Seeking the Missing, Finding the Dead

"My boss has been missing for two days. Which, in this town, means that I should probably start by looking at the bottom of the river."

— Rachel Dawes, Batman Begins

When someone is on the hunt for a missing person but finds out that the person is no longer alive—either recently deceased or long dead. Often a result of realizing that someone is Never a Runaway.

This usually comes as a surprise, but if someone has been missing for a very long time, there may be doubts whether he is still alive, and finding the corpse merely proves those suspicions.

Usually overlaps with Late to the Tragedy. Tragic when it involved Searching for the Lost Relative. Contrast Never Found the Body, where the presumed dead is really missing.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water: At the beginning of the series, Jean tells Nadia that he wants to build an airplane so he can search for his father, who went missing at sea years ago. In the 16th episode, he learns his search would've been in vain, when he finds his father's tombstone in the Atlantean graveyard.
• In A Place Further than the Universe, Shirase's main goal is to find her Missing Mom in Antarctica. Gin, a close friend of Shirase's mother, tells Shirase that her mother is almost certainly dead after being missing for three years. At the end of Episode 12, Shirase finds her mother's laptop and sees that all 1,105 emails that she sent (one per day since her mother's disappearance) were unread, so she realizes that her mother is dead.
• In Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, Kamina's father went to the surface and never came back. Kamina wants to go there and find him.... But in the second episode, he finds his old man's skeleton.

Comic Books

• The first issue of Mouse Guard has Saxon, Kenzie, and Lieam searching for a missing grain merchant. They find him in the belly of the serpent that Lieam kills.

Fan Works

• This is the entire reason Mike Schmidt comes back night after night in Something Always Remains: he's hoping to find out what happened to Jeremy Fitzgerald before the place shuts down, and learns that he was murdered in the Spring Bonnie suit.

Film — Animation

• Finding Dory: Subverted. Dory is told by the other blue tangs that her parents went to Quarantine to look for her, and that fish who don't come back from Quarantine have been euthanized. Dory's parents actually made it out of Quarantine and reached the ocean.

Film — Live-Action

• Avalanche Sharks: Madison and Wade (who are looking for Wade's missing brother) and Carol and Randy (who are looking for Carol's missing cousin) don't actually find them, but they do find signs which let them know what happened (goggles belonging to Carol's cousin, and witnessing the sharks attacking someone near where Wade's brother disappeared respectively) that gives them a good enough idea of what happened.
• Dragonslayer. After Princess Elspeth enters the dragon's cave, Galen follows her in order to rescue her. He finds the dragon's hatchlings feeding on her corpse.
• The Host (2006): Hyun-seo is swallowed by the creature and suffocates shortly before her father Gang-du can rescue her. Se-joo survives being swallowed, and Gang-du adopts him.
• Jumanji in the alternate timeline which arises from the impact of the titular game, Alan emerges from being trapped in the game for twenty-five years and goes looking for his parents. A man squatting in his dad's old factory building steers him toward the local cemetery, where he finds the graves of his parents. It turns out his father had devoted himself to searching for him.
• Return Engagement: In this Heroic Bloodshed film, mob leader Lung Ho-tin gets imprisoned in Canada for 18 years over a gang war, leaving behind his young daughter which was sent back to Hong Kong. Upon release, he immediately made his way to Hong Kong to reunite with her, only to discover she actually died a year earlier; the girl he assumed was his daughter for most of the movie is only a friend who keeps her death a secret to avoid hurting Lung.
• The Searchers. Ethan Edwards and Martin Pawley ride out to find Martin's two sisters, who were kidnapped by Comanche raiders. They soon find the older sister's body. (The younger sister lives, and the search for her takes up the majority of the film.)
• In Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, Anakin tries to track down his mother and finds that she's been kidnapped by Tusken Raiders. He gets to her just in time to have her die in his arms, and he doesn't take it well.
• In The Thing (1982), this is the fate of Fuchs, who goes missing and then later his body is found burned in the snow. Mac speculates that the Thing found him and he immolated himself with his flare to stop the abomination from killing and assimilating him.
• Ugly (2014) is about the search for a kidnapped girl who turns out to be dead by the end.
• Uncommon Valor: A grieving father and retired army colonel recruits a squad of Vietnam War veterans to go back and rescue American prisoners of war, including his long-missing son. In the end, the squad rescues the POWs—but not his son, who is revealed to have died of an illness some time ago.

