Insurance-Motivated Murder

Mike Teevee: Saw this in a movie once. Guy signed his wife's insurance policy. Then he bumped her off.
Willy Wonka: Clever!

—Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory

The idea of killing someone for their insurance has been around for nearly as long as the concept of insurance itself, and it's understandable why: the idea of being able to get rid of your pesky partner or relative before getting away and living it up on your ill-gotten gains has often tempted those with big ambitions and no desire to share their rewards with anyone else. Sometimes the killer will rely on a pre-existing claim for this, but more often than not they'll put a claim on their heads specifically for the murder so they have full control of where the money goes afterward.

While this trope was Truth in Television for many years, it's since become a lot harder to pull off: with the advent of background checking, detailed autopsies, and easy-to-access digital records, no more are the days where someone could waltz into the claims office, weep about the claimant's totally natural or accidental death and leave a few thousand dollars richer. This hasn't stopped the trope from still featuring as a mainstay of Crime Fiction and Detective Literature, and as a result, it's vastly more common nowadays to hear of people attempting this trope and failing miserably rather than actually pulling this off.

A frequent motivator (though not always; sometimes they just do it for kicks) for a Black Widow or The Bluebeard, occasionally aided by their "true" love. A subtrope of Insurance Fraud. Compare Faking the Dead, which depending on the reasoning can be an inverse of this trope (someone "killing themselves" so their relative or partner can claim their life insurance), Inheritance Murder (where someone murders another person or people for their inheritance) and Greed (which is the primary motive to attempt this in the first place).

As a Death Trope, all spoilers will be unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Fuura Kafuka from Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei is revealed to have been a victim of this at the hands of her schizophrenic father, who took out a claim on her before pushing her into oncoming traffic and presumably fleeing the country with the payout.

Comic Books

• EC Comics: In the Vault of Horror story "And All Through the House", a housewife murders her husband Joseph on Christmas Eve with a fire poker. She had planned the murder so she could have his life insurance money.
• Superman: Lex Luthor's wealth, in some versions of the canon, came from him convincing his parents to take out an expensive insurance policy and then sabotaging their car in order to murder them.

Film — Live-Action

• Amos: Invoked. Amos finds himself in a retirement home from hell. Seeing no escape, Amos changes the beneficiary on his insurance policy to head nurse Daisy, then aggravates her brutal orderly into beating him into bed. When Amos is found dead the next morning, an autopsy reveals a lethal dose of sedatives in his system; Daisy is arrested for first-degree murder, as the policy change was dated the night before.
• Subverted in Double Jeopardy: Libby is accused of murdering her husband Nick for his $2 million life insurance policy. However, while she's in prison she discovers that Nick faked his death and then shacked up with her friend who was taking care of their son (and thus would have gotten the payout). This is enough to motivate her to try murdering him for real.
• Double Indemnity: The premise of the film centers around this: A crooked insurance agent conspires with an unfaithful wife to murder her husband in such a way that the insurance payout will be doubled.
• Four Brothers: Jeremiah is accused of this as the brothers are trying to figure out the motive behind their mother's murder. They discover that Jeremiah had been paying on an insurance policy for Evelyn and now is primed to receive a $400k payout which would conveniently bail out his struggling construction business. The accusation leads to Jeremiah delivering a blistering "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  Jeremiah: Y'all tripping because I made insurance payments? What?! I paid all her bills! Where the fuck were y'all? Y'all were around doing nothing! Bullshitting!
• In The Fugitive, the Chicago Police Department instantly decide that Richard Kimble killed his wife Helen for the insurance and the inheritance and lock him up. The rest of the movie involves Kimble escaping custody and looking for the real killer while being pursued by the authorities.
• Falling Down: Inverted by D-FENS at the climax, who decides to pull a Suicide by Cop, allowing his daughter to collect on his life insurance policy (do note that this ploy will NOT work in real life).
• The Last Seduction: Feigned by Bridget. She claims that this is what The Plan involves: murdering abusive husbands for the insurance and then getting paid by splitting the money with their mistreated wives. It isn't true, though — it's all a setup.
• In the film Short Time, Detective Burt Simpson tries to do this to himself when he is mistakenly diagnosed with a terminal disease (the man actually suffering the disease, a bus driver, secretly changed his urine sample with Burt's because he was doing marijuana and was in the doctor's office on a drug test) and he discovers that his life insurance will only pay up the full amount if he is killed in the line of duty (and he wishes to send his daughter to Harvard, and he only has two days left until retirement). The movie follows his attempts at getting killed during his last case, which bounces back into painting him as a heroic Cowboy Cop because he keeps surviving the demented stunts he pulls, with the crooks he's pursuing (who can't shoot straight to save their lives) being terrified of his sheer relentlessness.
• A Simple Favor: Invoked, though technically subverted. Emily got life insurance for both her and Sean so that Nicky would be taken care of if anything happened to them (as Stephanie said that was the only way she was able to survive after her husband's death). Then Emily killed her identical twin sister, Faith, in unrelated circumstances while in an enormous amount of debt. That got her thinking, and she used Faith as her own body double so she could fake her own death for the insurance money, and run away with Nicky, while also framing Sean for doing exactly this (killing her for the insurance money).
• Discussed in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory: When the kids are signing a contract at the start of the tour, Mike mentions seeing something like this before.
  Mike: Saw this in a movie once. Guy signed his wife's insurance policy. Then he bumped her off.
  Wonka: Clever.

