Factual error: In common with many other episodes neither Columbo, the attending police officers or forensic investigators wear gloves or other sterile gear while examining the murder victim's body or the crime scene. Columbo hands out bananas to other people on the scene which they happily eat. The senior crime scene forensics officer, Kingsley, hands out coffee and doughnuts! Eating and drinking are absolutely forbidden on a sterile crime scene, which has been hopelessly contaminated with fingerprints anyway.
Other mistake: Kingsley doesn't know if his victim is married or unmarried, whether or not he has children, if he has a maid, but he brings a hand vacuum and empty vial to the murder to collect cat hair from the victim's cat to plant on Clifford's jacket.
Character mistake: Kingsley carries a briefcase in to the attorney's office, but leaves without it.
Continuity mistake: Close to the end when Colombo is talking to Patrick Kinsley he is holding up the bag with the cigar-end; the bag is upside down. In the next shot from behind the bag is the right way.
Factual error: An important plot point is that diamonds do not burn and can be recovered from the ashes of a cremated body. This is completely wrong - diamonds would combust freely at cremation temperatures, and since they are pure carbon they don't even leave any residue.
Murder with Too Many Notes - S13-E4
Other mistake: In the movie within the story the murderer repeatedly stabs the victim and pulls back the knife. Even after several stabs there is no blood on the knife. (00:02:25)
Suggested correction: Nobody is stabbed in this made-for-television film. The murder victim is drugged, then dropped from the roof of a tall building, staged to look like suicide.
This mistake refers to the "movie within the story" that's having its film score completed by the composer, Crawford. The "murderer repeatedly stabs the victim" in a scene of "Corkscrew," the soon-to-be-released movie; it plays in the recording studio (00:02:25), as Crawford (Billy Connolly) conducts the orchestra for its score. Corkscrew's murder scene plays again in the screening room (00:05:45), with Corkscrew's director extolling Crawford's genius as a composer.
Suggested correction: As has been posted elsewhere - in the early seventies, no television show used blood effects. They were too expensive and would severely restrict potential audiences, as television channels were notoriously conservative in those days. This is a creative and technical decision, not a mistake.
There are a few things wrong with the correction. First, this shows a total lack of knowledge of the mistake in question. Corrections should be based on watching the scene first, not just throwing out wild and inaccurate guesses. While listed as an episode, this was a Columbo made-for-TV movie from 2001, not the early 70s. Second, explaining how or why a mistake occurs doesn't invalidate them. Creative and technical decisions can be deliberate mistakes.
