Home → Episodes → Columbo and the Murder of a Rock Star

The case

The killer

Dabney Coleman as Hugh Creighton

The victim

Cheryl Paris as Marcy Edwards

Guest cast

Dabney Coleman, Little Richard, Tad Horino, John Martin, Julian Stone, Shera Danese

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

Hugh Creighton is a celebrated defence lawyer whose girlfriend, the singer Marcy Edwards, is about to leave him for someone else. His reputation, his practice and his self-image are all bound up in her.

He shoots her at her home and constructs an alibi from a concert he is supposedly attending: the performance is broadcast, the timing is documented, and he ensures he is seen at the right moments.

The plan is exactly what you would expect from a man who spends his professional life anticipating how prosecutions are built — every element is designed against a specific evidentiary objection.

The relationship had been an open secret in the industry and a closed one in Creighton's professional life, where a rock singer girlfriend was an asset until she became a liability. Marcy's decision to leave threatened not his heart but his standing among people who measure everything.

The concert alibi is built with a lawyer's care. He arranges to be seen arriving, seen in the interval and seen leaving, and calculates that nobody checks the middle of an evening they can account for at both ends. It is the reasoning of a man who has cross-examined a hundred witnesses about exactly that.

How Columbo gets him

The lawyer-versus-detective dynamic is the episode's strength. Creighton knows precisely what Columbo is allowed to do, objects to it constantly, and treats every conversation as a deposition.

The concert alibi is where it fails. Broadcasts have timings; timings can be checked; and a man who was where he says he was would have seen things he cannot describe.

Columbo also works the victim's world — the band, the recording contracts, the people who knew what she was about to do — and finds that everybody except the boyfriend knew it was over.

Columbo's first move is the one Creighton least expects: he asks about the music. Not as a tactic but because he does not know it, and the questions establish, without appearing to, how much of the evening the lawyer actually experienced.

There is also the matter of the house. Creighton's account requires him to have arrived after the death, and the state of a Malibu property at night — lights, doors, the position of a car — is the sort of small physical record the series has always preferred to forensics.

5:22

Worth knowing

• Dabney Coleman plays Creighton with a professional impatience that suits the character exactly.
• The episode is one of several in the ABC run to use a lawyer as the murderer, on the theory that no opponent is better matched to a policeman.
• Directed by Alan J. Levi.
• Dabney Coleman had played comparable roles in 9 to 5 and Tootsie; the casting relies on the audience already finding him plausible as a man who talks over people.
• The episode was one of four Columbo films broadcast in the 1990–91 season, the densest year of the ABC run.

Verdict

Solid and unremarkable. The alibi is decent, the duel is professionally played, and nothing about it lingers.

A good example of the competent middle of the second run: nothing wrong with it, nothing to argue about either.

Watch it after the stronger lawyer episodes rather than before. Agenda for Murder does the same duel considerably better, and this one suffers by comparison in a way it would not if it stood alone.

Familiar faces

Actors who turn up in the series more than once — sometimes in very different parts.

• John Finnegan as Quentin Corbett12 episodesalso 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 Trish Fairbanks6 episodesalso in Fade in to Murder, Murder Under Glass, Murder, A Self Portrait, Undercover, A Trace of Murder
• Steven Gilborn as George4 episodesalso in Uneasy Lies the Crown, Columbo Goes to College, Caution: Murder Can Be Hazardous to Your Health
• Charles D. Miller as Crime Scene Cop4 episodesalso in Agenda for Murder, Columbo Goes to College, Caution: Murder Can Be Hazardous to Your Health
• Dabney Coleman as Hugh Creighton2 episodesalso in Double Shock
• Sondra Currie as Sergeant Hubach2 episodesalso in Murder in Malibu

Cast data from TMDB, including uncredited bit parts. All the familiar faces →