Terminally-Ill Criminal

A character learns they have contracted an incurable disease and resolves to carry out a murder or other crime, seeing as they're going to die soon anyway. Sometimes the character is actually heroic and kills an Asshole Victim, other times it's done out of sheer spite.

This includes cases where the character was already a criminal and the illness pushes them into breaking the law even further. Sometimes, the disease turns out to not be fatal (or might have been misdiagnosed in the first place), leading to Crossing the Burnt Bridge.

The underlying reason is that oftentimes terminal diseases push people to confront their own mortality. After all, we might know that we are going to die someday but most of us see that day as too far in the future. For these characters, their death day hangs above them like the sword of Damocles. In such circumstances, things like morality tend to lose all meaning.

Compare and contrast The Last Dance, when a doomed character sets out to complete a last adventure or goal. Contrast Taking You with Me, when a defeated character pulls a suicide attack in an attempt to kill their enemy. See Convenient Terminal Illness, when the terminally ill person makes a Heroic Sacrifice. Compare Last Day to Live, when a character is told they are going to die until they don't, and Like You Were Dying, when the dying character decides to make the most of their remaining time. Sub-Trope of Your Days Are Numbered. See also Thanatos Gambit, when a plan hinges upon the planner dying. Can also overlap with Whodunnit to Me?, when the victim takes extra-legal means to gain vengeance on their killer.

As this is a Death Trope, unmarked spoilers abound. Beware.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Eternal Sabbath: Izaku is an Enfant Terrible who can manipulate others to commit suicide or otherwise kill them for sick amusement, but for the most part he only does it when the target is in his way or has "wronged" him somehow. Then he discovers that he's dying due to a genetic anomaly, and goes on a rampage by indiscriminately controlling other people to kill and/or vandalize buildings, resulting in city-wide destruction.
• YuYu Hakusho: It is revealed at the end of the Chapter Black Story Arc that the reason why Sensui wanted to open the interdimensional tunnel between the human world and Makai (which in turn allows all demons who live in the latter realm to invade the former) is that he's suffering from a terminal illness, and wants to challenge the strongest demon possible in battle before his passing. The tunnel is opened in the end, but Yusuke, himself revealed to be the descendant of a powerful demon, defeats Sensui afterwards.

Arts

• Marriage A-la-Mode: Implied. The young Earl's excesses have led him to contract syphilis and carry out an unfulfilling sex life. As a consequence, when he discovers his (married for convenience) wife having an extramarital affair with Silvertongue, he has no problems challenging the lawyer to a Duel to the Death. At the time, this practice is already illegal so the Earl is prepared to either die at the hands of Silvertongue or to kill him and then die by execution —the then punishment for murder.

Comic Books

• Subverted in G.I. Joe: Sierra Muerte, where the sickly Cobra Commander believes he is dying and at the end of the miniseries gloats to the Joes that he gets the last laugh even if they've beaten him due to how hollow a victory would be to send a terminally ill man to jail. He is then informed that he's not really dying and just has the flu.
• Green Arrow: William Tockman, the original Clock King, originally turned to a life of crime after being diagnosed with a terminal illness, for the purpose of providing for his sister after his death. Ironically, while his diagnosis turned out to be false, his sister did die while Tockman was imprisoned for his crimes.
• Green Manor: The "John Smith" story has a man murder his wife and disguise it as the work of the elusive Serial Killer John Smith, then confess his crime to the inspector on the case. As he explains, he's going to die soon of an Incurable Cough of Death, so he confesses out of respect for the inspector's work, giving the key to the mystery: "John Smith" is actually dozens of people each murdering an Asshole Victim they know and pinning it on the killer.
• Joker's Last Laugh: A doctor fakes the Joker's diagnosis — about having terminal cancer — on the theory that terminal cancer might force him to confront his own mortality and re-assess his life. Instead, it inspires him to go on a cross-country rampage. His goal is either to annihilate society or make damned sure he will be forever remembered as one of history's greatest monsters. He gets very damned close to doing so, too.
• A Million Ways to Die Hard: Mr. Moviefone is a serial killer from John McClane's past whose murders center around movie themes. McClane would pursue Moviefone until he disappeared into Europe. Come present day, with the 30th anniversary of the events at Nakatomi Plaza, Mr. Moviefone returns once again to wreak havoc, going after McClane. Later on, Moviefone kidnaps McClane's ex-wife, Holly, and lures McClane into a trap inside an old theater. It's here that Moviefone reveals that he has a terminal illness and wishes to end his rivalry with his old foe once and for all. He shows that he has himself and the theater rigged to a bomb set to detonate once his oxygen intake meteor goes down once and for all. Although his plan gets foiled when an Interpol agent who also has a vendetta with Moviefone sacrifices herself to save McClane and Holly.
• Poison Ivy: Merging with Queen Ivy has left Eco-Terrorist Poison Ivy both severely depowered and terminally ill. Her letters to Harley reveal that she has about one year left. She then sets out to eradicate humanity with Festering Fungi before she dies to save Earth from pollution.
• Spider-Man 2099: The CEO of Alchemax Tyler Stone was already an immoral monster, between the abusive treatment towards his family, the human experimentation, and the horrendous treatment of his employees. However, in volume 3 of the comic, he joins in on a plot to murder one million people after he is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Miguel doesn't feel particularly sorry for him.

