Joe Julian and Lawson Zerbe star in a Joseph Cochran script about two strangers who have an interest in the crime of murder. Julian plays Fred Spung, a drifting man who is renting a room in town for a few days. Lawson Zerbe plays John Cotter, a strange man, who says his interest in murder is getting down to the core reasons why a murder is committed. He believes the usual reasons of passion, money, and the other usual ones, have much deeper reasons for the act. He has studied 98 cases, and is looking for two more to make it 100. He has done a detailed study of each of them and has constructed “tables” of data to that have predictive power to understand the crimes. The two strangers find the topic so interesting, Cotter accepts an invitation to visit Spung at his room and stay there.
While they were at the diner, Spung strikes up a conversation with Amy, a waitress. Their flirtatious banter results in her agreeing to a date to see a movie. You know that with two rootless men with an interest in homicide this is likely to play out in some important manner in the story.
Spung and Cotter’s discussions at the hotel room take an ominous tone the more Cotter talks. It is very clear he is a very odd and knows a little too much about his subject. They start talking about a murder in Springdale, and it starts to sound like Cotter might have done it. The gives Spung the creeps!
Spung and Amy finally have their date and it involves a walk in the park. She was skeptical of him, but they seem to be warming up to each other. It’s warm and she helps loosen his tie. Spung’s mind seems to get into a different gear, and he takes off the tie, and he starts strangling her. He blacks out, and when he comes back to consciousness, Amy is gone and his necktie is missing. He knows he has to leave town, quickly. He’s not sure what happened, but that it was bad, and he might have killed Amy. He heads back to the room, where it is very dark, and it seems Cotter is asleep in his bed. He thinks he can sneak out quietly. He realizes something is wrong when he comes upon a knife and blood on the floor. A guest in the hotel, who had complained about the noise that Spung and Cotter had made before, barges in to complain again. He sees Spung with the knife and blood on his hands. Spung panics and the roomer yells for someone to call the police. Spung ends up at the police. They accuse him of killing Cotter, but he says he did not do it, and that he was scared of him because he was “nuts.” It becomes clear that Cotter committed suicide. The police start asking where Spung was in the evening, and they are fishing for information about a murder in the park. In the closing scenes, the story wraps up and we find out what cases Cotter had for numbers 99 and 100.
The story is occasionally tedious, where you wonder what the point of certain scenes or dialogue might be, even if you know where it is headed. For the New York Suspense, however, it is one of the more interesting ones, but could have been done better at an earlier time in the series.
The program was recorded on Thursday, June 28, 1962. The session began at 1:30pm and was completed at 5:00pm.
This episode is often in sub-par sound, but this recording is much better, and provides a better listening experience.
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https://archive.org/details/TSP620722
THE CAST
Joe Julian (Spong), Lawson Zerbe (Cotter), Ted Osborne [aka Reynold Osborn] (Man on p.6 of the script [another tenant of the hotel]), Elizabeth Lawrence (Amy the waitress), William Redfield (Cop)
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