Home → Episodes → Murder in Malibu

The case

The killer

Andrew Stevens as Wayne Jennings

The victim

Janet Margolin as Theresa Goren

Guest cast

Andrew Stevens, Brenda Vaccaro, Laurie Walters, Jana Brown, Floyd Levine, Sondra Currie

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.

7:51

The murder

Theresa Goren writes bestselling romances and is engaged to Wayne Jennings, a man whose interest in her is entirely financial. When she discovers what he is and moves to cut him out, he shoots her at her Malibu house.

The staging is a burglary, and it is not especially careful. Jennings is not a planner; he is an opportunist who has run out of options and improvises a scene he hopes will hold.

The film's structural problem is that he is never a credible opponent. Where the classic murderers are professionals whose competence creates the puzzle, Jennings is a man hoping nobody looks too hard.

Theresa Goren's world is the machinery of commercial romance: deadlines, publicity tours, a publisher who needs the next book. Jennings has been living inside that machinery as an accessory, and the engagement was his route to a permanent position in it.

When she discovers he is only in it for the money and moves to end things, he shoots her at the beach house and turns the room over. There is no timing to speak of and no alibi worth the name — he is relying entirely on the police accepting a burglary.

How Columbo gets him

Columbo's interest lands quickly on the fiancé, and the episode does not pretend otherwise. There is no duel of wits, only a slow accumulation of small inconsistencies in a story that was never strong.

The best material is peripheral: the dead woman's publisher, her sister, the machinery of romantic fiction as an industry. The lieutenant is genuinely curious about how books get written, and those scenes have more life than the case.

The physical evidence is straightforward — the burglary is staged, the entry was not forced from outside, and Jennings cannot account for the hour.

Columbo's suspicion is immediate and stays that way, which is the episode's structural problem: there is nowhere for the film to develop. What holds the middle together is the peripheral world — the publisher, the sister, the business of writing books to a formula.

The lieutenant asks a great many questions about publishing schedules and royalty statements, and the answers establish who stood to gain from the marriage and who from the death.

The final trap is small and physical, built on what the victim had done that afternoon rather than on anything the murderer said.

6:01

Worth knowing

• Andrew Stevens plays Jennings; the character is one of the few Columbo murderers with no professional standing at all.
• The episode is regularly voted the weakest of the ABC run in fan polls.
• Directed by Walter Grauman, who made six of the later films.
• The episode was one of two Columbo films broadcast in the 1989–90 season's second half and had a noticeably shorter production schedule than the others.
• Andrew Stevens was better known for television movies; this is his only Columbo appearance.
• Directed by Walter Grauman, who made six of the ABC-era films.

Verdict

Flat. The murderer is not clever enough to sustain ninety minutes, and the film knows it — the pacing sags badly in the middle.

Completists only. If you are working through the ABC years, this is the one to watch when you are doing something else.

The comparison that matters is with the classic-era films about the wealthy: those murderers had something to defend, and Jennings has only something to gain.

If you are watching the whole run in order, this is the point where the difference between the two eras is at its most visible — and the honest thing to say is that it is a matter of writing rather than of Falk, who is exactly as good here as he is anywhere.

Familiar faces

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

• Bill Zuckert as Father3 episodesalso in Negative Reaction, A Case of Immunity
• John Petlock as Plainclothesman #23 episodesalso in A Bird in the Hand…, It's All in the Game
• Sondra Currie as Mrs. Rocca2 episodesalso in Columbo and the Murder of a Rock Star
• Michele Bernath as Fifth Woman2 episodesalso in It's All in the Game
• Larry Grant as Photographer2 episodesalso in Columbo Cries Wolf

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