A temporary blackout at a recording studio leaves Jessica in the dark when the wealthy, soon-to-be-owner is stabbed to death.

Season 3, Episode 22: Murder, She Spoke (May 10, 1987)

Jessica has been booked in a studio to record her mystery books as part of a series for the blind. Mid-recording, a blackout hits the studio, and when the lights come back on, someone discovers Randy Whitman, the owner-to-be, dying of a stab wound to the back.

Who’s in it, outside of Angela Lansbury?

William Atherton (Greg Dalton): The undisputed king of the “guy you love to hate.” Before he was getting his house covered in marshmallows in Ghostbusters, he was starring in the 1974 cult classic The Sugarland Express. Seriously, his IMDb is filled with roles that should just say “jerk.”

G.W. Bailey (Lt. Oswald Faraday): Long before he was the bumbling Captain Harris in Police Academy, Bailey was dodging the undead in Tom McLoughlin’s moody 1982 cult horror One Dark Night.

Michael Callan (Carl Anglin): A veteran of the screen who took a dip into the “Nature Gone Wild” subgenre with the 1977 giant-cat-on-the-loose flick The Uncanny, and appeared in the giallo-influenced TV thriller The Killer on Board.

Michael Cole (Earl Tuchman): Best known as Pete from The Mod Squad, but he earned his horror stripes playing the adult Henry Bowers in the original 1990 miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s It.

Charlie Daniels (Stoney Carmichael): The man who told us the Devil went down to Georgia. While primarily a country legend, his presence here adds that grit necessary for a Southern-fried thriller.

Jonna Lee (Sally Ann Carmichael): A 1980s mainstay who faced off against a supernatural force in the 1984 film Making the Grade.

Fredric Lehne (Al Parker): You recognize him as the “Yellow-Eyed Demon” (Azazel) from Supernatural. He’s a genre veteran who also appeared in Night Game, a slasher set at a baseball stadium.

Wendy Phillips (Nancy Dalton): She survived the 1988 TV movie The People Across the Lake, which is a textbook “suburban nightmare” thriller.

Constance Towers (Margaret Witworth): A genuine icon of cult cinema. She starred in Samuel Fuller’s insane 1963 masterpiece Shock Corridor and the 1964 neo-noir The Naked Kiss. If you haven’t seen them, fix your life.

Patrick Wayne (Randy Witworth): The son of The Duke himself. He led the charge against Ray Harryhausen monsters in the 1977 fantasy-adventure cult classic Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.

Mark Neely (Sergeant): A familiar face from The Young and the Restless, Neely also did time in the 1981 slasher Graduation Day.

Trish Garland (Secretary): Mostly known for her stage work, but she popped up in the psychological thriller The 4th Floor.

Austin Kelly (Cabbie): A reliable character actor who appeared in the gritty 1970s crime-cult classic Across 110th Street.

What happens?

If you thought the most dangerous thing in a recording studio was a high-pitched feedback loop or a diva’s rider, you clearly haven’t spent enough time in Cabot Cove’s extended universe.

In this week’s episode, our favorite mystery writer is recording her books for the blind. Naturally, because Jessica can’t even go to the grocery store without someone checking out permanently, a blackout hits the studio. When the lights flicker back on, Randy Whitman—the studio’s owner-to-be and a man with all the charm of a paper cut—is found with a knife in his back.

Enter Lt. Faraday, played by G.W. Bailey, who has apparently decided that since he can’t stop Mahoney and Tackleberry, he’ll spend his time being a condescending misogynist to a world-famous novelist. Faraday immediately pivots his detective skills toward Greg Dalton, the blind producer.

Why Greg? Because Faraday’s logic is airtight: Greg can move in the dark, he was near the switch, and he’s the suspicious type. Meanwhile, Jessica finds a bottle of expensive purple nail polish at the scene. That leads her to:

• Suspect A: Cindy, the runaway niece of country star Stoney Carmichael, wears purple polish, but it’s the cheap stuff.
• Suspect B: The victim’s widow, who seems about as sad as someone who just won the lottery, wears the expensive brand.
• The Reality: The nail polish is a Total Red Herring. It has absolutely nothing to do with the murder, but it gives Jessica something to do while Faraday is busy being useless.

