The Dead Guy Did It

"Oh but surely he simply shot himself and then hid the gun."

— Monty Python's Flying Circus

The culprit of a mystery turns out to be someone who is now dead.

This trope can be a nice way of playing with the audience's expectations because when a character is dead, we might automatically stop thinking of them as having once been an intelligent figure with agency and instead just think of them as a dead body. Thus the audience will not consider them a potential suspect. As a result, the dead guys in this trope will nearly always be a Posthumous Character. Furthermore, if the dead character is murdered and isn't known to be a bad person or have a motive to kill someone, the audience might get stuck thinking of them as just a victim and have trouble imagining them in a more active role.

Plus, there's generally an expectation that there will be some sort of face-off between the heroes and the villains, which this trope subverts. This may have the effect of the villain becoming a Karma Houdini.

If the character was mistakenly believed to have died, it will probably fall under Back from the Dead and Not Quite Dead.

A way that authors will often have their cake and eat it with this trope is to reveal that Two Dun It. One evildoer is dead, but there's still a living enemy for the protagonist to pursue.

Depending on the way they died, the following are subtropes:

• Accidental Suicide: The dead guy was actually responsible for their own accidental death.
• Accident, Not Murder: Stretching the definition of "doing it", it's possible the dead guy whose murder they're solving was not murdered at all.
• Dead Man's Switch: The dead guy does it after death.
• Posthumous Villain Victory: The dead guy got away with it even though he's dead.
• Resurrected Murderer: The murderer is Back from the Dead to kill again via occult forces.
• Suicide, Not Murder: For when a character "did it" in that they killed themselves rather than be murdered, which may or may not have been intentional.
• Suspect Existence Failure: Someone's death complicates a murder investigation because they can no longer be interrogated, whether they did commit the crime or not.
• Thanatos Gambit: They "did it" with regards to their own death with a greater plan in mind.
• Vengeful Ghost: Their ghost did it from beyond the grave.

If a character seeks to make people think that a dead character was responsible for a crime they themselves committed, then we're dealing with a Deceased Fall-Guy Gambit.

Compare and contrast Whodunnit to Me?, when the dead guy is investigating their own murder.

This is a Death Trope and is often associated with plot twists, so expect unmarked spoilers in the examples below!

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Case Closed:
  • The "Luxury Liner Serial Murder Case" story^note "Smooth Sailing" in the FUNimation dub (chapters 20-25 of the manga), in which the patriarch of a dysfunctional family, Gozo, is murdered, does this twice:
    • At first, the murder seems like a convoluted Locked Room Mystery because the only door to the victim's room was locked from the inside, but he was clearly killed by a stab wound and there's no weapon inside. Conan points out that there are blood drops in the entrance below the door, indicating that Gozo was stabbed while exiting the room. However, Kogoro is still stumped about how the door could still be locked from inside. Again with Conan's help, he realizes that Gozo himself locked the door from within after retreating inside, dying of his stab wound shortly afterwards.
    • When one of the suspects, Takeshi, is accused of killing Gozo, he is locked inside a room until they can make it to shore and turn him in to the police. Later, the room is found unlocked from the outside and another family member, Tatsuo, is found murdered. The others figure that Takeshi killed him, which still raises the question of how he could get out of a room that was locked from the outside. One of the family members, Joji, suggests that Tatsuo might have opened the door for Takeshi and offered to lie for him and give him an alibi for money since he had just found out that his fiancée, whom he had planned to marry just for the money, wouldn't inherit anything from Gozo when he died. He turns out to be wrong; the real killer killed Tatsuo when he saw the killer dispose of evidence and then opened Takeshi's door to frame him for that murder as well.
  • A particularly tragic example in the "Poisonous Coffee Case" (chapters 628-630 of the manga, episodes 513-514 of the anime as "Coffee Aroma with Murderous Intention"). The victim, a TV producer, is found poisoned in his apartment, in an apparent suicide since the apartment is locked from inside. Conan realizes that the crime scene has been tampered with and suspects Shogo, the president of a small production company who was working with the victim. In the end, Conan realizes that actual killer was Shogo's assistant, Maiko, who was in love with him and saw how much he suffered from being exploited by the victim. To stop this, she poisoned the victim in a straightforward murder, after which she called Shogo to say she loved him and then jumped off the balcony to her death. He found her on the ground, hid the body in his car and then staged the crime scene to protect her name.

