After years of marriage to his domineering wife, Frances, professional photographer Paul Galesko decides to kill her. He hires ex-con Alvin Deschler to rent an isolated ranch house. Galesko persuades his wife to accompany him there and she grudgingly agrees. He ties her to a chair, photographs the scene, and then shoots her. He sets things up so it will appear he is elsewhere when the pictures were taken. Galesko meets Deschler at a junkyard. After shooting Deschler with a revolver, Galesko shoots himself in the leg with the pistol used in the first murder, then plants that gun on Deschler so that it will appear the "kidnapper" was killed in self-defense. JoAnna Cameron plays Galesko's assistant, with whom he is planning a romantic getaway. Final clue/twist: Columbo stages a false accusation using a mirror-inverted version of the kidnapping photo Galesko used to fabricate an alibi. The reverse negative shows a different time on a clock in the photo, a time for which Galesko has no alibi. An increasingly riled Galesko accuses Columbo of framing him with false evidence, and becomes more incensed when Columbo tells him the original photo was accidentally destroyed. Galesko grabs a camera from a shelf where there are twelve other cameras, and shows Columbo a negative that is still inside it. Galesko says the negative proves him right about which way the clock is pointing in the original photograph. Galesko has thus given himself away. He had no way of knowing which camera had been used as part of the kidnapping scheme, or that the negative was still in the back of that camera. Galesko, defeated, realizes that Columbo had staged the false arrest with the exact purpose of getting him to lose his cool so he would rashly identify the camera. The outside set of Deschler's hotel room is the set of Psycho. Directed by: Alf Kjellin. Story by: Peter S. Fischer.