One of the better episodes of Season 4, in this long-running popular series.
When a newspaper reporter dies a suspicious "accidental" death at a lumber yard, his fiancée suspects foul play and hires Barnaby to look into the matter. Barnaby certainly has good reason to be suspicious himself when he quickly discovers that the reporter had just returned from San Francisco to investigate the "accidental" death of someone from his own Army unit in Vietnam.
In the course of the investigation, Barnaby meets with a business owner from that same Army unit, played by Robert Webber. Turns out that this individual has a very lucrative business in which he somehow acquires old, damaged Army equipment at bargain basement prices, fixes it up, and then sells it at a huge profit...
...that is, until he, too dies in a strange "accident", and by this point Barnaby knows something is very, very wrong here. Three officers/soldiers all from the same unit in Vietnam have all died within a week, all under suspicious circumstances---now, that can't be a coincidence, can it ? So who's responsible, and why ? When Barnaby meets a black-belt expert named Tally Morgan (well-played by Marc Singer) from that SAME unit, who was very good friends with the business owner, he knows who's probably responsible for all this--especially since he already knows by now, that there was a suspicious black-market operation in Vietnam that had to do with old, damaged Army equipment.
But by now, Tally knows that Barnaby is on to him--and there's only one way that Tally can stop Barnaby from blowing all this wide open. So, at the conclusion of this above-average episode, we see a match-up between Tally's karate-trained hands, and Barnaby's gun (and wits). Care to guess who wins ?
John Ritter, incidentally, has a small part as a wheelchair-confined Vietnam vet, who gives Barnaby some valuable information.
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