Columbo

Verity Chandler (Rue McClanahan), a dirt-digging television gossip columnist, attends the funeral of Chuck Houston, famous Hollywood star and war hero, at a funeral home owned by the coldly calculation Eric Price (Patrick McGoohan), who was once her lover, but had jilted her. There, she confronts him in his private office. For revenge, she has decided to make public a dark secret from his past. She’d learned that Prince had stolen a diamond necklace off of the body of a silent screen star, Dorothea Page, in 1979, when he was just an employee at the funeral home he now owns. He’d sold the necklace on the black market to finance his empire, and Verity plans to reveal the truth on her Sunday night broadcast. In a rage, he murders her and cremates her body in place of Houston’s.