Blueprint for Murder story
Elliot Markham is an architect with a vision for a city of the future, and a penchant for classical music. His latest project is being bankrolled by the young wife of Bo Williamson, a wealthy industrialist who has been away on a lengthy overseas business trip. When Williamson returns and finds out how his money is being spent, he is furious, and intends to cut off the funds. Markham decides that the only way he can continue his work is to eliminate Williamson. Simply killing him, however, poses a problem, because his money reverts to a trust fund when he dies. Markham comes up with a clever plan to conceal the body and make it appear as if Beau has gone on another long foreign trip. Final clue/twist: Markham repeatedly goads Columbo into excavating a building site to search for Williamson's body, until Columbo finally does so. It yields nothing. Later that night Markham returns to that site with the body, assuming no-one would ever look there again. However Columbo has known what Markham has been up to all along, he emerges from the shadows with other policemen and arrests Markham. Columbo reveals that he knew something had happened to Williamson when he checked his car and found the radio turned to a classical music station, something odd for Williamson, who only listened to country music. Directed by: Peter Falk. Story by: William Kelley, Steven Bochco.
20 total · 3 choice · 6 major · 11 minor
| Theme | Level | Motivation |
|---|---|---|
| greed for riches | choice | Bo Williamson accused Elliot of being a con artist who seduced Beau's wife to build an unprofitable, so-called "city of the future". The ex-wife of Beau planted a bloody hat so she could collect on the 25% of his estate that she had bequeathed to her. |
| how to dispose of a corpse and get away with it | choice | Elliot hatched the following plot to dispose of his young lover's uncooperative but wealthy husband: Elliot simply shot the husband and hid his body in a barn, then tricked Lt. Columbo into digging up a huge sky scraper cement pile to look for the body. His plan was then to dump the body under the now-cleared cement pile and replace it. But the ever tenacious Lt. Columbo was one step ahead of him. |
| how to murder someone and get away with it | choice | Elliot hatched the following plot to dispose of his young lover's uncooperative but wealthy husband: Elliot simply shot the husband and hid his body in a barn, then tricked Lt. Columbo into digging up a huge sky scraper cement pile to look for the body. His plan was then to dump the body under the now-cleared cement pile and replace it. But the ever tenacious Lt. Columbo was one step ahead of him. |
| appearances can be deceiving | major | Witnesses and villains alike are caught off guard by Lieutenant Columbo's bumbling façade, which invariably proves to conceal a laser-focused mind. |
| architect occupation | major | The villain of the story, Elliot Markham, was an architect of some renown. The viewer is shown a window into his designing and building a so-called city of the future. |
| embarrassment | major | Columbo seemingly had egg on his face upon finding no body buried under the cement pile he had dug up at great expense. This was all because Elliot carefully goaded and manipulated Columbo into digging up the cement pile all along, or so he thought. |
| extramarital affair | major | Jennifer was carrying on with Elliot behind her husband Bo's back when the latter was away. |
| husband and wife | major | Bo Williams had a young wife who spoke of him with disinterest, and an ex-wife who spoke of him with affection and respect. |
| law enforcement | major | The bumbling but sharp-witted homicide detective Lieutenant Columbo was tasked with solving the following alleged murder mystery: Did an illustrious architect murder his financier and bury the body in the foundation of his newly under construction building? |
| bureaucracy | minor | After an exasperatingly long wait in line at the Building & Safety municipal office, Columbo was informed he'd need to get departmental approval under regulation 613 of the municipal code, file the proper permits and requisition slips, and wait for approval from the mayor's office, if he really wanted to have a certain cement pile excavated. |