Films — Live-Action

• Flight from Destiny: The 1941 film begins with Professor Henry Todhunter being diagnosed with an aortic aneurism that will kill him in no more than six months. Discussing (hypothetically) with several colleagues what someone who will soon die might do, one man suggests committing a "social murder" of someone without whom society would be better off. He decides to apply this by killing a woman who is blackmailing two of his friends.
• God Bless America: Frank is diagnosed with incurable brain cancer early in the film and sets out on a killing spree, targeting people he considers detrimental to society. Subverted later on when his doctor discovers that he has misdiagnosed him and Frank has been healthy the whole time. By that time, though, Frank is too far gone and sets up an elaborate Suicide by Cop at the set of the talent show he most despises.
• Icebreaker has Bruce Campbell starring as Greig, a terrorist mastermind dying of cancer who intends to "go out with a bang on his final birthday" by taking an entire ski resort hostage, murdering the staff and guards, and hijacking a nuke to make sure the world remembers his legacy.
• Parting Shots: This Black Comedy film revolves around failed photographer Harry Sterndale, who after learning that he has terminal cancer and will die in just six weeks, decides to go on a killing spree targeting everyone in his life who ever wronged him.
• Saw: John Kramer is a colon cancer patient who had developed an inoperable frontal lobe tumor by the time of the main films, and this is part of his motivation for putting ruined people through the wringer as a the Jigsaw Killer. Being forced to confront his own mortality, he became obsessed with helping society and forces people to appreciate their lives by torturing them. Given his occasional moments where he defies this reasoning, though, it's implied that his tumor clouded his judgment and made him unable to grasp morality anymore up until his death in Saw III (which wasn't because of his cancer, but rather a Slashed Throat done by his latest victim by then).
• Speed 2: Cruise Control: The Big Bad John Geiger has a fatal disease and uses the time he has left to get revenge on the people he has a grudge against.
• Tenet: Andrei Sator, the main villain, is dying of cancer and intends to wipe out all life in existence with him by rewriting the world's algorithm.
• White House Down: One of the reasons why Walker works with the men invading the White House is because he has an inoperable brain tumor and only has a few months to live.
• The World Is Not Enough: Renard is one half of the Big Bad Duumvirate and has lived so far with a bullet in his brain that's slowly killing him. Figuring that's he dead soon no matter what, Renard has no qualms about handling a nuclear fuel rod with his bare hands, nor with getting blown up in a reactor meltdown. Even after learning that his partner + lover is dead, Renard continues the Evil Plan, aiming for a Dying Moment of Awesome.

