Line #88 Main/FinallyFoundTheBody


1	When NeverFoundTheBody is [[SubvertedTrope subverted]]--after a long time. It can be an emotional scene, as friends and family can finally take their loved one to a final resting place. (This can also be used to settle any WildMassGuessing that claims that the character [[HesJustHiding may have survived after all]].)
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3	This is, sadly, often TruthInTelevision, and may prove LegallyDead true.
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5	A variation can be proof of their fate--for example, a burial record or finding a possession in a manner that strongly suggests the person is dead. If the body a character finds is ''their own'', it's DiscoveringYourOwnDeadBody. May lead to an IdentifyingTheBody scene.
6	!!As this is a {{Death Trope\|s}}, unmarked spoilers abound. ''Beware!''
7	----
8	!!Examples:
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10	[[foldercontrol]]
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12	[[folder:Anime and Manga]]
13	* Happens more than once in ''Manga/CaseClosed'', specially in the case of [[spoiler:Sanae Kouda and her KnightTemplarBigBrother Masao.]]
14	* In the final arc of ''Anime/GhostHunt'' Kazuya Shibuya[[spoiler: AKA Oliver Davies finally tracks down the body of his deceased brother Gene. It turned out he had had been thrown in a lake after a hit and run]].
15	* ''Manga/MariaNoDanzai'': [[spoiler:Iijima]]'s body is found buried near the roadway. Forensics estimate his time of death to be a week before then, shortly after his meeting with Maria. What makes his death particularly notorious is that [[spoiler:[[NotMeThisTime neither Maria]] or [[BigBad Okaya's]] gang were the ones who killed him, nor do they know who could've done it. The fact that a third party with unknown motives is interfering with her own schemes puts Maria on edge, while Okaya [[LetNoCrisisGoToWaste sees it as an opportunity]] to potentially identify their own mystery killer (i.e. Maria herself)]].
16	* ''Manga/OshiNoKo'': Goro is murdered and then reincarnates as Aqua [[FirstEpisodeResurrection in the first chapter]]. The killer hid the body well enough that Goro was only reported as disappearing. Sixteen years later, Aqua's sister Ruby and girlfriend Akane find the corpse in a crow's nest while visiting Goro's hometown. This was pretty traumatizing to Ruby, as (unknown to either sibling) she knew Goro in her past life and assumed he was just in hiding.
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19	[[folder:Fan Fic]]
20	* In the ''Manga/DeathNote'' fic ''FanFic/ACureForLove'' when [[OriginalCharacter V]] begins work on the Kira case, she finds [[spoiler:Naomi Misora]]'s body.
21	* In ''VideoGame/FireEmblemAwakening'' fanfic ''FanFic/{{Pretender}}'', [[spoiler:Emmeryn]]'s body is found and delivered to Ylisse [[spoiler:leaving no room for her canon unlikely survival.]]
22	* In the ''VideoGame/FiveNightsAtFreddys'' fanfic, ''Fanfic/SomethingAlwaysRemains'', [[spoiler: Freddy Wickes' body is found underneath the foundation of Freddy Fazbear's Pizza after over twenty years]].
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25	[[folder:Film]]
26	* ''Film/VerticalLimit'': The old climber's wife is found, along with evidence that one of her fellow climbers had caused her death to save himself.
27	* ''Film/CarnivalOfSouls'': TheReveal that Mary was DeadAllAlong. She appears to escape after her car crashes into a river, only to have a series of bizarre and frightening experiences. At the end, the authorities pull her car out of the river and find Mary inside, drowned.
28	* ''Film/{{Meadowland}}'' is about a couple coping with the loss of their son, who mysteriously disappeared a year ago. [[spoiler:Near the end, a child's body is found. Phil is shown the shirt, and identifies it as that of his son.]]
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31	[[folder:Folklore]]
32	* In the old Italian(?) story "Ginevra", the title character's body is found in a trunk, years after she vanished while playing hide-and-seek on the eve of her wedding... she'd accidentally locked herself in.
33	** More variations of the tale [[http://www.snopes.com/weddings/horrors/hideseek.asp can be found here.]]
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36	[[folder:Literature]]
37	* In ''Literature/{{Blackwater}}'', Brodie thinks [[spoiler:Otis]] might be the one sending him notes pressuring him to tell the truth about how [[spoiler:Pauline]] died, but then [[spoiler:Otis' body is found at the bottom of the river]].
