Fake Alibi

A crime has been committed. A suspect is investigated, and claims to have been seen elsewhere by specified people. These people are questioned, and they say that the suspect was with them. Thus the suspect is clearly innocent.

However, sometimes this person will succeed in faking this. This can be done in any of a number of ways:

1. Time manipulation: A person either is seen at a different time than what the witnesses think (such as due to Clock Discrepancy), or makes it look like the crime took place at a different time than it did.
2. The crime did not require the culprit to be on the scene when it occurred, although at first this fact isn't known.
3. The crime could have taken place in one location, but evidence subsequently got planted which makes it look like the crime took place elsewhere.
4. The culprit had an accomplice, who was actually at the alibi location pretending to be the culprit.
5. The culprit had some means of going from the scene of the alibi to the scene of the crime and/or visa versa, quicker than any known route or which can't be seen by people who supposedly would see him en route.
6. Then there's the possibility that the witnesses are simply not as reliable as originally believed, and were honestly mistaken or even deliberately lying about the alibi.
7. The culprit helpfully provides an alibi to an innocent who is pressed for one, actually covering themselves.

A subverted case of The Alibi for the actual culprit would clearly belong to this trope, but this trope would also apply if the reader/viewer is aware that the alibi is fake. On the other hand, a faked alibi by an innocent person who happens not to have a real alibi would not apply.

This can overlap with "Strangers on a Train"-Plot Murder, where two characters each murder someone on the other's behalf. The prime suspect of the first victim's murder was elsewhere killing the second victim; meanwhile, the prime suspect of the second victim was slaying the first victim. Each has an alibi for the time of death, too far removed from their supposed victim.

Due to the potential for controversy, No Real Life Examples, Please!. While there have been cases where a suspect's alibi was definitely proven false, there have also been cases where the authorities believed a suspect's alibi but the public didn't, or vice versa.

As this trope is frequently a Twist Ending, many spoilers on this page are unmarked... You Have Been Warned!

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In the Ace Attorney manga's Turnabout Gallows case, the entire crux of the case revolves around the fact that everyone but the defendant has a completely impenetrable rock-solid alibi: At the exact time of the victim's instantaneous death, everyone who could have possibly committed the murder besides the defendant was right there in front of Phoenix. This seemingly cast-iron fact is about to get Phoenix's client a guilty verdict. That's when Phoenix quite literally turns the entire case upside down to work out and prove how the real killer managed to cause the victim's death without actually being anywhere near him.
• One episode of Case Closed had an alleged killer with an airtight alibi: he had taken a photo of himself in front of a New Years celebration, right at midnight, clock highly visible in the photo, right at the time of the murder, and the camera wasn't tampered with in any way. Thanks to minute (heh) details in the photo, it's eventually proven the photo was taken at midnight of last year, and he'd been planning this to be his alibi for the murder all this time.
• One episode of Detective School Q had a killer try to use some of the main characters as her alibi: She talked with them on the train, then got off the train, drove to the location of her victim, killed him, and then drove to a later train station (the tracks took a big arc, so it was possible for someone with a fast car taking a direct route from the station at the start of the arc to the station at the end of it to beat the train there), then talk to the main characters again, presenting the illusion that she'd been on the train the entire time. It didn't work.

Comic Books

• Tintin: Subverted in "The Castafiore Emerald". The eponymous gemstone is missing presumed stolen, and Mr. Wagner is supposedly cleared as a suspect because he was allegedly practicing the piano in a different room at the time it disappeared. However, Tintin notices that Wagner's shoes are muddy, that someone had recently fallen down the stairs, and eventually, that the piano music was just a recording. Despite this, however, Wagner is not the thief — he was actually going off to gamble in secret.