Literature

• And Then There Were None: The Big Bad learns that he has cancer and resolves to kill several people who were acquitted of their crimes despite their certain guilt. He ends up committing suicide after all the others are dead, having previously faked his death to continue the murders unimpeded.
• Arsène Lupin: The Teeth of the Tiger is a revenge story where an engineer married to a woman who doesn't love him learns he has cancer (and his son has tuberculosis). He resolves to murder his son and kill himself in a way that will ensure his wife and her (platonic) lover will take the fall for it. And it would have worked (the wife and lover independently commit suicide) if it weren't for Arsène investigating, but the story is further complicated by the fact that there's another murderer on the scene manipulating the engineer and the lover so he can inherit from all the victims involved.
• Dear Miss Demeanor by Joan Hess: The culprit in two murders among a high school's faculty is discovered to be a terminally-ill teacher who'd been outraged at the principal's and custodian's corruption and sexual exploitation of students for years. Three of her colleagues are suspected of being an accomplice to the latter murder, but there's no proof of which one, and no evidence they'd known for sure that the food she'd dosed was poisoned.
• Hercule Poirot:
  • "Wasp's Nest": A man named Harrison, who is diagnosed with terminal cancer, plots to commit suicide after leaving clues that will lead to his romantic rival being blamed for his "murder" and hanged for it. Poirot discovers and foils his plan by replacing the poison he used to kill himself with baking soda and chews out the man because his plan was effectively attempted murder. Harrison accepts the admonishment and makes peace with the fact that his ex-lover had chosen the other guy.
  • Curtain: Poirot himself commits murder to remove a sociopath capable of inciting people to murder for his own sick amusement, and his confession only comes to Hastings after his death of natural causes (that is, not taking the medicine for his heart condition).
• Judge Dee: In "The Red Pavilion", the murderer is a leper who killed the woman he mistakenly thought was the reason his son had killed himself. She claimed this was the case to boost her reputation, but the son thought he'd contracted leprosy like his father.
• A Line to Kill: Anne kills the two people she blames for her son being Driven to Suicide after becoming addicted to gambling. She has a fatal heart disease and asks Hawthorne and Horowitz to spare her accomplice, her daughter Katherine, as a result. Hawthorne declines, but the jury clearly sees Katherine as a Sympathetic Murderer and acquitted her. Anne dies before she can be sentenced.
• Millennium Series: Evert Gullberg, head of the Section (Internal Affairs who degenerated into a Government Conspiracy), goes to the hospital and kills Zalachenko to remove someone who might be able to blackmail them once and for all. He was previously diagnosed with terminal cancer.
• Mr. Monk Gets Even: The guy behind three recent murders turns out to be Cleve Dobbs, who was just apparently murdered by his wife. He wasn't; it was suicide dressed up to look like murder. The whole thing started because Dobbs found out he had Lou Gehrig's disease and chose to get revenge for perceived slights before killing himself.
• Sherlock Holmes:
  • A Study in Scarlet: Jefferson Hope reveals at the end that his heart might give out at any moment, and he was determined to kill the murderers of his beloved Lucy before that happened. He dies shortly after confessing, "as though he had been able in his dying moments to look back upon a useful life, and on work well done".
  • The Boscombe Valley Mystery: John Turner had diabetes (a death sentence before insulin was discovered) in such an advanced state that he decides to kill Charles MacCarthy (who'd been blackmailing him for most of his life), helped by the victim referring to the man's daughter in very crude terms, and the only reason he didn't do it publicly was fear of his daughter finding out. He dies before he can reveal his guilt to exonerate the main suspect (the victim's son), but the evidence supplied by Holmes is enough to ensure the son's acquittal.
• Trial and Error by Anthony Berkeley: The protagonist, Lawrence Todhunter, learns he has a terminal heart condition and decides to do the world one last service by murdering someone who, in his view, truly deserves it. Then the police arrest someone else for the crime and Todhunter has to call on the services of amateur sleuth Ambrose Chitterwick to prove that he actually is the guilty party.
• Tony Hill and Carol Jordan: Revealed to be the case of Stalky, the killer from "Beneath The Bleeding." Discovering he had contracted a fatal case of AIDS and was going to be dead before he reached his thirties, thus meaning he would never accomplish any of his dreams, he decided to take revenge by poisoning all the people who had managed to accomplish them instead of him first.
• Bernard Werber: One of his stories has the dictator of Pakistan learn that he has cancer and decide that if he doesn't get to live, no one does. He acquires an atomic bomb powerful enough to wipe out all life on the globe... and goes through with it.

