History Main / TheCorpseStopsHere

* At least a third of [[VisualNovel/PhoenixWrightAceAttorney Phoenix Wright's]] clients are victims of this, but they are almost always subverted in some way. There are many borderline examples and variations of this trope in the AceAttorney series.
** In case 1 of AceAttorneyApolloJustice, Phoenix is accused of being the murder, partially based on being the only person in the room with the victim, who wasn't a witness. Justified in that, this reason isn't why he's on trial for the murder, but was simply something brought up in a argument.
** Case 2 of AceAttorneyInvestigations has Edgeworth being accused of murder, ''literally seconds'' after he found the body. Subverted and justified however, in that the main accusation is based upon a witness's misinterpretation that the juice stained wallet Edgeworth was holding was a item covered in blood.
** For the most part in ''AceAttorney'', whenever a defendant was the first person to find the body, or are in the room with the victim, that's usually not the actual reason why they're suspected, with other, more hard evidence also being used to prove their guilt. Thus this series as a whole subverts this trope.
** Lampshaded in the last case of Investigations, in which if you press Lang's statement that he was the first to find [=DeMasque=] II's body, Edgeworth will point out that Kay was suspected of killing Manny Coachen based on being the first to find the body. Lang responds that Kay was cleared of suspicion, then goes on to explain why Larry is the suspect.
** Also lampshaded in the same way in Investigations when, upon Edgeworth's accusation that Shi-na is the killer based on her being the only one in the room, Lang states that "accusing someone based on being alone in a murder room is a stupid sick way of putting the guilt onto innocent people". Edgeworth however points out that Shi-na had used such a argument to put the blame of the murder onto Kay, to which Lang and Shi-na both unwillingly apologies for there rashness.

This trope is often (and cheaply) accompanied by a sub-trope: ''"Don't pick up the knife!"'' The person standing over the corpse feels inexplicably compelled to pick up the bloody knife, smoking gun, or gory fireplace poker lying next to the victim. This makes it easier for the writer to justify the police ignoring all other evidence and possible suspects, but is counter-intuitive: what instinct or rationale could cause a normal human being to touch such a horrible object, let alone pick it up?[[note]]When one finds an obvious murder victim, with no idea whether the killer is still in the vicinity, seems plausible to grab a handy weapon for self-defense in case the killer re-appears and decides to get rid of the finder.[[/note]] With embedded knives, this is worse as removing a knife from a stabbing victim can actually cause more harm by unplugging the wound. And of course, see BetterManhandleTheMurderWeapon.

* The ''CSICrimeSceneInvestigation'' episode "Alter Boys", where a man in bloody clothes is found by the police trying to bury two bodies in the desert. As it turns out, the real killer is his (literal) EvilTwin, who had talked him into hiding the bodies to protect him. Unlike most examples, the main characters can't prove that he wasn't the real perp, since every little bit of evidence point to him (twins sharing the same DNA and all), so he is sentenced to [[RealityEnsues life in prison]], and while in there he commits suicide.

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[[caption-width-right:318:How to turn from InnocentBystander to fugitive in a second]]

[[caption-width-right:318:How to turn from InnocentBystander to fugitive]]

* ''Film/BeverleyHillsNinja'': Haru has this happen to him ''twice'', always because he's spying on the BigBad and winds up with the corpse landing next to him. Once in Hong Kong, where the corpse lands in his little raft at the wharf, and once in Beverley Hills with a pair of freshly shot Yakuza landing in front of him on a pile of garbage.

* A regular recipe for getting ''Series/PerryMason'' a client.

* At least a third of [[VisualNovel/PhoenixWrightAceAttorney Phoenix Wright's]] clients are victims of this. There are many borderline examples and variations of this trope in the AceAttorney series, but some pretty clear-cut examples are cases PWAA-2 and AJ-1.
** It happens in [[AceAttorneyInvestigations ''Investigations'']], too. In ''Turnabout Airlines'' Edgeworth himself catches the rap, admittedly in part because Rhoda Teneiro panicked enough to mistake a grape juice-soaked wallet for a murder weapon. It comes to a ridiculously stupid apex with Mike Meekins, found idly standing next to the garage where the body was hidden. No motive, no connection, and obviously [[TheDitz not much brain]] and yet Lang accuses him of cold-blooded murder.
*** He did have some rationale, since Lang claims only police officers can have access to firearms after the establishment of bigger restrictions on firearm possession, and Meekins was unable to explain what had happened to his gun. Of course, we ''are'' talking about [[InspectorJavert Lang]]...
*** And to be fair about the accusations surrounding Edgeworth, he wasn't just the first to find the body. He was the found next to the dead body, holding an object with red substance on it that belonged to the victim, in a rather dark room, was the only one with no alibi, and was the only person who was out of his seat and in the murder room at the time of the murder. It's not hard to imagine why Edgeworth was seen as the main suspect.