38	* [[spoiler:Mundo Cani's]] skeleton is found underneath the earth in ''The Book of Sorrows'', some time after his HeroicSacrifice in ''Literature/TheBookOfTheDunCow''.
39	* ''Literature/BratFarrar'' by Creator/JosephineTey revolves around the disappearance of Patrick Ashby, who left a suicide note but his body was not found. The body turns up near the end of the novel, many years later.
40	* In the British series ''Literature/CaseHistories'', the detective is charged with finding a girl who disappeared thirty years ago. He finds her in her neighbor's garden.
41	%%* Literature/EmilyOfNewMoon.
42	* In ''[[Literature/NightWatchSeries Final Watch]]'', Anton believes that [[spoiler:Kostya's]] body has never been found after the events of ''Twilight Watch''. Geser proves him wrong.
43	* In ''Literature/FriedGreenTomatoesAtTheWhistleStopCafe'', it's Frank Bennet's truck that's finally found, giving evidence to the cause of his disappearance. [[spoiler:When the Cafe is being bulldozed, a skull with a glass eye is found in the garden. Guess what Frank's left eye was made of...]]
44	* Used very poignantly in ''Literature/TheHunchbackOfNotreDame'' (the original novel), where a group of Paris sewer cleaners stumble upon the long-rotted remains of [[spoiler:Quasimodo and Esmeralda. Together]].
45	* In ''Literature/IHeardThatSongBefore'', Susan Althorp is widely believed to be dead, but her disappearance officially remains a cold case as no body had been found. Her body eventually turns up buried on the edge of the Carrington estate, twenty-two years after she went missing and still wearing the dress she was last seen wearing. This doesn't bode well for Peter Carrington, who has long been suspected of killing her the night she went missing.
46	* ZigZaggedTrope on ''Literature/TheLovelyBones'' for a very BittersweetEnding: Susie's long-rotten-to-the-bones body and the safe it was locked in are finally found when the sinkhole it was thrown in opens again, but the novel ends without them having been identified and the people who found them [[TooGoodForThisSinfulEarth lament the fact that the deceased was clearly a little girl]]. [[DeadAllAlong Susie, at least, doesn't mind anymore]].
47	* This happens multiple times in ''Literature/OnTheStreetWhereYouLive'':
48	** Martha Lawrence disappeared without a trace over four years ago, but her family and the police have accepted that she's dead given how long she's been gone and how out-of-character it would be for her to run away. While builders are excavating the Shapley house garden for a pool, they uncover a young woman's body wrapped in plastic; forensic tests confirm the remains are Martha's, although everyone already knew it would be her. The identity of the ''other'' skeleton in the grave is less obvious, though, given it's been in the ground ''much'' longer.
49	** The second skeleton found buried in the Shapley garden is confirmed to Madeline Shapley, a young woman who disappeared from the family property 110 years ago in 1891. The fact Martha was buried alongside Madeline - with Martha holding Madeline's fingerbone and ring - suggests Martha's killer somehow found out who killed Madeline and where she was buried all this time.
50	** The killer anonymously sends a postcard to Emily revealing where Letitia Gregg, a young woman who disappeared in 1893, and Carla Harper, a young woman who vanished two and a half years ago, are both buried. The police search the property indicated and indeed find the bodies.
51	* In the ''Literature/PrettyLittleLiars'' series, Alison's body is found buried behind her house long, long after she goes missing.
52	* ''Literature/{{Violeta}}'': a priest hears a confession and he uses the information to track down a cave where the bodies of peasants executed by the military have been hidden. [[spoiler:Torito, who had gone with Juan Martín to help him escape, was among the deceased.]]
53	* In ''Literature/TheRavenCycle'', Blue and Gansey discover [[spoiler:Noah is dead]] after they stumble across his body in the woods, seven years after he went missing.
54	* Happens twice in the ''Literature/SanoIchiro'' series:
55	** In ''The Fire Kimono'', the victim was thought to have been killed in a massive fire that ravaged Edo, but his body is found decades later under a tree toppled by a windstorm. Rather than being burned, there were signs he had been killed with a sword, starting [[TheExoticDetective Sano's]] investigation.
56	** In ''The Incense Game'', the bodies of three women are found sealed in the remains of a house that was destroyed by a massive earthquake. It is thought they died in the quake until someone goes into the room and is sickened by the tainted incense lingering there that actually killed them.
