This script about insurance fraud by a husband and wife was written by San Quentin inmate Elmer Parsons. He would expand the story into his first novel, released in 1959 by Fawcett, Self Made Widow. The story was adapted for this broadcast by Charles B. Smith.
A supposedly happy couple decides to fake the husband’s death to collect on his new $100,000 insurance policy (that is about $1.2 million in US$2025). The husband finds a down-on-his-luck man with drinking problems, whom they assume no one would miss or look to find, and he kills him (or beats him unconscious). The husband drives him to a high spot where they can stage an accident with the husband’s car falling down a steep mountainside. He puts his clothes on the man, arranges him in the car, makes sure the husband’s identification is there. He starts a fire, making sure the burning car will fall off the roadside. After the husband’s “death” is staged, the husband has to hide and disguise himself. Then he has to wait for the insurance company to pay the money to his wife. He doesn’t follow the plan, and goes home to see his her. It is there he learns that she has no intention of going away with him or sharing the money. He’s not very pleased by that, and he starts his own plan to undermine his wife’s plan and alibi.
There are plot holes in the story in terms of how quickly the wife is paid, and other aspects of the story. It is still an entertaining listen, with some smirk-worthy moments, and a surprise ending as the husband and wife are trapped by their own plan. Of course, modern DNA testing would not make their scheme possible. Today’s writers would come up with something different; they always do.
Larry Thor appears… again… as a police lieutenant.
There are some similarities in plot set-up with the episodes 1949-03-31 You Can’t Die Twice with Edward G. Robinson and 1949-06-30 The Day I Died with Joseph Cotten. This has a much different ending as the plan unravels.
There are three surviving recordings and the network recording is the best. This complete recording has not been in wide circulation. The other two are the most commonly circulating recording that is likely an edited Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS) recording. The closing “Suspense March” music is missing. There are no network announcements. A better recording, but still flawed, is from the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service program AFRTS Adventure Theater. This was a 1970s and 1980s series that AFRTS used for Suspense and other golden age series. There were many locations around the world at that time where US military and families did not have access to television, making a series like this an important source of entertainment. There are about two minutes of filler music at the end.
Author Elmer Parsons was one of the three Suspense writers who served time in San Quentin. While Jules Maitland was able to leave his criminal past behind, Parsons and fellow inmate Edgar Scott Flohr were not. Parsons was arrested in Arizona for burglary and car theft in August 1949. The car was wrecked while he was in a car chase with police. After leaving Arizona, he had another run-in with the law in California that had him in Chino prison for three years for forgery. In 1952, he was arrested for car theft in Riverside, CA, and while facing a narcotics charge in Los Angeles. In 1955 in Pasadena, CA, he was arrested for check fraud. At the arrest, he told police that he needed the money because he was waiting for payment of $30,000 for a movie script he had written about a safe burglar. He entered a guilty plea for the offense. At the sentencing, he claimed hat he had a severe head injury when he was nine years old, and desired to be sent to county jail where he could receive treatment by brain specialists. He said that a radio “crime series program” (it may have been for this episode) had accepted one of his scripts. They sent him to San Quenitin, instead. He kept his writing skills sharp by being the editor of the prison’s newspaper. He was released in the early 1960s and had some scripts produced on television, but was arrested for selling heroin in 1965 in California and Oregon. He was arrested again for transporting a stolen car across state lines in 1969. Parsons died on June 6, 1969 in Los Angeles at age 44.
He sold Self Made Widow to Fawcett for a $3500 advance (about $38,000 in US$2025) using the pseudonym “Philip Race.” Other novels followed: Killer Take All, Johnny Come Deadly, and Dark of Summer. He wrote a few westerns under “E.M. Parsons” including Easy Gun and Texas Heller. He contributed scripts for many TV series, including Aquanauts, Sea Hunt, Flipper, and some westerns such as Cheyenne, Bonanza, and The Virginian. Though those list of publications and broadcast teleplays are great accomplishments. Despite his paradoxical discipline around a typewriter, it is clear that Parsons led a very reckless life and could not settle into a quieter time, free of his past problems.
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https://archive.org/details/TSP560925
THE CAST
Parley Baer (Harry Burton), Michael Ann Barrett (Edna), Joe Kearns (Wallace the tramp / Sergeant Barton), Charles Seel (Croyd / Hotel clerk), Shep Menken (Gas Station attendant), Larry Thor (Lieutenant Johnson), George Walsh (Radio Announcer / Narrator)
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