Things get messy when Jessica catches Nancy Dalton (Greg’s wife) trying to hide a set of matching silverware in the dryer. Pro tip: if your husband is a murder suspect, don’t try to tumble-dry the evidence. Jessica has to gently remind her that “Obstruction of Justice” isn’t a great look for the fall season.

The lightbulb — literally, see the trivia — finally goes off for J.B. when Faraday calls her and mistakes her recorded voice for her actual voice. Suddenly, the blackout rehearsals and the constant technical difficulties during Stoney’s recording sessions make sense.

Who did it?

Al Parker. He flipped a master switch on his keyboard to cause the blackouts, using them as dress rehearsals to frame Greg (who was conveniently distracted by his meds at the time).

How did Al pull off the ultimate alibi? The old Recorded Audio Trick. He made it look like Randy was calling him on the phone, but Al was actually just listening to a recording of Randy’s voice. This kept Randy pinned in one spot for the stabbing while making Al look like he was elsewhere, chatting away with the soon-to-be corpse.

Al tries to play it cool, claiming the evidence is circumstantial, which is a classic move for a guy who just got outsmarted by a woman in a smart blazer. It isn’t until Faraday finds the actual alibi tape (thanks to a heavy nudge from Jessica) that Al finally folds.

Faraday ends the episode by graciously admitting he’ll never undervalue female intuition again. Jessica likely responded with a polite smile, while internally calculating exactly how many ways she could have disposed of his body without leaving a trace.

Be nice to Jessica Fletcher. She has a very intimate relationship with death.

Who made it?

This was directed by Jessica’s real-life son, Anthony Pullen Shaw and written by Si Rose, who created Sigmund and the Sea Monster and Dr. Shrinker.

Does Jessica dress up and act stupid? Does she get some?

No. I’m wondering if I’ll ever see that again. Maybe in season 4? This is the last episode of season 3.

Was it any good?

Yes!

Any trivia?

The moment that Jessica figures out who the murderer is, a light bulb comes on above her head.

Screenshot

Give me a reasonable quote:

Lt. Faraday: Oh, I think writing is a real good hobby for a woman. You can cook up some supper. You can chat on the phone. And then pop over to the old typewriter now and then for a few minutes.

Jessica Fletcher: Yes. When I’m not too busy beating laundry against the rocks in the river.

What’s next?

The first episode of season 4! Jessica jaunts to Paris at the behest of an old friend whose fashion boutique is in financial trouble. When a local loan shark is murdered, she must dig deep to find the truth.

This episode is a surrealist take on the Ghost Train story, serving as an allegory for death and the afterlife.

Stacey (Begonya Plaza), a college student traveling home for Thanksgiving, finds herself alone in a desolate train station. The atmosphere is immediately off as the station feels abandoned, and an exit sign falls from the wall without provocation. When her train arrives, she boards the very last car, the caboose.

Inside, she meets three eccentric passengers. Mrs. Crane (Mary Carver) is a grandmotherly figure who knits incessantly and speaks in soothing, rhythmic metaphors. The Old Man (Louis Guss) is a silent, suited passenger focused on his lunch box. And finally, Joe (Scooter Stevens) is a young boy dressed in a cowboy outfit who appears restless.

Mrs. Crane welcomes Stacey, explaining that the last car sways like a cradle. Stacey attempts to relax, but the logic of the world begins to fray. She notices her watch has stopped, and when the train enters its first tunnel, the lights flicker to the sound of a haunting, maniacal laugh. For a fleeting second, Stacey sees her own reflection closing the window shades independently of her movements.

As the journey continues, Stacey realizes she is trapped. The door to the next car is locked, appearing and disappearing, with signs forbidding passage while the train is in motion. Time becomes elastic; Joe inexplicably changes costumes, from a cowboy to an infantry soldier, and the passengers seem to know Stacey’s name despite never being introduced.