57	* In Creator/AgathaChristie novel ''Literature/SleepingMurder'', Helen Halliday has been missing for 18 years, but two letters after her disappearance seem to indicate that she left town alive. Literature/MissMarple finally figures out where Helen really is: resting quietly under the bushes behind the house where she was last seen.
58	* ''Literature/TroubledBlood'': The central mystery involves detectives Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott investigating the mysterious disappearance of Dr. Margot Bamborough in 1974, 39 years ago. They eventually find her, crammed inside an ottoman which was then filled with concrete to cover the smell.
59	* ''Literature/AnUnkindnessOfGhosts'': Everyone assumed Aster Grey's mother Lune crawled into some hiding spot where no one would find her and [[DrivenToSuicide cut her own throat]]. [[spoiler:In fact, she was poisoned by siluminium while repairing a dent in the hull, a task she knew would be fatal, so that others would have a chance of reaching Earth. Aster finds her skeleton in the shuttle twenty-five years later.]]
60	* ''Literature/ExperimentalFilm'': Over a hundred years ago, the mentally disabled child Hyatt Whitcomb ran away from his bedroom and vanished. Some years later, his mother Iris Dunlopp Whitcomb disappeared from a train compartment. [[spoiler:Both were killed by Lady Midday. After Lady Midday's attack on Ursulines Studio, their skeletons are found near the front of the room. DNA testing confirms their identity.]]
61	* ''Literature/NavigatingEarly'' has ScatterbrainedSenior Eustasia Johanssen, a widow living alone in the Appalachian Mountains. Over fifty years ago, her teenage son Martin went out to show his friend a new rifle, and never returned. She's been waiting for him ever since. [[spoiler:Until Jack and Early find his skeleton in a CaveBehindTheFalls. His friend Archibald committed an AccidentalMurder and couldn't work up the nerve to tell anyone, so he left the body in the cave.]]
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64	[[folder:Live-Action TV]]
65	* In a 1970 episode of the soap ''Series/AllMyChildren'', a teen named Bobby Martin goes up in his family's attic to wax his skis. The actor was then abruptly fired and so Bobby was never seen again. Years later, the show lampshaded this by having a character go into the same attic and find a skeleton with a pair of skis, wearing a ski hat with "Bobby" on it—a comedic example of a BusCrash.
66	* In an episode of ''Series/{{Angel}}'', the young man who resided in Cordelia Chase's apartment years earlier is discovered behind an added wall, having been bricked in ''alive'' by his angry mother.
67	* In new ''Series/{{Battlestar Galactica\|2003}}'', [[spoiler:Starbuck comes back from the dead and finds her '''own''' body. She and the deeply religious Cylon Leoben are completely freaked out by it. He actually takes off.]]
68	* ''Series/{{Bones}}'': Fifteen years after Brennan's parents disappeared (when she was 15), the body of her mother is found. The show's premise is essentially based on this trope as the victims are either [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTIn skeletal]] or physically unidentifiable remains by the time they're found by the team of forensic anthropologists.
69	* On ''Series/{{Castle\|2009}}'', an up-and-coming mobster disappeared in the 70s. He was presumed murdered by his rivals but without a body, the investigation quickly went cold. Forty years later, a building is demolished and the mobster's body is found encased in cement inside one of the support pillars.
70	* Very often the break in the case on ''Cold Case Files''.
71	* And on the fictional version, ''Series/ColdCase'', for the episodes where it was a missing persons case that went cold, rather than a murder case--although we the audience have already seen the victim's body at the beginning of the episode and know that he/she is dead. In a few episodes, there ''was'' no case until the body was discovered because, for some reason or another, no one even reported the person missing.
72	* ''Series/{{CSI}}'':
73	** An episode has a woman lose her daughter, son, and husband in a car accident. The son ends up being in a box in her attic. [[spoiler:The daughter and husband turn up too, but they ended up being alive, at least until the wife killed the husband in a fit of crazy.]]
74	** In another episode, a corpse found inside a house's chimney leads to the discovery of ''another'' corpse matching a young woman who disappeared a year earlier. [[spoiler:Her father had stolen the first corpse from a morgue and stuffed it in the chimney since he was sure the house's owner was the culprit and by planting the corpse, the house would be investigated more thoroughly than the first time and his daughter's body found.]]
