Jessica Fletcher is in Genoa, Italy, by special invitation from an opera singer friend who had been pursued by a crazed stalker in New York. When it appears that the stalker may have followed the friend to Italy, and when a member of the Italian opera company that the friend is part of turns up dead, Jessica investigates!
Just the facts:
Click on the text below to reveal spoilers.
Click to reveal the victim
It was Rudolpho Petrocelli, the head of the Italian opera company!Click to reveal the killer
It was Jonas Cole, the young opera singer’s husband! (And Vicki Lawson, a woman who was in love with him, acted as his accomplice by playing pre-recorded tapes of the stalker over the phone.)Click to reveal the weapon
It was a gun belonging to the killer (which the killer left on purpose so that he would be suspected of the murder and then have Jessica prove he was framed)!Click to reveal the location
The murder happened in the opera singer’s dressing room at night (but the body was discovered in the morning and was set up to make it seem like the shooting happened shortly before the body was discovered)!Click to reveal the motive
The victim tried to blackmail the killer after finding out that the killer was the one making threatening phone calls to the opera singer! (The original motive for the killer’s plan to kill the opera singer was that he had a life insurance policy on her and needed the money.)Click to reveal the major clue
It was the fact that the shreds of newspaper stuffed into the blanks that went off the morning that the body was found came from the stock market pages of the Wall Street Journal — which the killer regularly read!Cast of characters (in order of appearance):
- Khrystyne Haje as Andrea Beaumont, an opera singer and friend of Jessica’s.
- Carol Lawrence as Stella Knight, another opera singer with the Italian opera company. This is Lawrence’s fourth and final appearance on MSW; she previously appeared in “When the Fat Lady Sings“.
- Ely Pouget as Vicki Lawson, the PR rep for the opera company.
- Bruce Abbott as Drew Granger, the maestro for the opera company and Andrea’s former lover. This is Abbott’s second of three appearances on MSW; he previously appeared in “Thicker than Water“.
- Charles Cioffi as Paul Faber, a male opera singer.
- Anthony Marciona as the Stage Manager at the opera theater, referred to as Eduardo.
- John Getz as Jonas Cole, opera impresario and husband of Andrea Beaumont. This is Getz’s first of two appearances on MSW.
- Benito Prezia as the Doctor who ministers to Andrea after she is attacked on the street.
- Lorenzo Caccialanza as Insp. Piero Amati, a “humble policeman from the mountains” who thinks this is all a stunt to garner publicity for the opera company. This is Caccialanza’s first of two appearances on MSW, both times playing Inspector Amati.
- Robert Costanzo as Rudolfo Petrocelli, the owner of the opera company. This is Costanzo’s third and final appearance on MSW; he previously appeared in “Family Doctor“.
- Pierrino Mascarino as Carlo Rossoni, the book-keeper for the opera company.
- Sam Ingraffia as Officer Spinato (although I don’t recall his name actually being mentioned on screen), who asists with the arrests.
Final thoughts and other trivia:
In a bit of character continuity, Jessica mentions that she’s getting information from her NYPD friend Lt. Artie Gelber (a character who had a manjor recurring role in the previous season).
The scene in which Jessica points her finger like a gun (at around 33 mins in), would later be used in the Season 12 opening montage.
One thing that I found personally interesting about this episode is the use of voice prints as evidence. Given my linguistics/phonetics background, I know that the “voice print” is actually just a spectrogram of a recorded utterance and that the differences between two people are more nuanced than what someone unfamiliar with acoustic phonetics would be able to see. Which is why it’s funny when they show a comparison of two voice prints which are not only of poor quality (they should depict gradiant grays rather than just being black and white) but are also clearly different simply because they depict recordings of two different phrases.
Murder, She Watched 