Examples of Dying Clues in live-action television series
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The message was incomplete
- Ancient Detective: The victim of the first case wrote the first few strokes of a Chinese character, but the main detective Jian Buzhi quickly realizes it's useless as a clue, since half the cast have a character in their name that starts with those strokes.
- CSI:
- In "Passed Pawns", the Victim of the Week writes the letters 'D E' in his own blood as he lies dying. Not that it helps the CSIs very much in the end.
- The revival had an episode where the body of a famous chef was found in his own freezer with the message "I'm so sorry" written on the glass in cooking grease. It's later discovered there's a letter rubbed out between the M and S and a few letters were added after that. The message was actually "Messy", the nickname for one of the chef's employees.
- Death in Paradise: In "A Murder on the Plantation", the Victim of the Week writes the letters 'J O H' in his own blood. The killer erases the message anyway.
- Frasier: In the first season, Martin is haunted by the one case he couldn't solve—a prostitute's murder. He's perplexed by the fact that she'd written "HELP" in the dirt while dying, which seems like a pointless thing to do. As it turns out, she was trying to write "SHELBY", the name of her killer. She died while writing the "B" and the "S" was obscured before anyone saw it.
- Furuhata Ninzaburo: A publisher locked into a storage unit by the mangaka he was having an inappropriate relationship with until he died of either suffocation, thirst, or hunger inflicts a wound on back of his head as to give any perspective investigator reasonable suspicion to keep looking and also grabs a piece of paper without writing anything on it (while also holding a capped pen in his hand) to symbolize that no matter what he wrote, the murderer would be able to get rid of it, implicating the person who "found his body"—i.e. the mangaka.
- In The Mentalist a man who knows Red John's identity is killed by him and manages to scrawl "He is Mar" on the wall in his own blood before dying. While Red John's real identity was eventually revealed it's still not clear what exactly he was trying to say.note
- Midsomer Murders: In "The Glitch", mechanic Daniel Snape leaves a message for a friend indicating he knows who the murderer is, but he's murdered before they can talk. He leaves a cryptic dying clue at least: writing down 'Escort 63' on the palm of his hand. he wrote down the make of car and part of the number plate, and not a year as Barnaby as initially assumes.
- Walker, Texas Ranger:
- The episode "Legends" counts as both Type 1 and Type 5. The Big Bad of the episode, Michael Viscardi, strangles his middle man, Dean Scaggs, to death when the latter ends up being followed to the former's office by Gage and Sydney, who had a warrant for his arrest. Gage and Sydney search the office to find Scaggs's lifeless corpse and the message written with Scaggs's blood reading "D.A. Walk", which signifies that in Michael's Roaring Rampage of Revenge against those who convicted his father, his final target is the prosecuting attorney, Alex. Alex's surname is incomplete when it is found written in blood, which makes it Type 1, but it counts as Type 5 for Alex and Walker to be named Michael's final targets after the he kills Scaggs.
- Whodunnit? (UK): In "Too Many Cooks", the Victim of the Week attempts to scratch the killer's name into a block of ice after he has been Locked in a Freezer. Unfortunately, he only gets as far as the first letter—'B'—which is not helpful as every suspect's name starts with B.
Dying people lack clear elocution
- Blake's 7: Victim writes 54134 on a touchpad. He was trying to write SARA, but dying people also lack good handwriting.
- In an episode of Castle, the Victim of the Week writes "LIE" in her blood on the ground before dying. Turns out they were looking at it upside-down. She actually wrote the number "317", the number of a storage unit.
- An episode of Criminal Minds had a detective, who had just made a major break in a case, carve "Jones" into a wall before dying from injuries sustained from Hurricane Katrina. It turns out Jones was the name of the bar where the killer was gang-raped, the act which drove her to kill.
- A CSI episode features a seeming nonsense string of numbers left on a phone; the investigators soon realize that the victim was trying to write down her murderer's license plate number and began trying different combinations of numbers and corresponding letters on the number pad.
- Dragnet had a case with a guy who got mad and shot the tv in the boarding house he lived at, then was killed in self-defense as he shot someone else. The guy who killed him said “OFT ONE” as he was dying, and Friday and Gannon have to use a pad and paper to figure out he was saying “loft one” referring to a loft room. The killer ran to the room and died after he got there. He’s found dead when the detectives go in.