Live-Action TV

• The Blacklist: Milton Bobbit, aka "The Undertaker", uses his insurance job to find people with terminal illnesses, and uses them as assassins who then kill themselves in order to let the trail go cold. In exchange, their families are given full benefits.
• Boomtown (2002): Discussed and invoked in the episode "Home Invasion". A gang are breaking into family homes, torturing, sexually assaulting, and murdering whole families. The patriarch of the next family has terminal cancer, which results in him still being at home during the break-in. He delivers an Agonizing Stomach Wound to the would-be perpetrator and contemplates killing him. He and Joel discuss that he would still be in prison, which he says doesn't matter as he'll be dead anyway, but is reassured by the pain of the wound and the risk of infection, so he puts the gun down.
• Breaking Bad: Deconstructed. Walt learns he has terminal lung cancer and chooses to manufacture crystal meth to leave enough money to support his family, reasoning he will be dead before he can be investigated or face any legal repercussions. His plan spirals out of control into murder and chaos almost immediately, and becomes even more complicated when a treatment he was talked into actually puts him in remission... and ironically makes it more likely he'll be caught. In the end, Walt dies via his own stray bullet instead of from cancer. Thus doubling with Not The Illness That Killed Them.
• The Brokenwood Mysteries: Subverted The first episode teases that this is going to be the solution to the mystery — that the victim of the episode is killed by a terminally ill retired detective — but it turns out that the detective was covering for someone else.
• Cold Case: In "One Night", after learning that he had MS, John buried a teenage boy alive so he could see what it felt like to watch someone else die. He does the same thing again, twenty years later, after finding out that his MS has progressed.
• Criminal Minds: The Big Bad of "Reckoner" is a judge who, having been diagnosed with terminal cancer, decides to hire a hitman to kill a number of criminals who got Off on a Technicality on his watch (the judge also puts his name on the list, accepting that what he's doing is monstrous, and is the last person the hitman kills before getting the hell out of Dodge).
• CSI:
  • The killer of a young girl in "Harvest" is eventually revealed to have been her older brother. Turns out that the teen was afflicted with leukemia and his sister was a Walking Transplant, and no matter how much they both tried to talk to their parents they refused to stop harvesting from the poor girl to keep him alive, so he decided to give the girl a Mercy Kill and let his failing organs kill him eventually (he confesses to Grissom knowing he won't live to see the inside of a courtroom).
  • "Living Legend" has a former mobster go around killing his former associates after discovering he would soon die from a bullet lodged in his chest that a mob doctor was unable to remove. He's eventually arrested and gloats that he won't live to see his trial. Catherine then points out that mob doctors aren't known for their skill and a regular doctor was able to remove the bullet. The mobster is now going to live a long time.
• CSI: NY:
  • "Blacklist": The villain is a terminally ill cancer patient who kills the head of his insurance company, lands his oncologist in the ICU, and goes after the home-health nurse who had cared for him. It all started when the insurance company dropped him. He blames all three of them for not continuing to provide his treatments, even though the doctor and nurse's hands were pretty much tied at that point. Under police guard at the hospital after being arrested, he tells Mac they should've let him die since he's terminal. Mac replies that's probably true since the state will now have to foot the bill for his care, but that he's entitled to his day in court. The man then says he'll be dead before his trial date.
  • "Shop Till You Drop": The Body of the Week is a department store owner who turns out to have been killed in self-defense after he blackmailed the store manager into having sex with him. The blackmail material? He caught her on tape stealing from the tills in order to pay unauthorized Christmas bonuses to employees who were scheduled to be laid off because she'd been diagnosed with terminal cancer and wanted to go out with a bang. Jo lets her walk, but it's mentioned that due to the late stage of her disease, it's likely she wouldn't be around to face trial anyway.
• Diagnosis: Murder has a few episodes regarding this idea.
  • One episode combines this with Suicide by Cop. A person learns he has an incurable disease and goes on an escalated crime spree so Steve Sloan can kill him and leave a mark much like other famous criminals.
  • The episode Murder, Country Style, has a country singer murder her lover in a rage after finding out he has cheated on her. When she goes to her mother, the mother attempts to take the blame for the murder, as she is dying of a disease and only has about 6 months left anyway. The plan is ultimately for naught, as Mark finds this out and realizes the mother can barely lift her own bags, let alone swing the murder weapon with enough force to kill a man, and the daughter is found out.
  • The trope is exploited in "Murder X 4", in which a string of murders is committed by people with seemingly no connection to their victims, a pattern only being found later that the killers are terminally ill. It is revealed that a computer consultant for Community General runs a sort of assassination service out of a company of his known as Montana Mutual Insurance. He travels around different hospitals finding people who need someone dead, then find terminally ill patients to kill the target, promising full benefits to their families for the job.
• Doctor Who: In "Voyage of the Damned", the Captain of the Titanic is dying from an illness, so he helps Max Capricorn sabotage the ship in exchange for money for his family.
• Elementary: The Body of the Week in one episode is a college professor who was shot in both eyes in an illegal casino. He turns out to have hired the hitman himself after being diagnosed with cancer of the eye, with the intent of framing his "wife" — actually his Sex Slave — after she fell in love with one of his graduate students.
• FBI:
  • FBI: International: In "One Kind of Madman", a group of terrorists led by Ivo Kostov takes a Concert Hall full of multinational students and their families hostage, demanding a fortune transferred for their safe release. The team's efforts to resolve the situation are further hampered by the discovery that Ivo, previously a minor member of an Albanian Separatist group known only for petty crimes, is dying of a fatal blood clot and is thus fanatically committed to doing something meaningful for his cause before his life comes to an end.
  • FBI: Most Wanted: "Deconflict" has the team dealing with Maurice Hewitt, a fugitive from Jess's past who eighteen years ago was responsible for a bank robbery that resulted in several deaths, including that of a pregnant police officer. The reason why he's resurfacing now is that he's dying from untreatable cancer, having decided to use the time he has left to get revenge on his partner who betrayed him after the robbery and to have one last showdown with Jess in the process. After being apprehended, Hewitt tries to goad Jess into killing him by taunting him about his late wife, only for Jess to decide not to since he's going to die anyway, although he confiscates Hewitt's remaining meds so that his death in prison will be more painful. However, it turns out Hewitt actually did regret killing the aforementioned officer, having visited her daughter along the way to give her a gift as a form of atonement for his actions.
• Grimm: Colonel Adam Desai from "The Good Soldier" was the Manticore Commander for soldier Frankie Gonzales in Afghanistan, who was unable to do anything to bring her justice after she was gang-raped by four Private Security Contractors, to his great regret. Years later now learning he's dying of cancer, Colonel Desai begins to hunt down and kill the four rapists.
• House of the Dragon: Craghas Dahar, aka "the Crabfeeder", is the Triarchy's admiral and leader of their armies during their war against the Velaryon. He's infamous for his cruelty and ruthlessness towards his enemies — he feeds them alive to crabs, hence his nickname — and by the time he first appears in the series, he's already contracted the (usually) incurable Greyscale. He dies at the hands of Daemon before the disease would have claimed his life.
• Law & Order:
  • Law & Order: Criminal Intent: In "Pas de Deux", the perp of the week is a bank robber who has cancer and is hoping for a Suicide by Cop.
  • Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: Benson and Stabler investigate the murder of a man who was HIV positive. It was later discovered that the killer was a woman he had infected with HIV. After she reveals he infected her, she tells them that she's dying from AIDS.
• Legends: Invoked. Infiltrating an Anti-government terrorist organisation who is planning an attack, the group grows suspicious of Martin's persona as he keeps pushing to be part of the big attack, despite supposedly being a mild-mannered individual drawn to the cause due to the government failing his family who only joined four months ago, wondering why he was so willing to throw away his life. To reassure them, Martin lies that he has stage four brain cancer and only months left to live (his team providing falsified medical records to back up the claim) and is thus happy to give what's left of his life for the cause, convincing them he'd be the perfect suicide bomber.
• Matlock: In "The Dare," wealthy philanthropist Malcolm Engle has a grudge against Matlock for not getting his son off on a murder charge many years prior. He spitefully kills the lawyer's detective friend, challenging Matlock beforehand to prove it. Matlock in fact does so during trial, and in the process reveals that Engle is terminally ill. Engle admits to this on the witness stand, cynically pointing out that convicting him to life in prison will be pointless given that he only has six months to live.
• Money Heist:
  • Midway through the first season, Berlin, the one who commands the heist team inside the Royal Mint of Spain, is revealed to have Helmer's Myopathy, which is mentioned to give him around two years of remaining life. Because of this, he's prompted to die as heroically as possible while fending off the armored police team pursuing the escaping robbers at the end of the second season, so as the make sure that the public remembers him well. Flashbacks featuring him in the following seasons delve further into how the illness motivated him to plan the (ongoing in the present) Bank of Spain heist with Palermo, and spend his life to his fullest while not engaging in any criminal activity, even if it involves questionable choices like constantly marrying a number of women.
  • In a What Could Have Been example, all of the robbers were meant to have terminal diseases of different kinds, all of which would serve as their motivation to begin the heist on the Mint.
  • Downplayed with Berlin's same-name equivalent from Money Heist: Korea - Joint Economic Area, who isn't really motivated by or doesn't mind about his identical illness at all, since he had spent over two decades diagnosed with it, and doesn't try to get himself killed when he gets the opportunity to do it in a glamorous way. He still gets physical and mental issues when he doesn't take his necessary medication for a good while, though.
• Nash Bridges: A sting operation is disrupted by a former gangster executing the criminals but sparing Evan. The mobster is later revealed to have a terminal illness and is killing his former associates. Nash spares him, saying "When you die, it's on God's terms."
• NCIS:
  • "SWAK" has Tony being infected with Y. pestis sent in the mail by a woman named Hannah Lowell in a desperate attempt to get NCIS to reveal the truth that her daughter Sarah was the rape victim of a midshipman, despite investigations suggesting otherwise and Sarah's Trauma-Induced Amnesia about the incident. If they don't reveal what she believes is the truth, Tony will die without the antidote. Hannah was unafraid of the consequences of her actions due to her dying of an inoperable brain tumor, which made her undergo enough Sanity Slippage to resort to using the bioweapon in the first place, having stolen it from one of the researchers at the pharmaceutical company of which she was the CEO. (Ironically, she had once been an activist against the use of bioweapons.) Fortunately, Hannah didn't know that the sample was programmed to kill itself off thirty-two hours after infecting the host. This fact, combined with his modern-day immune system, allows Tony to survive. Apparently, after she was arrested, Hannah's tumor made her regress to her activist days during which she had a tendency to flash her breasts alongside her peace slogans. Sarah apologizes to the team for her mother's actions, knowing of her condition but not expecting she would do something that extreme. She also reveals that she faked her amnesia and lied about being raped. What had actually happened was that she was involved with the midshipman, and was consensually tied to his bed. He left to get food for them both but was killed in a car accident and never returned, leaving Sarah tied to the bed panicking and calling for help. She lied to her mother because she couldn't figure out how else to explain the situation of why she would be tied to a bed.
