A character with my name :-) It doesn't happen often :-) Well, it's a weak woman, made weaker by the drugs given her and all the brain-washing, and she has horrible taste in men choosing only jerks, but still, she's called Nadia :-)
So, Marc Collier is a doctor, specialised in hypnotherapy, he writes books about it, but the last one is causing him trouble and he's using Nadia as his subject, using drugs on her to facilitate the state of surrender so he can easily manipulate her. She's married but in love with him, so they plan to meet at her country house while her husband is away. He goes there but, surprise! the husband is present, he forbid her to call him to warn him. Collier doesn't really seem to care and acts all cocky, even after the husband tells him that she's had many lovers before, and he plans on taking her away with him. Now the husband gets angry and attacks Collier and when she tries to stop him he attacks her. To stop him, Collier takes a poker next to the fireplace and hits him hard, killing him. She's in shock, but he tries to think and doesn't want to tell the police the truth so he stages a fake robbery, taking the jewellery (rings and watches) from her and her husband hand and wrist, and telling her exactly what to say. Using hypnosis, so she's pretty convincing where she tells her story to the police. She says she was listening to music with her husband when a man came asking to make a phone call then broke in with another man, their faces covered, took their jewels and when her husband attacked them they killed him.
Colombo is not convinced, he thinks that if they drove in front of the house she should have seen the car lights, and even without lights, they said the car was far away but then drove to the front... little things as usual that make him think. Then he finds on the floor a flint that came out of Collier's lighter since he smokes a lot. Nadia and her husband don't smoke and the 'robbers' were supposed to have their faces covered, and the house had been closed for months after being throughly cleaned, so he thinks there was someone else in the house. Nadia seems increasingly unstable and he keeps thinking that she's hiding something, so Collier plans on getting rid of her. Hypnotising her again, making her believe that she's about to swim in the swimming pool so she throws herself off the fifth floor.
Colombo is convinced that Collier killed her, exactly like that. He found all her clothes neatly arranged on a chair, with her jewels inside her shoes, not something you do if you want to kill yourself, but something you do before taking a swim. Still, he can't prove that he hypnotised her.
What he can do, is to prove that he lied before and killed her husband.
When he drove off after killing him, he almost hit a blind man walking with his dog. Now Colombo tells him, with various officers as witnesses, that that man can identify him and state that he was there indeed, and at 530 not 700pm. Collier acts all cocky again, saying that he won't fall for their little act, that the man is blind and can't have seen anybody. He says that he never saw him of course, having never been there before, but that being a doctor he can tell for sure that the man is blind, although they staged it very well, telling him where to go, where to sit, where to take the matches to hand the lieutenant... and to prove it Collier gives the man a magazine to read. To his utter surprise, the man reads it with no problem. Collier is shocked, and Columbo's trap is revealed. The blind guy has a brother who looks a lot like him, and they gave him glasses to make it better.
Only the brother is not blind, and it was him talking to them. So Colombo says that there was no way he would think that that man was blind if he hadn't seen the brother before. So Colombo indeed has an eye witness, only it isn't mr Morris, it's Collier himself!
Colombo - Peter Falk
ITA Colombo - testimone di se stesso
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