Season synopsis
Contains spoilers for this season and earlier seasons.
Actor Ward Fowler plays a television detective, but his producer Claire Daley knows that he deserted during the Korean War and uses the secret to blackmail him. Fowler drugs a friend, manipulates a televised baseball game to establish an alibi, and shoots Claire during a staged delicatessen robbery. He then slips between his own identity and his detective character while offering Columbo advice. The investigation eventually turns to a small oversight: Fowler wiped the revolver, but left fingerprints on the live ammunition still inside it.
At the Lytton antiquities museum, Ruth fears that her brother Edward will close the institution she has devoted her life to preserving. She recruits guard Milton Schaeffer for an insurance scheme, kills him and Edward, and arranges the weapons to suggest they shot each other. When that explanation fails, she plants an ancient buckle in her niece Janie’s room. Janie’s use of it as an ashtray tells Columbo she does not recognize the supposedly stolen object. Ruth ultimately agrees to confess in exchange for his leaving older questions about Janie’s father alone.
The final case pits Columbo against accountant Oliver Brandt, whose partner Bertie Hastings discovers his embezzlement. At their high-IQ society, Brandt kills Hastings and uses a record player, explosive squibs and a falling dictionary to manufacture a later time for the shooting. Columbo cannot initially explain the sequence of sounds. By crediting another club member with an incorrect solution, he provokes Brandt into demonstrating the mechanism himself. Brandt’s need to prove his intelligence supplies the missing explanation of his own crime.