The horror escalates during the second tunnel sequence. Joe begins shooting his toy gun, but the play turns lethal. The Old Man is riddled with actual bullet holes and slumps over, dead. Stacey screams in terror, but as soon as the train exits the tunnel, the Old Man sits up, perfectly intact, and begins eating a sandwich as if nothing happened. Mrs. Crane simply smiles and tells a shell-shocked Stacey, “You get used to the tunnels… eventually.”

The appearance of the Conductor (Bert Williams) brings no relief. When Stacey demands to be let off or taken to the dining car, she is met with bureaucratic indifference. She offers her round-trip ticket, but the Conductor clips it and returns a one-way ticket, claiming it is the only kind he has.

Stacey’s desperation peaks when she looks through the door’s window as the Conductor leaves. For a split second, the polished interior of the train vanishes, replaced by a rotting, skeletal wreckage. The passengers are revealed as decayed corpses, and the Conductor is a grinning skeleton. However, as the train emerges into the light, the illusion of normalcy returns.

Mrs. Crane reveals the true nature of their journey: the Conductor won’t return until there is a new passenger to collect. Stacey is no longer a traveler; she is now a permanent fixture of the last car. Mrs. Crane drapes a handmade shawl around Stacey’s shoulders—the very one she had been knitting since Stacey boarded—and offers to teach her how to knit. This is the acceptance of death.

The episode concludes with the train entering another tunnel. This time, Stacey doesn’t scream. Instead, she joins the others in a rhythmic, catatonic chant: “Tunnel… Tunnel… Tunnel.” As the darkness engulfs the car, Stacey’s face withers into a pale, skeletal mask. She has finally gotten used to the tunnels, becoming just another ghost on a train that never reaches its destination.

This episode was directed by John Strysik, who directed five other episodes of this series. It was written by Michael McDowell, who wrote the script for Beetlejuice. This is one of the strongest episodes of the show.

Jessica investigates the possibility that a man spent 30 years in prison for a murder he did not commit.

Season 3, Episode 21: The Days Dwindle Down (April 19, 1987)

An elderly waitress begs for J.B.’s help in solving a decades-old murder.

Who’s in it, outside of Angela Lansbury?

Richard Beymer (Sydney Jarvis): Best known as Tony in the original West Side Story, cult cinema fans adore him as Ben Horne in Twin Peaks. Here, he plays the man on trial for his life, providing the episode’s central tension.

June Havoc (Thelma Vantay): A true vaudeville legend (and the real-life sister of Gypsy Rose Lee), she brings old-school theatrical gravity to the role of the domineering mother-in-law.

Harry Morgan (Retired Lt. Richard Webb): Before he was Colonel Potter on M’A’S’H, he was Jack Webb’s partner on Dragnet. In a fun meta twist, he plays a retired detective whom Jessica hires to help her dig into the case.

Susan Strasberg (Dorothy Hearn Davis): The daughter of legendary acting coach Lee Strasberg, Susan was a “Method” darling who appeared in everything from Picnic to the psychedelic cult classic The Trip. She plays the tragic wife whose death sets the plot in motion.

Gloria Stuart (Edna Jarvis): Decades before she became a household name (and Oscar nominee) as “Old Rose” in James Cameron’s Titanic, Stuart was a 1930s starlet. She appears here in the present day, while Katherine Emery appears in uncredited archive footage as a younger version of her.

Art Hindle (Rod Wilson): A Canadian legend! If you love 70s/80s horror, you know him from David Cronenberg’s The Brood and the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He plays the Wilson family’s son.

Martha Scott (Georgia Wilson): An Academy Award nominee for Our Town, she’s perhaps most famous for playing Charlton Heston’s mother in both The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur. She plays the Wilson matriarch.

Jeffrey Lynn (Sam Wilson): A former leading man from the 1940s (Four Daughters), he returned to the screen for this role after a period of semi-retirement.