* ''Series/{{Smallville}}''

* Ned's discovery of a corpse in the Balsam's Bittersweets taffy vat in ''PushingDaisies''.

* At the start of the [[KamenRiderRyuki Ryuki's World]] arc in ''KamenRiderDecade'', [[TheChick Natsumi]] is meeting with the publisher of a magazine when the woman grabs the back of her neck and keels over, dead. People rush into the room and, because Natsumi is standing there holding a fork (which she was using to eat cake), she's assumed to be the murderer. Admittedly, the murder WAS the result of a supernatural assassin, but it's still hard to mistake a cut caused by a monster throwing an energy sickle from the nearby cafe through the window and into the publisher's neck for '''any''' kind of wound a standard fork would have inflicted.

This trope is often (and cheaply) accompanied by a sub-trope: ''"Don't pick up the knife!"'' The person standing over the corpse feels inexplicably compelled to pick up the bloody knife, smoking gun, or gory fireplace poker lying next to the victim. This makes it easier for the writer to justify the police ignoring all other evidence and possible suspects, but is counter-intuitive: what instinct or rationale could cause a normal human being to touch such a horrible object, let alone pick it up?[[hottip:*: When one finds an obvious murder victim, with no idea whether the killer is still in the vicinity, seems plausible to grab a handy weapon for self-defense in case the killer re-appears and decides to get rid of the finder.]] With embedded knives, this is worse as removing a knife from a stabbing victim can actually cause more harm by unplugging the wound. And of course, see BetterManhandleTheMurderWeapon.

* The ''ConanTheBarbarian'' story "The God in the Bowl" by Creator/RobertEHoward opens with this situation: Arus the watchman, who is the first on the scene of the murder of Kallian Publico, immediately jumps to the conclusion that Conan was the killer when he revealed himself, kicking off an investigation when his fellows come by. (It doesn't exactly help that Conan broke into the place to steal.)

** Heck, this trope generally defines Buffy's high school experience. She's constantly fighting the undead and whatnot, and gets labeled a troublemaker because she's missing so many classes and being near unfortunate events (due to, you know, stopping them being worse).

* A regular recipe for getting ''PerryMason'' a client.

* Shortly after a card sharp swindles one of the protagonists in ''Film/{{Life}}'', he stumbles upon both protagonists after being brutally beaten -- by the [[CorruptHick racist hick sheriff]] and his cronies, natch -- just in time to kick the bucket, leading to the arrest of both protagonists.

* In the 90s live-action ''{{Zorro}}'', a laborer drives away the man who killed his employer with his musket shortly before the Alcalde arrives. Seeing a man killed by a gunshot wound and a man with a recently fired gun (And with the only actual witness to the incident unconscious and unable to testify), the Alcalde decides that the laborer killed his employer and [[KangarooCourt does his best to railroad him to a prompt hanging]].

* This happens several times in the ''VideoGame/LauraBow'' series. Laura never gets directly accused, though, but the detective in the second game does point out how suspicious it is that she's always the first one to find the bodies.

* ''Literature/HarryPotter [[HarryPotter/HarryPotterAndTheChamberOfSecrets and the Chamber of Secrets]]'' (although the body wasn't actually dead).
** Bizarre subversion: In ''Literature/HarryPotter [[HarryPotter/HarryPotterAndTheGobletOfFire and The Goblet of Fire]]'', Harry teleports into a humongous crowd along with Cedric Diggory. The crowd stops cheering and gasps when they notice that Harry is clutching his ''dead body''. Even though no one saw how Cedric died and the first anyone knew of his death was Harry appearing in front of everyone with his corpse, and even though the government later denied the true cause of Cedric's death and denounced both Harry and his story, no one accuses Harry (or anyone else) of killing him. Instead, it's claimed Cedric died in an accident.
*** Although it is mentioned that all the other students avoided Harry for the rest of the term, and that "Perhaps they were formulating their own theories about how Cedric had died."
*** That was probably because Dumbledore later tells the entire school that Cedric was murdered by Voldemort.
*** Also, if Harry had killed Cedric, then why the hell would he have teleported '''back''' with him?
** On the other hand, Harry ''is'' blamed for Dumbledore's death since he was the only one up there the entire time when it happened.
*** By this time, however, Voldemort's people are in full control of the Press and the justice system, and the accusation comes as no surprise.

* This happens in ''Series/{{Supernatural}}'' enough that the main characters were pretty high on the FBI wanted list and considered serial killers. Of course, in their case, the problem is exacerbated by their tendency to commit crimes like credit card fraud and corpse desecration, and by many of the monsters and demons they kill leaving corpses indistinguishable from human corpses.