Requiem for a Falling Star story
Jean Davis, personal assistant to aging movie star Nora Chandler, is engaged to gossip reporter Jerry Parks, and she has secret information about Chandler. Nora deflates the tire of Jean's car so that the engaged couple will have to switch vehicles. Chandler starts a gasoline fire just as Parks's car (being driven by Davis) pulls into his garage. It initially appears that the murderer's intended victim was Parks, but actually Jean was the target. Columbo solves the case after connecting it to the mysterious disappearance of Chandler's husband a decade earlier. Final clue/twist: Columbo is not sure of anything. He watches one of Nora's old movies in which she disguised herself as a man to commit a murder. He remembers some facts about the disappearance of her husband years before, that the fountain in Nora's garden does not work, and learns it was purchased the day after her husband disappeared. He tricks Nora into thinking her husband's body might have been discovered. When she rushes home and runs straight to her garden, Columbo, lying in wait, confronts her. She confesses that she killed her husband and buried his body under the fountain, and that Jean knew it and that is why she killed her. Directed by: Richard Quine. Story by: Jackson Gillis.
18 total · 1 choice · 8 major · 9 minor
| Theme | Level | Motivation |
|---|---|---|
| how to murder someone and get away with it | choice | The aging movie star Nora Chandler murdered her personal assistant, Jean, to keep her from sharing an incriminating tidbit of information with a gossip reporter to whom Jean had recently become engaged. Nora came up with this seemingly foolproof method: she deflated a tire of Jean's car so that she'd be compelled to switch vehicles with her fiancé. Then Nora started a gasoline fire just as Jean pulled up into the gossip reporter's driveway, leaving Jean charred to a crisp and everyone thinking that the gossip reporter was the true target of the killer. The aforementioned incriminating tidbit, to top it all off, was that Nora had murdered her husband years prior and buried his body under a fountain in her garden. She would have gotten away with both crimes, one may presume, had it not been for the ever-pesky Lieutenant Columbo. |
| appearances can be deceiving | major | Witness and villains alike are caught off guard by Lieutenant Columbo's bumbling façade, which invariably proves to conceal a laser-focused mind. |
| blackmail | major | The gossip reporter Jerry Parks was strongly suspected of having been blackmailing Nora. |
| boss and employee | major | The story concerns Nora and her personal assistant, Jean, whom she murdered callously and feigned to grieve over. |
| coping with aging | major | Nora coped gracefully with aging. |
| how to dispose of a corpse and get away with it | major | The grand revelation of the story was that Nora had long ago murdered her husband and buried the body under the fountain in her garden. |
| law enforcement | major | The bumbling but sharp-witted homicide detective Lieutenant Columbo was tasked with solving the following murder mystery: An apparent attempt on the life of the Hollywood gossip reporter Jerry Parks that resulted, not uncoincidentally as it happened, in the death of Nora Chandler's personal assistant Jean Davis. |
| spouse murder | major | The grand revelation of the story was that Nora had long ago murdered her husband and buried the body under the fountain in her garden. |
| the entertainment industry | major | The story centers around an aging movie star who is strangely reluctant to cash out on the failing film studio that she inherited from her mysteriously disappeared husband. |
| acting | minor | Nora was shown acting on the set of a television show. |