Literature

• In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Hagrid reveals to Harry, Ron, and Hermione that Dumbledore sent him to convince the giants to join forces with the order. He says that he took the opportunity to look up his mother, who abandoned him and his father when he was three, while he was at it, and that he found out she died.
• In the book series Pretty Little Liars Alison Dilaurentis was thought to be missing for three years, but it turned out she had been dead and buried under her family's gazebo all along.
• Redwall:
  • In Rakkety Tam, Gulo the Savage is seeking revenge on his brother Askor, who stole The Walking Stone and fled. Unbeknownst to him, Askor had a tree fall on him and died of his injuries before Gulo reached Mossflower. Rakkety Tam finally tells Gulo, "Thou art looking for a deadbeast" and claims to have killed Askor.
  • Subverted in The Taggerung of the same series. Ruggan Bor thinks Gruven is lying about being The Taggering by virtue of killing the previous one, who hasn't been seen since he ran away. Upon a visit to Redwall Abbey, Deyna the otter confirms Gruvan's story. However, Deyna is lying. He is the missing Taggerung. Ruggan, having his confirmation, promptly beheads Gruvan to take the title.
• The Saga of Grettir the Strong: The morning after Glam has not returned from his job of herding sheep in the haunted valley of Forsaeludal on Christmas Eve, the people of Thorhallsstadir look for him and find his dead, blackened body at the upper end of the valley, with nearby traces of a great fight indicating he has been killed by the unknown creature that haunts Forsaeludal.
• In the Sherlock Holmes short story "The Adventure of the Priory School", Holmes and Watson are seeking two people; a young aristocrat and a schoolmaster. The child is found alive and relatively well, the schoolmaster is dead.
• The Silkworm: Leonora Quine hires Cormoran Strike to find her serial adulterer husband Owen, figuring he's wandered off somewhere. After Leonora (who isn't terribly bright) offhandedly mentions that her husband owns another London house, Strike goes there. He discovers Owen Quine, dead and horribly mutilated.
• While My Pretty One Sleeps: Initially, no one knows Ethel is dead and Neeve spends nearly the first half of the book trying to figure out where she might've gone, feeling there's something wrong about her just taking off like this. Most of the other characters dismiss Neeve's suspicions... until Kitty Conway discovers Ethel's body in Morrison State Park, at which point the characters realise she's been Dead All Along.

