With a title like “The Man in the Fog” the program might be expected to be in the era of the character of Sherlock Holmes or Bulldog Drummond. It might even imply that it is a spy story of some sort. It is not. It is about a serial killer, but not about the famous Jack the Ripper. The story does involve murders by knife, but it is not a recreation of the Ripper. It is a different killer with a similar modus operandi. The scripter is Joseph Cochran. The stars are Bob Dryden and Ethel Everett. She occasionally was billed as Ethel Remey in her performances.
The slasher killer is loose in London, and a housewife suspects that it is her husband. The seemingly random murders of women has police baffled, however. The killings typically occur on weekends, leading to speculation that the murderer might be a working man, free only on those days. She is obsessed with the news coverage of the killings, and especially the pattern and location of the crimes. She marks a city map and realizes that the locations approximate a square. When she draws diagonal lines inside the square, they lines intersect near her own block. She suspects the killer lives nearby. After she sends information about her theory to the police, they read it, but are somewhat skeptical. Her husband works in a factory and some evenings he has not been at home, especially on foggy nights. After another murder occurs outside their home block, and not on a weekend, the interest of the police is piqued and they step up their investigation. She learns from a fellow factory worker that her husband missed work on those nights. He insisted to her that he was at work those times. She confronts him, and tells him that she can be an alibi. She decides, instead, to go to the police. By now, the officers are much more interested in what she has to say. They tell her that they need to have him confess to the crimes, because a wife’s testimony against her husband is inadmissible. They contrive a way in the interrogation of the husband to win his confidence, and he soon makes incriminating statements. His motives for the killings indicate significant delusions about what he was doing.
The law in Britain is actually that a wife can voluntarily testify against a husband, and vice versa, but such testimony cannot be compelled. Cochran used this mild misrepresentation of the law in the plot, anyway. He likely realized that the story was better if the husband admitted the crimes himself, and needed a way to set that up.
The title ends up having two meanings. The first indicates the places and times of the killings, at night, in the fog. The second is that the killer is a man who definitely has psychological issues, mentally in a fog and unable to reason properly.
The program was recorded on Thursday, September 21. No session time is noted on the available script cover sheet.
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https://archive.org/details/TSP610924
THE CAST
Robert Dryden (Ben Kast), Ethel Everett (Mamie), Lawson Zerbe (Howley), Mercer McLeod (Britt), Guy Repp (Timekeeper / Officer)
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