History Main / SympatheticMurderer

* The actual murderer in ''Gosford Park''.

* The titular character from [[Psycho]] is a very deeply disturbed man, and the movie is directed in such a way as to elicit sympathy from the audience after he kills Marion. In the end he becomes a figure of pity and is states to not really be responsible for his own actions.

* SilentHill2 has [[spoiler:James, the protagonist]]. In an unusual variant, both the murderer ''and'' the victim are very sympathetic.

* HigurashiNoNakuKoroNi has this in spades. Most of the main characters end up as this in [[GroundhogDayLoop some version of the world.]] Keiichi [[spoiler: killed Satoko's abusive uncle to protect her]], Rena [[spoiler: killed Satako's uncle and his girlfriend to protect her father from their blackmail (and stop the girlfriend from throttling her)]], and Shion [[spoiler: takes out village elders who have treated her horribly and, we are led to believe, arranged multiple murders to protect their power...]] of course, Shion also ruins the "sympathetic" bit by [[spoiler: going AxCrazy on Keiichi, Mion, Rika, and Satako]]. It turns out much later that there were ways to avoid these and still solve the problems... but dang if it didn't feel good watching some of those jerks get it.

* [[spoiler:[[DGrayMan Alma]] [[HighOctaneNightmareFuel Karma,]] who may have had a worse childhood then even Allen!]]

See also ManslaughterProvocation.

** In the Miss Marple short story "Death by Drowning", the (unsympathetic) victim was pregnant by a man who had no intention of marrying her; she was expected to marry the DoggedNiceGuy she'd dumped in his favor. [[spoiler: The DoggedNiceGuy's landlady, however, was a WidowWoman who'd survived a bad marriage and appreciated nice guys, and snapped.]]

* The mentally unstable George Loomis (Joseph Cotten) from the 1953 film ''Niagara''. His wife (Marilyn Monroe) and her lover are plotting his murder (after, it is implied, deliberately driving him mad), [[spoiler: but the plot backfires and Loomis kills the lover in self-defence. Later he vengefully murders his wife, and is overcome with remorse. At the end of the film, while trapped with an innocent girl in a boat hurtling toward the edge of Niagara Falls, he helps her climb safely out onto a rock before falling to his death over the edge, possibly making this an example of {{Redemption Equals Death}}.]]

** Just about every other villain in ''LawAndOrderSVU'' will have a FreudianExcuse.

* ''[[{{LawAndOrderSVU}}Law & Order: SVU]]'' had several:
** The father from "Paternity" who found out his wife has having an affair and her lover was the real father of his son. He [[BezerkButton snaps]] and goes PapaWolf on her when she intends to divorce him and take her son away from him. It's even speculated that, had she divorced him, he'd still have to pay alimony and child support without having any parental rights whatsoever despite not loving his son any less because of the reveal.
** A CIA analyst who needed to get a list of Cuban double-agents to the Cuban Resistance Movement enlists the help of her longtime friend by paying for her breast implants and inserting the microchip into one of them. Unfortunately for her, the friend was not patriotically-inclined, since she was now part of a drug ring, and tried to blackmail the analyst for more money (which she didn't have). She was forced to retrieve the implant (yes, in ''[[Squick that]]'' manner) or risk her friend possibly selling it and getting everyone on the list killed. [[spoiler: She gets away since the agent behind the GovernmentConspiracy to frame her drug contacts for the murder covers the whole thing up]].

** [[spoiler: Yanni Yogi, who killed the man who[[AssholeVictim ruined his life fifteen years ago by convincing him to plead insanity.]]

*** While YourMileageMayVary as to whether the man himself is sympathetic, [[spoiler: Godot only murdered Misty Fey (possessed by VengefulSpirit Dahlia) to protect the little sister of the woman he'd loved. Afterwards he continually directs the trial to make sure Phoenix eventually finds him guilty. It's also implied that Misty went into the situation willing to die for her daughter.]]