Debbie Zipp (Terry Wilson): A Murder, She Wrote regular. She appeared in several episodes playing different characters, most notably as the wife of Jessica’s nephew, Grady Fletcher.

Tom Dreesen (Peabody): A legendary stand-up comedian who famously toured with Frank Sinatra for years. He steps into a character role here.

Emory Bass (Manager): A character actor staple who you might recognize from 1776 or his numerous appearances on The Love Boat.

Russ Marin (Lt. Sharp): A “that guy” actor seen in everything from The Rockford Files to Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.

Mark Pilon (Male Secretary): A prolific voice actor and performer who appeared in various 80s staples like Knots Landing.

Walter Smith (Restaurant Patron): One of the unsung heroes of Hollywood—a professional background actor who appeared in hundreds of episodes of television, including over 40 episodes of Murder, She Wrote alone!

What happens?

Jessica is living the high life in a luxury hotel suite—probably on the dime of her publisher or some poor sap who didn’t realize inviting J.B. Fletcher to your city is a death warrant for at least one local socialite.

While she’s being pampered, she’s approached by Georgia Wilson. Georgia’s husband, Sam, just got out of the slammer after serving thirty years. He was sent up for the rub-out of his boss, Richard Jarvis. Sam’s story? He was framed. He claims Jarvis’s firm went bust, and the guy offered Sam his last ten grand to make his suicide look like an armed robbery so the insurance company would cough up a fortune for the Jarvis family. Only problem? Someone actually did kill him before the plan went south.

Sam and Georgia’s son, Rod, became a cop specifically to clear his old man’s name. He puts his badge and his expertise at Jessica’s disposal. Along with a retired Lt. Webb, they start digging into 30-year-old forensic evidence.

Naturally, someone isn’t happy about this walk down memory lane. After someone takes a literal shot at Jessica with a matching bullet, J.B. realizes the past isn’t dead.

Who did it?

The victim died by accident. His wife arrived home, caught him mid-attempt and tried to snatch the heater out of his hand because she actually loved the guy. Bang! The gun goes off in the struggle. The big giveaway for J.B. Webb? The fingerprints on the barrel proved it was a wrestling match, not a solo act.

Who made it?

This was directed by Michael J. Lynch and written by Philip Gerson.

Does Jessica dress up and act stupid? Does she get some?

No. I’m wondering if I’ll ever see that.

Was it any good?

Yes, as always.

Any trivia?

The flashbacks are taken from the film Strange Bargain. Jeffrey Lynn, Martha Scott and Harry Morgan reprise their roles from the movie. In the movie, Lt. Webb identifies the murderer, and Sam is saved from prison.

Richard Beymer, who played Sydney Jarvis, was actually 14 years younger than Raymond Roe, who played the same character in Strange Behavior. By this point, he’d retired and was a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy.

Give me a reasonable quote:

Retired Lt. Richard Webb: I figured she was playin’ bedsheet bingo with the boss.

What’s next?

A temporary blackout at a recording studio leaves Jessica in the dark when the wealthy, soon-to-be-owner is stabbed to death.

We open on a guy — let’s call him Chester Caruso (Paul Dooley) — whining into a rotary phone to his unseen wife, Marian. He’s stuck in a blizzard, definitely not cheating (wink, wink and his car is currently being hooked up to a tow truck. Chester leaves his room to wander into the lobby and immediately starts hitting on anything with a pulse. He tells a fellow guest he’s a lingerie salesman and decides to get a room, asking for cottage 7, a place where a murder happened just last week.

Chester walks into his room and finds a woman named Carol (Kathy McLain) waiting for him. She thinks he’s Harry. Instead of leaving or calling the cops, they start dancing. He tells her his ballroom-dancing skills are why he’s called Soft Shoes, and it’s all very surreal and artsy until Chester mentions his wife. Suddenly, the mood shifts from The Twilight Zone to Fatal Attraction.

The woman pulls a gun because Harry or Chester has broken her heart for the last time. Bang! Chester runs to the owner, screaming about being shot and dames with revolvers. The owner just sighs, looks at Chester’s breath and tells him to go sleep it off.

