Blooper

When Columbo looks through Dorothea's memorabilia for a piece of the photograph, he shakes a smaller magazine ("Once Upon A Time"), then throws it back on the bed upside down. In the next shot, the magazine is lying on the bed the right way up, free of any other items. After Columbo has found the photo cut-out in the other magazine, he looks back at the remaining items on the bed, which now cover the Once Upon A Time magazine half-way.

When Dorothea answers the door to Columbo she has a small red rose tattoo on her left breast. Later inside her apartment the tattoo is gone.

When Columbo shows up at Mo Weinberg's apartment, he looks through the key hole and sees Mo straight ahead in the kitchen, and then he sees Mo move across the apartment to his bedroom. The first problem is that a keyhole that can be seen through would require a skeleton key, and no apartment in any big city, such as L.A., would still be using skeleton keys in 1994 -at least not as the sole lock for a front door. However, assuming that the skeleton keyhole was in that door, then the second problem is that Columbo would have been able to see only straight ahead, i.e., tunnel vision. People are not able to pan across the room through a keyhole.

When Columbo pours out the coins taken from the parking meter, he states that they were deposited from 1:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. on Saturday. However, there are way too many coins (approximately 100) for 5 hours of parking.

The roadway in the photo-jigsaw is cracked in a very distinctive fashion. That being the case, it should not have been difficult to identify the exact location using only the piece marked with the 'X'. There wouldn't have been many places with that layout (roadway near a stone breakwater) which would be accessible in the short time indicated following the robbery. Arguably, the whole plot makes no sense because of this.

The newspaper article that is alongside the picture of Mary Bonamico repeats 3 of the 5 paragraphs. These are the same paragraphs found in previous Columbo adventures that feature newspaper articles.

The location where the police find the sunken chest in no way matches the picture that supposedly reveals the location. The picture shows a wide "roadway" with square posts along the edge that borders the ocean. Where they actually pull up the chest the roadway is narrower with boulders on either side and no posts.

When Krutch shows the files of the puzzle holders, the birthplace for Bonamico is shown as Pheniox, Arizona. This is not an intentional misspelling as the files for the others show birthplaces of Cleveland, Boston and Los Angeles.

Lt. Columbo asked Irving if he knew what a time table was, when he should have asked him if he knew what a time line.