Whodunit?

The redhead in Apartment 1-A was strangled first. Then the redhead in 2-B and the one in 3-C got theirs. All died at the hands of "The Creeper," a sinister, unseen character in last week's Suspense play over CBS television. But after the murder of Georgia, the redhead who lived in 4-D, Georgia came back to haunt her scripters and the network.

Since network television rules forbid any act of violence to be shown (after all, Greek tragedy had the same convention), Georgia was done in just offscreen. A man's voice murmured: "What nice lipstick you use . . ." Georgia shrieked and dropped the phone she was using. The camera panned blankly at the phone while the dirty work was done.

Minutes after Suspense was officially ended, Georgia was on the haunt. In all, more than 2,500 phone calls jammed CBS's Manhattan switchboard. Everyone had the same reasonable question: Whodunit? Apparently the scripters thought they had made it plain: "The Creeper" was the locksmith who had just come to fix Georgia's front door. Why, then, had the TV audience been confused?

The answer, CBS finally decided, was that most people tend to retain what they see more readily than what they hear. Television, which demands closer visual attention than the ordinary, unselected sights of everyday life, closer even than movies, may exaggerate this tendency. The TV audience had not seen the locksmith, but had heard him speak several times during the play. Yet, reasons CBS, the audience was looking so hard that it forgot to listen, and could not place the murderer's voice. Later that night CBS was forced to telecast a "news bulletin" announcing the identity of the killer.

The incident held a lesson for television: tell it through the vision. It was a lesson that radio-trained telecasters badly needed. If they learned it, red-haired Georgia did not die in vain.

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