Wealthy businessman Carl Gorman has a neglected though loved wife, Alice. Enter stage left Carl's snake in the grass nephew Jim Ferris (Jack Cassidy). He makes Alice feel desired, and he makes plans to run away with her but first he needs - eighty thousand dollars. Jim has been nickel and diming the people who work at Carl's company - twenty dollars here, a hundred there, free drinks, a room for the night, etc. But Jim is tired of the penny ante pan handling and wants a big score. Jim and Alice come up with a plan to fake a kidnapping plot in which Alice might be harmed if Jim's fictitious gambling debts are not paid. Carl sends his secretary, Betty, to the remote cabin to deliver the eighty thousand dollars, but things go wrong. Somebody bursts into the cabin after Betty leaves and tries to rob Jim and Alice. A fire breaks out, a gun goes off, Jim falls to the floor dead.
Alice flees the scene. Betty returns to the cabin when she sees the flames over the treetops from her rearview mirror, and she picks up the gun, just in time for the police to appear. Normally this could be easily cleared up, but Betty had a past relationship with Jim, and so she is arrested for his murder with the police believing she was in on the fake 80K ransom plot.
Normally on Perry Mason, you see the set up and the possible murderers, you are pretty sure you know who the victim is going to be, then you see said victim dead on the floor as the body is discovered. You have no idea how the murder happened or who did it. Here you see everything, and you know who did it. You get to see the killer wrestle with her conscience as she sees an innocent person, somebody whom she likes, accused of what she did. That and one final twist in this case make it special.
One final issue - You might wonder why Kenneth Tobey is standing in for William Talman as the prosecuting attorney this week. In 1960 Talman was caught up in a scandal involving lewdness at a wild party. He actually had nothing to do with it, but Tallman was absent from a few episodes because CBS executed their rights under the morals clause of his contract until the entire incident was cleared up. A bit ironic considering how Hamilton Burger often went off half cocked in many of these murder cases.