language thriller film directed by Ladislao Vajda. The original screenplay was written by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, a Swiss playwright and novelist, and the first incarnation of the film is still acclaimed by critics. Plot Matthäi, a senior detective with the Zürich police, is about to take up a post in the Middle East when a call comes in that a peddler has found the body of a little girl in the woods. With the peddler he inspects the site and, when none of the other police volunteer, says he will tell the parents. Distraught, the mother asks him to swear that he will find the killer. He goes to the little girls' school, where another child points out a picture the dead girl had drawn. It shows a tall man in a long black coat, a large black car, a little girl, a horned creature, and some black hedgehogs. The villagers think the peddler was the murderer, as does Matthäi's successor who, after a long hard interrogation, gets a confession. That night the peddler hangs himself in his cell. The police consider the case closed. Matthäi, however, believes the peddler was innocent and that the culprit is a serial killer who has murdered two other little girls and may strike again. As he takes his seat in the airliner, the man next to him is eating chocolate truffles which look just like the hedgehogs in the drawing. Realising that the killer may have befriended the little girl with chocolates, he leaps off the plane, but his successor is uninterested. Deciding to solve the case on his own, a psychiatrist friend suggests that the drawing is true. Such a killer is intimidated by grown women, and gets his revenge by murdering little girls. He must be childless himself.