Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Thursdays, I will be reviewing Decoy, which aired in Syndication in 1957 and 1958.  The show can be viewed on Tubi!

This week, Casey is haunted by the past.

Episode 1.27 “The Sound of Tears”

(Dir by Marc Daniels, originally aired on April 14th, 1958)

A wealthy young man has been gunned down in a New York park.  It falls to Casey to deliver the news to both the man’s mother (Muriel Kirland) and the man’s ex-fiancée, Wendy Jenkins (Suzanne Pleshette).  At first, Wendy is the number one suspect but, as she investigates, Casey comes to suspect that the killer was actually Susan Connor (Molly McCarthy), a family friend who had fallen in love with the victim.

This is an interesting episode, in that it reveals a bit of Casey’s past.  Usually, Casey doesn’t let her personal feelings get in the way of doing her job but, in this episode, she finds herself thinking about the day that a policewoman told her that her husband had been killed in the line of duty.  Casey has a unique understanding of the pain that the three women are feeling and Beverly Garland does a good job of showing the anguish that Casey is going through.

Unfortunately, the rest of the episode isn’t quite as good as Garland’s performance.  From the start, Susan is portrayed as being so obviously unhinged that it’s not really a surprise when she turns out to be the killer.  None of the guest cast, including a young Suzanne Pleshette, are as convincing as Beverly Garland is in the lead role.  Indeed, Charles Mendick — cast of Lt. Doyle — gives one of the worst performances that I’ve ever seen on this show.

On the plus side, this episode does feature some good location footage of 1950s New York.  The noirish black-and-white imagery nicely fits the melancholy story.  The cinematography captures the world in which Casey lives, one in which pain doesn’t just go away after a few years and the guilty are often as traumatized as those they victimize.