Flush the Evidence

Amphetamines go down the hooooole.

Now, clogs really aren’t the issue when it comes to flushing pills, but contaminating our water supply is a huge issue. Movies never think about this when the bad guy proceeds to dump 3 kilos of something expensive down the toilet.

— 10 Things You Should Never Flush Down the Toilet!

You want to get rid of evidence that could be really hazardous to your and/or others' health and/or reputation, but how and where possibly? A fire would be way too destructive, and authorities generally have no qualms about scouring through trash bins, so how about the last place where people would be willing to look—down the toilet, where the evidence is flushed away!

An example being when the police search a criminal's house, they generally look in every nook and cranny they can find. So, the criminal may try to just flush the evidence (typically illegal drugs, but can be other things depending on the Rule of Funny) down the toilet. Sometimes a character needs to get rid of an incriminating note or document.

Success varies, with the worst case scenario being a clogged toilet and a potentially flooded bathroom. In fact, the FDA outright discourages doing this in the first place due to environmental concerns.

Sister Trope of Fun with Flushing.

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Examples:

Comic Books

• In Persepolis, the police suspect that Marjane's family has been to a party and are following them home to check for stashed wine (illegal under Islamic law). When they arrive, Marjane's grandma asks to enter the house first, claiming she has diabetes and needs to get her medicine urgently. Once inside she and Marjane flush all the wine down the toilet, but later find they needn't have bothered: Marjane's father merely bribed the police officer to get him to leave. And the stress of dealing with the cop makes him say "I Need a Freaking Drink".

Fan Works

• One More Trigger: When Tattletale is "caught" in the bathroom calling Coil for extraction, she drops her phone in the toilet ostensibly so the Samaritans can't check what she was doing. (It's actually all a ruse for Coil's sake, she's working with the Samaritans, but the phone really does get dropped in.)
  Tattletale: I liked that phone too.
  Emma: Eh. Casualties of war.

Film — Animated

• Referenced in Lilo & Stitch 2: Stitch Has a Glitch, where Lilo deadpans to Stitch, "Next time, flush the evidence." Stitch responds by miming flushing a toilet and making a "ka-shush" noise.
• Monsters, Inc.: After he attempts to put Boo back in her room, Sulley gets some of her toys tangled around his person. He tries to flush them all down the toilet, but it gets backed up, so instead he hides them inside a locker, where they reappear later in the movie.

Film — Live-Action

• Abominable: CJ smokes a joint in the bathroom and flushes it down the toilet when Karen knocks on the door.
• Attempted but subverted (hilariously) in Angel's Mission; when the police raids a night club where a drug dealing is happening, one of the dealers escapes to the toilets with packets and packets of heroin with him, being pursued by the police, where he then locks himself in one of the stalls and begins emptying the drugs into the toilet while shouting at the cops outside, taunting them that they are helpless from stopping him from disposing the evidence... oblivious to a sign outside the stall that says "Toilet is Currently Out of Water. Apologies for Any Inconveniences Caused".
• Happens to Oscar in Enter the Void, during a drug deal at a club. The police start raiding the place and he heads for the toilet to flush down the drugs on him. A disgusting scene of him shoving the pills down the drain ensues.
• Go: Ronna flushes ecstasy pills down the toilet before replacing them with fake ones to give to Todd.
• Goodfellas: Henry is furious and suffers a breakdown after his wife tells him she flushed $60k worth of drugs down the toilet while the police raided his house with a search warrant.
• In The Man with One Red Shoe, the agents think Richard is doing this when he repeatedly flushes his toilet. In reality, they put his bathroom plumbing back together so poorly, he has to flush the toilet to get the sink to work.
• Psycho famously became the first film in history to feature a toilet flushing for including a scene where Marian tears up a note and discards of the remains this way.
• Smiley Face: After offering to sell her precious government weed to the pro-cop casting director, Jane hides in a stall, and, mistaking a cleaner for the police, flushes the weed down the toilet.
• White Nights: A famous ballet dancer who defected from the USSR tries to hide his identity from Soviet officials by flushing his passport down an airplane toilet as his plane crashes in Soviet territory.

