Never Found the Body

Riff is too Genre Savvy to count out Oasis.

"Never count a Human as dead until you see his body. And even then you can make a mistake."

— Lady Margot Fenring, quoting a Bene Gesserit aphorism, Dune

A character is killed off, but their death occurs in such a way that no body is recovered.

No matter how all laws of physics and biology indicate No One Could Survive That!, remember, this old rule trumps all: "Never count someone dead unless you have the body in front of you." (And in some cases, not even then.)

The daytime Soap Opera frequently uses this trope combined with Put on a Bus. The actor is leaving the show and the producers want to take advantage of the opportunity for drama. The character is in fact being written out and will be presumed dead indefinitely. However, they leave themselves an out without closing the door in case the actor decides to return.

A common inversion of this trope can be seen in shows where Everything Fades; if there is a body to be found, try not to get too used to his absence. Compare No Body Left Behind.

Subtrope of Uncertain Doom. See also Left for Dead, when the body is seen but left behind without confirming it's dead. May lead to declarations that He's Just Hiding.

Modern audiences have long since gotten cynical of shows that pull this, so it's on the verge of becoming a Discredited Trope; it's almost more common for it to be subverted, with characters automatically assuming someone is alive if there's no corpse.

When those left behind proceed to put the disappeared person's house in order, that's declaring the person Legally Dead. If the mortal remains are eventually found, it's Finally Found the Body. If someone wants to hold a Meaningful Funeral despite the lack of a body, it may involve Burying a Substitute. Compare Chekhov M.I.A. and Faking the Dead. Also compare, slightly ironically, both Disney Villain Death and Disney Death. Contrast Mistaken Death Confirmation, where the body is present and checked for lack of life signs.

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

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Example subpages

• Literature
• Live-Action TV
• Video Games

Other examples:

