History Main / BeneathSuspicion

* ''Franchise/ScoobyDoo'' plays this trope straight constantly during its early incarnations, although like many of the franchise's mainstay tropes, they begin [[PlayingWithATrope playing with it]] to some regularity by the late 1990s/early 2000s. In the original series, it's the one character the gang briefly meets early, only to disappear and never be seen again... [[YouMeddlingKids until the monster is captured]]. He usually tries to make himself extremely helpful during the brief time he's seen, which is another hint.
** Subverted in one episode where the gang meets a rather creepy-looking farmer who tells them about a ghost haunting a nearby abandoned airfield. They investigate and find out that the phony ghost is ''not'' the farmer, but the farmer's next-door neighbor (who we haven't even seen until now) who was trying to scare the farmer off his land. And the police who show up at the end? The creepy farmer called them himself when he got worried about the Scooby gang's own safety!
** Double subverted in one episode, where the kids meet a creepy old man who tells them a creepy story of a haunted house, then disappears. They spend most of the episode trying to catch a headless ghost in said haunted house, only to find out it's the inheritor of the house (a person they've never seen before), trying to keep treasure hunters away until he can recover his grandfather's fortune. The next moment, a masked burglar wearing a bedsheet on his head breaks into the house. They catch him and guess what? He's the guy they met in the beginning.
** In another episode, they are alone for the first half without meeting anyone. This one has no disguised villains, just a malfunctioning robot and an inventor trying to repair it, and his wife, who doesn't like robots, and only appears at the very end.

* Played straight and zig-zagged in an episode of ''WesternAnimation/GravityFalls''. Dipper realizes that local MadScientist and {{Cloudcuckoolander}} Old Man [=McGucket=], who he's ignored for the most part over the show's past season, might be the Author of the Journals. The quest to recover his lost memories leads to the straight example: the reason why few townsfolk seem to remember the local oddities is because of a cultist group called The Society of the Blind Eye, dedicated to erasing resident's memories of such activity in the town, comprised of Bud Gleeful, father of the previous season's BigBad Gideon, lame reporter Toby Determined, Tats, the bouncer of the local lumberjack bar, Sprott, the former owner of Mabel's pig Waddles, and a man married to a woodpecker who had appeared as a RunningGag several times before. They all used the Society to make themselves and others forget their failures and oddities. The zig-zag part comes in [=McGucket=]'s identity: no, he wasn't the Author of the Journals. But he did work with him on the portal project, and would go on to found the Society in order to prevent himself from going mad after seeing the Nightmare Dimension during said project. However, he went too far, erased too much, and became a hermit hillbilly and local crackpot.

* ''WesternAnimation/RickAndMorty'': How [[Characters/RickAndMortyEvilMorty Evil Morty]] gets away with his plans. No Rick would ever suspect a Morty could outplay them.

* ''Manga/MariaNoDanzai'': Becoming the universally-beloved SchoolNurse within a couple of months since first getting the job means not a soul will suspect that Maria is the one [[BullyHunter offing Okaya's gang one by one]], especially since [[ThatWomanIsDead she's completely discarded her former identity as Mari Nagare and erased anything that could reveal]] she is [[KnightTemplarParent Kiritaka's mother]].

* In the ''Series/MurdochMysteries'' episode "Mrs Crabtree's Neighbourhood", Murdoch is trying to track down a scarily efficient hitman, and suddently notices that ''all'' the testimony from previous investigations mention a milk cart. Apparently, nobody else ever considered that a milkman might be a hitman, even when witnesses stated that it wasn't the usual delivery time, or even the usual dairy.

* In ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'', this is how Homer ultimately gets away with being the masked vigilante Pie Man. The mystique and legend of Pie Man gets built up so much that the people of Springfield would never in a million years suspect ''Homer'' of being the man, and even when Homer outright unmasks himself in front of a crowd and confesses, everyone calls him a liar.

* ''Film/GlassOnion'': Early in the film, Blanc dismisses genius CEO Miles Bron as a suspect in Andi's death because the two were recently involved in a very public legal battle and only an idiot would kill her with such an obvious motive. It's only late in the film when Blanc realizes that Bron is in fact an idiot who has convinced everyone he's a genius, meaning he's exactly the sort of person who would kill Andi.