75	* In ''Series/DiagnosisMurder'', this is the fate of Mark Sloan's father in the episode "Sins of the Father." Mark had always thought he had run out on the family. [[spoiler:He had actually been sealed in a tomb while investigating a case.]]
76	* In the ''Series/{{Forever\|2014}}'' episode "The Night In Question", Henry finally finds the body [[spoiler:of his missing wife Abigail]].
77	* ''Series/{{Lewis}}'': The backstory to episode "[[Recap/LewisS4E1 The Dead of Winter]]" involves Linda Grahame, the wife of Crevecoeur Hall estate manager Ralph Grahame, running off with another man years ago. Supposedly Steven Black, the murder victim at the start of the episode, was the man who ran away with Linda, and Ralph killed Stephen and then himself in a murder-suicide. In fact, TheButlerDidIt, and he also killed Linda seven years ago and buried her under a fountain on the estate. The episode ends with the cops finding remains.
78	* ''Series/Mouse2021'': Han Kook's body is found a year after his disappearance.
79	* ''Series/{{NCIS}}'' has used this more than once. A few examples:
80	** "The Curse": A hunter in rural Maryland stumbles across a drop-tank half buried in the woods. When he opens it, he finds (among other things) the mummified corpse of a Navy lieutenant who went missing ten years ago after a robbery on board his ship.
81	** "Black Water": A car is found sunk in a lake. When the car is pulled out, inside are the remains of a Marine officer who vanished mysteriously three years before. The presence of a bullet among the remains suggests strongly that he was murdered.
82	** "Mind Games": Years ago, Gibbs caught Kyle Boone, a serial killer who hid his victims so successfully that none of them have ever been found. Now Boone says he'll reveal the location of his killing-ground, complete with the bodies, in exchange for his sentence being changed from "death" to "life in prison." Gibbs is determined to give Boone nothing, so he commits his team to finding the bodies some other way. They do, and Gibbs finally gets to see Boone [[VillainousBreakdown break down in a screaming rage]] as his entire scheme, years in the making, collapses before his eyes.
83	--->'''Gibbs:''' Enjoy Hell.
84	** "Caged": The just-discovered skeletal body of a Navy petty officer is found to match two other murders committed by a very disturbed woman. [=McGee=] is sent to interview the woman and find out if this is another of her kills, and he promptly gets caught up in a prison riot.
85	* ''Series/Numb3rs'':
86	** In "End of Watch", a detective's body is found after being missing for 17 years and Walker is angry when he [[spoiler:discovers that of his own men was in on it]].
87	** In "The Art of Reckoning", the body of a congressman's young son is finally found after the hitman who killed him finally points to the location of where the boy was killed.
88	* After Harold is kidnapped by Root in ''Series/PersonOfInterest'', John and Carter chase a lead, thinking they've finally found Root, and investigate Hanna Frey's disappearance from a Texas small town 15 years earlier. The girl in question turns out to be Root's childhood friend and they end up finding her body under the patio of the man who killed her, whose death Root had orchestrated years before.
89	* In the pilot of ''Series/PrettyLittleLiars'', [[spoiler: not]] Alison's body is found buried in her old backyard after she's been missing for a year. [[spoiler: When Ali turns up alive, the body is properly identified as Bethany Young, a mental hospital patient who escaped and disappeared the same night Ali vanished.]]
90	* In Season 6 of ''Series/{{Spooks}}'', Zaf is shot in the gut and then kidnapped by mercenaries. Although he was declared dead, there was no confirmation, and some characters still held out hope that they'd find him. The Season 6 finale reveals via photos that Zaf was tortured to death and horribly mutilated.
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93	[[folder:Video Games]]
94	* In ''[[VisualNovel/AceAttorneyInvestigationsMilesEdgeworth Ace Attorney Investigations 2]]'', Yutaka Kazami takes Paul Holic's body and hides it inside a sculpture so it isn't found during the investigation. It's only found 18 years later when Tsukasa Oyashiki buys back the mansion that the murder took place in.
95	* In the first ''VideoGame/BrokenSword'' game, the long-missing remains of several children are found in the well of a Spanish villa, after having been told to hide until their father returned, during an attack on the villa. The father never made it back.
