The first episode of the first series, right after the two pilot episodes. A good one, directed by Steven Spielberg with Jack Cassidy as Ken Franklin.
Colombo is his usual self, although with hair maybe a little neater than other times :lol
The story is intriguing too.
The details:
Ken and Jim are a duo of writers, of the famous series of Mrs Melville crime novels where an old lady solves mystery cases. In truth, Jim is the one who wrote all the books, Ken was just the public faces, he liked attention and money and interviews, but now Jim wants to go solo and write different things. They had a fight about it, but now Ken ‘apologizes’, says he wants to make peace and take Jim to his new house by the lake, I think it’s in San Diego, not sure I remember right, but anyway it’s a two hour drive.
He drives Jim there and stops at the local shop for supplies, but also to call Jim’s wife to tell her where he was and that they made peace. He told the shop owner Lily La Sanka that he was alone, but she looked outside wanting to know if he had a girl in the car…
Once at his house, Ken has Jim call his wife and tell her that he’s in his office working still, and then he shoots him. Hearing the shot, the wife calls the police. She also calls Ken, who says he’ll come right away. He stops at her house and meets Colombo too, and they talk, and at the office Ken ‘finds’ the piece of paper he put there before with a list of names on it, stating that Jim was investigating the Crime scene and those were all big names, and surely one of them had ordered Jim’s murder to stop him. Then he goes to his house. Since he dumped Jim’s body on his own front lawn, he now calls the police. He doesn’t care about Jim one bit, and he takes and opens his mail while on the phone, a thing that will be immediately noted by Colombo.
Ken says that the body was put there as intimidation for him to not continue Jim’s work, and says he never had any intention of doing that, it was a solo project of Jim’s.
When out at the theatre with a girl, Lily LaSanka approaches him; she saw Jim in his car so she knows he lied. They dine together and she asks for 15000$. He will then later appear at her shop with the money and two bottles of champagne, knowing that she had a thing for him. They eat at her place, then he kills her and dumps her body at night in the lake. He wanted the local police to think her boat turned, hitting her on the head, and she drowned.
Colombo is sure that he did he killed both, but he can’t prove, and asks Jim’s wife to talk about them to learn more. Knowing that Jim always used to write down ideas on every scrap of paper he found, he looks at the house first then he searches the office.
When Ken arrives and learns of this, he gets angry, but Colombo states clearly that he’s under arrest, because he knows everything he did, and can prove it. The facts that he drove back instead of getting on a plane is no proof, of course (well, I probably would have done that), nor the fact that he read his mail (ok, nobody would have done that), but he has found the piece of paper where Jim wrote down the idea for this alibi, to be seen in one place and have the victim call home to say he was somewhere else. Colombo talks of it as Jim’s idea, but Ken reveals that, ironically, this one was actually Ken’s own idea, and he had once told it to Jim, not knowing he had written it down. The only good idea he ever had.
It was a good episode, the first of the three with Cassidy as the murderer.
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