Sally Kellerman

            I spent most of Thursday finishing up my journal entry about Tom Phillips. I photographed the two prints of his artwork that I’d found, uploaded the images and then spent the rest of the evening and night framing them properly and evenly in Microsoft Paint. Because I wanted to get that done I didn’t take the time for a bike ride.

            That night I watched an Alfred Hitchcock Hour teleplay that was quite different than usual in that nothing horrible happened to a main character. Instead the story manipulates the viewer throughout to make us think that something has happened.

            A London police detective named Tommy has returned from a cruise to and from the United States to find that there have been a string of strangulations by silk stocking of thirtyish women. On his return journey from New York, Tommy met and fell in love with Sally, whom he is scheduled to marry that night. Sally though is plagued with doubt and a couple of hours before the wedding decides to take a walk alone through the parts of London made famous by her favourite poets, Keats and Shelley. This is also the part of the town where the strangler’s attacks have been concentrated and Sally is 31 years old.

            She goes to the drug store and when she leaves one of the pharmacists follows her.  She goes to a bookstore and then to a pub where a young and intense looking dandy approaches her.

            Hours pass, including the hour of the wedding but Sally does not return. Tommy and his partner go looking for her. They track her through all of the places we saw her so and everyone they interview keeps suggesting that she probably became a victim of the strangler.

            At the pub the young man named Edward that had approached her is there when Tommy arrives. He says a lot of cryptic things that pretty much suggest that he killed Sally. He takes the two cops to a bridge where he hints that he tossed her body but when Tommy goes back to the hotel to console Sally’s parents he finds Sally there. She says that her walk helped her decide that she does want to marry Tommy. Meanwhile the river is dredged and a body is found. Edward admits that he tried to kill Sally but when she got away he killed another woman instead.

            I didn’t recognize at first that Edward was played by David Carradine, talking in the exact same fake British accent that Efram Zimbalist Jr. used sometimes.
            Sally was played by Sally Kellerman, the original Hot Lips Hoolihan from the movie MASH.