Anime & Manga

• 20th Century Boys:
  • Sadakiyo's death is never seen on-screen, and both the characters and the reader only hear about it through a news story (which could've been easily manufactured by Friend.) This, of course, sets up his return at the end of the manga.
  • The same goes for Kenji, who suddenly disappears from the plot after the first third of the story, and the reader is told that he apparently died on Bloody New Year's Eve. He eventually returns in the final third of the story after Taking a Level in Badass.
• The end of Aldnoah.Zero's first season states Asseylum's body was never found. This leaves a glimmer of hope she survived. The second season confirms it: she's comatose but alive in the Martian moonbase.
• Invoked by Erwin in Attack on Titan; When the Female Titan a.k.a. Annie summons Titans to swarm and eat her body before the Survey Corps can capture her, he observes that the Titans did not eat a human as they tore the Female Titan apart. He takes this to mean the Female Titan-Shifter escaped and is hiding among them in disguise. He is proven right moments later when she attacks Levi's squad.
  • In the post-timeskip Marley arc, the Survey Corps mounts a coordinated surprise attack against the Marley military in the internment zone of Liberio, and Levi seemingly dispatches the Beast Titan in a matter of seconds, with merely some well-aimed chops at the nape followed by a hand grenade to the same area. Right in front of Pieck, Magath, Gabi, and Falco, no less. In the chaos, the Marley forces have no time to check Zeke's status and he is presumed dead, but of course, he then surprises Gabi and Falco once they sneak aboard the Paradis airship by being alive and well, and the whole "murder" having just been a Staged Shooting to get him out of there safely and smuggle him to Paradis. After the dust settles, Magath and the gang who stayed behind soon catch on to this as well, and Zeke is declared public enemy #1... or, well, maybe #2. After Eren.
• Baccano! has a variation: a certain redheaded conductor was presumed to be dead because they did find the body... well, what's left of it, anyway. Of course, the body is really that of that one similarly redheaded and uniformed lackey of Ladd Russo, who made the mistake of assuming that the aforementioned conductor would not be absolutely Ax-Crazy. Said conductor cheerfully got off the train with a near-perfect alibi and nary a scratch.
• In BlazBlue: Alter Memory, as part of his brutal Mind Rape of Noel to initiate her transformation into Kuzanagi, Terumi brutally tortures Makoto in front of her, almost crushing her to death, then throws her off the roof of the building they're on. Her body isn't shown, but Terumi makes it quite clear not even a Beastkin could have survived that fall. However, at the end of the series we see that Makoto did indeed survive.
• Bleach:
  • Three of the Espada sort of vanish after losing. Coyote Starrk, Tia Harribel, and Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez are scarcely if at all mentioned after defeat and their defeats are rather open-ended. The one most likely to have really died, Starrk, was cut down by a statedly powerful attack from Shunsui Kyoraku and sort of fell, apparently dying, into the city below. Harribel, after successfully fending off Hitsugaya, Hiyori, and Lisa, got offed by Aizen himself, but what Aizen does to her is very tame compared to what other characters have survived (not to mention that Aizen has a fairly poor track record of actually killing the people he cuts down), leaving speculation open. The most likely to have lived, Grimmjow, gets whacked by Nnoitra after losing to Ichigo. Ichigo stops Nnoitra from killing him, but he hasn't been seen or mentioned since.
    • The novels mention that, thanks to Orihime, Harribel and her fraccion managed to survive. Harribel is later revealed to be ruling the Hollow World after Aizen's defeat, before being defeated by the new Big Bad. As of Chapter 624, Grimmjow is also confirmed alive.
  • Tsukishima's fate is left ambiguous in the anime, as the anime omits the line from the manga where Orihime forgets about him, implying he may still be alive. Tsukishima has been confirmed dead as of Chapter 518, where he, along with Ginjou and Giriko, shows up in Soul Society.
  • Gin is last seen bleeding out, but since Orihime was in the area, there's a small chance he's still alive. Though with no mention of him after a Time Skip of seventeen months, those odds have been shrunk significantly.
  • A bit of a weird case: 3rd Division's Lieutenant, Izuru Kira, was seen falling down with a huge hole in his torso in Chapter 494. Other characters mentioned that his reiatsu had disappeared, but his state was considered ambiguous then and not revisited for three years. In Chapter 654, however, we see Kira, walking around with that same huge hole in his torso, which now is being propped open by rods, and he refers to himself as a dead man. Jury's still out on what just happened.
• Code Geass played quite a bit with this.
  • You could say that if a character doesn't explode inside a Humongous Mecha or isn't shown lying on the ground in a pool of blood, they're probably coming back. Case in point, Nunnally and Sayoko were thought to have been killed on their shuttle in the FLEYA explosion that destroyed Tokyo. Justified later on because there were actually two different escape shuttles and Schneizel had arranged the whole affair beforehand. A few episodes later, it was revealed that Guilford joined the club.
  • One argument about Lelouch is that despite the Really Dead Montage, part of what makes the epilogue ambiguous and/or open-ended is that it never explains anything about him beyond that, like what happened with the body afterward. While it remains unknown in the original version of the series, the Re;surrection movie confirms that Lelouch is alive, revealing that Shirley (who is Spared by the Adaptation in the compilation movies) and Schneizel stowed away his body out of the country so that C.C. can resurrect him.
