Season synopsis
Contains spoilers for this season and earlier seasons.
Season 4 opens with health-club owner Milo Janus killing franchisee Gene Stafford after Stafford finds evidence of financial fraud. Janus stages a weightlifting accident and invents a phone conversation to place Stafford in gym clothes before the death; the shoes and the altered call recordings expose the false timeline. Photographer Paul Galesko fakes his wife’s kidnapping and murder, frames a man with a criminal record, and shoots him in staged self-defense, while military academy commandant Lyle Rumford rigs a ceremonial cannon to kill the school’s chairman and blame a cadet. Rumford’s knowledge of a hidden cider bottle places him beside the cannon at dawn, contradicting his alibi.
A cruise ship brings Columbo into the case of auto executive Hayden Danziger, who kills singer Rosanna Wells after her blackmail over their affair, then frames a musician as the killer. In another investigation, Harold Van Wick uses delayed security footage to disguise when he shot his mother-in-law, but a party invitation visible in the recording exposes his timing. The closing case centers on psychiatrist Mark Collier, whose affair with patient Nadia Donner leads to a violent confrontation with her husband. Collier persuades Nadia to report a fictitious home invasion, then hypnotizes her into a fatal balcony jump. Columbo presents the sighted brother of a blind passerby as a witness; Collier’s insistence that the man cannot see betrays his presence at the crime scene.