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It's that mostly familiar, spiffed up and neatly tied off version of the sensational yet true story you didn't want to read in the papers anyway. (Double points if the real crime sounds like something fictional, and the fiction takes the real crime to an even further extreme.) About as often as not the real story doesn't even involve a murder, and they just add one to the real story to make it different (and to work as an episode)

Most often seen on Law And Order and its various spinoffs, though many self-contained crime shows sneak one in here or there.

Can sometimes result in a Clueless Aesop. The evil cousin of this trope is But It Really Happened, and its Evil Twin is Could This Happen To You.

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Examples:

• One of the first and most notable examples comes from the first season of Law And Order — "Out of the Half-Light", an episode which fictionalized the then-unresolved Tawana Brawley scandal/hoax.
  • Another first season episode, "Indifference," is so obviously inspired by the Lisa Steinberg case that it concludes with a long disclaimer both displayed and spoken about how the real case differed from the story just shown. It is easily the creepiest moment of the entire series considering they used the same title sequence narrator to tell the audience that the horrific case and the depraved criminals involved have some basis in real life.
    • Of course, they needed the extra mile disclaimer, given the strong resemblance of the actors in this episode to the real-life Joel Steinberg and Hedda Nussbaum.
  • One especially egregious Law And Order example took the infamous 2002 "Michael Jackson dangles his baby out of a hotel window" incident to its (il)logical extreme; a famous eccentric celebrity dangles his young son out a window... AND DROPS HIM! Cue Sting.
  • One involved a variation of the Valerie Plame outing, although with the politics reversed: the target of the outing of his daughter as a covert undercover agent was a Republican politician, and the political operative responsible for the outing was a ruthless, vicious, scary Democrat.
  • One story line was very obviously based off of Anna Nicole Smith (substituting her with a blonde bombshell named "Lorelei", probably not coincidentally the name of a siren-analogue from German legend) and featured suspicions about the deaths of her son and herself that have been raised in real life.
  • There were actually three episodes mined from the Anna Nicole fiasco: one dealing with her son's death (L&O, "The Remains of the Day"), one dealing with her death (L&O:CI, "Bombshell"), and one that dealt with the complete ass Judge Larry Seldin made of himself at the trial for custody of her baby (L&O, "The Family Hour").
    • There was one episode even prior to those: season 7's Matrimony, which featured yet another blond bombshell being investigated for the murder of her octogenarian millionaire husband.
  • The 2008 episode "Bottomless" has to win some kind of award for this trope: it managed to tie together no less than three thinly-veiled versions of real news stories (Wal-Mart ethics enforcement, Chinese quality control scandals, and Roy Pearson's multi-million dollar lawsuit over being given the wrong pair of pants by his dry cleaners) into one vaguely-coherent 44-minute episode.
    • L&O has pulled that trifecta at least once before: "True Crime" combined Courtney Love's coked-up exploits, Kurt Cobain's murder suicide, and the Dave Mustaine/Metallica split (With a layer of The Beatles/Yoko Ono thrown in for good measure).
    • SVU pulled a trifecta when they combined Rhianna's physical abuse, "sexting" (teens sending nude pics over their cellphones), and a scandal about two judges who'd send kids with very minor offenses to private juvenile facilities for cash (basically Holes if Stanley's judge was getting paid for each kid he sent to Camp Green Lake).
  • A 2008 episode of L&O referenced the scientology Paranoia Fuel-ed suicides of a prominent New York artist couple (you've seen the husband's artwork if you saw the trailer for Adam Sandler's Punch Drunk Love or Beck's Sea Change album). Notable in the fact that it vaguely alluded that Assist. DA Cutter might be an expy-scientologist too; sadly, the expy-scilons have yet to return.   ^*
    ^{The scientologists' harassment tactic isn't meant to drive their victim(s) to suicide, just away from investigating scientology. Going crazy and being committed (the ultimate hell for the psychiatry-loathing scientologists) or broke from filing libel suits is just a bonus.}
  • Similarly, another episode of L&O: SVU dealt with a famous person advocating against psychiatric drugs, and the disastrous effects when someone with a mental disorder listens to him (this character wasn't a Happyologist, it was just his personal opinion).