- Father Brown: In "The Face of Death", Lady Galloway writes a bloody message on her pillow, but due to her dyslexia, she winds up writing the letter 'P' back to front, causing most people to mistake it for the number 9 at first glance.
- In Forbrydelsen, Sarah Lund and Meyer manage to corner the murderer in an abandoned warehouse. The duo, however, decides to split up, which allows the murderer to get the drop on Meyer as he is alone and fatally wound him. He later dies from his wounds in the hospital, his last words being a repeated "Sarah". This causes Internal Affairs to cast their suspicion on Lund, but she points out that she and Meyer were firmly on a Last-Name Basis, so if he was going to accuse her, he never would have done so by calling her "Sarah". Indeed, it turns out that Meyer was actually trying to say "Sarajevo", as it was a prominent part of what was written on his assailant's shirt.
- In an episode of Foyle's War, the Asshole Victim has been killed at the time and place he'd arranged to fight the man who was having an affair with his wife, and his dying words were heard as her name, "Elsie." In the end it turns out he was killed for unrelated reasons by a character named Leonard Cartwright, and is supposed to have been saying the initials of his murderer rather than the name of a woman who would almost certainly have been on his mind under the circumstances. To be fair to the show, it doesn't push this idea very hard.
- In Get Smart, the Dead Spy Scrawls are a specific shorthand designed to be left by dying spies.
- Game of Thrones: Jon Arryn's dying words that "The seed is strong," turn out to mean Baratheon black hair is dominant over Lannister blond.
- Nikki from Lost staggers out of the jungle, mutters something that sounds like "Paulo lies", and then collapses. She's actually not dead, and she said "Paralyzed"; Nikki was bitten by a spider whose venom causes paralysis. The other survivors don't know this, though, so they bury her alive.
- Monk:
- In "Mr. Monk Goes to the Ballgame," the nonsense phrase that billionaire Lawrence Hammond said to a passing truck driver while dying after being shot in the chest, run over with a car, and crawling a great distance, "Girls Can't Eat 15 Pizzas," turns out to be a mnemonic device to a license plate on the killer's car.
- In "Mr. Monk Goes to the Dentist," Lt. Disher is half-conscious with laughing gas while in a dentist's chair and witnesses a murder; the victim keeps shouting "Barry Bonds, Barry Bonds!" When Disher awakes, there's no body in the room and the dentist denies it, so everyone thinks that the cop was hallucinating. It isn't until later in the episode that Disher and Monk discover that the dentist and victim had worked together to steal a huge amount of bearer bonds from a bank; the man was killed when he came in demanding his share of the loot, but to Disher's fogged mind, it sounded like the name of the baseball player.
- Another episode had a variation where the victim didn't know he was about to die (in fact, the attack kills him instantly), but his last words do lend a clue to why he was killed. He's a Latvian ambassador who steps into an elevator, says what sounds like "She's gone meatless now.", and gets shot to death along with his bodyguards. Monk looks into his main political rival who has an alibi, but can't make sense of the message either. However, his companion says he was likely speaking a Latvian dialect and actually said what translates to "This is not my coat." The ambassador accidentally swapped his coat with his soon-to-be-killer, who then killed him to retrieve his stolen jewelry.
- Murder, She Wrote: In "The Monte Carlo Murders", a dying victim seemingly tell Jessica (in French) that "the recording is in the fish". However, he was actually trying to tell her that "the recording was in the poison" (i.e. hidden in a can of rat poison): the French words for poison (poison) and fish (poisson) being very similar.
- An episode of The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo had a victim claw at a nearby wall calendar after being attacked, pulling several pages to the floor. This leads everybody to assume the victim was trying to ID the guilty party and began to suspect a character named "June" after seeing that page of the calendar on the floor. They were half-right: that was what the victim was doing, but the "June" page was merely in bad shape and fell out accidentally... the victim was trying to grab the next five pages, as those months (July, August, September, October, and November) spell out the name JASON.
- When Bunny is murdered on Only Murders in the Building, she says something sounding like "Fourteen...Savage." to Mabel. It sounds like she's referring to Charles-Haden Savage, his father, or the painting of his father having sex. It later turns out that she actually said "Fourteen sandwich" referring to the order her killer normally got at a local diner. It's a rare enough order to make a positive identification.
