History Main / CrimeAfterCrime

* The first half of ''Manga/DeathNote'' involves this. At first, Light receives the Death Note but thinks it must be a prank. He tests it out on two people and finds out that it really does work. At this point, he decides to kill criminals, but then the police start to get suspicious, so he starts killing people who are connected with the investigation, as well as criminals.

[[folder:FanFic]]

[[folder:Films -- Live-Action]]

* ''Series/MidsomerMurders'': "Talking to the Dead" is a textbook example. The original crime (which the viewer only learns about after several murders) was the comparatively minor one of stealing goods that were already stolen. When of the crooks they were stealing from discovered them, the murderer killed him and blackmailed his accomplice into helping him dispose of the body. However, things quickly escalated and he committed three subsequent murders to prevent his crimes from being discovered and would have committed a fourth if Barnaby had not caught him.

** The BigBad of ''Trials and Tribulations'' ([[spoiler:Dahlia Hawthorne]]) killed their sister to keep her from talking about a fake kidnapping they had staged years ago to steal a jewel from their family. [[labelnote:Spoiler elaboration]]After that, she (count with us now!) 1) tried to frame her ex-boyfriend who was already convicted by the staged kidnapping; 2) when he was about to be cleared she convinced him to commit suicide so he wouldn't tell the truth to the court; 3) poisoned a lawyer that was tracking her; 4) hid the poison with a young Phoenix, disguising it as a gift of love; 5) she tried to get the poison back from him by killing him, only to end up killing another ex-boyfriend and 6) framing Phoenix for it. After that, she was finally convicted and ''executed'', but still 7) returned from the dead years later to try to kill Maya, the sister of the lawyer (Mia) that got Dahlia in prison, to have her revenge. Note that she didn't go for directly killing Mia because Mia was already dead in the interim.[[/labelnote]]

* Jean Loring did this as part of DC's ''ComicBook/IdentityCrisis'' storyline in which she set up a murder and an attack in order to cover up her own accidental killing of Sue Dibny.

* In the Creator/HarryTurtledove novel ''Noninterference'', the head of TheFederation's pre-warp civilization Survey organization gets a report from a recent mission that a violation of the title AlienNonInterferenceClause had longer-lasting effects than anyone had anticipated. Instead of working on Spin Control (the guy responsible for the initial screwup was cashiered, his mission is used as a case study in What Not To Do, and more to the point he has been dead for over ''fourteen centuries'') she orders the files erased... and goes after the copy downloaded by a xeno-anthropology professor... and tries to shut up the survey team... and tracks down which of the professor's students has a copy....

* [[Film/TheLadykillers1955 Both]] [[Film/TheLadykillers2004]] versions of ''The Ladykillers'' involve a gang of thieves who rent an old woman's basement under false pretenses in order to commit grand theft. She discovers the crime and threatens to go to the police, so they try to silence her. [[spoiler:They all die in the attempt.]]

* Both versions of ''Film/TheLadykillers'' involve a gang of thieves who rent an old woman's basement under false pretenses in order to commit grand theft. She discovers the crime and threatens to go to the police, so they try to silence her. [[spoiler:They all die in the attempt.]]

** DefiedTrope in [[http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20031017 this strip.]] Gorb suggests killing Agatha for [[HeKnowsTooMuch finding a secret door]], and killing Othar to cover up Agatha's death, at which point Minsk points out what he's doing and reminds him that this sort of plan always ends with [[SeriousBusiness Gorb losing his hat, which makes it a bad plan]].

* Happens in the ''Literature/GauntsGhosts'' novel ''Necropolis''. A trader disobeyed an order to seal off a fuel pipeline he owned since he was making a fortune selling the fuel in the besieged city. Then the pipeline was used by Chaos forces to infiltrate the city and his crime became an act of treason. To get rid of witnesses, he killed the civilian workers he used in his scheme, then he killed his bodyguards who helped him kill the civilians, then his aide (or was planning to, at least), then tried to kill the medics of the titular Ghosts who were investigating the murders. Luckily, he was stopped by Gaunt, but one has to wonder how he was planning to kill the 1500+ pissed-off Imperial Guardsmen that would have torn the city apart looking for him.