  • "Last Dance" has convicted arms dealer Reymundo Diaz bribing his way out of prison and going on a bloody rampage with his henchmen across the US seeking revenge on the two people who put him away six years ago, Carlos Salazar (who happens to be one of Torres's undercover aliases, but Diaz never learned his real name) and his own cousin Maria whom Torres convinced to testify against him. However, he shows no interest in rebuilding his empire. It's because Diaz is dying from a rare and deadly cancer, and he's hellbent on making sure Torres and Maria die with him. He fails, as Diaz is shot in the head by Torres during their shootout.
• The Outer Limits: In "New Lease", two scientists invent a device that can revive the dead. They test it on various cryogenically frozen animals, then a person, but they find that every test subject can only last a day before it dies again. When one of the scientists is killed by a mugger, his partner decides to bring him back so they can have one last day together. The revived scientist, unable to let go of his desire for revenge and feeling he has nothing to lose, wastes the day tracking down the mugger, ignoring his friend and his family. When he finds the mugger, he murders him in public. To his horror, he finds out that the problem all along was the cryogenic freezing; having been revived as a fresh corpse, he's going to get to live to be arrested for the murder and most likely sentenced to life in prison.
• Rizzoli & Isles: Zigzagged. Charles Hoyt, aka "The Surgeon", is already a convicted killer. But when he learns that he is dying of cancer, he determines to draw in and kill his surviving victim, Det. Jane Rizzoli, by having another inmate killed so that she'd investigate. Fortunately, his plan fails, and Jane kills Hoyt and his accomplice, a sadistic prison guard, by the end of the episode.
• The Rookie: Inverted. "Long Shot" features Tim and Lucy on a trail of a series of seemingly random crimes including a car being vandalised, someone releasing rats into a café, and a man being attacked by pepper spray. When they eventually catch up with the culprit, it turns out she was diagnosed with breast cancer the year before (the same condition which killed her mother) and thus put up with the victims' abuse and rejection (her boyfriend ditching her, her employer firing her due to her missing work due to chemo treatments, her landlord hiking up the rent whilst she was unemployed) convinced she would be dead soon so it was all meaningless. Upon discovering that she was in remission, she's furious and thus decides to strike back at them all.
• Sherlock: The killer of the week in the pilot episode "A Study in Pink" is a taxi driver-turned-Serial Killer because, as he's terminally ill and unable to provide for his family, he approached "consulting criminal" James Moriarty and accepted the offer to be paid for every person he murdered (an offer that, quite notably, Moriarty apparently decided to fund just for kicks).
• Silent Witness: "World Cruise" features Doctor Josef Horowitz, a charming respected academic who was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust. Discovering he only has months left to live due to lung cancer, Horowitz sets out to complete his "World Cruise" that he spent years thinking about, namely getting revenge on all those responsible for the death of his twin brother Aaron in the camps.
• Slow Horses: Nikolai Katinsky was one of the greatest Soviet Spymasters during the Cold War, setting up numerous sleeper agents and moles in the highest ranks of British Intelligence. Following escaping to America and living for years as a seemingly unassuming bureaucrat, upon being diagnosed with terminal cancer and given six months left to live, he decides to embark on a final quest for revenge against Jackson Lamb, by robbing the Glasshouse, as Lamb was responsible for killing his operative all those years ago.
• Squid Game: The host of the unnamed annual contest the series revolves around, Oh Il-nam, is an elderly hyper-rich capitalist dying of a brain tumor. Well before he was diagnosed, he spent years running the clandestine contest, where hundreds of financially troubled people compete in a Deadly Game in which only one can come out alive and win, for the entertainment of the world's wealthiest men, motivated by him growing jaded by his immense wealth and trying to prove his misanthrope beliefs. In the final year he's set to headline (which is when the series happens), he instead decides to compete in the games himself, out of a faint hope that he can relive his childhood and finally feel alive again, even if he's at risk of dying with the other players along the way. In the one-year Time Skip at the final episode, he dies once and for all when he calls Gi-hun, the winner of the last year and his declared "Gganbu" by then, to meet him, at which his view on humanity is disproven to him in his last seconds of life.
• S.W.A.T.: "Short Fuse" sees the squad facing Joey Barrata, a hit man with a specialty for car bombs. Already serving a life sentence for multiple murders, following being diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and given three months to live, Barrata breaks out of prison and unleashes another bombing spree on the city. Initially assuming he's after revenge, the team later realise he's been hired for one last big job so he can be sure his sons will have enough money after he dies.
• Taxi Brooklyn: In "The Longest Night", the precinct is under siege by a gang whose leader has cancer and wants to be shot dead by the cops before he ends up wasting away in a hospital bed. He ends up mortally wounded, but the NYPD keep him alive just long enough so that he dies in a hospital.
• The Tourist: Inspector Lachlan Rogers, formerly an exemplary detective, upon discovering he had six months left to live from terminal stomach cancer, turned to moonlighting as an enforcer for Mr. Kosta so that he could acquire enough money to ensure his wife was looked after for the rest of her life.

