The Mystery of Marie Roget

Originally Aired: December 14, 1953 Suspense #530, "The Mystery of Marie Roget," presents Edgar Allan Poe's detective C. Auguste Dupin investigating a haunting murder case. When the body of a beautiful young woman is pulled from the Seine River in Paris, the Prefect of Police summons Dupin to help solve the crime before public pressure mounts. The victim is identified as Marie Roget, a perfume shop employee who vanished on Sunday while supposedly visiting her aunt. Her employer Beauvais and her betrothed Jacques Saint-Eustache have been desperately searching for her since she failed to return. As Dupin examines the body with a doctor, he makes crucial deductions about the murder: the victim was strangled by hand and cord tied with a sailor's knot, killed quickly near the riverbank on Sunday, and transported by boat into deeper water. Suspicions deepen when Beauvais reveals that Marie had mysteriously disappeared once before for a week, three years earlier. With the prefect's honor and a substantial reward at stake, Dupin begins piecing together the clues using only his powers of observation and deduction to unmask the killer.