Fan Fiction

• Before the start of Earning Her Stripes, the PRT captured Purity, and as a result, they investigated her husband Max Anders. However, Max and Kaiser had been very publicly seen in different places at the same time. Once Kaiser is caught and does turn out to be Max, Deputy Director Renick realises that those appearances could have been faked by using Victor as a Body Double. Upon being confronted with this flaw in his alibi, Max stops protesting his innocence and clams up, insisting he won't say any more until he talks to a lawyer.
• In the oneshot Ambition, Harry Potter has over a dozen different alibis after getting revenge on a group of Ravenclaws who put Luna in the Hospital Wing. Notably, Harry doesn't supply any of the alibis, everyone else does. The entirety of Hufflepuff house insists he was studying with them in their common room, half a dozen Ravenclaws separately insist Harry was with them, two different Slytherin prefects took points from him on opposite ends of the castle, half of Gryffindor provided him an alibi within minutes of the attack and the other half within an hour, finally one of the House Elves insists Harry was in the kitchens.

Films — Live-Action

• The Fugitive: Sykes (the One-Armed Man) says earlier in the film that he had an alibi for the murder of Richard Kimble's wife. Since it turns out that he was in fact the killer in question, this also means there was a conspiracy to give him the fake alibi in question (and those people, which could include members of the Chicago PD, will be going to prison along with Sykes and his boss, Charles Nichols).
• Heatwave (2022): Eve fakes an alibi very well for murdering her husband Scott, which leaves the police suspecting Claire of his murder instead, just as she wanted. The police realize they could be in the act together however, so this simply convinces them that Eve didn't personally murder him.
• The 1974 Made-for-TV movie Indict And Convict has a pair of lovers slain mid-tryst. The prime suspect is the slain woman's husband, deputy DA Sam Belden. Belden has an alibi, however: he was at an airport lounge at the time, and the waitress confirms this. It turns out that under oath, the waitress isn't certain when Belden left the lounge, and further evidence proves him the culprit.
• Knives Out: After Marta thinks she accidentally poisoned Harlan, Harlan orders her to leave the house in full view of the family, then sneak back inside and pretend to be Harlan before sneaking out again, so that she'll appear to have gone home well before Harlan seemingly committed suicide. It works on the cops who immediately dismiss her as a suspect, but not on Detective Blanc who catches Marta's more involved than she seems.