  • Just recently, they based an episode on the murder of abortion doctor George Tiller. Their slant on the whole thing was... interesting, to be charitable.
  • A recent episode of L&O combines conspicuous references to the Octomom, Kate and Jon Gosselin, and the Dugger family in a mess of reality-tv motivated familial drama.
• Played with a little in Blue Heelers, where a character might mention police quotas and revenue-raising. Can lead into Writer On Board.
• In late 2006, Law And Order Criminal Intent fictionalized the already-fictional character of the YouTube "celebrity" lonelygirl15 as "WeepingWillow17" and made her the victim of a kidnapping, and by the end it's as hard for the detectives to tell what's real and what isn't as it is for the viewers.
  • As of late December 2006, it looks like the creative minds behind lonelygirl15 might be incorporating a similar idea in their own storyline. Although since lonelygirl15 is supposed to be a cult escapee, this was probably in the works from the beginning.
• Yet another Criminal Intent episode dramatized the John Mark Karr confession to the murder of Jon Benet Ramsey, for the first half hour at least. And come on, you knew the creepy neighbor had to have something to do with it. Bonus: The character of Faith Yancy makes another appearance.
• Basically Law & Order: Criminal Intent does a lot of these. The show is about high-profile crimes, after all.
  • All of this makes watching True Crime shows like American Justice or Cold Case Files an interesting experience, especially when you recognize a case you didn't know had been Ripped From The Headlines.
• Cold Case has done this a few times:
  • Look Again is based on the Martha Moxley case.
  • The Boy In The Box is based on the actual Philadelphia unsolved case.
  • Thrill Kill is based on the case of the Memphis Three.
  • Other episodes based on real crimes are Blackout, the upcoming Jurisprudence, based on a scandal about two judges who'd send kids with very minor offenses to private juvenile facilities for cash and Strange Fruit.
• Criminal Minds has done this a few times:
  • "Natural Born Killer" — based on real-life Mafia hitman Richard Kuklinski
  • Two-parter "To Hell..." "...And Back" — based on the case of Canadian serial killer Robert Pickton
  • "Empty Planet"" — seems to be based in part on the Unabomber
• The first episode of the final season of Strong Medicine had a storyline that referenced the 2005 Glendale train derailment (where a guy left a truck on the track.) They made the suspect in the episode female...and bipolar.
• Dirty Harry fought obvious stand-ins for the Zodiac Killer (in Dirty Harry) and the Symbionese Liberation Army. (in The Enforcer)
  • Lampshaded in Zodiac (2007) with the obvious Aesop that Real Life crimes aren't solved by just shooting someone.
• Another version of this occurred in the Protest Song movement of the early 1960's. Singers like Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs would literally write songs, often using old folk melodies, about events they read about in the newspaper. Three of the best examples of this are Dylan's "Lonesome Death of Hattie Caroll," about the real life killing of a poor black maid by a bored aristocrat, "Hurricane", about how the Black boxer was unfairly thrown to jail instead of the two Whites who started a shooting at a bar, and "Who Killed Davy Moore" about the boxer who died in the ring. It was Dylan's gradual movement away from this style, however, that made his later and more general political commentary much more lasting than that of his contemporaries- just compare "Masters of War", which has been played as commentary on every U.S. conflict since Vietnam, and Och's "Here's to the state of Richard Nixon," which lost its relevance as soon as tricky Dick left office.
  • Dylan and Ochs were both following in the footsteps of Woody Guthrie, who wrote many, many songs like this, "Pretty Boy Floyd" and "Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)" probably being the most famous. And you can throw his son Arlo Guthrie in here as well, since the littering incident from "Alice's Restaurant" actually made the local newspaper before he wrote the song about it.
