... the Black Adder would say on the old British sitcom of the same name, usually in the season finale, usually resulting in the mass extinction of the entire cast. But I digress, but not really since Howard Walters rather sounds like that in this week's episode of Perry Mason.
Howard is one of three people at his company who know the combination to a safe that has 130K in it. That would be about 1.5 million dollars in 2022. So Howard plans to have his girlfriend who works at the same company take the money instead. Howard will conveniently be out of town when the theft occurs, so he will not be blamed.
Howard's simple plan is:
1. Pilot his plane to a planned business meeting the day of the theft.
2. Crash land the plane in some remote area so it takes awhile for anyone to get to the plane.
3. Parachute from the plane to a remote cabin where his girlfriend, with the money, will meet up with him.
4. They then disappear.
5. What about the body of Howard which will not be in the wreckage? His plan also includes getting the son of the company president to come with him to his plane where he will then shoot him. His burned body will substitute for Howard's.
6. The actual dead person, the company president's son, will thus be considered missing and be the chief suspect in the theft of the money.
Can you see how many ways this plan can go wrong? There's one more - Howard's girlfriend plans to betray him and kill him, mainly because she is greedy but also because she has been stringing Howard along and has another ACTUAL boyfriend who plans to help her.
When "Howard's End" comes - the real end, not the one he planned, his widow - yes the lying weasel is married - is accused of the crime and Perry Mason is on the case.
As the series progressed and ran out of stories actually penned by Erle Stanley Gardner, it was necessary to come up with original screenplays. On the most part these new screenplays were complex and interesting, but they lacked one thing - a good motive for the murder by the actual killer. Sure, the murderer usually had good reason to steal, to get revenge, etc., but there wasn't a very good reason to actually kill anybody to accomplish the end result given the circumstances other than Perry Mason needing at least one murder an episode. This entry is one of those episodes IMHO.