Film — Animated

• Coco: The titular character's father, believed to have abandoned her back when she was a little kid, was actually murdered by Ernesto de la Cruz, who was long dead by the time the movie started.

Film — Live-Action

• In the 22 Jump Street, a college student named Cynthia is found dead from a drug called WHY-PHY loose on college campus, and Jenko and Schmidt believe Zook is the dealer due to an incriminating tattoo from a photograph and finding WHY-PHY in his bag. They later find out he was just a buyer/user and the posthumous Cynthia (who they originally thought was a victim) was the dealer.
• Clue: In the first ending, it's revealed that the first three murders (Mr. Boddy, the chef, and the motorist) were committed by Yvette, a later victim, on the behalf of Miss Scarlet, who kills her before this fact can be revealed.
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011): Lisbeth and Mikael are looking into Harriet's diary and her mysterious entries, which they link to a series of murders that happened throughout the 1960s. It turns out that the perpetrator of these was Harriet's dead father Gottfried, who drowned drunkenly the year before Harriet's disappearance and couldn't have been involved with it. It turns out to have been a Two Dun It case where Harriet and her older brother Martin were sexually abused by Gotffried and inducted into the serial killings. When Harriet killed Gottfried in self-defence after he raped her and Martin, Martin "took over" Gottfried's role and continued killing.
• Hereditary: The film begins with Annie's mother Ellen having already died and Annie dealing with (or, more to the point, not dealing with) Ellen's death as Annie worries increasingly that Ellen is Back from the Dead. She's not, but she did give her granddaughter Charlie to Paimon, resulting in her getting possessed, and brought the cult to them that eventually orchestrated the deaths of the entire family except Peter, and Peter's possession.
• Knives Out: Fairly early in the film, it's revealed that Harlan Thombrey wasn't murdered, but committed suicide after being administered what he thought was a fatal overdose of morphine by Marta, wanting to save her from prosecution. However, it's later shown that this is Played With, as Ransom switched the medicines in an attempt to kill Harlan, and he was actually given the correct dose by Marta.
• Parodied in Murder by Death: Lionel Twain's death was engineered by Lionel Twain himself as part of a Thanatos Gambit to humiliate the foremost detectives of the day. Twain is a brilliant inventor, so they speculate that he built a stabbing rig to stab him repeatedly in the back with a kitchen knife. Turns out that none of that actually happened; Twain simply used a lifelike representative of his own body (and the cook, for that matter) to fool everyone into thinking he was dead, while Twain was using Latex Perfection to impersonate the butler the whole time.
• Prisoners: The dead man in the priest's basement, who was murdered after he confessed to being a child predator, is also the kidnapper and Serial Killer of many children — with the help of his wife Holly, who is still posing as the aunt of their surviving victim, Brian/Alex.
• Smallpox: The Patient Zero who purposefully loosed smallpox upon New York City at rush hour, killing millions, is found weeks later having died by suicide via an OD on the day he started the outbreak and led to the near-collapse of society after a massive manhunt to find him. He is never identified nor are his reasons.