<<|CrimeAndPunishmentTropes|>>

* The ''AceAttorney'' games have some of these, including [[spoiler: someone who killed the man who had [[AssholeVictim made everyone think the killer was deranged and ruined his life fifteen years ago]], and also a paraplegic who wanted to get back at someone for both crippling him and putting his brother into a deep coma, but ended up killing the wrong person, and regrets everything]].
** Then again his intended victim was [[spoiler: a young girl who didn't even realise she was responsible and who decided to keep vigil over the comatose brother when she realised the gravity of the situation...]]
** [[spoiler:But that's precisely what pissed him off so much. How would you like it if someone accidentally crippled you and put your brother in a coma as the result of a ''prank'' and didn't even realize that it was ''all her fault?'']]
** [[spoiler:Also, the "young girl" in question, while an extreme {{Cloudcuckoolander}}, was 15 or 16 when it happened. That ought to be more than old enough to comprehend the gravity of the situation.]]

* ...Wait, no one's listed ''{{Dexter}}'' yet?! ''Whole point of the show.''

** Maybe OlderThanDirt. TheBible does what it can to make heroes out of David, Solomon and other murderers too numerous to mention.

* [[ElfenLied Lucy]]. [[BrokenBird Dear]] ''[[BreakTheCutie god]]'', [[WoobieDestroyerOfWorlds Lucy!]] Even being a mass murderer with a penchant for {{Slasher Smile}}s and ColdBloodedTorture isn't enough to keep her from being sympathetic; her backstory is ''just that crappy'' that you can't help but want to give her a hug even when she's in the middle of eviscerating some innocent or not-so-innocent soul.

*** From the same series, there's the perp from "Prey": the victim is a stalker who has already caused one of his victims to commit suicide. The perp is another victim whom the law did very little to protect (a few restraining orders, the violations of which only got the stalked a few days in jail) and had even changed her name and moved to another city to escape from only for him to follow her. Feeling she had no option other than killing herself or be killed, she finally killed him. The team feels pretty sympathetic towards her (even Mac, who in an earlier episode has shown disgust to a rape victim who killed rapists aquitted on technicalities) and Hawkes even mentions to her that since she only left circunstancial evidence (the woman took a class that Stella taught), it is very hard for her to be convicted.
*** I find that highly unlikely, as that morally upright douche Mac Taylor and his team frequently treat all thier suspects as though they're Adolf Hitler, sympathtic or otherwise. In one example, a man named 'Mac Taylor' was killed and they assumed the murderer meant to kill thier Mac. [[spoiler: it turned out he was looking for an AssholeVictim also named Mac Taylor, who had committed a hit and run on his fiancee. The murderer later set himself on fire rather than be captured]]. The first thing Stella tells Mac after the case is "What he did wasn't right" or something to that effect. In another episode, while investigating the death of a young girl [[spoiler: who it turned out was killed after walking in on a guy killing his sister's husband so she could get his pension money]] Lindsay basically says to the suspect "screw you lady, you're going to jail."

* The comedy show ''MurderMostHorrid'' had a fair number of these, because A. there kind of has to be a murder, given the title, but, B. it's a comedy, SoYeah. [[CompleteMonster Complete Monsters]] can be played for laughs (and are on that show), but sympathetic murderers can be even funnier.

[[{{M}} http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/beckert.jpg]]
[[caption-width:315: Who knows what it's like to be me?]]

* The mentally unstable George Loomis (Joseph Cotten) from the 1953 film ''Niagra''. His wife (Marilyn Monroe) and her lover are plotting his murder (after, it is implied, deliberately driving him mad), [[spoiler: but the plot backfires and Loomis kills the lover in self-defence. Later he vengefully murders his wife, and is overcome with remorse. At the end of the film, while trapped with an innocent girl in a boat hurtling toward the edge of Niagara Falls, he helps her climb safely out onto a rock before falling to his death over the edge, possibly making this an example of {{Redemption Equals Death}}.]]