This little poverty row murder mystery has a good basis in its script - A campus could-have-been athlete is a slacker on and off the athletic field, failing in his studies, yet Lillian Voyne (Shirley Grey) seems to have a soft spot for him. This causes some jealousy from reporter Bill Bartlett (Charles Starrett). But then one night when Bill actually drives Lillian to go find said athlete, he is murdered in the campus bell tower just as the chimes have rung. Bartlett is nearby and blocks the only exit from the tower. Yet, when the police arrive, they find the campus slacker dead in the bell tower with a bullet in him, nobody else is in the tower, and there was no place from outside the tower that he could have been shot.
The film keeps things moving, and with fairly good production values, although I can spot a few scenes where the sets have been redressed and reused as different rooms entirely. And there are a couple of other murders that seem to be related to the first one. The problem is, as is common in these lower budget productions, that there are too many characters that don't distinguish themselves from one another, so that when anybody ponders a theory about who did what to who, I had no idea who they were talking about without backing up and rewatching parts of the film.
But the oddest characteristic of this film is that the police just let reporter Bill Bartlett barge in on the entire murder investigation. He tampers with witnesses, steals evidence from police custody to have it examined by a lab he trusts, and encourages a local criminologist to take the investigation away from the police because he has no faith in them, as if he has that kind of authority. If the accused has a good attorney he/she could probably get lots of evidence tossed just because of this busy body reporter breaking all of the rules.
I'd probably give this a 5.5 if that was possible because it is interesting.