Video Games

• Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3: Desolators are terminally ill patients given mind wipes and outfitted with cyborg technology that ensures they no longer need to eat or sleep (for around three years, at which point the cybernetics break down), then outfitted with chemical sprayers that literally melt flesh to take out their suffering on the world.
  They look too happy!
• Heat Signature: A character with the "dying" trait has only ten minutes to live, so anyone with an assassination as their personal mission qualifies.
• Persona 2: Eternal Punishment features General Sugawara, a member of the new world order and commander of the Tenchu army who performs immoral experiments on humans in order to create Magitech / Organic Technology mechas for military purposes. The reason he does this is that he is dying from an unspecified malady, and the leader of NWO Tatsuzou Sudou has promised to make him immortal. He keeps that promise... by turning him into an unkillable monster with Body Horror in spades.
• Inverted in Red Dead Redemption II: Arthur was already a ruthless outlaw, but being diagnosed with tuberculosis (caught while beating up a sick debtor) shocks him into attempting to redeem himself (unless the player chooses High Chaos, of course).

Web Videos

• Paint: In the first "After Ever After" song, Pocahontas talks about her tribe being abused by the colonists through genocide, rape, slavery, and exile. She takes it upon herself to start fighting back and slaughtering the foreign men by the dozens, ending her verse with "I can murder if I please, 'cuz I'm dying of disease". Later, she mentions having STDs.

Western Animation

• Batman: The Brave and the Bold: The Clown Prince of Crime, learns that he's dying due to long-term exposure to his own laughing gas. As a result, he lashes out against the doctor who diagnosed him and sets to strike down Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle. His son is the one who stages the attack, but he does so under his father's orders.
  The Joker: The doctor gave me six months to live. I gave him six seconds.

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