Literature

• Larry Niven's short story "The Alibi Machine" notes this as an effect of widespread teleportation technology (though the fact that the police are aware of the problem limits its effectiveness).
• The Continental Op: Lampshaded in "The Girl with the Silver Eyes". The Op's client winds up murdered just in front of a speakeasy, and the Op suspects either "Tin-Star" Joplin, Fag Kilcourse, or Jeane Delano did it—but Porky Grout, his informant, claims all three of them were on the back porch when the murder happened. The Op half-suspects that Porky is lying to provide the killer an alibi, but also knows that if he presses the issue, a dozen of Joplin's cronies will also lie to strengthen their boss's alibi.
  But there was this about it: if Joplin, Kilcourse, or the girl had [...] fixed my informant, then it was hopeless for me to try to prove that they weren't on the rear porch when the shot was fired. Joplin had a crowd of hangers-on who would swear to anything he told them without batting an eye. There would be a dozen supposed witnesses to their presence on the rear porch.
• Death on the Nile has a variant: a person has an airtight alibi until he is shot in the leg. After being left alone, he is examined by a doctor who says that he would have been incapable of walking after being shot. Next morning, his wife is found murdered. Turns out he wasn't shot in the leg when the witnesses thought — he and the shooter had put on an act to make it look like he was shot at that point, then he murdered his wife, returned to where he had previously been, and shot himself in the leg.
• Isaac Asimov's Black Widowers story "Early Sunday Morning" has the killer create an alibi using a Clock Discrepancy created when one character didn't promptly adjust a clock to Daylight Saving Time.
• Evil Under the Sun: Two people in the boat see a body on a hidden beach. One of these people goes over to the body and says the body is dead, while the other goes for the authorities. Turns out the body was quite alive and goes away just for the person who stayed with the body to do the actual murder.
• The Mysterious Mr. Quin: In "The Sign in the Sky," a murderer is well known for his insistence on winding all the clocks in his mansion himself. On the day he kills his wife, he secretly sets them back an extra ten minutes so that all of the official reports will state he was out of the house when she died. A Spanner in the Works arises in the form of a housemaid who happened to catch a glimpse of smoke (the titular sign) from a passing train; when the heroes notice the discrepancy between the train schedule and the supposed timeline of the murder, the killer is caught.
• Subverted in Ordeal by Innocence: The murderer had his alibi all planned out, having someone else do the murder while he was elsewhere, but the witness suffered a car crash that put him in a coma, then left for an Antarctic expedition without learning of the trial, leaving the murderer without a witness to testify that he wasn't present. And while there was another person who could have testified, she chose not to out of Woman Scorned, having discovered he was already married and just using her to do the actual killing.
• From Sherlock Holmes:
  • In "The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge", a man was invited over by someone he knew only passingly to spend a day. The host was found dead, killed at a time the guest claimed he was at home. Holmes figures out the host did a bit of Clock Tampering and went to commit a crime, but the victim got the jump on him. One of the clues is that the guest was an extremely respectable man, so of course no policeman would have doubted his word.
  • In "The Adventure of the Retired Colourman", the man whose wife vanished shows Watson a theatre ticket, claiming that he went while she stayed at home and didn't use it. Holmes checks and, sure enough, the seats next to the wife's were unsold.
