Goofs

In the first minute, an overhead view reveals that Ken Franklin parks his Mercedes Benz in a space with the number 62 on it. When Ken and Jim walk out to the car, it is parked in space number 59.

The writing partnership produced 15 Mrs. Melville books, but when Ken gives Columbo the books to take home, there are only 10. When Columbo brings them back when Ken is being interviewed, he comes with 14, and when they are piled on the table during the climactic office scene, there are 16.

Ken gives Ms. La Sanka an autographed Mrs. Melville book. The book has his shopping list inserted into the front of the book, and sticking out of the top. The list is gone when he tells her to look at the inscription, and then he gives the list to her personally.

When Franklin is staging the crime in the writing office, one of the first things he does is sweep the Mrs. Melville books off the table onto the floor. Before he does that he moves the left bookend so that it is next to the right bookend. However when the police are investigating the office, the books and the bookend are seen on the table as they were before Ken swept them off the table.

Lilly La Sanka dips strawberries in sugar and eats them while talking to Ken Franklin. In a shot looking toward Franklin, Lilly is holding an entire strawberry, still coated with sugar at the tip. A moment later (and also in the previous shot), before she can take a bite, Lilly's strawberry is half-devoured.

Ken Franklin withdrawing $15,000 from his bank would have taken up to two days to process, especially in 1971. In addition, withdrawing and then re-depositing that amount a day later would have aroused suspicion by the bank, causing it to issue a suspicious activity report. It's not likely that any criminal attempting to avoid suspicion would make such a move.

Had the amount been *over* $10,000 it might have generated a report to the government. And banks see people move large sums of money in and out of accounts all the time which would not be suspicious.

Withdrawing and then immediately re-depositing $15,000 cash, especially in a personal account, is not a normal transaction for any bank and would undoubtedly be deemed suspicious, requiring an SAR (Suspicious Activity Report).

Franklin has Ferris call his wife and lie about being at the office so that when Franklin shoots him in the cabin during the call, he will have time to move the body to his own house unobserved. But Franklin could have simply waited until after the call was done to kill Ferris so that nobody would know of the crime for many hours, perhaps even days, buying him much more time to move the body.

Aside from the fact it wouldn't be more than a few hours before Ferris' wife would call the police about her missing husband, it was a deliberate part of his plan, as he wanted the wife to hear the gun shot.

As one of his final lines, the murderer says the murder took place in accordance with a book idea that he told the victim five years ago. The victim even wrote it down. Hard to believe the victim could be fooled into that very same set up for his own murder.

As he has written more than a dozen books and written down scads more ideas for books, the likelihood that he would recognize one idea out of many from five years ago is pretty close to not at all. He did have an inkling of it though on the car ride to the cabin when he said he was experiencing deja vu. Evidence that he had a sense of it, but hadn't pieced it all together.

Outside Jim's office, Columbo says to Mrs. Ferris, "That's the trouble with these new buildings. The water fountains don't work, so you have to use the coffee machine. Then you lose your dime AND the coffee is lousy." Columbo should have said, "Then you lose your dime OR the coffee is lousy." If a person "loses" their money in a vending machine, it usually means the machine took their money and did not give them the item they paid for.

Columbo likely meant "losing" in the sense of wasting - such as paying good money for something that isn't worth it.

Before Columbo begins to grate cheese, he grabs a bowl from the cabinet to put the cheese in. The bowl already has grated cheese in it.

After the row boat tips over and Ken comes out of the water, he is wearing a skin colored wet suit under his t-shirt. The folds of the material can be seen when his right arm starts to come out of the water.

After Ken has dumped the two champagne bottles in the lake, Jack Cassidy looks directly toward the camera for a split second, then he looks away, and starts rocking the row boat.

The police radio at both murder investigation scenes (Ken Franklin's house and Lilly LaSanka) is exactly the same.

When Ken and Lilly are having champagne, they clink their glasses twice, but both times, the clinking noise comes before the glasses actually touch.

When after Jim Farris murder, as he leaves the country house, the shadow of a microphone can be seen.

Shadow of camera appears on actors standing just in front of the camera.

Since his wife heard the gun shot over the phone, everyone believes that Jim Ferris was shot in his office. In spite of this, neither Columbo nor any other authorities wonder why there are no blood stains in the office. Surely, there would be blood stains in the area where a person has been shot.

Jim's body is located by the police only because Ken pulls it out of his trunk, dumps it on his lawn and calls the police to tell them about it when he returns home. It's outrageous that nobody in Ken's neighborhood could have seen that the appearance of Jim's body coincided with Ken's return to his house.

Near the very end, Columbo tells Mrs. Ferris that Ken had very suspiciously withdrawn and then banked $15,000. Viewing a person's bank transactions would require a warrant, and the audience is never shown what motivated and legally justified Columbo to check Ken's bank account. Furthermore, if Columbo had somehow miraculously figured that a woman's drowning in Big Bear involved the blackmail of Ken, the police in Big Bear would have had to get the warrant to view Ken's account.

When Columbo and Ken first meet, Ken says that news of Jim's disappearance is all over the radio, which Columbo agrees with. Yet that very night, Ken (who is famous as Jim's writing partner) comes home to a house where there isn't a single member of the media or police and is able to pull the body out of his trunk and dump it on his lawn without being observed, not even by a curious neighbor.

After Ken (Jack Cassidy) gets the call about his writing partner's murder, he leaves his cabin and goes to the trunk of his car. In the lower right portion of the frame, the shadow of a boom mic is visible.

When Columbo makes Joanna Ferris an omelet, he says: "I'll tell you what the secret is to a good omelet -- no eggs, just milk." She laughs at Columbo's mistake. [In the original script, the line is: "The secret is just eggs, no milk."]

When Ferris is typing out a new story, he is typing in all caps. This is solely for the audience, as manuscripts are never typed in all caps.

When Franklin presents La Sanka with a copy of his book, she says, "Pour moi?" and he responds, "Pour moi." One needn't be a Francophone to know he should have responded, "Pour vous."

In the opening scenes, when Franklin is entering the garage of the building with his car, there's a big sign above the gate saying "EXIT ONLY Enter on Sunset Blvd."

At the beginning, Ferris is typing his manuscript. He types "j'acuse", a spelling error. The French phrase, made famous by Emile Zola, is "j'accuse."