• Law And Order referenced itself, in a recent (2007-08) episode. In real life, Andrea Yates, killer of her own five children, was granted a new trial after appeal, based mainly on the fact that a forensic psychiatrist testified she had borrowed her defense from an episode of Law and Order, one of Yates' favorite shows. The psychiatrist was mistaken, as there had never been such an episode. Testimony from an NBC executive involved in Law and Order was part of the appellate case. Later, in an actual episode of L&O, the forensic pathologist, Dr. Rogers, series regular, makes a similar mistake in testifying, when she says that a criminal borrowed elements of his crime from a novel, and names the novel. She is mistaken about the title, and this becomes part of the defendant's appeal.
• Just about every Police Procedural show (Bones, Numb3rs and most recently Without A Trace ... remarkably I can't recall any of the Law And Orders participating) got to show off their China Towns for an episode based on the ancient Chinese custom of "ghost brides": the family of a young man who died before getting married arranges for a deceased girl to marry him in the afterlife; the episode typically dealt with someone who forgot the "deceased" part when selecting a bride. Sadly, this troper has no idea what story prompted this.
• Deconstructed in Fahrenheit 451. Montag, after escaping from police, watches the police catch and kill a random person, then claim that the person was Montag. This is because the police thought a chase is boring on TV when it takes all night, so they decided to wrap it up neatly instead.
  • This may have originated in the 40's-50's radio show "Dragnet" which claimed that "All you are about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent" at the start of every show.
• L.A. Law once had an episode based on the case of Angela Carder, a pregnant woman terminally ill with cancer who was forced to undergo premature cesarean section by a court order which the hospital administrators successfully obtained. In Real Life, both died. On TV, the baby survived.
  • This was also common for whatever the 'light' sub-plot was for L.A. Law. Lawsuits and criminal charges based around toad-lickers and bull semen were often just highly fictionalized news bites.
• Agatha Christie example: part of Murder on the Orient Express, the Daisy Armstrong kidnapping, is clearly based on the Charles Lindbergh case.
• Anything written by Jodi Picoult is Ripped From The Headlines and obfuscated just enough that Picoult doesn't need to get permission from the people involved.
• Poe did it with The Mystery of Marie Roget, which is based on the real-life disappearance and apparent murder of an American woman named Mary Rogers.
• The first three seasons of the Canadian crime series DaVinci's Inquest dealt with the main characters attempting to find out who was behind the disappearances of prostitutes in and around the Vancouver area. The show was inspired by the real-life kidnappings of prostitutes by B.C. pig farmer Robert Pickton (he hadn't been caught at the time the show began), and numerous episodes contained characters speaking at length on the failure of the Vancouver police department to find the killer. When Pickton was caught, the creators wisely dropped the plotline altogether.
• An episode of Law And Order SVU managed to work in the case covered in 'As Nature Made Him' the biographical story of the twin boy forced to live as a girl after a botched circumcision. The episode had the non-altered twin charged with a crime based on the fact that the evidence proved there had been a young boy at the scene. Altered-twin eventually fessed up after being hit with the news that 'she' used to be male. This troper predicted halfway through the episode that it would end with 'What was my name (as a boy)?' since that was a key moment in the real story.
• Dubbing companies like Four Kids Entertainment will typically remove episodes/clips to avoid this trope. Although they do tend to remove things that aren't really examples (or not intended to be examples) such as tall skyscrapers blowing up.
  • This troper recalls them keeping a scene in the first episode of Sonic X that involved Eggman ramming a giant mech into a building while the police officers below were shown covered in dust and ashes. It aired roughly a year and a half after 9-11, when networks were still excising planes/crumbling buildings/references to falling/whatever from shows, movies, and music.
• This 8-Bit Theater comic.
• One episode of Grounded for Life was promo-ed as "ripped from the headlines", when a character's interference causes the Yankees to lose a game. Except that the real game was between the Marlins and Cubs, and the episode was a rerun.
  • Law And Order had an episode in which a fan who interfered with a game was murdered.
• The idea for Stone Temple Pilots' song "Plush" is, according to singer Scott Weiland, partially taken from an article he read in the paper one day about a woman's murder.
• Similarly, Nirvana's "Polly" was based on the kidnapping of a girl who eventually escaped from her abductor.
