Goofs

When Oliver Brandt has the last argument with his wife, he removes his tie and opens his shirt, revealing a white T-shirt underneath. The phone rings, and he is summoned to meet Columbo at the Sigma Society club. When he arrives there, he's still wearing the same suit and unbuttoned shirt, but the T-shirt underneath is gone.

In the nightclub, Suzy introduces herself to George, but he doesn't say his name. After Columbo falls into her lap, Suzy introduces herself and George by name.

When Columbo meets Brandt in the park, Brandt is holding an ice cream cone with a full scoop of ice cream. They turn around to walk up a path and the ice cream is down almost to the level of the top of the cone. No time had passed where Brandt could have eaten that much ice cream.

The character in the suede coat originally starts with a straight-stem briar pipe, then right before the supposed gun shots, he is smoking a bent-stem meerschaum pipe.

After Columbo leaves Brandt's office, he walks to the elevator and pushes the "down" button. He then turns to talk to the secretary. He walks towards her, and the elevator button is not lit. The camera angle changes as Columbo walks over to the secretary, and the the button is now illuminated.

An exploding squib doesn't sound anything like a gunshot and is much quieter, yet the sounds heard by the guests at the club were clearly gunshots.

The murder is committed with a silenced revolver. It is a myth that revolvers cannot be silenced. The majority of the noise from a gun comes from muzzle, which means a silencer works on both types of guns. The amount of noise which would be caused by the explosion escaping between the cylinder and barrel of a revolver would not be that significant.

When the murderer demonstrates for Columbo how the dictionary is made to fall by a Magic Marker knocked onto it by the turntable arm, overbalancing the dictionary, the dictionary begins to fall before the marker lands on it.

The two first responders carry the stretcher with a full grown man on it with too much ease.

When the murderer Oliver Brandt wipes his forehead with the cloth, soot ends up on his forehead. This is impossible since after using the cloth to place the umbrella inside the chimney, he turned the cloth over itself, bringing the outside inside, and the soot is therefore trapped inside the cloth.

During the murderer's demonstration of how the dictionary is made to fall, as the magic marker falls it moves horizontally in mid-air a couple of inches before it hits the dictionary.

When Columbo (Peter Falk) goes to Oliver Brandt's Theodore Bikel) house and speaks with his wife, Vivian Brandt (Samantha Eggar), she says, "Say you wanted to play a Sinatra record" and then proceeds to pick up an album presumed to be by Frank Sinatra. The record sleeve, however, confirms that it is not a Sinatra album at all but actually Mishel Piastro and His Concert Orchestra's "The Best of Strauss".

The foil-coated chocolate coins which Columbo shows Oliver Brandt (and one of which he later eats) clink like solid metal.

At the end, Brandt walks into the room as Columbo is playing Tchaikovsky on the stereo. When Columbo turns around toward Brandt, he bumps the turntable, which would have made the record skip.

Prior to the murder, the victim (Bertie) and the murderer (Oliver) are arguing loudly with each other in the upstairs library. None of the guests downstairs hears any of it, but when the two squibs go off in the library, they're all startled by the sound.

When Brandt asks Columbo if he knows what his IQ is, he says, "The army took it, but they never told us". All army test scores are part of a soldier's 201 file, the Official Military Personnel File, and the file is made available to the soldier at any time.