Ian Blackburn was a character who appeared in the Season 3 episode "Mr. Monk and the Panic Room" where he is the victim of the week after he got murdered at the start of the episode.
Ian was married to pop sensation Chloe. In 2003, he hired security expert Kurt Wolff to build him a panic room he could go into in case of emergencies. Blackburn was unaware that Kurt and Chloe were having an affair, started when Wolff had done security on one of Chloe's tours. The two had figured that Ian would be the best to them if he were dead. So, Kurt hatched a plan. His idea was to sneak into Blackburn's panic room via a secret passageway built into the room's refrigerator. Once inside, he set off the alarm's test function to lure him inside. The idea was that once Blackburn had locked himself in the room, Kurt would shoot him with his own gun. The only explanation would have been that Ian had killed himself in a locked room.
However, things went wrong for Kurt once Blackburn was where he wanted him. Darwin, Ian's pet chimp, jumped on Kurt as he took aim, which gave Ian the opportunity to grab for the gun. Kurt managed to get Darwin off him and got Ian to let go of the gun, but in his adrenaline rush, he shot Ian four times; once in the head, once in the chest, and twice in the back. Seeing as he had just thrown the suicide angle out the window, Kurt realized the only way he had a chance of salvaging the situation was to make it look like Darwin was the shooter, sliding the gun to him and fleeing.
Ian would be avenged when Adrian Monk deduced how the murder was committed and tricked Wolff into returning to the panic room via the secret entrance to retrieve an "incriminating" tape recorder.