  • The Valley of Fear: No accusation made against the scourers will stand, since they simply have more of their members swear the accused were with them all night.
• Lampshaded in The Singing Bell by Isaac Asimov. Inspector Davenport complains that had Peyton had some alibi, he could have cracked it as a fake. However, while a document or witness can be caught on inconsistencies, Peyton instead has a very well-established habit of spending a month every year without being seen by a single person, and that is effectively unassailable.
• The Thirteen Problems:
  • In "The Blood-Stained Pavement," a man named Denis, his dowdy wife Margery, and an old friend of his named Carol go out sailing near a seaside town; Denis and Margery then return, and a few minutes later, Carol also gets back to town and leaves. Later, Margery's body is found swept up on the shoreline in a supposedly-accidental drowning, with Denis (the only suspect) having an airtight alibi at the time of her death. Miss Marple determines that the murder actually occurred when the three first went out; Denis and Carol—who's actually his real wife—killed Margery and dumped her into the ocean. Carol then donned Margery's bathing dress and returned with him; after they drove away, she switched back into her original outfit and made a show of coming back to town in her own clothes. It turns out that Denis is a serial wife murderer who has pulled off the same scheme at least ten times.
  • In "Death by Drowning," local girl Rose Emmett is thrown off a bridge, and suspicion falls on Joe Ellis, her longtime (and long-suffering) boyfriend. Joe quickly establishes himself as having an alibi: he was fixing a shelf for his landlady, the kindly Mrs. Bartlett, who backs him up. It's later discovered that Joe was actually in the woods near where Rose was killed...but in a twist, the fake alibi he gave was actually for Mrs. Bartlett, who'd fallen for Joe herself and killed Rose to eliminate the competition. Mrs. Bartlett convinced Joe that he'd be accused of the murder and offered to cover for him with the fake story, which was actually a method of protecting herself.
• In The Three Musketeers, d'Artagnan needs to have an unimpeachable witness vouch that he was elsewhere at a specific time. d'Artagnan visits his friend and mentor Monsieur de Tréville, and pushes his clock back forty-five minutes so that de Tréville will honestly believe that d'Artagnan had been there at the noted time. Not even de Tréville's enemies believe that he would possibly lie about such things, so they must accept d'Artagnan's alibi.
• Under Suspicion:
  • All Dressed in White: On the second-to-last night of filming, Nick tells his friends he's sailing from the Grand Victoria Hotel to Boca Raton to meet a client. He also sends Jeff a text telling him he's in Boca. This was all done in an attempt to establish an alibi for Meghan's murder, though it falls apart when Jeremy snaps a photo of Nick and Meghan (whom Nick has kidnapped) going aboard his boat at the Grand Victoria's pier, after he was supposedly already in Boca.
  • In Every Breath You Take, it turns out Tom and Tiffany both gave each other fake alibis on the night Virginia was killed, albeit for different, unrelated crimes; Tiffany (who is a bit ditzy) is also initially unaware she's also Tom's fake alibi and is horrified when she realises. Tom and Tiffany both snuck up to second floor of the Met, with Tom saying they should split up to head back downstairs to avoid being caught by security. Tiffany stole a bracelet from an exhibit on the second floor and when she saw all the commotion downstairs due to Virginia's body having been discovered, she panicked and told Tom about the theft. He assured her he wouldn't tell anyone and they both told investigators that they were together on the second floor when Virginia was pushed off the roof. With the revelation that Tom wasn't with Tiffany the whole night, it puts him back into spotlight for Virginia's murder; the fact Tiffany had committed a crime too meant Tom felt confident his alibi was safe.

