Ted Osborne and Charita Bauer star in a creative Peter Fernandez
script where scammers are scammed by scammers, with a twist. Bauer
plays “Angela,” a new housekeeper arriving at an isolated estate
owned by a reclusive married couple, the Cromwells, who insist on
strict privacy. She is met by the butler, Victor, who has carefully
screened her, not just for her skills, but for her specific physical
attributes such as age and height and other factors. It is very clear
that Victor has something cunning planned, and he finally reveals it
to Angela once he is confident enough to do so. His plan is to murder
the couple and assume their identities. The Cromwells are wealthy,
and have no relatives that Victor knows of who might spoil the plan.
He has studied the Cromwells, their habits, the flow of the household
in terms of deliveries of food and supplies (ordered by phone and
delivered only as far as the front gate), the way they spoke and the
phrases they used, and how they protected their identities and
minimized their contact with others. Financial and legal transactions
are always at arms-length, and never in person. He teaches Angela how
to forge signatures as needed to pay bills and other circumstances.
They decide they are finally ready to execute the plan, and they
poison the Cromwells, and bury the bodies. Then an unexpected event
happens: a letter arrives for the butler, from his son. He will be
arriving to visit his father. That son has likely met the Cromwells,
man years ago, and will likely realize that something is very wrong.
It is here that Fernandez’ script takes a surprising turn, several,
in fact. It is learned that the people Victor and Angela knew as the
Cromwells were not who they said they were… and everything falls
apart.
The program was recorded on Thursday, November 9, 1961. The session
began at 1:00pm and concluded at 6:00pm.
The script was used again on ABC Radio’s Theatre 5 on
1965-01-21.
There are two network aircheck recordings of this episode. The
WROW (Albany, NY) recording is the much better of the two. The
WINF (Hartford, Connecticut) recording is very low quality with
background noise and station drift.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/611112
THE CAST
Ted Osborne aka Reynold Osborn (Victor Hammersmith), Charita Bauer
(Angela), Arline Blackburn (Agnes Cromwell), Melville Ruick (Charles
Cromwell), Cliff Carpenter (Police Lt. / Taxi Driver), Bill Lipton
(Paul Mason)
This is the first time Ted Osborne used the name “Reynold Osborn”
on Suspense. No explanation for his use of that name has been
found. Osborne is the only actor who was in both the first and the
last episodes of Suspense.
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