Hide the Evidence

To be fair, he might have been very sorry had he seen that raccoon-skin hat.

"Dirt makes a great hiding place. I've got a dirt salesman on speed dial for JUST this kind of thing."

— Insti-Gator, Investi-Gator: The Case of the Big Crime

It happens on nearly every crime show you can mention, although it also appears in other genres. Someone has committed a crime, or has been up to mischief, or has been doing something embarrassing or simply private. So they hide the evidence of what they've done.

Because this is a common trope, it should be limited to examples where hiding the evidence is either the whole point of the work or a key point in the work.

Do not list all the works by the author or all the works in a series otherwise this trope will be too long. Listing all such examples will not add any value to the trope. Instead, list the author known for this trope or the first work in a series known for this trope along with a single example.

A Super-Trope to Eat the Evidence and Poster Patchup. See also Destroy the Evidence.

This is Truth in Television, but Real Life cases won't be listed, since it is a derogatory trope and listing them would give criminals ideas to hide the evidence of their crimes.

noreallife

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Examples:

Film

• A Most Violent Year: The police show up to search the premises during the middle of a child's birthday party. Anna and Abel excuse themselves to say goodbye to their guests, then scramble to hide file-boxes of tax records underneath their back porch.
• Murphy's War: When the Nazis attack the hospital, Lt. Ellis hides his flight jacket so that the Nazis won't know that the people at the hospital have access to a seaplane (which Murphy is planning to use to attack the submarine).
• The premise of The Trouble with Harry is that several people try to hide the corpse of Harry, who they may have killed.
• In Turning Red, Mei hides her mediocre grades, red panda merch and money she and her friends made from selling said merch under her bed.
• The premise of Weekend at Bernie's and its sequel is that two office workers have to conceal that their boss died on Friday until the following Monday, in order for their promotions to go through.

Literature

• Occurs regularly in most of Agatha Christie's works, usually because the hider found evidence that could point to their Love Interest as guilty. Often ends with the happy couple both proven innocent (generally they don't believe in the other's guilt, but think the police might).
• Chocoholic Mysteries: In Moose Motive, when Lee's found their footprints and made plaster casts that could potentially be used to identify someone who's been prowling around an area and might be the killer, the villain of the book (who's apparently been spying on her) promptly smashes the casts and then rakes over the original prints to destroy them when she leaves the area for a short time.
• Family Skeleton Mysteries: Why Sid was made into a skeleton, letting the killer hide him in plain sight in the Joshua Tay University anthropology department.
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: Harry discovers the "Room of Requirement" at Hogwarts, which has been used by decades of students to hide things that they don't want anyone else to see.

Live-Action TV

• In an episode of Criminologist Himura and Mystery Writer Arisugawa, Himura solves the case and deduces that the sole witness was responsible for tampering with the crime scene and hiding the murder weapon. The question then becomes where they hid it: they were given a body search at the scene, and couldn't have walked far due to their frail body. The answer is revealed to be that the witness hid the knife inside his dog's nifty little sweater.
• One episode of Malcolm in the Middle had Lois starting housecleaning, only to start finding various pieces of long-hidden evidence from her family's various escapades. By the time she's done, she's recovered enough evidence to incriminate her husband and her sons for years and years.
• In an episode of Psych, Gus finds his boss (who he had earlier told off and submitted a resignation letter to) dead with the resignation letter in hand. So he stumbles about trying to cover his tracks only to make the crime scene a mess. He recruits Shawn to help wipe away the evidence that he was there, but it means the two have to solve the case and get a confession before Lassiter catches on that Gus was involved in messing up the scene. It's then complicated even further when they realize someone had tampered with the scene before Gus and they accidentally implicate Henry and Juliet in Gus's mess by admitting what happened, to them.