96	* Seen in the first and second ''VideoGame/{{Enigmatis}}'' mystery games. The detective comes across the bodies of ''many'' people who have disappeared over the past thirty years. Only some are identified in-game.
97	* How [[spoiler:the Rachel Amber subplot]] in ''VideoGame/LifeIsStrange'' ends. [[spoiler:It drives Chloe into a RoaringRampageOfRevenge.]]
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100	[[folder:Webcomics]]
101	* In ''Webcomic/{{Drowtales}}'' it took 45 chapters and 30 years of in-universe time, but they [[http://www.drowtales.com/mainarchive.php?sid=9941 finally found]] the body of [[spoiler:Val'Sharess Diva'ratrika]] who was coldly left by her own daughters to die of starvation in her throne room by sealing the doors shut with rubble. This discovery is also the final nail in the coffin (so to speak) of the deception campaign her daughters had been running since her death [[ElCidPloy to convince everyone she was still alive]], up to and including using a BodyDouble for public appearances.
102	* ''Webcomic/{{Unsounded}}'': Despite being named as a major player behind the scenes in the Black Tongue organization it turns out [[spoiler:Delicieu]] was killed long before the story began and his killer is using his name. His skeletal remains are only found decades after his death.
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105	[[folder:Web Original]]
106	* Referenced in ''Lust over Pendle'' when Draco is escaping Malfoy Manor while it's under attack from the Ministry. The Bride is a family ghost who, legend has it, is supposed to have been a Muggle who married into the family, only to vanish during the wedding celebrations after everyone had gotten snowed in and someone decided it'd be a good idea to play a game of hide-and-seek. Her body was found several years later, locked in a trunk. The Bride, by the way, guards one of the alternate escape routes - the one Draco ends up having to use - and demands a password from Draco before she'll let him past. He figures out the right one.
107	* Used in ''WebVideo/MarbleHornets'' when Beardy is killed and then taken by [[Franchise/TheSlenderManMythos The Operator]] in ''Entry #49''. It isn't until ''Entry #65'' that Tim stumbles across his body while in an EldritchLocation. Despite the passage of time (almost 2 years), the body shows no sign of decay. However, Tim is forced to leave the EldritchLocation before he can do anything about the body.
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110	[[folder:Western Animation]]
111	* ''WesternAnimation/TheVentureBros'': "Past Tense" begins with several members of Team Venture being abducted by an old classmate of Dr. Venture, who had [[FakingTheDead faked his own death]] to capture them at his funeral, as revenge for a decades-old slight. After being eventually thwarted and [[OffWithHisHead decapitated,]] the classmate's [[ActuallyADoombot robotic body double]] is revealed, with his real corpse instead found moldering inside a coffin elsewhere in his house.
112	* ''WesternAnimation/StevenUniverse'': Garnet finds out, after thousands of years, that [[AndIMustScream the shards of her fallen comrades]] [[BodyHorror from the Gem Rebellion have been forcibly fused together]] in experiments to create The Cluster, a forced fusion of ''millions of shards'' incubating in the Earth that will [[ApocalypseHow/ClassX destroy the Earth when it emerges]]. Garnet assumes that this fate was Homeworld's punishment for defying them. It's implied that the survived Crystal Gems had been looking for shattered gems in the millennia since the war ended to find their missing comrades, as Garnet angrily states the clusters were made from "all the ones we couldn't find".
113	* ''WesternAnimation/TeenageMutantNinjaTurtles2012'': The Rat King ends up plunging to what seems like a DisneyVillainDeath at the end of his third appearance, but two seasons passed without any onscreen confirmation of his fate, the door left wide open for his return. By the fourth season, the Rat King seemingly returns no worse to confront Splinter--except Splinter is actually hallucinating for the events of the episode. By the time Splinter snaps back to reality, he comes across the Rat King's skeletal corpse, confirming once and for all that he died from the fall.
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116	[[folder:Real Life]]
117	* Happened twice with the Romanov family. First, the bodies of most of the family and several of their household staff were discovered in one grave in the 1980s (though not made public until 1991), over half a century after they were killed, but not all the bodies were accounted for: Tsarevich Alexei and one of his sisters (either Maria or Anastasia, depending on who you ask) were not among those buried in that grave. Then, in 2007, a second burial site containing the remaining two bodies was found. Once the DNA testing was complete, the ninety-year-long mystery of DidAnastasiaSurvive was finally put to rest for good.