Literature

• And Then There Were None: Played with. The killer fakes his own death early in the story, in order to be able to kill off the rest of the cast one by one, then commits suicide in a way that corresponds with his reported death. He does reveal how the entire thing went down using a Message in a Bottle to the police.
• In The Big Sleep, Arthur Geiger, a photographer that Philip Marlowe is hired to deal with when he blackmails Carmen Sternwood, a daughter of the Sternwood family. Eventually, Marlowe finds Geiger murdered; having to leave, he returns later and finds the body gone. Later, the Sternwood family's car is found driven off a pier with the chauffeur dead inside. Marlowe's investigation takes him to Joe Brody, another man who had blackmailed Carmen before. Upon questioning Brody, Marlowe figures that Geiger was killed by the chauffeur, Owen Taylor, who did it to protect Carmen from Geiger's blackmail, after which Brody knocked him out, robbed him of a recently used reel of nude photos Geiger had taken of Carmen and possibly pushed him and the car off the pier.
• The Burning Room: One of Harry Bosch's two cases has him investigating a 20-year-old cold case, the Bonnie Brae fire that killed five children and one day-care worker. He eventually discovers that the fire was a plot to distract the police from the robbery of a check-cashing business, and that the perpetrators were two Historical Domain Characters, bank robbers who died a couple of years later in the 1997 North Hollywood shootout.
• The last Hercule Poirot novel, Curtain, does this with all three characters who die in the present day of the story in some way:
  • Barbara Franklin is fatally poisoned via her coffee... and turns out to have poisoned the coffee herself, intending to murder her husband, but accidentally drank from his cup when Hastings, unaware of all this, rotated the table the cup sat on looking for something.
  • Stephen Norton as a murder victim matches this trope. Months after his and Poirot's deaths, he turns out to have been the mysterious X who manipulated several people in the past to commit murders or attempted murders, including the ones that happened in the present. He is also on the "victim" end of the trope in that he was killed by Poirot in a staged suicide by gunshot, after which Poirot stopped taking his heart medication in order to end his own life.
• Judge Dee: In "The Chinese Maze Murders", General Ding's murderer turns out to be ex-Governor Yoo, who had died several years before. Yoo was aware of Ding's treasonous behavior and determined to enforce a Karma Houdini Warranty, but could not act for fear of his family being punished alongside him. So he gave the general a posthumous gift to be used on his 60th birthday, a spring-loaded brush that would inevitably propel a poisoned dart into Ding's face or throat.
• Millennium Series: Lisbeth and Mikael are looking into Harriet's diary and her mysterious entries, which they link to a series of murders that happened throughout the 1960s. It turns out that the perpetrator of these was Harriet's dead father, Gottfried, who drowned drunkenly the year before Harriet's disappearance and couldn't have been involved with it. It turns out to have been a Two Dun It case where Harriet and her older brother Martin were sexually abused by Gotffried and inducted into the serial killings. When Harriet killed Gottfried in self-defence after he raped her and Martin, Martin "took over" Gottfried's role and continued killing.
• Subverted in Moonflower Murders. In story-within-a-story Atticus Pund Takes The Case. Francis Pendleton is stabbed to death after the strangulation of his wife, the famous actress Melissa. It's revealed that Francis was killed in act of vengeance by Melissa's Loony Fan Madeline because he had strangled Melissa. The twist is that while he did that, he didn't kill her - he "simply" strangled her into unconsciousness. She called her lover, and he strangled her to death.
• Solar Pons: In "The Adventure of the Grice-Paterson Curse", Pons tells Parker that the true killer has been decades: being the result of a revenge plot set up decades ago and allowed to continue after the instigator's death because no one else knew about it, until it eventually killed someone unconnected to the killer.
• Wings of Fire: The second book The Lost Heir revolves around finding out who is killing Queen Coral's daughters before they hatch. It turns out the culprit is Orca, Coral's oldest daughter who died challenging her for the throne years before the story starts. She had used her secret animus powers to enchant a statue in the hatchery to kill any female relatives of hers, intending to kill potential competitors when she took power, but due to her death it ended up killing Coral's future children instead.