• At the end of Coffin Princess Chaika Season 1, Alberic Gillette is seemingly caught in a blast fired by the Soara Fortress and obliterated: all that is found of him is his sword. Season 2, however, reveals that he survived seemingly unharmed.
• Subverted in Death Note — Naomi Misora's body was never found, but that was because Light stipulated in the Note that she would kill herself in a way that made her body unlikely to be discovered.
• D.Gray-Man:
  • Lenalee and Lavi watched a recording of Allen Walker apparently dying, but all that was left was a card and a bit of a bloodstain on the forest floor. Then BAM! Guess who wakes up by the end of the episode?
  • They never found Cross Marian's body either. His guards were put to sleep, and his mask was found with a bullet hole in it in the middle of a pool of blood large enough that the blood loss ought to have killed him, along with his Empathic Weapon. Recent Chapter 222, which is 54 chapters after his disappearance, has confirmed that he's alive. Road mentions in her dream world that he's sleeping, and she wants him to continue doing so for a bit longer. But the trope can still apply as we still don't know who has his body while he's possibly comatose.
• Dragon Ball:
  • Tao Pai-Pai pulls this coupled with Unexplained Recovery: his death at the hands of his own grenade shows nothing but an explosion. Tao would later show up as a cyborg three arcs later.
  • Frieza manages to pull this off twice in one fight. First, he takes Goku's Genki-Dama/Spirit Bomb, leaving behind nothing but a crater. He shows up soon after with nothing but a cut tail for his troubles. At the end of the fight, he is again annihilated by Goku's attack (including the classic close-up of the villain's distorted face just before death) and again only a crater remains. He is later recovered when his father does indeed find the body.
  • When Gohan is blasted to kingdom come by Majin Buu, the Z-Fighters are all convinced he's dead simply because they can't sense his Ki. Videl even invokes this, pointing out they didn't find Gohan's body. As it turns out, Gohan was Not Quite Dead; the Supreme Kai rescued him and took him to the Kai's realm, and he was simply too far away for them to detect.
  • In Dragon Ball Z: Cooler's Revenge, Cooler invokes this: when Goku takes a direct hit from his Eye Beams and falls into a river, he orders his Armored Squadron to hunt him down. Even after they raze an entire landscape with Beam Spams, Cooler isn't convinced and orders them to search every last inch of the area until they find him.
• Fairy Tail:
  • In the Tower Of Heaven arc, they don't even try to find Jellal's body. They just assume that since Erza was still alive despite merging with the damaged R-System to redirect the critical magic power meltdown while he himself was nowhere in sight, he must have sacrificed himself to save her, give him a Really Dead Montage, and go on with their lives. When he comes back in a later arc (albeit comatose and recovered by the villains of said arc to revive him) they're all shocked.
  • They also invert this with Lisanna, whose body is found immediately after her death but she turns out to have never died two years later anyway. If you're confused, it's because Alternate Universes were involved where she heavily injured got snatched up to Edolas by a magic portal while her Dead Alternate Counterpart got left in her place.
• Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • Justified: the body missing is of a person who can regenerate any injury, and the leader of one of the two allied armies present knows enough to find the body first, or he plans to betray his allies, and grab power for himself, one or the other.
  • Downplayed in the case of 2nd Lt. Ross. There is a body recovered, but it's so badly damaged that no one could be absolutely certain that it's actually hers. The "evidence" (dental records, etc.) found allow her to be considered Legally Dead.
• Occurred in Full Metal Panic! with Gauron. Again, and again, and again, and I think again. He just refuses to stay dead. Let's see... airfield hostage situation? Never found the body. Afghanistan (Helmajistan)? Never found the body. De Dannan's takeover? Never found the body. Before the series started, he was shot in the head. I guess they never found the body on that one, either.
• There are a couple of these in the Gundam multiverse.
  • This happens to Quattro Bajeena in the final battle of Zeta Gundam, as his trashed mobile suit is discovered afterwards with the cockpit hatch open.
  • Averted in Gundam SEED when the cracked helmet of Mu La Flaga is seen floating in space after taking an anti-battleship cannon head-on. Then played straight in the compilation special as the helmet is edited out to set up his return in Gundam SEED Destiny.
  • There was some speculation as to the fate of the first Lockon Stratos in Gundam 00, but Word of God put a stop to all of that.
    • Not that it stopped almost anyone else who seemingly perished in the last couple episodes of the season from then being confirmed as alive.
    • The PlayStation 2 title Mobile Suit Gundam 00 Gundam Meister showed the body. Though whether that can be considered canon is debatable.
• In This Corner of the World: Suzu's brother was killed in action but his remains are never returned; all the family gets back is a rock that they morbidly joke is his brain. Later, her mother was in Hiroshima when Little Boy went off and she is last stated as missing.
• Yashiro Isana in K. Kuroh and Neko find his parasol after Mikoto kills him with an explosion, and both of them believe he's still alive.
