Agnes Moorehead returns for the new season in a disturbing but engrossing play about a greedy spiritualist who preys on loved ones of US service personnel who are missing-in-action in the Korean War. She begins her narrative by explaining she has not been able to speak for six years because of a bullet that doctors recently removed.
She explains how the scam works. Prospective victims are selected from the list of casualties and missing soldiers as published in local newspapers. Their families are desperate to know the status of missing soldiers, and whether to grieve or wait in stressful trepidation. If the soldiers are deceased, the psychic will be able to detect their spirit and communicate with them. Joe Kearns plays her long-time co-conspirator and imitates spirit voices as part of the scam. He is getting tired of the hoax, and is having guilt over manipulating the emotions of distraught victims. He wants her to stop. It’s too lucrative for her, and she presses on. This time they choose poorly. The widower whose son was lost becomes obsessed with her process, and the psychic herself, and asks her to marry him to ensure she continues contact with his son. That was her plan, too, so she could take all of his money, but still keep her relationship with Kearns’ character as they perpetuate the hoax. Events take a strange turn, and would soon take a deadly one. Moorehead’s character panics as she realizes things are getting out of control in a trap of her own making.
It is another script by Arthur Ross prior to his successful screenwriting career. Stories with psychics can become tedious and fall into easily predictable patterns, but this does not and has a rather shocking ending. Yet again, a Moorehead character falls with a thump to the floor, but she’s been shot, and survives, as we already know. (Spoiler, but keep reading, anyway). The distraught man commits suicide to join his son in the eternal happiness that her character assured him he was enjoying. Suspense is not for kids, as this ends with a murder attempt and a suicide.
There is a cough during the music that concludes the drama at 26:06. It’s likely Herb Butterfield, since Kearns was finished with his lines a while before and left the microphone. It sounds too deep to be Moorehead. Thor was not due to speak until after the music and would have quietly cleared his throat before getting near the microphone.
As far as “actual events” go, there were numerous warnings about scams and schemes that took advantage of veterans and families. Fake spiritualist schemes were common for decades, but newspaper searches could find no particular event or news pattern that fit this story. It’s just a good story that claimed to fit the strategy.
Like many of the 1951 Suspense recordings, the end of the program suffers from wow and flutter.
At the end of the broadcast it is mentioned that Moorehead was traveling the country with Charles Laughton, Charles Boyer, and Cedric Hardwicke as “The First Drama Quartette” in a presentation of George Bernard Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell. The production of the four actors on a bare stage received excellent reviews wherever it was presented. A recording was released in 1952 and is available at https://archive.org/details/G.B.SHAWDonJuanInHell-NEWTRANSFER
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https://archive.org/details/TSP510910
THE CAST
AGNES MOOREHEAD (Adelaide), Herb Butterfield (Porter), Joe Kearns (McBain), Larry Thor (Narrator)
COMMERCIAL: unknown (Stanley Smart), Harlow Wilcox (Announcer), Sylvia Simms (Operator)
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