Stacy Harris stars as a police lieutenant in a Charles B. Smith story that seems like a murder story but is ultimately about suspicion and lack of trust between a husband and wife. The two plotlines become intertwined. The story plods along as many police procedurals do, but this story is so much more. What seems to be methodical and good police work falls apart. Facts are revealed that were never in the officer’s consideration as a theory of the murder, and the case is solved without (or despite) him. The suspect Harris’ character was certain was the killer turns out to be a false conjecture that rattles him, and badly so. The officer’s home life, biases, and habits blurred his ability to be a good investigator and a good husband. The wife’s uncomfortable relationship with him is dismissed, much like the “rest cure” suggested in Yellow Wallpaper and I Saw Myself Running. It’s a complex story with more undercurrents than expected, and worth attentive and uninterrupted listening. The bottom line is that the Harris’s authoritative character is myopic in his work and his family. He is revealed to be failure as an investigator and as a husband, but that’s never really an expectation developed in the plotline. This makes the surprise ending stronger than anticipated. Can he recover his career and his marriage? We’ll never know.
The crime that starts the episode is the murder of a postal delivery worker. He is killed in a quiet “picket fence” neighborhood, attacked in the middle of the night, with no witnesses. Everyone was home sleeping and heard nothing that stirred them.
The worker was respected among workers and friends, and no one can understand why he was killed. Six letters were found at the scene, and delivery addresses and return addresses were noted for five of them. One of them did not have a return address. Police and Post Office investigations identify the senders as potential suspects, but they really don’t lead anywhere.
A theory of the crime is developed that the person who killed the worker was trying to retrieve a letter they had mailed then regretted. That seventh letter must have had something worth making sure it would never be delivered. The sender waited near that neighborhood mailbox until the postal worker arrived on their rounds to empty it in the middle of the night. Various leads come together to eventually convince the lieutenant of the identity of the seventh letter’s writer, and identity of the killer. He heads home, and sees his son, who innocently asks if his father had seen his missing “scouting knife.” A Boy Scout knife had great use for being outdoors for hiking, fishing, and camping. The postal worker was attacked by knife. This casts suspicion on the officer’s wife because she had earlier said she did not know where the knife could be, and she went to the mailbox the evening before to mail a letter.
A line of dialogue sets up some of the story when Harris’ character says “Nobody is completely honest.” This was in conversation with another officer about how people follow the law because of fear of being caught, and not because they don’t consider breaking the law in certain circumstances. That line creates theories of the crime. His own lack of honesty, however, was one of the factors preventing him from considering a wider range of possibilities about the case. He was immediately suspicious of neighbors, including his wife, if they were seen anywhere near the mailbox whether they mailed a letter or not.
The story has a strong sense of Dragnet or The Line-Up in its opening scenes and subsequent dialogue. Baer’s character comments that the crime was in a “nice quiet neighborhood” and that’s followed with the Lieutenant’s retort they were looking for “a nice quiet killer.”
The wife, portrayed as nervous and unsettled, unhappy with her husband’s hours away from home with his job. At about 10:45 the dialogue comes to her “headaches” and soon mentions she was recently in a sanitarium. In the final scenes, she arrives home from a doctor appointment, saying says she received a new prescription for her nerves (21:35). This is part of a thematic parallel with I Saw Myself Running and Yellow Wallpaper. The story also includes Harris’ character slapping his wife, a disturbing part of the story, but a necessary story element that shows how far he and the marriage had fallen. There was a seventh letter in the story, and it was hers. She went to the mailbox, thought better of it, and never mailed it. She reads the letter to him… and he finally realizes, it is hoped, that his actions were what was sending their marriage into trouble.
There are two Greek history references in the script. The phrase “Seventh Letter” would have been a familiar one to those who studied classics or philosophy as the name of a work of Plato. There is no tie to the storyline beyond being a familiar phrase.
There is another Greek reference. A police sergeant (played by Baer) utters the postal service motto that starts with “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night…” He attributes it to a Greek historian. Those exact words come from a poem by Charles W. Eliot's The Letter revised at various times over the years, but the Greek origin is true, from a translation of Herodotus about the Persian Empire’s courier service. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Service_creed
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https://archive.org/details/TSP560417
THE CAST
Stacy Harris (Lieutenant Joseph Carter), Parley Baer (Sergeant Sol Morris), John Dehner (Narrator), Vic Perrin (Gillis / Larch), George Walsh (Suspense Narrator / Johnson), Vivi Janiss (Louise), Richard Beals (Bobby), Paula Winslowe (Margaret Richards), James Nusser (Police Inspector Lee)
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