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A Trace of Murder
Russian title: Закон Коломбо · Russian version
A forensic scientist helps his lover's husband beat a murder charge, then realises he has been used. The only episode where the murderer and Columbo are, professionally speaking, colleagues.
Editor’s rating — 7 out of 10.
- Number
- 66 of 69
- Aired
- May 15, 1997
- Running time
- 88 min
- Director
- Vincent McEveety
- Writer
- Charles Kipps
The case
- The killer
- David Rasche as Patrick Kinsley and Shera Danese as Cathleen Calvert
- The victim
- Raye Birk as Howard Seltzer
- Guest cast
- David Rasche, Barry Corbin, Shera Danese, John Finnegan, James Almanzar, Raye Birk
Columbo is an inverted mystery: the murder opens the film and the killer is known from the first minutes. What you are watching for is how he proves it — see how the character works.
The murder
Patrick Kinsley is a forensic specialist working with the police, having an affair with Cathleen Calvert, whose husband Clifford is on trial for murder. Kinsley has quietly ensured the evidence points away from him.
The twist is that Kinsley is the murderer: he killed the victim himself and constructed the case that nearly convicted an innocent man — then adjusted it when he needed the husband free for reasons of his own.
It is the most professionally corrupt crime in the run, committed by someone whose job is to be trusted absolutely by everyone in the room.
The affair is the engine. Kinsley wants Cathleen, Cathleen wants her husband's money and freedom from him, and the plan they arrive at is grotesque in its efficiency: kill a third party, let the husband stand trial for it, and either outcome serves them.
Kinsley's advantage is that he controls the physical record. He attends the scene officially, handles what is collected, writes the report — every fact the prosecution will rely on passes through his hands before anyone else sees it. It is the closest the series comes to a murderer with institutional power over the case against him.
How Columbo gets him
The relationship is the point. Columbo works alongside Kinsley in the ordinary course of a case, relies on his findings, and has to unpick the possibility that the science he has been given is a lie.
That makes the film procedurally interesting: every piece of evidence has to be re-examined, not for what it shows but for who produced it.
Kinsley is arrogant in a technical register — he assumes that a detective who cannot read a spectrograph cannot catch a man who can.
The early stretch of the film is a trial, and Columbo is a witness in it. Watching the lieutenant give evidence, and watching the defence pull his own testimony apart using forensics he cannot evaluate, is the most uncomfortable he has ever looked in a professional setting.
His way back in is to stop trusting the file. He re-walks the scene himself, physically, and finds that the sequence the evidence describes could not have produced the marks the scene actually carries.
Cathleen is the seam. She is not a scientist, she has less to lose by talking, and she has begun to notice that a man who can construct a case against her husband could construct one against her.
Worth knowing
- David Rasche plays Kinsley, and the episode is one of the few to explore how much of police work rests on trusting specialists.
- Shera Danese, Peter Falk's wife, appears in the episode — one of six Columbo films she was in.
- Directed by Vincent McEveety.
- Shera Danese, Falk's wife, plays Cathleen; she appeared in six Columbo films across both runs.
- The episode's premise — corrupt forensic evidence — predates the real-world crime lab scandals that would make the subject familiar a decade later.
- It was the last Columbo of the 1990s, broadcast in May 1997.
Verdict
A good idea executed adequately. The premise — corrupt forensics — is one the series could have done more with, and the film settles for competence.
Still, watching Columbo doubt evidence rather than people is a genuine change of gear for a character who has spent thirty years doing the opposite.
Worth watching for the courtroom section alone, which is unlike anything else in the run: the one time we see what Columbo looks like from the other side of a professional cross-examination.
Familiar faces
Actors who turn up in the series more than once — sometimes in very different parts.
- John Finnegan as Barney 12 episodes also in Blueprint for Murder, The Most Dangerous Match, Lovely But Lethal, A Friend in Deed, Last Salute to the Commodore and 6 more
- Shera Danese as Cathleen Calvert 6 episodes also in Fade in to Murder, Murder Under Glass, Murder, A Self Portrait, Columbo and the Murder of a Rock Star, Undercover
- Alice Backes as Harriet Jenkins 2 episodes also in Negative Reaction
Cast data from TMDB, including uncredited bit parts. All the familiar faces →