118	* There was a news story about a woman who found the body of her son, who had hanged himself in the basement years earlier. Nobody had happened to have gone into that room since then. They had thought he ran away from home.
119	* In Calgary, a car was pulled from a lake. A bystander told the police of a woman who had disappeared in the area many years earlier. The car's license plates were checked, and the woman's disappearance was solved.
120	* Similarly, the body of Carole Pappas, wife of baseball player Milt Pappas, was finally found in 1987, five years after her disappearance--inside her car, [[DramaticIrony in a pond only a short distance from her home]].
121	** ''Many'' [[http://www.candidslice.com/vanished-missing-persons-discovered-in-submerged-cars/4/ missing persons cases]] have been resolved like this. This is a very common occurrence--people driving into lakes, rivers, etc., because they've gotten lost and/or disoriented, disappearing off the face of the earth, leaving their grieving friends and family utterly bewildered as to what happened to them, only to be found even decades later, finally answering their loved ones' questions and giving them some measure of peace.
122	* The Franklin Expedition into the arctic vanished in the 1840s, and Lady Franklin made many petitions to the governments of the major powers to go looking for it. She even became an expert in the arctic herself and outfitted several missions to find her husband or any trace of his fate. While they didn't recover the body itself, the searchers found a record of his burial along with a grim hint that the expedition ended in disaster.
123	** In 2014, they found one of the ships, identified as the ''Erebus''. 2 years later, the other ship, the ''Terror'', was found.
124	* The body of mountain climber [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mallory George Mallory]] was found in 1999, 75 years after his disappearance at Mount Everest. It is assumed he was ''descending'' from the summit when he had died. The body of his companion, [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Irvine_%28mountaineer%29 Andrew Irvine]], has not yet been found. It is highly possible they actually had been the first to climb to Mount Everest, before Tenzing and Hillary.
125	* Many of the "Updates" on ''Series/UnsolvedMysteries'' dealing with mysterious disappearances were like this, with the victim's remains being found. The families of the victims will often consider this at least a partial BittersweetEnding since they at least have closure.
126	** For example, in January 1993, young mother Bonnie Haim abruptly disappeared. Suspicion immediately fell on her husband Michael, who was known to be abusive and who she had been planning to leave. Ironically, this suspicion came from ''his'' family, not hers, who believed that she had willfully abandoned her husband and 3-year old son. Unfortunately, with no evidence to suggest foul play, the case went cold. 22 years later, construction workers doing excavation in the backyard of the home that the Haim family had shared found skeletal remains that were identified as Bonnie's. At long last, her husband has been charged, tried, and convicted of her murder.
127	** Another story about two friends who inexplicably vanished while on their way to meet other friends at a local bar was found to be one of the "TrappedInASinkingCar" type stories cited above, after years of speculation that the two had either met with foul play or had run off together.
128	* A community member of Creator/RoosterTeeth, known to the masses as David "Knuckles Dawson" Dreger, deleted all of his accounts and went missing for a month while leaving his phone and wallet at home. His body was found a month later, after a dedicated effort to bring him home by fans and Rooster Teeth employees alike.
129	* From 1972 through 2005, 18 people vanished during UsefulNotes/TheTroubles in Northern Ireland and are believed to have been abducted and killed by [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_republicanism Irish Republicans]]. The remains of all but 3 of "[[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappeared_(Northern_Ireland) The Disappeared]]", as they came to be known, have been discovered thanks to the efforts of law enforcement, 2-45 years after they went missing.
130	* The United States Army [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortuary_Affairs Mortuary Affairs]] service are an entire organization dedicated to the retrieval, identification, transportation, and burial of deceased American and American-allied military personnel. They have offices in many counties where American military personnel fought and died and once a body is identified it is returned to the United States for burial with full honors months, years, or even decades after the soldier in question died.
