We all know that at the end of Murder with too Many Notes, Columbo doesn't exactly prove anything, let alone that Crawford killed someone. I watched Ashes to Ashes right after that and got the same impression. Price switched bodies when he burned the victim and put the guy with the shrapnel in with a smaller body. Columbo tells Price that the victim had her pager with her when she disappered and that it probably wouldn't have burned. Using this knowledge and after learning that Chuck had shrapnel in him when he was cremated, Columbo searches the urn of the smaller guy and finds the shrapnel. How is this supposed to convince a jury that Price killed the victim? All he has to say is that the shrapnel got caught and fell out later. If he would have found the burnt up pager, that would have been a different story.....

First off, for anyone reading this who hasn't seen "Ashes To Ashes"... SPOILERS!

There's the problem of too many ashes. A certain amount of ashes equals a certain amount of weight. So the ashes of the little squirt of a husband in the urn should have only weighed so much.

Therefore Prince had to account for the fact that the ashes in the little squirt's urn weighed the equivalent of a little squirt plus that of a large person.

One way or another, Prince had to admit that there was a second person in with the squirt. Who could Prince possibly say it was? The shrapnel in the urn made it pretty obvious as to who it was in that urn.

Now Prince had to come up with who the ashes in the urn tossed out over the Hollywood sign belonged to.

Columbo knew that the guy with the shrapnel was the one who was supposed to be burnt up when the murder victim disappeared. She was last seen at the funeral for Shrapnel guy. All the dots would be connected for a jury and the murder becomes obvious.

So it wasn't so much the piece of shrapnel in the urn that led to Prince's downfall. It was all the extra ashes and extra weight.

One way or another, Prince burned up one extra body and there was no way he could get out of that.

That's my take on it.

i have to agree. I just watched this episode for about the third time in a year, and overwhelmingly the ending makes almost no sense to me. What Columbo finds doesn’t prove anything at all. It’s conjecture, at best. If the point of the episode is to try to find out who killed Rue McClanahan’s character then this episode fails. Which is probably why the name of McClanahan’s character wasn’t even mentioned during the last 15 minutes of the show including at the end where Columbo tries to prove this guy killed her. Each time I watch this I don’t see what the end has to do with the rest of the story, all it proves is that PERHAPS another body was cremated with this one. It doesn’t prove it was her body, It just proves that a guy was shrapnel was cremated, perhaps with someone else … perhaps not… all that was left in the urn was a piece of shrapnel.