The woman comes back, rambling about the good old days while Chester realizes he’s stuck in a narrative loop he can’t escape. We wrap up with the manager (John Fiedler) and the law (Patrick Farrelly) standing outside, basically admitting the room is cursed. Their solution? Demolish the place.

This shows up in the direct-to-video release Stephen King’s Golden Years, which has five Tales from the Darkside stories with only one — “The Word Processor of the Gods” — written by King. It was directed by Richard Friedman, who also made Phantom of the Mall: Eric’s Revenge, Doom Asylum and Scared Stiff and written by Art Monterastelli.

By the late 1940s, Buster Keaton, the man who literally reinvented what a human body could do on film, was basically a ghost. He was doing daywork, a four-week circus stint in Paris and touring in a stage production of The Gorilla. It looked like the credits had rolled on one of the greatest careers in cinema.

Then came the magic of the vacuum tube.

In 1949, Ed Wynn (the Perfect Fool and a guy who knew talent when he saw it) brought Buster onto his variety show. It was the early days of TV, broadcast live on the West Coast, recorded on kinescopes and then physically mailed to the rest of the country like a weird cinematic chain letter. The reaction was electric. People remembered why they loved Buster.

This led to The Buster Keaton Show on KHJ (KTTV) in Los Angeles. As Buster put it: “It was one of the thrills of my life… I had almost given up hope of getting another real chance as an actor.”

Watching these episodes now is like looking at a lost civilization. Because there was no such thing as canned laughter yet, and the shows were often filmed without a studio audience, Buster’s brilliant, bone-crunching physical comedy often lands in a vacuum of silence. It’s eerie, beautiful and occasionally heartbreaking.

Eventually, producer Carl Hittleman tried to film a new version of the show in 1951 to syndicate it nationally, bringing in a Who’s Who of silent-era vets like Hank Mann and Harold Goodwin. They even re-titled it Life with Buster Keaton and chopped it up into a feature film called The Misadventures of Buster Keaton for the European market. It was marketed to kids as a slapstick museum piece, but we know better. This is the work of a master finding his feet in a brand-new world.

This set is a miracle of preservation. Archivist Jeff Joseph has done the heavy lifting here, digitally upgrading these rare kinescopes to high resolution. Out of the 13 original live episodes, only 9 remain. This set includes two holy grails: a February 2, 1950, episode that hasn’t been seen since the night it aired, and a February 23, 1950, episode making its first-ever home media appearance.

Extras on the Blu-ray include Three Comedians in Close-up (CBC-TV), an episode of This Your Life, rare footage of Keaton at the circus and two shorts, Cops and The Goat.  If you have any love for the history of the medium or the man who broke his neck for a gag and kept filming, you need this from MVD.

The reform mayor dies in a so-called “accident,” and the mayor’s father is murdered after he demands an investigation into it.

Season 3, Episode 20: The Cemetery Vote (April 5, 1987)

Jessica investigates when her nephew, a junior executive for a large accounting firm, is charged with tax fraud and the murder of his boss.

Who’s in it, outside of Angela Lansbury?

Bruce Davison plays David Carroll, and the man is a legend, appearing in Willard, The Lords of Salem, and so many more movies.

Ed Lauter is the law here; Sheriff Orville Yates and no one played the menacing authority figure better. He was the creepy attendant in Cujo, the cop dealing with Bronson in Death Wish 3 and fought off The Car.

Marie Windsor is Kate Gunnerson, and she was in The Day Mars Invaded Earth.

Jeff Yagher plays Deputy Wayne Beeler. He was in V.

Joseph Campanella is George McDaniels.

Charlene Tilton plays Cyndy March and is best known for Dallas.

Mitchell Ryan is Captain Ernest Lenko, and I will always know him for his role in Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers as Dr. Terence Wynn, the man behind the Cult of Thorn.

Ellen Bry plays Linda Stevens, John McLiam is Harry Stevens, Dick Balduzzi plays Gil Stokes, Katherine De Hetre is Rita, Zale Kessler plays the coroner, Neal Penso is a paramedic and Hank Robinson and Ilona Wilson are casino players.