131	* One of the stranger and more extreme examples of this is that of Pia Farrenkopf. Despite coming from a large family, she was a loner who was often out of contact with them or with friends for years at a time, whether due to traveling for work or simply being reclusive. Although she owed money for various reasons and had resigned from her job of 23 years, she otherwise had a large amount of money in her savings account, had all of her bills set up for automatic payment online, had arrangements with neighbors to take care of the lawn and snow shoveling, and regularly refused mail. Other than abandoning her pets so they were claimed by the state and having received a traffic citation for driving with an expired license and no proof of insurance, she otherwise seemed to have pulled one of her usual disappearing acts. It wasn't until 2014 when her account finally ran out of money, her Pontiac, Michigan house was foreclosed, and the bank sent people to check out the property that the discovery was made--her body, mummified from being sealed in the cold for so long, was found frozen in the back seat of her vehicle in the garage, surrounded by unopened mail, an empty wine bottle with no fingerprints, and cigarette packages. Thanks to the condition of the body, the autopsy could not determine cause of death, but it was concluded she had been there for at least five years. The key was in the ignition but the gas tank was still mostly full, ruling out suicide, and while it is possible she had a medical condition, nothing could be proven. The extremely messy and mold-covered nature of her home, unlike her usual neat-freak self, has made some members of her family believe she was hiding in fear of her life from someone and had been murdered. But with no further evidence, the case has remained unsolved.
132	* In October 1989, [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Wetterling 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling]] was abducted while riding his bike home from a local store. 27 years later, a man who had been the prime suspect for some time led police to his remains.
133	* In January of 2006, police broke into what they thought was an unoccupied bedsit in London to repossess it after the rent had gone delinquent for too long--only to make the disturbing discovery of a mostly skeletal body lying on the sofa, the TV on and a pile of unopened Christmas presents around it. It turned out to be the body of a woman named Joyce Carol Vincent who, apparently escaping domestic abuse of some sort, had been assigned the apartment only to die there around December of 2003. No one discovered her for all that time because the window was open thus allowing the smell of rotting flesh to escape (which had been confused for the smell of the waste bins below) and did not allow a direct view inside, drug addicts in the area often broke in and caused noise (thus explaining the TV sounds), the rent was partly covered by benefits agencies so that she was still assumed alive and no one investigated until the half not paid added up significantly, and Vincent had cut herself off from all of her family and friends. Her cause of death could not be unequivocally determined; the coroner believed it to either be due to her asthma or a peptic ulcer she had suffered not long before which had put her in the hospital. Others who knew her were not so sure, as it was claimed that at a different point in time before the discovery, the open window had been closed with the curtain trapped in it...
134	* [[https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/skeletal-remains-found-in-septic-tank-idd-as-woman-who-vanished-in-2004/ Leona Marie Tollett Johnson]] vanished in 2004. Her remains were discovered in a septic tank on July 26, 2017.
135	* In 1969, a young woman named [[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Reyna_Marroquin Reyna Marroquin]] vanished after a frightened phone call to a friend. 30 years later, a man found her remains stuffed in a barrel hidden in the crawl space of the home he had just purchased. It turned out that the previous owner, Howard Elkins, had been Ms. Marroquin's employer and lover and killed her after she [[ImperiledInPregnancy became pregnant and called his wife and told her about the affair]]. He'd intended to dump the barrel in the ocean, but couldn't lift it, resulting in him stashing it in his garage. Elkins killed himself shortly after the police arrived at his house to question him. This case was profiled in an episode of ''Series/ForensicFiles''.
136	* In 1966, a young woman named [[https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Woman-Missing-50-Years-Found-Body-Dead-Basement-Louise-Pietrewicz-478873233.html?_osource=SocialFlowFB_NYBrand Louise Pietrewicz]] vanished. Suspicion fell on her estranged husband and her married lover, police officer William Boken, but both died before they could be prosecuted. In March 2018, the basement of Boken's home was excavated and the remains of Ms. Pietrewicz were finally found, 52 years later, finally giving closure to her daughter who was only 11 when her mother vanished.
137	* In 2008, [[https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/police-say-suspected-serial-killer-touted-body-count/ar-AAx4niU?ocid=ob-fb-enus-280 Arthur Ream]] led police to the body of Cindy Zarzycki, who had vanished in 1986. Only now has he confessed to being a SerialKiller and admitted that the bodies of as many of ''six'' other girls who disappeared roughly 30-50 years ago [[note]] Cynthia Coon, 13, who disappeared from Ann Arbor in 1970, Nadine O'Dell, 16, who disappeared in Inkster in 1974, Kim Larrow, 15, who disappeared in Canton in 1981, and Kellie Brownlee, 17, who disappeared in Novi in 1982 [[/note]] could be buried in that area.