Live-Action TV

• Bones:
  • The episode "The Death of the Queen Bee" features two murders: Sarah Tidwyler, who was killed 15 years in the past, and Evelyn Simms, who was killed in the present. Both had their ribs cut out after being killed, suggesting a connection to an urban legend serial killer in area. When Booth and Brennan arrest the killer, Evelyn's friend Julie Coyle, it turns out that she and Evelyn killed Sarah together so they could date her boyfriend, Brad. Evelyn and Brad stayed together and even got married; Julie, still hung up on Brad, then killed Evelyn the same way they killed Sarah, planning to get together with Brad with Evelyn gone.
  • In the episode "The Nail in the Coffin", the victim Stephanie McNamara is initially believed to be the latest victim of the Ghost Killer, a Serial Killer whose murders are only connected by the fact the victim is missing a fingernail. However, further investigation into Stephanie's background revealed that her travel history matches up with the time and place of the previous killings, meaning she was the Ghost Killer all along.
• A semi-common occurrence in Cold Case, where the doer will frequently die before the truth comes out due to the length of time passed:
  • Downplayed in "The Letter". One of the men who gang-raped Sadie and led to her death had died of old age. However, at least two of the other participants are still alive.
  • Played with in "The Boy in the Box". Sister Grace, who has recently died of old age, had to give up her son Arnold. But because of his bad behavior (which may be ADD, Aspergers, or just kid stuff) such as his extreme hyperactivity, he wasn't getting adopted. Out of desperation, Grace tried to seek behavioural therapy for him, which resulted in his accidental death, and she covered it up. They end up Together in Death.
  • In "Committed", the head doctor who convinced Anika and Anton to abandon Bettie outside where she froze to death has already died when the Cold Case team figure it out.
  • In "A Perfect Day", the remains of a four-year-old girl are found under a bridge, from which she was thrown in 1965. It's revealed that her father was a Domestic Abuser and a police officer who threw her off to destroy her mother after she tried to leave him. However, the father died years previously with his public reputation still intact.
  • In "Lonely Hearts", con man Ramon Delgado commits suicide. Investigation into his death reveals that he and his unknown lover/partner Martha Puck were serial murderers.
  • In "Strange Fruit", the long dead Henry Jones had raped his maid Mathilde. He, his brother Billy and their cronies killed Zeke after he threatened to expose them all.
  • "Beautiful Little Fool" and "Torn" are both set around 80 years prior, so it's obvious that the killers wouldn't live to the present.
  • Clem from ''8 Years" turned out to have been murdered by local crime boss Mac. Petey, in turn, killed Mac.
• Death in Paradise: In Season 4's "Stab in the Dark", the victim, Elias Thomson, is killed in the middle of a séance in a dark room. During the séance, the candle in the middle of the table is somehow blown out and a bell in the room rings, which the superstitious in the episode attribute to something spiritual and becomes a significant sticking point in the investigation. It turns out that the candle was blown out by Elias Thomson himself just before he was murdered; he had set up the séance and gotten help from a partner, who rang the bell and killed him in the dark, to put on a show of expelling a ghost locals believed haunted his property, which got in the way of Thomson's plans.
• In one episode of Law & Order, the detectives and district attorney are trying to solve a murder that appears to have been done by a hitman who was hired by either the dead man's Gold Digger wife or her lover. Then they learn that the dead man borrowed a lot of money from an old friend, which makes them think he might be the guilty party. It turns out that the dead man himself hired the hitman. He was going broke and was about to be indicted, and he wanted to frame both the wife and the lover as retaliation for the affair. He only left a video confession to be played in the event that the officers tried to arrest his friend.
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit:
  • In "Tangled", a wealthy doctor Max is brutally beaten to death (and his wife Peyton raped) during a home invasion by a mentally unstable man, Vincent. It turned out that Max and his mistress Laura had hired Vincent to rape and kill Peyton (and attack but obviously not kill Max) in that home invasion so Max and Laura could run away together. Unfortunately, Vincent was obsessed with Laura and killed Max out of jealousy.
