Who killed Xavier on NCIS? The clues all point in one uncomfortable direction
"On Fire" — season 17, episode 14, first aired 28 January 2020 — is one of the only NCIS episodes that never names its killer. A man ends up dead in a bathtub, the case gets closed off screen, and the show simply moves on. Except the clues weren't subtle. Here's the full picture.
Who was Xavier?
Xavier Zolotov (Nikolai Nikolaeff) was a drunk Russian playboy who mowed down Torres and Bishop with his Lamborghini while they were out jogging, putting Torres in intensive care. The team identified him quickly — then hit a wall: Zolotov claimed sovereign immunity through "old-school Russian royal blood", and the State Department refused to touch him. The best NCIS could do was stall his exit from the country by arresting his wife Layla for keeping a pet tiger.
Days later, the team found Zolotov dead in his girlfriend's bathtub. Shot within the previous five hours by someone with weapons experience — who removed the bullet, cleaned the scene, and left behind a single blonde hair.
The suspects
- Colleen Kennedy — the girlfriend, and the episode's real villain. The hit-and-run was no accident: Torres had once gone undercover in Michigan on a case where Colleen was suspected of injecting her sister with heroin over an inheritance, and with the case reopened, he was set to be the star witness. She was caught trying to finish him off in his hospital bed — but everything tying her to Xavier's murder was circumstantial, and she denied it.
- Ellie Bishop — went missing for hours after telling McGee, "I don't plan on arresting him. I'm going to kill him." She denied doing it, and McGee believed her.
- Leroy Jethro Gibbs — the uncomfortable one.
The case against Gibbs
Earlier in the episode, Gibbs pulled Bishop aside to talk her off what he called the murder road, warning her, "You don't want to become me." It plays very differently on a rewatch. Gibbs arrived at Colleen's flat late, saying he'd come straight from visiting Torres at the hospital — a window nobody accounts for. The bullet was removed by someone who knew exactly what they were doing. And the episode's final shot lingers on Gibbs, alone in the lift, saying nothing.
So who did it?
Officially: never answered. The show never revisited the murder, and Mark Harmon left the series in season 19 in 2021 with the question still open. Unofficially, the episode's framing points squarely at Gibbs — the vigilante reading most fans and recappers landed on the night it aired.
The bullet was never found. Neither was an answer.