Live-Action TV

• American Vandal:
  • Peter suspects this about Dylan's alibi that he was visiting his girlfriend Mackenzie when the vandalism happened, especially when he starts to believe that the two were partners in crime.
  • In the season 1 finale, it's strongly implied that Christa Carlyle's alibi—that she was getting CPR training from Van Delorie—was fake, and that both she and Van committed the vandalism.
• Castle:
  • In "Flowers for Your Grave", Harrison Tisdale is a suspect in a string of three murders, but claims he was out of the country on all three dates, and has a stamped passport to prove it. However, Detective Beckett finds it suspicious that Tisdale is able to provide this alibi so quickly, without consulting his calendar or even asking for the dates. She and Castle dig deeper and figure out how he faked it: Harrison has a second passport under a false identity. So he left the country with his real passport just to establish his alibi, then used his false passport to return incognito and commit the murders.
  • 'Overkill' has a bizarre accidental version. Beckett and Castle work out a timeline of when the murder of Damien Wilder took place: the murderer was there by 10:34 pm (based on a clock at the scene that was broken during the attack) and fled at 10:52 (according to an eyewitness who just saw a foot disappearing over the back fence). They get two main suspects for the killing, Lisa Jenkins and Blake Wilder, but both have hard evidence they were elsewhere in the middle of the murder timeline: security footage shows Lisa returning to her apartment at 10:47, and bank records show Blake made an ATM withdrawal at 10:39. Beckett solves the mystery when she realizes her timeline is wrong, and this murder wasn't the act of a single person. Lisa broke into Damien's home and fatally shot him, then was scared away by the sudden arrival of Blake, who had independently also decided Damien needed to go, and finished the dying man off by bludgeoning him.
  Kate Beckett: Lisa and Blake came here separately to kill Wilder, and by doing that, they both inadvertently alibied each other out.
• The Commish. A Knight Templar Parent appears to have murdered the person running a prostitution ring that was pimping out his own daughter. His friend offers to provide an alibi for the night in question. Turns out the friend committed the murder (to cover up the fact that he was a client of his daughter) so he'd actually be providing the fake alibi for himself.
• In the Elementary episode "While You Were Sleeping", the murderer has her accomplice place her in a medically induced coma so everyone will believe she's completely immobile and helpless. Late at night when nobody is watching, the accomplice takes her out of the coma so she can murder her targets and puts her back into the coma by the next morning.
• Grimm: In "Game Ogre," a murderer Hank arrested, Oleg Stark, has escaped and is killing people involved with his conviction. Hank himself is the ultimate target, and he explains to Nick why that is: Stark had faked an alibi using a lookalike who was just good enough to potentially fool a jury. Knowing the alibi was fake, Hank and the murdered DA suppressed the footage.
• In Harlots, Lord Fallon stabbed Amelia in an alley, but when the police came to question him, his mistress Lucy lied by saying he was with her at the time. Lucy believed Fallon was innocent and was horrified when she realized the truth. To matters worse, Lucy's mother Margaret took the fall for Sir George's murder so Lord Fallon couldn't blackmail her by threatening to pin the murder on Lucy herself. After her confession, Margaret told the police what Fallon did, which is why they knew to question him. She thought that by doing so, she would ensure Fallon was executed at the cost of her own life, not expecting Lucy to cover for him. Josiah Hunt faked Margaret's execution, but Lucy didn't know that. She believed that by lying for Fallon, she caused her mother to die in vain.
• In the Heat of the Night: In "Rape", Chief Gillespie starts to suspect that Monster of the Week Ainslee, who raped Althea Tibbs, is a Serial Rapist and that his wife has been covering for him by giving him alibis for the various assaults he's accused of. He manages to guilt-trip her into fessing up and gets a warrant to arrest Ainslee.
• Law & Order: A man is murdered and a witness's description of the killer leads the detectives to an Irish mobster. But the mobster is given an alibi by two FBI agents. Things get more complicated when the witness is killed, and then the detectives learn that the mobster has an identical twin brother who lives upstate and teaches math in a small college. Both brothers have motives for both murders, both brothers have an alibi for at least one of the murders ... so exactly who is guilty of what?
• Monk:
  • In "Mr. Monk Goes to the Circus," a man is shot in full view of multiple people by a masked assassin, who promptly pulls off some incredible acrobatics as they make their escape. When the cops learn that the victim was the ringmaster of a circus, they immediately suspect his ex-wife, the star aerialist of the show...only to discover that she's broken her foot (with X-rays to prove it) and couldn't have performed the stunts the killer did as they fled. Monk and Sharona eventually determine that the acrobat pretended to be injured weeks prior, committed the murder, then had one of the circus's elephants deliberately crush her ankle to complete the illusion.
  • In "Mr. Monk and the Sleeping Suspect," a killer concocts an elaborate scheme to send mail bombs—he coats the packages with a small amount of glue, then breaks into nearby mailboxes and sticks them to their tops. Over time, the glue degrades and breaks, sending the packages to the bottom of the box, where unsuspecting mail carriers collect them. The killer originally planned to get himself arrested for speeding just before the packages were due to fall, thus putting him behind bars and creating an ironclad alibi...but as the title implies, the plan works too well when he gets in a traffic accident while speeding and ends up in a coma.
  • In "Mr. Monk Goes to the Hospital", Monk zeroes in on a doctor who had a strong motive for killing the victim, but a security guard says the doctor never left the room he checked himself into, and his heart monitor seems to back the claim up. This is because the doctor slipped into the connected room of another patient^note The rooms used to be fully connected, but were divided up years back by a thin fake wall and attached the heart monitor to him while the patient was sedated, then committed the murder.
• NCIS: A series of similar murders lead the team to think they have a serial killer on the loose. Then they realize that two of the murders were smokescreens, intended to hide the actual motive for the third one. They have a suspect and a good circumstantial case against her, but she has a firm alibi with multiple witnesses and even a bank's security cameras. Only at the last moment does Gibbs think to check her background, whereupon he finds out that she has a twin sister.
• Police Squad!: The suspect for Revenge and Remorse has an alibi that could show that he was unable to plant the bomb killing the judge. The fake alibi wasn't to cover for the murder, but to cover for a parole violation because he went to see a baseball game.
• Shameless (US): After the police discover Eddie's body, Frank is the prime suspect. His initial plan is to get his sons to claim he took them on a camping trip around the time Eddie died. He then tries to go to Terry, who suggests Frank say he was at a gun show at the time. He even gets Frank a gun he allegedly bought at the gun show and a phony witness to claim he saw Frank there.