Literature

• Implied to be the fate of the main character in Arkady Averchenko's Black Comedy story The Wife. At first, the eponymous wife makes sure the narrator drinks in moderation, doesn't overeat or smoke, and stays away from cold air. After he insures his life in her favor, she immediately begins encouraging him to drink lots of wine, eat heavy pies, smoke cigars, and go out lightly-dressed when it's snowing. In the last scene, he complains that his chest hurts, and she advises him to have a cigar as a remedy.
• Deconstructed in Dark Places. Insurance murders are Calvin Diehl's whole MO: he kills willing farmers who are deeply in debt and makes it look like accidents so that their insurance pays out (he's called "the Angel of Debt" for this reason). Patty hired him to kill her because she was drowning in debt and her son Ben had just been accused of child molestation. However, Patty's death is the only one of Calvin's crimes that looks like a murder (all the others are freak accidents) because he happened to meet Patty's horrible ex-husband, Runner, at a bar and decided to make him sweat because he'd be the prime suspect. Unfortunately, when he did it, they were interrupted by Patty's daughter Debby, and Calvin killed her too.
• An unusual variation in Michael Shayne's Long Chance. Joe Little's daughter Barbara kills herself, drowning herself in the ocean—but if she's identified, the insurance payout goes to Barbara's aunt, whom Joe hates, and who happens to be terminally ill. So he pretends that the victim isn't his daughter, waits for his sister to die, then kills a completely different young woman and passes her off as his daughter in order to get the payout.
• In the Sherlock Holmes story The Sign of the Four, when discussing Beauty Equals Goodness, Holmes tells Watson about a very beautiful woman he knew who was hanged for "poisoning three little children for their insurance-money".
• The Thirteen Problems: In "The Bloodstained Pavement", the death turns out to be the work of a Serial Killer couple who routinely carried out this plan: under an assumed identity, the man would marry a young woman and take out a huge life insurance policy on her, then the two of them would murder her and arrange to Make It Look Like an Accident, with the woman briefly assuming the victim's identity in order to stage a false time of death (for which her husband would have an alibi). They were eventually caught, though, as they always used exactly the same plan, which attracted the insurance companies' suspicions.

