Three men have been convicted of the same murder of the, admittedly, quite reprehensible Floyd Cooper, and sit on death row awaiting execution the following morning. However, only one bullet could have struck the victim first, so only one of the three men is actually guilty of murder, since "the other two shot into a corpse," and so must be innocent; but which two? Professor Varney's machine, a kind of lie detector, will determine who is guilty as each man tells the story of how he came to know, hate, and kill the victim.