  • "Signature": The episode starts with the finding of two bodies, a tortured woman and a jogger who was shot in the head. The woman is soon determined to have been the victim of a Serial Killer known as The Woodsman, and the man is assumed to have been a bystander who stumbled upon the killer visiting the body. Then it turns out the guy is The Woodsman, and he was killed in a Vigilante Execution.
• The Mentalist: In the episode "The Red Tattoo", the primary victim is a gymnastics coach named Chad Parkman, who died of a stab wound in a locked apartment, barely having the time to say, "He stabbed me" before he bleeds to death. Later in the episode, another man, Devin Frost, is found shot and killed. It turns out that Parkman killed Frost, having been blackmailed by him, and was stabbed by him in the altercation. However, the injury wasn't immediately noticed, and he went to the apartment to use a makeshift slingshot to dispose of the gun he used. When he exerted himself to pull back the slingshot and launched the gun away, the stab wound was exacerbated so badly that a major artery was opened and he bled to death.
• Midsomer Murders:
  • In the second episode of the series, "Written in Blood", the first victim is a writer, Gerald Hadleigh, who is bludgeoned to death. Earlier, he had asked another member of his writing group not to leave him alone with their special guest, a celebrity writer named Max Jennings. On the night of the get-together, the two of them do end up alone for a while when Jennings forgets his gloves and goes back for them. Hadleigh and Jennings shared drinks and some tense remarks, after which Jennings left. Because he would have had the time to kill Hadleigh, Barnaby and Troy consider Jennings a suspect... but then Jennings turns up dead too, having been poisoned. Barnaby and Troy later discover that Jennings had known Hadleigh when they were younger and had used his traumatic childhood as the basis for his bestselling book. When they also learn that Jennings seemed lightheaded when he left Hadleigh's home, they realize that Hadleigh killed Jennings and not the other way around; he actually took the gloves to give him a reason to go back inside and poisoned him via the drink he served him. Hadleigh's killer turned out to be another member of the writing group.
  • All over the place in the episode "Destroying Angel". The first murder we see is of a hotel employee, Gregory Chambers, who is shot dead with a bow and arrow. Over the course of the episode, three more people are murdered, all of whom, along with Gregory, in some way inherited a share of the hotel and its estate after the owner, Mr. Wainwright, passed away: Gregory's wife and the hotel manager Suzanna, the hotel chef Tristan, and Kenneth, the husband of another beneficiary of the will. It turns out that all three of the later victims actually killed both Gregory and Mr. Wainwright; the latter when he found that the inheritors were planning to sell off the estate rather than keep running it and wrote a new will, leading to the group killing him and making it look like natural causes so they would keep the inheritance, and Gregory because he knew the truth. The three conspirators were killed indirectly by a woman named Evelyn Pope, who tricked Kenneth's wife into killing Suzanna and used unwitting proxies to stage accidents for the rest.
  • Combined with Two Dun It in the episode "The Sleeper Under The Hill". In this episode, the killer of the first two victims eventually becomes the third victim at the hands of the episode's true mastermind, who manipulated him into killing the other victims and leading the investigation astray.
• In the Psych episode "Black and Tan: A Crime of Fashion", a fashion designer is killed by electrocution via tampered mic. The wife is first suspect but she ends up dead at his funeral by poison. Then they go after the assistant but she too almost dies from poisoning. As it turns out, the wife and husband killed each other. The reason why the wife took so long to die is that the husband poisoned her health drink but she was bulimic.
• On Resident Alien, the main character, Harry Vanderspeigle, is an alien who pulled a Kill and Replace on the human doctor Harry Vanderspeigle, assuming his form. Harry then lives in the doctor's isolated cabin, searching for his Kill All Humans device, until he is summoned to the nearby town of Patience to diagnose the cause of the death of the town doctor, Sam Hodges. It is discovered that he was poisoned in a manner that caused him to choke to death, eventually revealed to be Botulinum toxin. In the first season finale, it is revealed that he was murdered by the human Harry Vanderspeigle. The second season reveals why he did it.
• Oh Il-Nam, contestant 001 from Squid Game, is killed early on. Its revealed in the end that he created the game itself.

