Motive for Murder

Originally Aired: March 16, 1950

Suspense #376, "Motive for Murder," stars Alan Ladd as Detective Dave Murphy, whose world shatters when he comes home to find a murdered stranger in his apartment and his wife Mary passed out drunk beside the body. The victim, Victor Hamilton, supposedly came to demonstrate a vacuum cleaner, but no vacuum cleaner is found at the scene. All the evidence points to Mary: her fingerprints on the murder weapon, lipstick on the dead man's cheek, and whiskey on her breath. Even Dave's partner, Lieutenant Jock Dusan, can't fight the facts, though he tries to give his fellow officer every consideration.

Refusing to believe Mary is guilty, Dave turns in his badge to investigate on his own. Working from the principle that strangers rarely kill each other, he becomes convinced there must be a third party involved, someone who drugged or knocked out Mary, killed Hamilton, and staged the scene. Dave pursues his theory that Hamilton was murdered for that missing vacuum cleaner, following a trail that leads him to Hamilton's landlady. As the evidence mounts against his wife and pressure builds from the District Attorney's office, Dave races against time to find the real killer before the system he's always believed in destroys the woman he loves.