Home → Episodes → Death Hits the Jackpot

The case

The killer

Rip Torn as Leon Lamarr and Jamie Rose as Nancy Brower

The victim

Gary Kroeger as Freddy Brower

Guest cast

Rip Torn, Jamie Rose, Gary Kroeger, Betsy Palmer, Warren Berlinger, Antony Ponzini

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.

3:19

The murder

Leon Lamarr is married to a wealthy woman and having an affair with the wife of her nephew, Freddy Brower. Freddy — cheerful, hopeless, permanently drunk — wins thirty million dollars on the lottery and tells Leon before he tells anyone else.

Leon kills him at home, and then has to keep the death quiet until the ticket can be claimed on a timetable that does not implicate him. The body goes into a bathtub, the scene is arranged as an accident, and the killer sets about managing a fortune he cannot yet admit to knowing about.

The complication is a gorilla suit, a party, and a witness who saw the wrong man at the wrong time — the plot is the busiest of the later films and the most farcical.

Freddy Brower is the most likeable victim in the series: permanently drunk, entirely harmless, and delighted about a lottery ticket he cannot quite believe in. The film spends real time on him before killing him, which is why the murder lands.

Leon's problem is that the ticket is worth thirty million dollars and belongs to a man married to the woman Leon is sleeping with. Killing Freddy is easy; the difficulty is the timing, because a ticket claimed too soon after a death invites exactly the questions he cannot answer.

So he kills him, hides the body, and then has to manage weeks of pretending Freddy is alive — a plan that requires him to keep improvising in front of people who keep asking where his nephew has got to.

How Columbo gets him

Rip Torn plays Leon as a man permanently three seconds behind his own plan, and the film gets a lot of comedy out of watching him improvise in front of a lieutenant who is in no hurry at all.

Columbo's interest is the ticket. Thirty million dollars is a motive that does not require interpretation, and the only question is who knew about it before the death.

The evidence is domestic — a matter of what a drunk man would and would not have done in his own bathroom, and of whose fingerprints are on which glass.

Rip Torn plays Leon as a man who is always slightly behind his own story, and Columbo's technique here is simply to be present as often as possible and let the improvisation accumulate.

The gorilla suit sequence — a costume party, a witness who saw the wrong man in the wrong costume — is the broadest comedy the series ever attempted, and it does carry a real clue inside it.

The financial trail is the spine. Thirty million dollars cannot be claimed quietly, and every step towards claiming it is documented by an organisation that keeps excellent records.

5:10

Worth knowing

• This is the episode in which an evidence bag reading 'Frank Columbo' is visible in the final scene, the third and clearest on-screen sighting of the name.
• Rip Torn's performance is broader than most Columbo villains, and the episode leans into comedy more than mystery.
• Directed by Vincent McEveety, who made eleven Columbo films across both runs.
• The evidence bag reading 'Frank Columbo' appears in the final scene, the third and clearest on-screen sighting of the name.
• Rip Torn and Falk had known each other since the 1960s New York theatre scene.
• Broadcast in December 1991.

Verdict

Entertaining rather than clever. The plot is overloaded and the murderer is not much of an opponent, but Torn is fun and the victim is genuinely missed.

The signature clue is neat, and the episode is one of the more relaxed hours of the second run.

Overloaded and often silly, but it has the warmest victim in the run and a genuinely satisfying financial unravelling.

It is also the clearest example of a late-period tendency: when the murderer is not a worthy opponent, the films lean on comedy, and sometimes that works.

Familiar faces

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

• Ed McCready as Security Guard5 episodesalso in Rest in Peace, Mrs. Columbo, A Bird in the Hand…, It's All in the Game, Strange Bedfellows
• Dianne Turley Travis as Greta4 episodesalso in Double Exposure, Mind Over Mayhem, A Friend in Deed
• Gerry Okuneff as Patrolman4 episodesalso in A Bird in the Hand…, It's All in the Game, Strange Bedfellows
• Penny Santon as Momma2 episodesalso in Undercover
• Elizabeth Lambert as Leda2 episodesalso in Sex and the Married Detective
• Michael Prince as Mr. Weatherford2 episodesalso in The Conspirators
• Robert Rothwell as Minister2 episodesalso in Double Shock

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