Victim didn't know the killer's name
- In one episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, ADA Sonya Paxton is murdered by the suspect the team is pursuing. Not knowing his name, and only able to speak a few syllables as her trachea was severed in the attack, she manages to gasp out only "I got him" before succumbing. For her part, Olivia figures it out pretty quickly; she understands immediately that Sonya meant she did something to the killer, and when Warner tells her Sonya wouldn't have been able to fight back with enough strength to do him any real damage, Olivia realizes the only other interpretation that makes sense is that Sonya was trying to tell her that she had gotten the killer's DNA in the struggle.
Other messages
- The Avengers (1960s): Victim writes "COP", so everybody suspects Coppice is the murderer. Mrs Peel proves that the victim was Russian. In the Cyrillic Alphabet "COP" = "sor". Sorrel is the murderer.
- In the Columbo episode "Try and Catch Me", a mystery writer murders her nephew by locking him in her airtight, walk-in safe. With the victim taking hours to suffocate, he has plenty of time to set up an elaborate dying clue, altering a page of the author's manuscript so it reads "I was murdered by Abigail Mitchell" and concealing it inside a light fitting, then leaving a disguised arrow pointing to it. The victim was smart enough to know that if Abigail was the first to open the safe after his death, she would have seen any obvious dying clues and removed them, so concealing them in a way that only sustained investigation would reveal makes this example one of the better-justified uses of the trope.
- Doctor Who
- In the story The Talons Of Weng-Chiang", a dying man points at the Doctor's boot. The Doctor later understands that he was trying to indicate an address in a street named Boot Court.
- In the episode "Heaven Sent", the Doctor finds a skull and the word 'BIRD' scrawled in the sand. It turns out to be the last message from the previous iteration of the Doctor, prompting him to remember the story about the bird and the mountain of diamond.
- The dying Inspector-General in Dong Yi shows Dong Yi a set of cryptic hand signals before he died. The signals actually point out the identity of the killer, although it would take Dong Yi many years before she deciphered the meaning behind them.
- Mentioned by name in the two hour pilot to the 1975 Ellery Queen series. Inspector Queen catches up Ellery as his son arrives at a murder scene where a victim pulled a plug out of the wall, stopping both her clock and TV.Inspector Queen: "Almost as far fetched as one of your books...a dying clue which makes absolutely no sense...which means of course it's right up your alley."
- Murder, She Wrote: In "The Great Twain Robbery", after being shot the Victim of the Week crawls across the floor to pull a copy of The Scarlet Letter off the bottom shelf of his bookcase.
- In the Sherlock episode "A Study In Pink", the victim writes out the password for her online phone-tracker, so that the police could track her phone and find the killer. (She didn't manage to get down the last letter, but Sherlock deduces it pretty easily — the harder part is figuring out what they're meant to do with it.)
- Whodunnit? (UK): In "Evidence of Death", the Victim of the Week, is poisoned with a nerve agent. With his voice paralysed and 20 seconds to live, he removes his signet ring and stuffs it into a matchbox as a cryptic clue to his killer's identity.
Since the author is dying, a frequent subversion is that the killer is actually able to use a dying message to their advantage — either modifying it to lead to another party, or acting on the message themselves.
- On one episode of The Cosby Mysteries, a reporter murders a British actress, writes Guy's phone number on her hand (to imply she was going to call him), and forges an entry in her diary to cast suspicion on her husband. However, Guy notices two mistakes: the forged diary entry uses the American spelling of "color" instead of the British one ("colour") and his phone number was written on her left hand which was the hand she wrote with.
- In an episode Forensic Files, a murder victim writes out the word "ROC" on a wall in her own blood, which is the name of one of her ex-boyfriends. It turns out that Roc is innocent, and the killer wrote that to hide his trails. Unfortunately, he left fingerprints on a nearby pizza box and made a phone call traced back to the scene of the crime.
- Walker, Texas Ranger:
- The episode "Legends" counts as both Type 1 and Type 5. The Big Bad of the episode, Michael Viscardi, strangles his middle man, Dean Scaggs, to death when the latter ends up being followed to the former's office by Gage and Sydney, who had a warrant for his arrest. Gage and Sydney search the office to find Scaggs's lifeless corpse and the message written with Scaggs's blood reading "D.A. Walk", which signifies that in Michael's Roaring Rampage of Revenge against those who convicted his father, his final target is the prosecuting attorney, Alex. The trope counts as Type 5 for Alex and Walker to be named Michael's final targets after the he kills Scaggs, but it also counts as Type 1 for Alex's surname turning up incomplete.
