That makes no damn sense! Let’s see Columbo try THAT in court.
And it reminds me of the Laurence Harvey episode, where LH killed a guy by pushing him into an industrial shredder. It was supposed to look like an accident.
But the machine had a safety stop, so the guy lived, for a while. Columbo says the machinery makes a lot of noise, so only a deaf person, such as LH’s character, would assume that the machine kept running and walk away. A hearing person would have went back to see why it stopped, and I assume be sure he was dead.
But, if it had actually been an accident, then the crime scene would have been exactly the same! Poor Laurence, not only stuck with a weak episode, but with a wired hearing aid the size of a transistor radio.