Literature

• Adrian Mole:
  • In Wilderness Years, Adrian writes a note to Bianca, but decides not to give it to her. He flushes it down the toilet, and it takes three full flushes before it disappears completely.
  • In Cappuccino Years, Rosie flushes Ivan's exfoliating hand mitt down the loo, which then has to be unblocked at great expense.
• In one Babylon 5 Expanded Universe novel, a murdered man is chopped into pieces and dropped down a waste recycling chute. This was only discovered because some random unnamed civilian ended up clogging that pipe by dropping too much trash down a chute in one go, and the maintenance staff found a foot while clearing up the blockage.
• In the fifth book of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, Greg goes to a lock-in at his middle school where a kid named Jeffery Chang brought a big bag of cheese puffs. Due to a ban on snacks, he locked himself in the boys' bathroom to eat them, but the adults caught on quickly, so Jeffery was forced to flush the cheese puffs down the toilet.
• The Drawing of the Three: Stephen King's gunslinger Roland meets Eddie Dean when a flight crew suspects Eddie of smuggling drugs and flushing the evidence down an airplane toilet.
• Revolting Rhymes: One of Cinderella's ugly sisters disposes of Cinderella's lost slipper this way, before replacing it with the slipper from her own foot.
  At once, one of the ugly sisters
  (The one whose face was blotched with blisters)
  Sneaked up and grabbed the dainty shoe
  And quickly flushed it down the loo.

Live-Action TV

• 24: Helen Singer flushes her son Kyle's cocaine when CTU agents arrive. Thankfully, this powder turned out to be totally harmless and not cocaine or something much worse.
• Alan Bennett's Talking Heads: Irene disposes of a prescription in this way, which is surprising as she is very prim and proper.
  Irene: I shan't bother with it. In fact I put it down the toilet. I don't know who you write to about doctors.
• Beverly Hills, 90210. David is holding a knapsack full of drugs for a friend of his when Dylan arrives at his apartment to warn him the cops are on the way. They promptly flush everything down the toilet just in time. (In Real Life, it's highly likely the toilet would have clogged, given the amount they were flushing, as well as the plastic bags).
• Breaking Bad: During Season 1, Walt and Jessie are forced to kill their first rival drug dealers, Krazy-8 Molina and Emilio Koyama. Walt hides evidence of murder by dissolving their bodies into red slush using hydrofluoric acid. Jesse is disgusted, but finishes the job flushing the evidence, bucket by bucket.
• Parodied on the Thanksgiving Episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine when everyone realizes what a terrible cook Amy is, they flush their food down the toilet to avoid telling her.
• Cluedo: In series 4, Colonel Mustard is sent some counterfeit money. In his fury, he throws it all around the bathroom, then tries to flush some of it down the toilet; but in his fury, he breaks off the chain, which becomes one of the possible weapons.
• Discussed in CSI as the reason Greg should not have used the bathroom at the scene he was working for his proficiency test. He hadn’t examined the bathroom yet and evidence could have been hidden there or flushed and left residue.
• CSI: NY: In "Unwrapped", some drug dealers force their neighbor to hold a kilo of cocaine for them when they hear cops entering their building. Terrified when the officers reach their floor and start knocking on doors, she races to her bathroom and flushes the whole thing.
• Euphoria: In "Stand Still Like the Hummingbird", Rue hits her Rage Breaking Point when Jules, her mother, tells her that she had flushed her $10k worth of drugs down the toilet.
• Law & Order: SVU:
  • During the episode "Poisoned Motive", drug dealer Earl Talley runs to the bathroom to flush his drug stash minutes before police arrive.
  • The episode "True Believers" has a complicated rape trial where the perpetrator flushed part of the DNA evidence along with a condom.
• Life: Detective Charlie Crews advises a murder victim's father to flush his stash of marijuana before the police search the house so that he can avoid a drugs charge and instead be present to support his family.
• Mom: When Bonnie and Christy find Ray's drugs in his car, they flush them down the toilet, causing it to back up.
  Bonnie: How about that, after all these years the toilet is throwing up on us.
• Monk:
  • In "Mr. Monk and the Big Reward", a woman keeps coming in to confess to comically small crimes (such as stealing a pen from a bank). During one of her "confessions", she admits to getting rid of a body by flushing it. It turns out the "body" was her hamster's.
  • In "Mr. Monk and the Rapper", Stottlemeyer, talking to Murderuss after circumstances implicate him in a rival's death, mentions having known him before he made it in music and reminds him that he tried to flush drugs several times to prevent Stottlemeyer from busting him.
• Pretty Little Liars: An unintentional example happens when, in "Blood Is The New Black", the girls accidentally flush a human teeth necklace they were planning on showing to the police down a sensor-activated toilet.
• The Wire:
  • The Season 2 episode "All Prologue" has D'Angelo Barksdale flush his drug stash down a prison cell toilet.
  • During a raid on a brothel led by Detective "Bunk" Moreland, a gung-ho cop prepares to knock the doors down. Bunk stops him and asks what he's doing, and the other cop responds that he's going by standard procedure, to knock down the doors and enter rapidly before evidence can be destroyed. Bunk stares at him for awhile and then asks if the other cop thinks the brothel is going to flush the whores down a toilet.

