Columbo - Swan song

 I didn’t like this much, because of the characters, both murderer and victim weren’t nice at all, not likable at all. Specially the murderer, I disliked him a lot. And honestly it annoyed me that at the end Colombo says that one that can sing like that can’t be all evil, and he was sure he would have confessed soon… 

This Tommy Brown is a man that didn’t just commit a murder - two actually, both his wife and Marianne, the girl that sang with him - he’s also a  likes to pray on girls; just because he’s famous he takes advantage of it to charm his young fans and he also had ‘relations’ with Marianne, taking her to motels when she was only sixteen, pretending to the hotel  he was her father… and after their death he teied to do the same with Tina, the new girl that replaced Marianne. He was all over her making her clearly uncomfortable. This is a shitty man, I totally despised him.

Well, the plot details:

His wife Edna kept all profits to build a big and very expensive sanctuary for her Lost Souls Crusade, and he was angry that other singers were rich while he had nothing (and also that Edna prevented him from taking advantage of all the fans propositioning him). He planned the murder meticulously. He told Edna’s brother to drive and take his beloved guitar with him. The three of them would have flown, he was always the pilot when they flew anywhere. He took out the maps from the bag and put a parachute inside. He put sleeping pills in the coffee that he later gave to Edna and Marianne. 

When they fell asleep, he put on the parachute, threw the thermos out and then down he went. The airplane went down and crashed, while he landed harshly and broke a leg. 

Somehow he managed to land just near the crash site so that he rolled to where he could plausibly be if he had jumped or something out of the plane.

Colombo is called because Edna’s brother loudly accuses Tommy of killing his sister because he always hated her. 

Colombo investigates. He sees no ash in the bag where the maps should have been, and many other little things like that; of course Brown has an explanation for everything, but Colombo keeps at it.

He realises that Brown used a smaller parachute than he should have, and that’s what caused his leg injury. 

At the end he knows that only Brown can know where the parachute is hidden, only he can find it, so he lets him know that they’ll search the woods for the thermos (knowing about the drugs inside it, and playing it like a third party wanted to kill him, and in that case they may found fingerprints on it). Colombo was sure that Brown wouldn’t risk the parachute being found and he would go and retrieve it himself, and is quite baffled when he sees Brown flying away. But then he understands: Brown had kept the rented-car keys, because he intended to use it again that night. He took another flight back, and drove to where he stashed the parachute. He found it, and Colombo busted him.