Video Games

• Ace Attorney has this at the centre of a number of cases. Usually this is used right at the end of a case, either as the last issue that needs to be resolved, or as the key piece of evidence that all other deductions have led to. A few examples include:
  • Case 4 from the first game, where the final nail in the Big Bad's coffin is that Phoenix works out he's hid a bullet in his shoulder for 15 years. Phoenix threatens to have the bullet removed and compared to the bullet that killed the victim, to see if they were fired from the same gun, causing the Big Bad to go into a rage-filled confession.
  • Case 3 of the second game, where the killer is caught hiding the murder weapon in court, after a sporadic search of his room forced him to hide it. Seeing as how he's in a wheelchair, the only place he could hide it in such short notice was the under-seat section of the wheelchair, which is covered by a blanket. Due to this, the weapon stayed there when he went to court to testify.
  • A few examples also come in the Investigation games. In I2-2, two people have the exact same idea. A witness who was thought to be the real killer hid what was thought to be the real murder weapon within his vicious, murderous and highly trained dog's mouth. Then the person who turns out to be the real real killer hid the real real murder weapon in the exact same way; inside their pet alligator's mouth. Admittedly clever hiding places, since they're places that no one in their right mind would think to, or want to, investigate.
• In Fahrenheit, after committing the murder in the opening scene, you, as Lucas, are tasked with cleaning up or hiding the evidence. In the next scene, you, as Carla or Tyler, have to uncover said evidence all over again. In a twist, the main piece (the knife) is hidden by Lucas off-screen, so the players have to actually look for it in the second scene.
• In Heavy Rain, Shelby and Lauren must wipe away their fingerprints after investigating the clock store to avoid being associated with Manfred's murder. If you miss any, Shelby's investigation is hampered by being dragged in to the station to explain why he was there. This also ends up being the motivation for Shelby visiting all the families of the Origami Killer's victims and collecting their clues.
• The game NOBODIES invokes this, as you are an employee of the “clean-up crew” for a governmental contracts agency, and the goal is to clean up after an assassin and make sure there are no evidence the assassination even happened.

Webcomics

• In one Sandra and Woo strip, Sandra is exploring the attic with her pet talking raccoon, Woo, and finds a raccoon-skin cap. She immediately hides it behind her back and lies to Woo so he won't see it.

Western Animation

• In The Loud House episode "Fed Up," the Loud siblings try to sabotage the goulash their dad was making for dinner, so that he'll order them pizza, by stealing all the goulash ingredients and hiding them. It doesn't work too well as Leni, who we know is not that bright, hid the ingredients in their dad's slippers and bathrobe, which he wears every night.
  Mr. Loud: Someone please explain why I'm wearing my goulash?
• Rugrats (1991):
  • In "Tell-Tale Cell Phone", Angelica plays with Charlotte's cell phone, but accidentally drops it and its battery comes off. Thinking she broke it, she hides it in a drawer so that Charlotte won't find out about it. It isn't long before Angelica's guilt catches up with her and she confesses what she did to Charlotte. Charlotte assures her that her cell phone's battery is always coming off and it's not broken. Unfortunately, Angelica isn't exactly off the hook when it's revealed that she called the John E. Mergency plumbing service, which came to her house.
  • In "Talk of the Town", Kimi gets a new roller coaster toy. Chuckie accidentally breaks it when he trips on his untied shoelaces, and is worried how upset Kimi will be if she finds her toy broken, so he hides it in a drawer. Angelica finds the broken toy and is eager to find out who broke it. When Chuckie confesses what he did to Kimi, she is distraught at first, but when she sees Tommy, Phil, and Lil playing with the pieces, she's happy that her friends can all have a piece to play with.
• In a Halloween Episode of South Park, Stan's mom ends up burying several bodies in the basement in order to hide Stan's seeming murder spree; but it wasn't him, it was a killer goldfish.
• Thomas & Friends: In "A Cranky Christmas", Thomas is assigned to get a crate from Brendam Docks, which is revealed to have everything needed to set up an ice rink inside it. Cranky accidentally drops the crate, and worried he might have broken what was inside, tries to hide the package and the fact that he dropped it. He eventually gets busted near the end of the episode, but he was Easily Forgiven, since Thomas himself was worried that he broke what was in the package when it fell off his flatbed when he tried to make a sharp turn.

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