• One recent episode of Bones takes the pregnancy pact reportedly taken by a group of Mass. girls and incorporates it into the storyline.
• A recent episode of Lie to Me was based on the Bernie Madoff blowup.
  • And the pilot had a similar plotline to the Elliot Spitzer scandal.
  • An episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent had a very Affable Evil Madoff expy, who confessed to his incredible scheme to get protection from the Colombian(?) gangsters he swindled.
  • The Leverage team alsp took down a Madoff expy and Hank-Med was hired to treat another one.
• This blog post by one of the writers of Leverage discusses this trope.
• Mainstream Comic Books don't do this too often (save for major events like World War II or 9/11) lest they date themselves, but in X-Men, one of the reasons Nightcrawler quit his divinity studies was the rash of child abuse cases surrounding the Catholic Church in the early 2000's, wondering how God could allow such a thing.
  • The more pertinent question that Nightcrawler should be asking is how God allowed such things as Chuck Austen's X-Men story lines.
• House did an episode based upon the case of Whitney Cerak and Laura VanRyn. Two young women with remarkably similar appearance and builds are confused for one another in the midst of horrific injuries sustained in an accident. In the House episode, as in real life, one of the women did not survive and the other woman's care was supervised by the deceased woman's family.
  • So did CSI:NY, with the twist (of course) being the "dead" girl's mother accidentally killed her own daughter, who she (and everyone else) thought was the party-girl "survivor".
• Ghost Whisperer and Criminal Intent dealt with the Tri-State Crematory scandal, where corpses were never cremated and "piled like cord wood" in the undergrowth; the (fictional) causes for this was the crematorium operator simply becoming too old and senile and the operator being ridiculously incompetent at business in general, respectively.
• Walter Gibson noted in an article in The Great Detectives (edited by Otto Penzler) that he based the Shadow's foe Double Z on the then contemporary terrorist Three X.
• Joyce Carol Oates is very fond of fictionalizing real cases of murder and violent death, sometimes sticking very close to actual events but going inside the minds of the people involved, sometimes departing much farther. Some examples are My Sister My Love (Jon Benet Ramsey), Zombie (Jeffrey Dahmer), "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" (Charles Schmid), "Dear Husband" (Andrea Yates), and "Landfill" (John Fiocco).
• All We Know of Heaven by Jacquelyn Mitchard is based on a real story about two girls who are in a car accident. One girl dies. Unfortunately, the hospital identified the wrong one as dead. In real life, the families were very nice about it and handled themselves well. The book adds more drama and a love story.
  • Same story was done on one of the crime shows (I think CSI, but don't hold me to it). The aftermath? The mother of one of the girls kills the girl she thinks is the other girl (because she was driving and "she killed my baby")...but turns out to be her own.
• 18 and life by Skid Row was written when guiarist Dave Sabo read a newspaper article about the event.
• The album "The Crusade" by heavy metal band Trivium had no less than four examples of this; "Entrance of the Conflagration" (about the murder of four children by their mother Andrea Yates), "Unrepentant" (about Nazir Ahmad's murder of his four daughters), "Contempt Breeds Contamination" (about the racially-influenced killing of a Guinean immigrant by four cops in New York), and "And Sadness Will Sear" (about the hate-driven torture and murder of Matthew Shepard).
• Depeche Mode did a song in 1986 called "New Dress", where nearly every line was taken from an actual headline. It's meant to showcase how people care more about celebrity gossip than, y'know, actual news. All the verses go something like this first one, with the last line recurring each time:
  Sex jibe, husband murders wife
  Bomb blast victims fight for life
  Girl, thirteen, attacked with knife
  Princess Di is wearing a new dress
• How did this list get so long until someone mentioned South Park? They use this once every two episodes, It's easier for them than `regular' tv shows and animated series because they can put an episode together in a mere couple of hours, so they can come with an episode about something that happened mere days earlier. Notable are the episode just after 9/11 in which the boys travel to iraq, and the episode about Kenny being kept on life support when God wanted him to die because the devil would attack heaven and Kenny was the only one able to stop him.

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