Live-Action TV

• The Closer: In "Speed Bump", a pair of women working at a halfway-house for ex-cons took out fraudulent insurance policies on several of the residents then murdered them.
• CSI-verse:
  • CSI:
    • "You've Got Male": Nick and Catherine investigate when a hunter wearing a reflective vest is found shot while sitting under a tree by a stream. Turns out the man had shot himself in the gut, threw the gun in the water, and sat down to die, hoping his death would be ruled an accident so his wife could collect his life insurance to pay off their debts.
    • Warrick and Sarah take on the case of a terminally ill elderly woman who drove her car through the glass storefront of a restaurant. She had meant to drive into her insurance office because they wouldn't pay for any more but got the address wrong. She wanted it to look like an accident so her grandson, who had put college on hold to take care of her, could use her life insurance money for his tuition.
  • CSI: NY:
    • Attempted in "Boo." A husband and wife fake his death by injection with tetrodotoxin to make him appear dead long enough for an actual funeral, planning to collect his life insurance and start a new life elsewhere. It goes awry when the man claws his way out of his hemp coffin only to find his wife in bed with the doctor who had signed his death certificate. Realizing they meant to run off with the money together, he grabs a syringe filled with the drug from the doctor's kit and injects both of them with near-fatal doses. The doctor manages to brain him with a cricket bat a few times before passing out himself, and the man falls dead in the street while leaving the scene.
    • Two women in "Second Chances" befriend homeless men and pretend to fall in love with them (one actually gets engaged), take out life insurance on them, wait a couple of years for the policies to mature, then fake accidents to kill them and collect the payouts.
  • An episode of CSI: Miami involves a company killing its employees and collecting on the "standard life insurance" policies they have for each employee. Strangely enough, the policy in question even applies to suicides (including faked ones).
• Cold Case has an interesting take on this trope in the episode "The River", where Grant Bowen, who had driven his family into debt due to his gambling habits, asks his friend and fellow gambling addict Cy to kill him so that his son and wife could collect the life insurance policy on him due to the fact that suicide wouldn't count towards it.
• Endeavour: Throughout season seven, Morse grows increasingly suspicious at the seemingly improbable number of accidental deaths that are befalling Oxford and the nearby cities. He eventually uncovers they were all part of a large-scale murder conspiracy, where the killer bought each victim's life insurance policy, then, upon the policy reaching the maximum payout, would murder them in a way disguised as an accident to collect the cash.
• Hawaii Five-0: In the fifth season episode "Ka Hana Malu", the sons of a murdered couple are initially suspected of arranging it to collect a large insurance payout, but it turns out that the mother had actually arranged it herself to secure her sons' future.
• Law & Order has done this trope a few times, both in the mothership series and its spin-offs.
  • In the Law & Order: Criminal Intent episode "Grow", Goren's nemesis Nicole Wallace re-emerges, this time having attached herself to a grieving widower and his young daughter, who happened to have a trust fund that would go to her parents if she died before turning 18. Goren initially suspects that Wallace intends to kill the girl, but it turns out the girl's father was trying to poison his daughter to get at the trust fund, and Wallace was actually sabotaging his attempts.
  • In the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode "Raw", a grisly school shooting by a white supremacist turns out to have been orchestrated by the primary victim's foster parents, who'd taken a large insurance policy out on him.
• Monk:
  • In "Mr. Monk and the Psychic", the killer murders his rich wife so he can collect her inheritance and a large life insurance policy. He makes it look like she died in a car wreck but an unfortunately-timed landslide buries her and the car; since he can't inherit anything until she's officially dead, and he can't exactly go and dig her up himself, he drugs a Phony Psychic and makes it look like she found her instead.
  • "Mr. Monk and the Genius" has a professional chess player who takes out a large life insurance policy on his wife and then poisons her. This is the second time he's done it.
• The Munsters: In one episode, Grandpa gets a bride from a matrimonial agency, who turns out to be a scam artist Serial Killer, marrying and then killing men to reap the life insurance benefits, along with the rest of their money. She attempts to kill Grandpa, but her plans backfire, and she is ultimately arrested while trying to escape.
• Lampshaded in The Office (US). When Michael asks for "Big Ideas" from his co-workers, Erin randomly chimes in about murdering a new employee for the insurance money. However, a delusional Erin tells the audience in a cutaway, that she thinks she is being used in Insurance Murder scheme at work:
  Erin : What if we all get together and help each other and hire a new guy and then we all kill him, but first we take out, like, a $100,000 life insurance policy? I bet you guys like that idea, don't you?
  Erin : [in talking head interview] I think that's what they're doing to me. I can't prove it, but I wanted to see their faces when I said it. I learned nothing.
  Michael: (Confused)...I don't know what the f*** that was.
• Smallville: Lionel Luthor is revealed to have hired Professional Killer Morgan Edge to kill his parents so he could use the insurance money to found LuthorCorp.
• Taggart: In "Death Benefits", the murder of a police officer's wife leads DCI Taggart, Sergeant Jardine, and DC Reid into uncovering a large series of other murders, all disguised as accidents. However, they can uncover no motive as none of the victims had anything in common or knew each other — until Taggart discovers that all the victims took to auctioning off their life insurance policies due to needing the cash, and realises that the killer is murdering them so they can collect the money the policy entitles them to.

