Barbara Becker portrays a woman, Lucinda, whose sister dies under suspicious circumstances. The story is by Walter Black. Lucinda holds her sister’s husband, Martin, responsible for her death. (He is played by Paul McGrath in the most reprehensible manner). At the reading of the will, she blurts out her suspicions. The sister’s will barely had its ink dried before the sister “fell down the stairs” in an accident. Her short marriage resulted in his sharing the family estate with Lucinda, and she asks him to leave. Yet, she eventually becomes engaged to her widowed brother-in-law. What changed? He seems to be a calculating sort, and proposes to restore a summer house that the sister loved, with plantings that she would have enjoyed. Lucinda is deeply touched by the idea; is he playing Lucinda for a patsy? He visits the lawyer for the family, and creates a transfer of property where he renounces his ownership of the property. Lucinda rejects it, and is warming up to him. Is this another ruse? They seem to reconcile, and he proposes marriage. She accepts. Then one evening, the help is given the night off so they can be alone, “a betrothal party, just the two of us,” he says. Then Lucinda decides to go down the stairs to the cellar for a bottle of wine… and the noise of her body falling down the stairs. And then there’s the surprise ending.
This episode is in a style similar to that of John Dickson Carr’s scripts used at the beginning of the series.
The program was recorded on Thursday, July 6, 1961. The session started at 10:30am and concluded at 2:30pm.
The surviving recording is very listenable, and in better quality than most of the recordings that collectors have shared for decades. It has a somewhat narrow range.
Barbara Becker was a regular on many 1950s radio and television soap operas.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP610709
THE CAST
Paul McGrath (Martin Pierce Ethridge), Barbara Becker (Lucinda Howell), Frank Behrens (Aaron Jenkins), Joan Lorring (Mary), Mary Michael (Agatha), Walter Black (Sheriff Ben Perry)
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