Murder, She Wrote Season 2, Episode 11
"Murder Digs Deep"
Original airdate: Dec. 29, 1985
Writers: Maryanne Kasica, Michael Scheff
Director: Philip Leacock
Cast: Angela Lansbury, William Windom, Cecile Callan, George Grizzard, David Groh, Randolph Mantooth, Stephen Shortridge, Connie Stevens, Robert Vaughn
I'll be the first to admit Murder, She Wrote didn't always get it right. This week we're looking at a weaker episode, one of at least four from the twelve season run that touches on indigenous American cultures. This one's probably somewhere in the middle in terms of sensitivity, so still quite yucky. It's probably the clunkiest mystery we've encountered thus far. We're talking boilerplate Scooby Doo.
Gold Diggers of 1985
A cat burglar repels into a chamber filled with ancient Egyptian artifacts. The camera pans to reveal a wall-mounted water fountain and museum signage. Nifty fakeout. A guard happens by and the thief pulls an ornate dagger replete with a snarling cat's head pommel. Luckily for everyone involved, the guard doesn't spot him and continues on his rounds. The thief goes about his sticky-fingered business.
Jessica joins an uncharacteristically intrepid Seth Hazzlit at an archaeological dig in New Mexico, ostensibly to research a novel. If it were literally anyone else I'd say she was looking to convert a holiday into a tax write-off, but Jess is extremely prolific and really does strive for authenticity. She's escorted by Raymond Two Crows (Mantooth), a stoic man purporting to be of Navajo descent. You may recognize the actor from his run on Adam-12. His father is said to have been Seminole, but let's just get this out of the way: Raymond's real surname turns out to be DeMarco.
Robert Vaughan, a three-time guest star on this series and a mainstay of every show like it from the '70s through the '90s, plays the expedition's sponsor, millionaire Gideon Armstrong. For fellow DC Comics fans, I'll liken him to Simon Stagg, right down to the relic hunter motif (though Armstrong favors an ascot over Stagg's southern colonel ribbon tie). Former pop singer and actress Connie Stevens ("Kookie, Kookie (Lend Me Your Comb)") plays his bottle blonde trophy wife, Cynthia. They traipse about the site in matching fatigues when they're not sequestered in their air-conditioned trailer.
Then there's Dr. Aubrey Benton (Grizzard), a celebrity archaeologist who insists they're sitting on Coronado's famed City of Gold. Or one of them anyway. I think the legend tells of seven cities. Grizzard appeared in the original production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but wasn't above guest roles on The Golden Girls and The Cosby Show. Benton's an obvious fraud though, so the episode also offers up a university-affiliated archaeologist in Dr. Stan Garfield (Groh), who seems to know his pottery shards. Two graduate students, Karen (Callan) and Steve (Shortridge) round out our named group, the bickering young lovers serving as (underutilized) comic relief.
Relief from what? Well. We've got a pretty unsavory Native American curse hoax at play. Each night as the group settle down for dinner, a man clad in "traditional dress" hoots and hollers from a high cliff, performing some kind of ritual intended to frighten them.
The rent-a-cops Armstrong hired never reach the "phantom" in time, which seems odd considering he appears in the same exact spot at the same exact time each night. Maybe pocket a couple Nature Valley bars and some orange slices and head on up there a little earlier and … you know what? Never mind. Everyone knows it's that grouchy Raymond Two Crows anyway. Everyone else is accounted for, bought-in on the project, and lily white. He's the one openly criticizing the whole endeavor as theft of his peoples' heritage.
When Seth and Jessica ask Raymond about it the next morning, he doesn't put up much of a defense. He also gets some basic Pueblo and Navajo trivia wrong.
Benton and Garfield are delighted when Jessica discovers a gold "medicine stick" in her patch of dirt. Armstrong, not one to get overexcited, inches ever closer to buying the land from a mysterious Santa Fe lawyer he's been speaking to by radio.
Seth and Jessica invite Cynthia to join them for dinner, but she's busy scraping a whole lot of mud from the bottom of her designer boots. She'll have to meet them later. That's probably nothing.
The Fall Guy
On night two, the phantom appears on the cliff right on schedule. A seemingly drunken Cynthia grabs one of the guards' rifles from a picnic table and begins firing at him. He lets out a death cry and falls backwards and out of sight. They find Raymond's body on the ground below, his ritual garments some distance away. Seth determines that he wasn't hit by Cynthia's shots, but succumbed to the fall.
Gideon gets real shady right away, preventing Jessica or anyone else from leaving the site or contacting anyone outside. He claims to have contacted the authorities about Raymond's death, but that's a pretty obvious lie. He needs to keep the news of the gold artifacts from getting out, even if it means delaying a death investigation.
The next day, Jessica leads Seth on a merry hike to where Raymond took that fall. She pranks him, feigning her own fall from the same spot, letting out a convincing yelp. Seth's already sweating through his khakis and this just about ends him. Fortunately Jessica hurries out from her hiding spot before he loses too much oxygen to the brain. Jessica believes Raymond, or whoever was on the cliff, could've survived the drop by backing onto the same ledge she'd found.
Benton invites Jessica to his camper with overtures Seth perceives as sexual. As it turns out, the egomaniac simply wants her to ghostwrite his autobiography. This is one of those chestnuts one might put on a Murder, She Wrote BINGO sheet. "Mediocre Old White Man Invites Jessica to Write His Book / Screenplay / Doctoral Thesis." She skillfully declines his stack of clippings without making an enemy.
Upon further inspection, Seth realizes Raymond actually died by drowning. The trauma from the fall occurred later.
So Like … Huh?
Jessica and Seth discover a cave filled with evidence. A boombox with a tape of chanting. Boxes of tagged artifacts stolen from that exhibit from the cold open. And a little stream where someone might drown upon receiving blunt force trauma.
As it turns out, "Raymond Two Crows" was really a man named Raymond DeMarco. We learn that from some library books he was using to read up on his cover story. See, this was all a scam, not by obvious fortune hunter Benton, but secret fortune hunter Garfield, in cahoots with Cynthia. She wanted to ruin her husband financially by making him cash in on land peppered with artifacts stolen from the museum by Raymond, but empty of its own. Raymond's Two Crows character was designed to make Armstrong feel like he was closing in on real treasure. But when he demanded a bigger cut, Cynthia struck him with a rock in the evidence cave.
Unbeknownst to Cynthia or Garfield, Raymond ultimately drowned in the shallow stream where he fell. Had he actually died from the impact of the rock, their scheme to disguise his death might've worked. Garfield posed as the phantom and pretended to fall when Cynthia fired into the night. Hidden on the ledge, he dropped Raymond's dead body and threw the disguise down with it.
Jessica confronts them with this in a gathering of the full group. Garfield tries to deny it, but Cynthia folds, unashamed of the conspiracy she nearly pulled on her despised husband. I think my second favorite detail is the cat pommel on Raymond's dagger being inspired by his university mascot. My favorite detail is the fact that Garfield admittedly brought along his least impressive students so they wouldn't see through the ruse. Probably not what Karen and Steve wanted to hear, but that's fine. As Jessica and Seth prepare to take their leave, the two young sweathogs transition from loudly arguing in their tent to bestial moaning. We freeze on the old folks laughing it up.
Next week, Joshua Peabody returns … in the form of a cottagecore pancake house. It's one of my all-time favorite episodes.