Music

• The Taylor Swift song "No Body No Crime" invokes and exploits this trope. After Taylor and Este's friends realize that Este's husband likely killed her after she confronted him about cheating, it's heavily implied that they killed him in retaliation. Seeing as how his unnamed mistress had taken out a life insurance policy shortly before he was killed, Taylor and her accomplices let the police think that the mistress was the most likely suspect in the murder.
  Good thing my daddy made me get a boating license when I was fifteen/And I've cleaned enough houses to know how to cover up a scene./Good thing Este's sister's gonna swear she was with me./Good thing his mistress took out a big life insurance policy...

Radio

• Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar: The show focuses heavily on these, as the titular character is a detective who works for insurance companies to investigate suspicious claims. Life Insurance is his bread and butter, though claims involving expensive items like boats and racehorses are also sometimes investigated.

Video Games

• L.A. Noire: The case "A Marriage Made In Heaven" has Cole Phelps and his partner Stefan Bekowsky investigate the death of a man named Lester Patterson in an apparent hit and run. As it turns out, the murder was committed by his wife Lorna and her business partner Leroy Sabo in an attempt to claim his life insurance and use it to open a new bar.
• Overboard! (2021): The Villain Protagonist you play as, Veronica Villensey, has murdered her husband in order to get the insurance payout from him. The goal of the game is to help her get away with it by preventing others from finding out you did it.

Web Animation

• Refreshing Stories:
  • "Married my boss’s beautiful daughter… and found something shocking in the secret basement": Toshio Hiyama made himself rich by killing people for insurance after his wife died in a flood in Thailand and got her insurance money. His daughter, Chinatsu, is also in on it, as she killed her previous husband to collect his insurance and then plans to do the same to Hiroshi after marrying him.
  • "After our parents died, my brother and I were living in a park…": After Hiroshi's and Satoru's parents died in a car accident and had to live with his lazy uncle, it turns out the bastard only took them so he could steal the insurance money the couple left for the brothers. Moreover, he even caused the car accident that killed the couple by talking to his brother while he was driving for "advice." Upon discovering his fraud from Mr. Satake, an acquaintance of his dad's, he resolves to make his uncle pay.
• Revenge Films: "My family was talking sh*t about me behind my back, so I left them": Kaitlin found out later on that her husband, her son, and her mother-in-law plotted to kill her to get her insurance money when they deemed her useless. Enraged, she retaliates by exposing both their scheme and their abuse to everyone else.
• Trouble Busters: In this story, Hillary finds out her abusive husband David put life insurance on her and plotted to kill her in a way that makes it look like an accident to claim the money and spend it on his mistress.

Web Comics

• Marry My Husband: After falling into debt from losing his job and his gambling habits, Minhwan Park takes out an insurance policy on Sumin, intending to kill her by sabotaging the brakes of her car. However, upon learning of his mother's death, he drunkenly takes the car for a joyride, only to crash it into a river and drown.