What happens?

Look, we all know J.B. Fletcher has more dear old friends than a politician has skeletons in the closet, like the Angel of Death. This time, she’s trekking out to Comstock, Idaho. It’s another one of those fictional map-dots that seem to exist only so someone can get murdered in it.

Our girl Jess is living her best life in Rome when she rings up Seth Hazlitt and gets the skinny: Linda Stevens (who we assume is a Cabot Cove expat because they once shared a picnic on the beach) is now a widow. Her husband, the Mayor, took a permanent detour in a car crash. Jess does what Jess does. She cuts the pasta tour short and flies into the eye of the storm to comfort the grieving friend. But Linda’s father-in-law, Harry, isn’t buying the accident narrative. He thinks the town’s political machine is running on high-octane foul play.

So he dies too. Turns out, being the only guy in town asking the right questions is a great way to get a one-way ticket to the morgue.

Who did it?

Deputy Mayor David Carroll! Bruce Davison goes from clean-up candidate to clean the blood off the carpet real fast. Carroll was playing both sides of the fence, tipping off an illegal gambling ring about police raids. Why? Because he wanted their political support (read: dirty money and influence) to slide into the Mayor’s chair.

Who made it?

This was directed by Seymour Robbie and written by Robert Van Scoyk.

Does Jessica dress up and act stupid? Does she get some?

No. A serious and non-sexy J.B. Boo.

Was it any good?

It’s decent.

Any trivia?

The sound of the truck that runs Jessica and David off the road was taken from the made-for-TV movie Duel.

Give me a reasonable quote:

Jessica Fletcher: Well, I really have to get home. Amos Tupper may uphold the law, but I can’t trust him to water my plants.

What’s next?

Jessica investigates the possibility that a man spent 30 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. Art Hindle is in this episode!

Hey, remember when you went to college and your parents turned your bedroom into a sewing room? Well, Cecilia Matthews did one better. She turned it into a psychic freakout where a spectral brat who never grows up and never talks back finally makes her happy as a mother, unlike her real-life child. In this slice of 80s psychological weirdness (based on a Pamela Sargent short story), we meet Christine (Lorna Luft), who comes home for a warm hug only to get the cold shoulder from her mother, Cecilia (Coleen Gray), who is too busy listening to a ghostly child sing “Three Blind Mice” upstairs to hear her own flesh-and-blood daughter pounding on the door.

It’s been six years. Six years since Christine had a nervous breakdown, likely caused by the very woman now offering her tea while treating her like a trespasser. Cecilia has storage in Christine’s old room, a code word for a pink-hued time capsule filled with pom-poms, horse trophies and a literal ghost of Christine’s childhood.

Enter Chrissie (Virginia Keehne). She’s the girl Christine used to be, or at least, the girl Cecilia wanted her to stay. While Christine is trying to process her trauma and navigate a broken life, Cecilia is upstairs, tucked in with a poltergeist version of her daughter, feeding the thing pure nostalgia.

The second act turns into a battle for maternal territory. We get a visit from Toni (Janet Wood), the Avon lady, who drops the bomb that Cecilia spends an unhealthy amount of time talking to the walls. Then there’s brother Chuck (Lary Gilman), who tries to play peacemaker but mostly just serves as a reminder that Christine is the only one in this family actually living in the real world.

Christine confronts Chrissie, who is basically a sentient World’s Best Daughter trophy with a mean streak. There’s shouting, a shattered mirror, and a tug-of-war for Cecilia’s soul. In the end, the power of a grown-up’s grief beats out a phantom’s playground rhymes, as you’d imagine it would. Chrissie goes poof in a flash of light, Cecilia wakes up from her nostalgic trance, and we’re left with two women holding each other in the wreckage of a childhood bedroom.

Most of Christopher T. Welch’s directing work was on TV, while he has also done ADR and production work. This was written by Julie Selbo, who wrote for this series and Monsters, as well as animation.