Universal Crime

A wine connoisseur kills his playboy brother to prevent his selling the family winery to expiate his latest scandal.

A senatorial candidate exploits death threats, fabricated for publicity, to kill his manager.

A motivational researcher blackmails to further his career, kills a man, then frames the victim's wife.

An enraged publisher hires a gunman to kill an author who intends to sign a contract with a competitor.

A prodigy and his robot help investigate the murder of a professor who threatened to disgrace a colleague's scientist son.

A gospel singer kills his evangelist wife when she denies him more money and threatens blackmail.

A man murders his wife and has a friend cover up the act with a burglary, only to have the friend blackmail him into doing the same favor in return.

Lt. Columbo keeps a close watch on a physical-fitness fanatic suspected of murdering his business partner.

A prominent photographer hatches a scheme to cover up his wife's murder with a phony kidnapping plot.

A military-academy commandant murders to protect his career and prevent his school's conversion to a coed junior college.

Columbo's Mexico cruise is disrupted when an automobile executive kills his blackmailing lover, the ship's singer, then frames a musician.

After killing his mother-in-law, an electronics magnate's alibi is a video security system.

A psychiatrist (George Hamilton) romances a wealthy patient (Lesley Ann Warren) then uses her in his alibi after killing her husband (Stephen Elliott).

A retired actress/dancer stages her wealthy husband's suicide after he refuses to finance her Broadway comeback.

A foreign dignitary murders his rival then disguises the crime as part of a robbery blamed on college protesters.

A cunning advertising consultant leading a double life as a spy tries to cover up the details of a homicide.

A retired bullfighter credited with saving a young man from a bull arranges the death of the boy's father to protect his own reputation.

A magician claims an airtight alibi -- being sealed in a tank of water -- in the murder of a blackmailing associate.

Lt. Columbo's prime suspect in the case of a drowned yacht magnate also turns up dead.

An egotistic TV detective matches wits with Columbo after murdering his producer , a former lover and current blackmailer.

The curator (Joyce Van Patten) of a strapped family-owned museum stages a robbery, for insurance, then murders to hide her crime; guests Celeste Holm, Tim O'Connor.