Web Video

• Epic Rap Battles of History: During Blackbeard vs. Al Capone, the latter threatens to use Blackbeard's fuse in his hair to light his head as well as his buddies on fire, then burn his ship down and collect the insurance money, a reference to Capone's protection in exchange of money extortion practices against small businesses under the threat of "unfortunate accidents" happening to them.
• Invoked in Part 1 of Some Jerk with a Camera's review of The Haunted Mansion (2003). When Count Jackula and The Horror Guru express interest in buying the titular Haunted Mansion, Jerk suggests killing him and collecting his life insurance to make a down payment on the mansion, and he can haunt them as a ghost in exchange. Part 1 ends with Count Jackula killing Jerk with a sword.
• The Trial Of Tim Heidecker: The prosecution implies that Tim let his infant son, Tom Cruise Heidecker Jr., die from neglect and Dr. San's quack medicine so Tim could claim a multi-million dollar life insurance policy he had recently taken out on the child.

Western Animation

• Family Guy: In "Stewie Kills Lois", Peter's friends start to suspect that he killed Lois after he tells them about the life insurance policy he took out on her right after they had a fight in which he told her that he wished she was dead. Fortunately, Lois turns up at Peter's trial to set the record straight.
• Sealab 2021: "The Policy" sees Sparks scheming up an insurance scam by taking out life insurance policies on all of the crew before offing them through manufactured accidents. Sparks even throws off the investigator who thinks that the deaths were on purpose. Captain Murphy only catches onto Sparks when he sees him standing over his hot tub with an electric coil. Realizing what's about to happen, he uses his last strength to touch Sparks and get them both electrocuted, and sending Sparks to spend an eternity in a lava-filled hot tub in Hell.
• Donald Duck: In the short "The Flying Jalopy", Donald Duck decides to test an used plane, but before testing it, Ben Buzzard coerces the duck into signing a life insurance policy that will grant Ben a sum of ten thousand dollars in case of the duck's demise. The rest of the short consists of Ben trying to trick Donald into getting an accident, then directly attempting to sabotage the plane in a fit of anger and ultimately ending with the buzzard trapped at the remains of the airplane and an angry Donald using him as his own personal plane, much to the buzzard's dismay.

Real Life

• Many murderers and Serial Killers have had this as their motive (to the point that The Other Wiki has a category dedicated to them), but perhaps the most infamous case is that of Belle Gunness, who killed both of her husbands and all but two of her children so she could obtain the money from life insurance policies she had placed on them (notably, she killed her first husband on the day that two of the aforementioned insurance policies would overlap). Eventually she became more of a Black Widow, luring prospective suitors to her farm before taking their money and killing them.
• One of the most unusual instances of this is that of Michael Malloy, a destitute ex-fireman living on the streets of New York during The Roaring '20s. One night, the owner of the speakeasy Malloy frequented conspired with four of his friends to take out a life insurance policy on Malloy and kill him. There was one slight problem: due to a variety of bizarre factors, their attempts kept failing. At first they gave him an unlimited bar tab in the hopes that Malloy would drink himself to death, but he kept strong despite spending most of his waking hours getting hammered. Several attempts at poisoning Malloy's food and drink with things like antifreeze, turpentine, and methanol also fell through due to the liquor in his system negating or severely dulling the effects of what he had just ingested. Not even hitting him with a car or dumping him in the snow and pouring freezing water on his chest worked (though the former did land him in the hospital for three weeks). Eventually, the group were finally able to do Malloy in by suffocating him with coal gas while he was asleep, though they were quickly caught by police.
• On November 1, 1955, United Air Lines Flight 629 exploded in midair over Colorado, killing all 44 people on board. After an investigation, it was concluded that the DC-6 had been blown up by a bomb planted in the luggage of passenger Daisie Graham by her son, Jack Gilbert Graham, partly out of hatred for his mother (their relationship was fraught), and partly to cash in on a life insurance policy he'd taken out on her.
• On Halloween 1974, eight-year-old Timothy O'Bryan died after consuming poisoned Halloween candy. It was later found that poisoned candy had also been given to Timothy's younger sister and to another neighbourhood boy, but they hadn't eaten their candy. Initially, a Razor Apples poisoning was suspected, but then the authorities found out that Timothy's father Ronald Clark O'Bryan was deep in debt, and had taken out life insurance policies on both of his children. Ronald would subsequently be arrested and executed for the murder of his son.

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