138	* Philip Taylor Kramer, a computer engineer and one-time bassist for Music/{{Iron Butterfly\|Band}}, went missing on February 12, 1995. In May of 1999, a pair of photographers searching for old car wrecks found his skeletal remains in the wreckage of his minivan. The cause of death is officially listed as a suicide.
139	* [[https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/07/25/us/colorado-missing-girl-remains-found-after-34-years/index.html Jonelle Renee Matthews]] disappeared from her home on December 20, 1984. Her remains were found at a pipeline site on July 23, 2019.
140	* [[http://readandwriteromance.blogspot.com/2010/08/inside-mind-of-murderer.html Scott Dunn]] went missing in May 1991. His ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend were convicted of his murder based on evidence found in Dunn's apartment. [[https://www.nj.com/mercer/2012/10/former_yardley_pa_man_is_final.html His remains were eventually found buried near the apartment complex in 2012]].
141	* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philibert_Aspairt Philibert Aspairt]] was the doorkeeper of Val-de-Grâce hospital in 1793. He ventured into the Catacombs of Paris, presumably to get wine from the cave of Carthusians's monastery (under the Jardin du Luxembourg). He got lost, and his body was only discovered in 1804, 11 years later, in a restricted area of the catacombs.
142	* In 2015 Gloria Gladue from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada went missing and [[https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alberta-gloria-gladue-missing-murdered-indigenous-edson-1.4726442 her remains only found in 2018 hundreds of miles away in rural Manitoba]]. Sadly, across Canada and the US Indigenous women have a higher rate of going missing and percentage of female homicide victims.
143	* Nearly 15 years after [[https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/national-international/christie-wilson-remains-found-15-years-later-casino/2583247/?_osource=SocialFlowFB_NYBrand Christine Wilson]] vanished from a casino parking lot, her remains were found in the backyard of the man convicted of her murder (security camera footage and forensic evidence found in his car was enough to determine that a crime had taken place).
144	* A variation can occur when a body ''is'' found but is not identified right away, as the lack of identification means that from the point of view of anyone trying to figure out what happened to that person, it's the same as if they NeverFoundTheBody at all; for those people, matching their loved one to an unknown body is in essence finding that person's body, with the only difference being that the body was technically accounted for the entire time. In recent years, DNA technology and the communication potential of the internet have helped investigators identify bodies that had gone unnamed for ''decades'':
145	** A New York Times article focusing on a detective determined to find the identity of 8 of SerialKiller [[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wayne_Gacy John Wayne Gacy's]] unknown victims, cited this phenomenon. While he has only been able to identify one of Gacy's victims, the DNA and dental records sent to him by hundreds of people desperate to find out what happened to their missing loved ones have been matched to numerous cold cases around the country. As such, unidentified remains finally have a name to them.
146	** [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Jason_Callahan Jason Callahan]], also known as the Grateful Doe, is one of the more well-known cases due to the role played by the online community. Callahan was one of two people killed in a single-car accident in 1995, but he wasn't carrying ID and the family of the driver didn't recognize him[[note]]the commonly accepted theory is that the driver picked up Callahan as a hitchhiker[[/note]], so he went unidentified for almost two decades. Then, in 2015, an online appeal for information reached someone who thought he might have been a former roommate of the Doe, providing pictures for comparison; those pictures in turn drew the attention of Margaretta Evans, who recognized the man in the photos as her son Jason Callahan, who she had lost contact with around the time of the accident. Evans then got in touch with investigators and provided a DNA sample, proving Grateful Doe was indeed her son.
147	** In November 1974, Deborah Kent was abducted by SerialKiller UsefulNotes/TedBundy. Forty-something years later, DNA testing on the scant remains found where he claimed to have dumped her body were finally identified as hers.
148	** In October 2023, a man named Allen Livingston was finally confirmed as one of the bodies found at the home of Indiana SerialKiller [[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herb_Baumeister Herb Baumeister]], despite his remains having been discovered in 1996.
149	** [[https://www.yahoo.com/news/remains-oregon-teen-went-missing-092337858.html Sandra Young]] disappeared in 1968/69, had her remains discovered in 1970, and was finally identified in 2024.
150	* The body in the Vietnam Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was eventually identified as Lt. [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Blassie Michael Blassie]] of the U.S. Air Force. He had actually been identified until mortuary staff disputed the identification and his body was selected for interment in the Tomb.
151	[[/folder]]

Context Main / FinallyFoundTheBody