I see Dean Stockwell has passed away at the age of 85. In one episode of Columbo, he was killed by creepy murderer Robert Culp. In another, he was framed by creepy murderer Robert Vaughn. (Columbo, of course, saw through the frame.)
More synchronicity? 
The only Columbo scenario I remember was him catching the bad guy because the layout of the knot on the dead guy’s shoelaces meant that he didn’t tie them himself. I admire your fortitude to actually watch all these episodes in relatively quick succession.
I’ve complained about that one several times. I’d love to see Columbo try to sell that one in court. “Are you an expert in knot-tying, Detective?”
I think the most feeble ‘gotcha’ Columbo ever used, which makes the knot-tying gotcha seem like DNA evidence in comparison, is one where the murderer leaving the scene of the murder passed a blind man, the only ‘eyewitness’.
At the big gotcha reveal, Columbo tells the murderer they’ve found an eyewitness, and brings in a man wearing dark glasses, who appears to be the blind man. The murderer says, preposterous! You obviously coached him to be able to walk to the couch and sit down on his own, thus appearing sighted, but this man is clearly blind! Columbo says, how can you tell? The murderer says, I’m a doctor! I can tell by the cast of his eyes, his movements, etc.
Then Columbo makes the big reveal- he hands the ‘blind’ man a newspaper. He can read it! He can see! It turns out the man is the actual blind man’s brother, who somewhat resembles him (I don’t think he was an identical twin). Columbo says 'there’s no way you’d assume this witness was blind unless you had been there to see the actual blind brother pass you as you walked away from the murder site!" Off to jail.
The thing is, blind or not, the man walked in the room wearing dark glasses indoors. Anybody might just assume he’s blind.
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.
It wasn’t quite like that. The knot was only a small part of the evidence. It just shows that someone else dressed the victim’s body, but doesn’t prove who did it.
The clincher was that the victim had been dressed in gym clothes. Only the murderer knew that, and Columbo catches him with that knowledege.
Uh, no. Tinted spectacles. Totally different to the dark glasses worn by his brother.
Eh, ok, maybe. I thought the glasses had been darker. Still seems like it would have been pretty weak evidence in court, but Columbo did already have a warrant for his arrest in that scene so maybe the blind misidentification was just a final nail in his coffin.
The thing about the shoelaces is true. Try it sometime and you’ll see. But yeah, the gym clothes were the clincher.
That guy’s brother sure looked blind to me. I would have assumed the same thing. If I were George Hamilton’s defense attorney, I’d bring the two of them into court the same way and ask the jury to identify which one is blind.
IIRC, Columbo finds a flint from Hamilton’s lighter on the carpet at the murder scene. I may be misremembering, but wasn’t there a story (if not on Columbo then somewhere else) in which it was established that each lighter leaves distinctive marks on a flint?
That’s about as smart as asking OJ to try on the glove.
If the jury can’t tell which one is blind, it will make Columbo’s point.
In The Conspirators the murderer had a habit of scratching bottles with his diamond ring. Columbo said that every diamond leaves a unique, identifiable scratch.
Just the opposite. It would show that George Hamilton was justified in thinking the guy was blind, and Columbo’s “demonstration” was a hoax aimed at entrapping him.
I remember the diamond and the whiskey bottle, but that wasn’t what I was thinking of. I was thinking about an incident specifically with a lighter flint. Maybe it was on Mission: Impossible, or another such show.
That’s the whole point. The doctor can’t tell a blind man from a sighted one. The fact that he said “That man is blind” when there is no way he could have told that is the evidence against him.
Showing the jury that they too can’t tell the blind one from the sighted one, would only make the point stronger.
The guy was made to look blind and told to act blind. He could have fooled anybody! Hamilton was perfectly justified in believing he was blind.
So I rewatched the scene carefully. The scene is kind of a double blind (if you’ll excuse the pun). Columbo is trying to fool the murderer into thinking they are trying to pass off a blind man as sighted, and the show is trying to fool the audience into thinking this as well. The way this is played is fairly ambiguous; he is wearing tinted glasses, though not so dark that a sighted man would not wear them indoors, maybe. He does walk to the couch and sit down unassisted, and take matches from the bowl and offer them to Columbo, but in a stiff, mechanical way that could be a blind man coached to appear sighted. When he walked to the couch he clearly looked like a blind man counting his steps until he was at the couch.
The whole effect was meant to make someone who assumed he was blind believe it (us and the murderer) and someone who did not have previous assumptions believe he was sighted. We as the audience clearly thought he was blind, but is that because we have the same knowledge as the murderer, or did the show overplay the blindness clues? It would be interesting to play that scene to a person who had never seen it, stop short of the murderer saying he’s blind, and ask if they notice anything odd or off about him.
That’s right. Any reasonable person would have assumed the sighted guy was blind whether or not he had seen his brother. So it does not prove that Hamilton was the murderer. It just shows he made a logical assumption based on Columbo’s contrived scenario.
More than enough to create reasonable doubt in a court of law.
That’s bullshit. Or, at best, it’s unproven quasi-fact, like no two snowflakes are the same. It will never meet the standards for expert testimony.
And, as in most episodes, if the killer would just shut up, they’d never get convicted. Don’t even say “You’re using a blind man as an eyewitness?”, just say nothing. Especially if you’re guilty!
Conspirators was on MeTV this week. A strange episode- it was about an arms smuggler running guns to North Ireland, a topic long forgotten; a youngster watching it today would be totally confused. The bad guy was caught by examining the cuts on the whiskey bottle, which sounded bonkers to me. Even if it was a thing, the episode was SO SLOW. I gave it some leeway since it was the last episode of the first run of episodes.
What got me about “The Conspirators” was how easily the Customs authorities were bamboozled, especially when they must have known who owned the tugboat.
What, you don’t know about “delivery at sea”? You never saw Ryan’s Daughter?
I was leaning toward the @terenti camp. But, per the bolded part of my quote above, I wondered if it was just my knowledge bias as a result of having the same info the murderer did, or if anybody who saw the scene in question that @Peter_Morris posted a YouTube video of upthread would assume the witness was blind.
So I showed the video to the wife, Mrs. solost, to get her opinion. Mrs. solost, she’s never watched Columbo, and she’s very smart and I often run things by her to get her insights, which are often things I never woulda even thought of. She’s a big help to my investigations…of YouTube videos. Anyway, what was I talking about?
Oh yeah, so I showed the video to Mrs. solost. From about the :30 to the 2:20 mark, just before Hamilton says “he’s blind!”. I just told her to watch the witness and tell me any impressions she had of the character, anything that might seem notable or off. And…she had no clue he might be blind. None at all. Sample size of one, so hardly definitive, but I was surprised. I figured she’d say wait, he’s saying he saw the guy, but isn’t he blind??!?
Not sure I understand here. Who saw what witness? Meaning that Hamilton is essentially confessing to having seen the blind brother as he was fleeing the scene of the crime?
I don’t think he does. I think he would have assumed the sighted man actually was blind with the visual clues (no pun intended) he was given, even if he had never seen his blind brother. (I sure would have!)
This completely destroys Columbo’s argument “The only way you would guess this man was blind is if you had seen his brother first.” Again, plenty of room for reasonable doubt.
It would have been a completely different matter if Columbo had somehow tricked him into saying “You can’t have a witness, because the only man around at the time was blind!” in front of other officers. That would stick in a court of law, I imagine