Video Games

• Parodied in A Hat in Time. In the level "Murder on the Owl Express", Hat Girl can accuse the victim himself of being the murderer. The "victim" then proceeds to drop his act and confesses that he faked his death because it was his turn to clean the floor that day and he didn't want to.
• Master Detective Archives: Rain Code:
  • Chapter 2 concerns the deaths of Aiko, who died six months ago, and Karen, who was killed by a Not-So-Fake Prop Weapon on stage in the present day. It turns out Karen was the one who murdered Aiko, and Aiko's friends conspired to kill Karen together out of Revenge.
  • Chapter 4 has two victims: a Mad Scientist is sent a calling card by an assassin, and is killed in his locked lab, which is protected by a Deadly Gas chamber among other lethal traps. Then, Yakou Furio, Da Chief of the protagonist's detective agency, is stabbed by the assassin as they're fleeing. The Awful Truth of the case is that Yakou is the culprit: he knowingly subjected himself to the gas to kill the first victim, knowing it takes 30 minutes for the gas to kill, and hired the assassin to kill himself to disguise his cause of death.
• In the finale of Laura Bow: The Colonel's Bequest, the heroine encounters two suspects struggling over a gun, neither of whom are responsible for most of the murders that occurred that night. Lillian committed those; Rudy shot her when she tried to add him to the list. Then Rudy took advantage of her crimes so he could shoot the Colonel, the last family member alive, for a different reason. If Laura doesn't figure this out and sides with him in the battle, he will frame the deceased Colonel for Lillian's murders. Cue the bad ending!
• Persona 2: When the conspiracy theory book "In Lak'ech" was published and immediately turned into a Tome of Eldritch Lore due to the Rumour Curse, the protagonists naturally wonder how did the book even come to be, and why it was so important in the Masked Circle's plans. Shortly afterwards, Maya Okamura reveals that she was one of the three authors of the book, alongside the long since dead Akinari Kashihara, and Tatsuya Sudou, who the protagonists killed just a few days before the book's publication. She has no idea who took the book for publishing, though, as Akinari made it clear that it should never see the light of day.