Live-Action TV

• A slight variation in the eighth season of 24 in which CTU is searching for the president of another country that was kidnapped while the beginning of his execution is being broadcast but find that the broadcast was a recording and that the president was already dead.
• All Saints: Shortly after Dan and Erica's wedding, the latter disappears, with Dan eager to find his wife. She's later found murdered, and Dan leaves the hospital out of grief.
• Inverted in an episode of Bones, "The Elephant in the Room." After the gang identifies a corpse as not a newsworthy missing child but actually another, non-newsworthy child, Booth says, "Why do we only care about dead bodies?" and proceeds to find the missing child in about five minutes.
• In CSI: NY, Mac's wife's grown-up son (whom she gave up for adoption before meeting Mac) shows up. Mac has to explain that she died on 9/11.
• At play throughout Endeavour, and even lampshaded in the pilot episode when a character refers to the missing person investigation as a murder investigation before the body has been found.
• Forever: After forty years together, the difference in apparent ages between mortal Abigail and The Ageless Henry, and the stares and whispers it produced, grew to be too much for Abigail and she left Henry with a note saying she needed a little time to think. Although Henry always was sure Abigail wouldn't have left him hanging, would have let him know if she had actually decided not to come back to him, after a year of obsessive searching yielded nothing, their son Abe pushed him into giving up on finding her and took away his String Theory Stalker Shrine. She would be 94 if still alive at the start of the series, so her dying since then was a likely possibility either way. But when a new clue appears, Abe secretly pursues it, and eventually they track it down and discover her ultimate fate. While she was deciding what to do, The Older Immortal Adam met her as a nurse, and her reaction to his claim of immortality gave away the fact that she had met another immortal in the past. He kidnapped her trying to get her to tell him where to find this other immortal, and in the end she killed herself rather than risk being forced to betray Henry. Tragically, Henry finds a letter she'd written asking him to come join her and be together again, but she died before she got the chance to send it.
• For the first arc or so of Kamen Rider Gaim, Kouta and his friends intermittently search for their missing friend Yuya. They eventually find that he's not only dead but he mutated into the first Monster of the Week and Kouta killed him back in the first episode.
• There have been at least a couple of inversions in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit that the detectives have looked for a dead person only to find that she was missing for all those years, staying with or waiting for her kidnapper.
• Murder, She Wrote: In the episode "No Laughing Murder", Phil Rinker goes missing after Murray gets stabbed in the shoulder, and before most of the guests can locate him again, he turns up hanged in the store room.
• In an episode of NYPD Blue, the officers are looking for a missing child, and Andy has a bad feeling about it. Sure enough, they find the body in an empty lot not far from his apartment complex. "He died looking at his house!"
• In Oliver's Travels, the purpose of Oliver's travels is to find his friend who left town in a hurry after getting on the wrong side of a criminal conspiracy. Eventually he comes to the town his friend settled in, and on asking a local where he can find his friend is given directions to the friend's grave.
• In the first season of Once Upon a Time a woman goes missing and a search eventually turns up a human heart which DNA testing proves to be hers. It's ultimately subverted when, a few episodes later, she turns up very much alive. Someone altered the test results.
• Over the first half of Person of Interest's fifth season, Fusco starts tracking several missing persons cases. In the sixth episode, he finds most of them dead and only narrowly escapes being buried with them.
• In Psych, "A Very Juliet Episode", Juliet is trying to locate an old boyfriend with which she was supposed to meet but never appeared. Shawn starts investigating and finds out the guy had died a couple years ago in a car accident but suspects it wasn't actually an accident...It turned out he was still alive, and in a witness protection program, and they just blew his cover.
• In the Supernatural episode "All Hell Breaks Loose, Part One" (S02, Ep21), Dean finds his brother only to watch Jake murder his brother moments later.
• In the first half of season 2 of The Walking Dead, the group is trying to find Sophia. They stayed at Hershel's farm until they could find that person. But at the mid-season finale, they discover that Hershel kept a barn full of walkers and when they freed the walkers to kill them, they discover that the last walker to leave the barn was Sophia, who was bitten.
• This is the Downer Ending for a few Without a Trace episodes. Most of the time the team is able to find the missing person but sometimes all they can do is find the body and give the person's next of kin some closure. The show often lampshades the fact that the longer someone is missing, the smaller the chance of finding him/her alive.

