What happens
Burton is due to hang at ten o'clock for a murder he insists he did not commit, and he has spent a year waiting for the truth to surface. Bobby, an eleven-year-old boy, witnesses a car crash on Maple Street and its badly hurt driver tells him that Burton is innocent and that he himself killed a pawnbroker. Bobby struggles to make the adults around him believe what the dying man said, while the clock keeps running toward the execution. The story is part of the radio series Suspense, first broadcast on August 30, 1959.
A small town street with an ice cream shop, a police station, and a state penitentiary, on the evening before an execution.
Characters: Burton, Bobby, Mr. Clay, Lieutenant Byron, Bobby's mother, Bobby's father, The Warden, Officer Moody
Listen for: Bobby's attempts to convince the adults that the injured driver confessed before he dies.
Written from the episode itself; it never gives away the ending. Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.