Visual Novels

• Ace Attorney: Done several times, and it's usually your job to prove the fakery.
  • Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Turnabout Samurai has a large broken head of the mascot block the normal path between the two studios, which would make it harder for them to travel within the suspected timeline.
  • Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Justice For All:
    • Episode three uses a mixture of technically not being at the crime scene and a physical disability as the alibi.
    • Episode four has a hired assassin doing the killing, giving the real culprit an alibi. He still ends up on trial due to Framing the Guilty Party.
  • Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Trials and Tribulations: Episode two has the murderer attempt to Confess to a Lesser Crime to be at a different location at the time of the crime. He's using time manipulation via evidence tampering to make it work.
  • Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies: Episode three has the culprit use a recorded speech to pretend to be somewhere other than the crime scene. There's also time manipulation at work.
  • Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice: The murderer in episode two goes for the non present approach. By luring the victim into an otherwise harmless scheme, modified to include a deadly weapon.
  • Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth:
    • Episode one has the culprit take advantage of a mistaken belief about the time the crime took place to make an impromptu alibi for himself when accused.
    • Episode four has the culprit use a recording of a gunshot to throw off the time.
• Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc: Celestia Ludenberg manages to set up one of these in the third case by using Hifumi Yamada as an accomplice and thus is able to claim innocence due to various factors, such as being with Aoi both when Hifumi supposedly "died" in the nurse's office and when Hifumi disappeared.
• In Higurashi: When They Cry's third arc, Tatarigoroshi, Keiichi murders Teppei Houjo, but all his friends lie and testify that he was hanging out with them at the festival, so he couldn't have been the culprit. Keiichi never asked them to do this, and they don't tell him that they lied or even that they know he's the murderer, so this, along with other details like the corpse disappearing and Satoko still showing signs of physical abuse, cause his Sanity Slippage to worsen as he starts to question if he really committed the crime or not.
• The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog: After Sonic is the victim in the murder mystery game, Tails, Amy, and Barry investigate, checking each passenger of their alibis. Espio's alibi being that he was reading in the library and didn't notice anything, which felt flimsy but validated proving to have memorized the book he was reading. It turns out to be a lie with Espio being the killer who was able to memorize the book he read through speedreading due to being a ninja, giving him time to take Sonic by surprise.

Western Animation

• The Adventures of T-Rex had an episode where a Surgical Impersonation conspiracy was used to give criminal masterminds an alibi.
• Batman: The Animated Series: In the episode "Joker's Millions", the Joker discovers that the "millions" of dollars he was left by the deceased crime lord King Barlow were actually mostly fake after he'd already blown through all the actual money, leaving him saddled with owing a huge amount of inheritance taxes that he can't afford to pay. He'd already claimed to have given up crime and was unwilling to cross the IRS, so he decided to commit a crime while having one of his minions dress up as him and hang out at Penguin's nightclub to provide an alibi. Batman figures out the ruse when he notices that the fake Joker's sweat is causing his white face paint to run.
• Martha Speaks:
  • In "The Dog Who Came to Dinner", some cupcakes go missing. The Lorraines think it can't have been Francois, the visiting dog, who ate them, because he's too small to reach them. As it turns out, however, he did eat them, accessing them by standing on a chair.
  • In "Martha Takes the Cake", someone took a big bite out of Alice's birthday cake and left crumbs next to a sleeping Martha. Nelson, a cat, is supposedly cleared since he has no thumbs and thus couldn't open the door to the basement where Martha was. As it turns out, however, he did do it. How is still a mystery, although it's implied at the end that he may have accessed the basement via a zip line.
• Rugrats: In "The Trial", the kids try to determine which one of them broke Tommy's lamp. Angelica is supposedly cleared since she claims to have been napping when the lamp broke, but she turns out to be guilty when Tommy realises that she'd already taken her nap prior and knew what was happening at the time of the lamp's breakage.
• South Park: In "Toilet Paper", after the boys TP their art teacher's house, it looks like they're caught, but Cartman comes up with a Seamless Spontaneous Lie to cover where they were at the time of the eponymous incident. It doesn't work because Kyle and Stan can't follow it, and Cartman gets tired of repeating it.
  Cartman: Okay. Last night, all four of us were at the bowling alley until about 7:30, at which time we noticed Ally Sheedy, the Goth chick from The Breakfast Club, was bowling in the lane next to us, and we asked her for her autograph, but she didn't have a pen, so we followed her out to her car, but on the way we were accosted by five Scientologists who wanted to give us all personality tests, which were administered at the Scientology Center in Denver until 10:45, at which time we accidentally boarded the wrong bus home and ended up in Rancho de Burritos Rojos, south of Castle Rock, and finally got a ride home with a man who was missing his left index finger, named Gary Bushwell, arriving home at 11:46.

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