Visual Novels

• Ace Attorney:
  • Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: In Turnabout Samurai, Jack Hammer was presumed to be an ordinary and innocent murder victim. Phoenix later uncovers that he's not only the person who drugged and impersonated Will Powers, but that his murder was actually an act of self-defense on the part of Dee Vasquez, who Hammer was going to kill (due to her blackmailing him).
  • Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice: In the third episode, "The Rite of Turnabout", Maya Fey is accused of being a Serial Killer who has been hunting those sympathetic to the Defiant Dragons, a group of revolutionaries who were challenging the leaders of the Kingdom of Khura'in. Specifically she's charged with killing two people, a high priest and an acolyte. It later turns out that the acolyte was the actual Serial Killer, who was killed by his next intended victim, the high priest's pregnant wife. As proving that acolyte's death was in self defense would be impossible due to the kingdom's Kangaroo Court, and not to mention that both the priest and the wife were indeed members of the Defiant Dragons, the priest sought to protect his wife by committing suicide in a way to make it look like Maya was the killer.
  • The Great Ace Attorney: A decade prior to the game's events, a killer, referred to as the "Professor", was murdering members of the British nobility, only to stop after the death of his fifth and final victim, Klint van Zieks. Genshin Asogi, an invitee from Japan studying police detective work, was charged, convicted, and executed as the killer. In the latter half of The Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve, Ryunosuke manages to uncover the truth; Genshin only killed one man, Klint, because Klint was the real "Professor" and chose to face Genshin in a duel when Genshin figured out the truth.
• Happens sometimes in the Danganronpa series.
  • Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc:
    • Downplayed in the first chapter, as Sayaka's killer is still alive at the class trial, but most of the heavy lifting in setting up the murder and framing Makoto was done by Sayaka herself; she was the one who took the murder weapon (a knife) from the kitchen, and she swapped rooms with Makoto to cast suspicion on him before inviting the culprit to her room, trying to kill him, failing horribly, and ending up murdered herself for her trouble (though it was an Accidental Murder in the manga). Figuring out Sayaka's plot takes up most of the trial, and all the culprit did himself (aside from the murder) was clean his hair from the room and burn his bloody shirt.
    • In the fourth chapter, despite a plethora of red herrings pointing to Toko, Yasuhiro, and Aoi, Sakura Ogami's death turns out to be Suicide, Not Murder. Toko and Yasuhiro both hit Sakura on the head with glass bottles, but this just temporarily knocked her out, and Aoi deliberately planted the evidence against herself in a plot to get everyone killed for voting wrong.
  • In the fifth chapter of Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, Nagito Komaeda, the victim of the case, intentionally set things up so he would die and the traitor would unknowingly kill him by sheer luck, resulting in no one being able to vote correctly and the traitor going free. In a real court of law it would be easily ruled a suicide, but Monokuma has a vested interest in students dying and instead rules the person who unknowingly struck the final blow as the killer.
  • In Danganronpa 3 Future Arc, the identity of the attacker killing off members of the Future Foundation is Chairman Kazuo Tengan, who dies halfway through but is able to keep killing because his method of murder is pre-recorded despair videos that drive his victims to suicide.
  • In the fifth chapter of Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, Kokichi pulls a similar gambit to Nagito and sets up the fifth murder case with himself as the victim and Kaito as his "killer", with the intention of creating a murder case even Big Bad Monokuma doesn't know the answer to.
• Shinrai: Broken Beyond Despair:
  • The murderer of Momoko Mori and Hiro Shiratake who also attempts to murder Kotoba Gaikoku is none other than Momoko herself, who faked her hanging, killed Hiro, set up the fire to kill Kotoba, and then hanged herself for real. The characters only realize she is the culprit after she's dead.
  • An alternative theory that Raiko believes for much of the story is that Hiro killed Momoko, and Momoko's best friend Kamen killed him and Kotoba in revenge. However, if Raiko proposes this theory, Kamen will be arrested, resulting in a bad ending.

Web Videos

• Edgar Allan Poe's Murder Mystery Dinner Party: Played with. Eddie Dantes is the first victim, found face down in the red herring soup and declared dead by Charlotte Bronte. The partygoers slowly uncover that every guest had a reason to want Eddie dead, muddying the suspect list as guests die off one by one. But when Annabel is reminded that Eddie was the one who made the guest list for her to give to Poe, she realizes it wasn't that the guests had motive to kill Eddie — Eddie had motive to kill them. Eddie had actually faked his death with the help of Charlotte, his accomplice, and is responsible for the whole murder scheme.

Western Animation

• DuckTales (2017): Played with in "McMystery at McDuck McManor!". Scrooge disappears from his birthday party (arranged by Huey, despite Scrooge's protests), where all the guests are Scrooge's enemies (because Louie made the guest list at the last minute). After painstaking investigation and the reveal of a ghost's involvement, the boys discover that the ghost was actually Duckworth, Scrooge's deceased butler mentioned throughout the episode. He took Scrooge in order to save him from his enemies... and the sub-par party.
• King of the Hill: The mystery of who killed Debbie Grund ended with the revelation that she accidentally killed herself. She was hiding in a dumpster with a shotgun in order to kill Buck Strickland, then got hungry and went to get some nachos and a drink from the Bland Name 7-Eleven across the street. She returned to the dumpster but couldn't climb in while juggling all three items, so she put the shotgun in first. When she climbed in, her foot accidentally tripped the hammer, causing the shotgun to fire, killing her.

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