Music

• On "Bullets and Love" by The Coup, Boots Riley boasts:
  When I'm runnin from the police I don't have to rush
  I'm so dope I just jump in the toilet and flush

Web Animation

• Referenced in Sam & Mickey's "Flying High":
  Curly Hair Jail Girl: So you killed your ex in the bathroom, cut up his body into little pieces, flushing them down the toilet?
  Barbie: (also in jail) No, but I did do something far more sinister with him.

Visual Novels

• In Chapter 5 of Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, Kokichi Oma's clothes are flushed down the toilet, to hide evidence of his and Kaito Momota's plan.

Western Animation

• In American Dad!, when Stan gets fired from the CIA, he takes up the job as a meter maid, much to his initial disdain. He soon discovers that collecting quarters for his own gain instead of giving them to the city earned him much more money that affords him and Francine a luxurious lifestyle. When an investigator knocks on their front door, Francine and Stan panic and start trying to flush dozens of quarters down the toilet when they think the jig is up.
• BoJack Horseman: A variation happens in "Ancient History"; Hollyhock still has bad memories of her food being drugged by Beatrice, causing her to dump BoJack's painkillers down the sink.
  BoJack: Noooo!!
  Hollyhock: (sarcastically) Oooops.
  BoJack: Hollyhock, those were for my back!
  Hollyhock: Wait, for real?
  BoJack: Yes.
  Hollyhock: Ohh, then, actually: oops.
• Semi-example in The Loud House episode, "Sleuth or Consequences". When Lincoln is accused of flushing a copy of the Princess Pony book down the toilet, Lucy decides to help Lincoln clear his name so he can go to a comic book convention. Near the end of the episode, it is revealed that Lucy is a fan of Princess Pony, but she didn't want anyone to find out, given her goth reputation. She hid the book in the toilet, but Lincoln accidentally flushed it down, not knowing it was there.
• The Simpsons: In "Love, Springfieldian Style", Lisa as Nancy Spuggen and Nelson as Sid Vicious get hooked on chocolate as if it were cocaine or heroin. Their chocolate spree involves them snorting lines, cooking (melting chocolate powder on spoons), and flushing chocolate bars and candy down the toilet when the police come a-knocking.

Real Life

• At least one group of dumb criminals tried to dispose of (a very large amount of) cannabis by attempting to flush it all down the toilet.
• British Serial Killer Dennis Nilsen's (considered the British equivalent of Jeffrey Dahmer) crimes were discovered when his drains were found to be clogged with human flesh.

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