Video Games

• ANNIE: Last Hope have a side mission where you try locating two of your close friends, the father-daughter-duo Mike and Jessica, after finding out they might be still alive, to bring them back to the survivors. You find them after escaping from zombies, in a clearing - Mike having hung himself to death, and Jessica already dead and buried because Mike is forced to Mercy Kill her after she gets turned into a zombie.
• Arrogation: Unlight of Day revolves around your quest to locate your sister, who went missing in an allegedly haunted village. You travelled there to uncover a decades-old conspiracy about an Apocalypse Cult, and needs to save her from a Human Sacrifice ritual, but unfortunately you can't save her at this point.
• Atelier Totori: Totori was looking for her missing mother, only to find a grave. It turns out that Totori had known her mother was dead, but had forgotten because she couldn't handle the truth before.
• In Mordecai's backstory in Borderlands, he apparently came to Pandora looking for someone who turned out to be dead and decided to join the other vault hunters in looking for the vault.
• Quite frequent in Borderlands 2 where if you're tasked with finding someone, chances are they're already dead (often with an ECHO recorder nearby to conveniently explain how they died). The times where they're still alive, you're hired to rectify that problem.
• In City of Heroes, kidnapped/missing people could usually be found alive, but sometimes not:
  • One Carnival of Shadows mission has you finding a missing track star as a Carnival strongman; a medical examination reveals he's actually a zombie.
  • A mini-story arc that has you on the trail of a man who was kidnapped from prison ends with you discovering that the Malta Group removed his brain to power one of their cyborg Titans, and you have to Mercy Kill him.
  • In The Underground Incarnate trial, when you first arrive, Vanessa DeVore is still alive. However, she's discovered by the bad guys in the area, and despite retreating further and further underground, is killed before you can find her.
• Dragon Age II contains a heartbreaking variation of this. Hawke's mother is taken captive by a serial kidnapper/killer that you'd been chasing. By the time you reach her, she's dead. Well, close enough.
• In Illusion of Gaia, Will's goal is to find his father. He finds his father's corpse in the Tower of Babel, shortly before the final battle.
• In Knights of the Old Republic, after you fully join the Jedi Order on Dantooine, you're sent to investigate nearby ruins, and discover what happened to the last Jedi sent there. You find that the Jedi has been killed by ancient droids in the ruins.
• In Knights of the Old Republic II, Lonna Vash, one of the Jedi Masters you're looking for is killed by Darth Sion before you find her.
• Life Is Strange originally follows Max as she's dragged into Chloe's search for the missing Rachel Amber, before escalating into the hunt for a serial sexual assaulter who likes taking pictures of his victims and demoralizing them into suicide. When you find Rachel, in Episode 4, she's long dead.
• Mass Effect:
  • A side-quest has an Alliance Admiral trying to find out about a squad of his, who've all dropped off the grid. Exploring the galaxy finds they were lured into a Thresher Maw nest and killed, thanks to Cerberus.
  • Another has the brother of a ship captain ask Shepard to look for his missing brother. Eventually the ship's found derelict, having been attacked by pirates. Shepard at least prevents them from harming anyone else.
• Many, many side missions in Mass Effect 3 end like this: you find more people dead or dying than ones still able to fight.
• Mass Effect: Andromeda: Two side-quests on Kadara and one on Eos.
  • An angaara asks Ryder to look for her missing sister. Ryder quickly finds them nearby, in the sewer pipes. The highly poisonous sewer pipes, where she died. Another quest has a salarian "businessman" ask them to look for one of his workers out mining in the badlands. Ryder finds their corpse in a cave, amazingly (for Kadara) not having died of malicious causes; he just fell and broke his neck.
  • Examining Remnant ruins on Eos finds some notes from one of the Site 1 scientists who went missing before everything went to crap. Ryder tracks her notes to an out-of-the-way Remnant bunker, where they find her long-desiccated corpse, having been shot by the security 'bots.
• Night in the Woods: Mae comes home to find out her friend Casey disappeared without a word a while back. No one aside from his parents seems too concerned — Mae's other friends theorize he simply skipped town like he always wanted to. But there are multiple hints something may have happened to him, culminating in the climax of the game, when you find out that the cultists kidnapped him and sacrificed him to the Black Goat, figuring he wouldn't be missed. Mae and her friends are all horrified by this, and to make matters worse, because no one will ever believe them about the cult, and all the cultists are dead (or close to it) by the end of the game, meaning there's no proof for their story, they can't tell anyone about what they saw. Casey's parents will never know the truth.
• One quest in Rakenzarn Tales involves searching for people who've all gone missing in the vicinity of a remote inn. They were all fed to giant insects.
• Resistance 2 has an example of this, when Shepherd has been sent to locate a team of scientists and their guard only to find them dead.
• The Trader of Stories Chapter III has two examples: Reyle, whom Myo finds alive, but who doesn't survive the road back home, and Kesaj, who upon finding is definitely dead (living people tend to have more flesh).
• The Witcher 3 offers several "find the missing person" secondary quests. Almost all of the missing persons are already dead, and Geralt usually has to kill whatever was responsible.
• Many quests in World of Warcraft involve this, most notably the infamous quest to find Mankirk's wife. Many players didn't realize that the "battered corpse" was what they were looking for.
  • Subverted in one quest in the Azure Span where the player is sent into a cave to rescue some Tuskarr, including the quest-giver's husband; he appears to be dead, leading the player to assume the trope applies and they'll have to bring word back to his widow, but on inspecting the "corpse" he turns out to have just been Playing Possum.

Web Animation

• Llamas with Hats: At the end, after 15 long years and killing all life on the planet, Carl goes to seek Paul... only to find his skeleton inside of his apartment.
  Carl: Oh... I guess you're gone...

Western Animation

• Star Wars Rebels:
  • The episode "Rise Of The Old Masters" has the Ghost crew learn that Jedi Master Luminara Unduli apparently survived the destruction of the Jedi Order and is currently being held by the Empire. While on a rescue mission, the Ghost crew soon learn Luminara was Dead All Along.
  • In "Legacy", Ezra learns what happened to his parents, who were taken away by The Empire when he was very young: they were killed in a prison escape.

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