I reblogged the whole article here. It was a play (a “mystery-comedy”) put on by a high school in Culver, Indiana. It was originally published by Clark Willard, the pseudonym of Willard J. Sergei. Looking through newspaper archives and Google it looks like the play was performed by a lot of high school students (especially junior classes) but I can’t find an example of it being performed by any non-school theater groups!

When I first read it, I thought it was something like the Mysterious Mr Raffles contests that ran in the 1900s/early 1910s.. I think I’ll post more on those later!