  Neko: He has to come back! He's the immortal king!
• Kyo Kara Maoh!:
  • Conrart and Yuuri are trapped by a bunch of opposing soldiers, and the last thing Yuuri sees before being forced back to Earth is Conrart getting his arm cut off. When Wolfram and Gwendal get to the scene, all they can find of them is Conrart's arm. He later turns up alive (and with a new arm) as a general for the army opposing Shin Makoku, but everyone pretty much thought he was dead.
  • Also shown later, when Cimaron General!Conrart turns his sword on Yozak and basically pushes him off the side of a cliff. Everyone witnessing thinks Conrart had just killed his best friend since childhood, but at the end of the episode Yozak shows up with the Shin Makoku army as back-up and with only minor bumps and bruises.
• Averted in a rather frightening way in Loveless, for while they did find the body of Seimei and even matched dental records — Guess what? He's alive.
• Mazinger Z:
  • Kouji, Sayaka and the remaining characters never found Dr. Hell's body and assumed he was dead. Granted, it would be hard to search and find his body given that in the original manga his Supervillain Lair Humongous Mecha got blown up in middle of the ocean; in the anime series, the Cool Airship where he was fleeing got blown to bits and the remains sank in the ocean; and in another manga version, he was inside of his Supervillain Lair as it drifted spacewards, bleeding to death due to a stab wound. Still, he returned at the last season of Great Mazinger like the second Dragon-in-Chief of the Big Bad.
  • In Episode 31, the bus where three workers of the Institute commuted crashed. The police believed they died, but Prof. Yumi refused to believe that because their bodies were not found.
• Happening two times with the prince in Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit. First, he is missing after the fire burned down his mother's palace. The second time, the leader of the hunters sees the bodies of the prince and Balsa at the bottom of a pit of poisonous gas but is unable to get to them. But as has been shown earlier, Torogai can make very convincing looking golems for short durations of time.
• In Naruto:
  • This is what happened with Obito — while he was undoubtedly buried under a ton of rock and understandably believed to be killed, his team was unable to secure his corpse due to both their mission and the insurmountable amount of debris that had crushed his body. Then, come Chapter 599...
  • After Jiraiya is killed, his body sinks into the ocean and is never retrieved. Kabuto has plans to use Jiraiya as part of his zombie army, but finds himself unable to retrieve the body because the ocean pressure is too high, and decides that it is not worth the risk.
• One Piece has a few:
  • Pell was seen making a Heroic Sacrifice by flying a massive bomb out of the range of innocents, seemingly blowing himself up in the process. Sometime later, a limping Pell returns home, only to find his own grave. In One Piece, a character is not dead unless you see him die, otherwise he'll come back. After all, One Piece characters are Made of Iron.
  • One of the major indicators to the fans about Sabo's revival was the fact that his body was never recovered. Then come Chapter 731...
  • In the Wano Arc, the reason Shogun Orochi is so paranoid about Lord Oden's vassals coming to kill him, despite their last sighting being inside Oden's burning castle 20 years prior, is that none of their bodies were found. Most of his samurai think he's being paranoid, but readers know that Oden's samurai and children did survive, and have teamed up with the Straw Hat Pirates to take down Orochi and Kaido.
• Happened to a little girl named Momoka Oginome in Penguindrum. She died in a bomb attack in the metro, but all that was found of her was her journal... the infamous "Destiny Diary" that her sister Ringo would use 16 years later.
• Pokémon: The Series:
  • Pokemon Hunter J's ship fills with water and explodes, leaving no sign but her glasses floating on the water. Did we just see our first actual human death in the anime?
  • A similar situation occurs when Cyrus, finally succeeding with his plan to create the perfect universe using Dialga and Palkia's power, gets absorbed into it. This "universe" ends up being destroyed when Dialga and Palkia regain control of themselves.
  • The old Stoutland that was Litten's mentor/father-figure in the Sun and Moon saga. It was clear that it was nearing the end of its life, but it simply leaves to pass away off-screen.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica:
  • As Homura explains to Madoka, a magical girl who dies in a witch's barrier does not leave a corpse in the real world. Thus, they will forever be "missing".
  • Defied in "The Only Thing I Have Left to Guide Me" with regards to Sayaka. Kyoko makes sure to take her body out of the witch's barrier and place it in a hotel for it to be found by a muggle.
  • Mami was eaten alive.
• Subverted in Shaman King; Asakura Hao's preferred method of killing leaves no bodies, but it also leaves no doubt that the victims are dead.
• It's played with in Simoun, and they seem to enjoy poking the viewer with it. Aresia "dies" in the very first episode, but they never find the body and, perhaps even more telling, she remains in the opening credits to the very last episode. You constantly expect her to reappear, especially when it is revealed that the action that caused her death is also a Time Travel thing-a-ma-jiggy....except no, she never comes back, you never learn her ultimate fate, and everybody else moves on with their own lives. The end.
• A rather sadistic version was featured in Tenchi Universe, near the end of the series, when it goes from Heroic Sacrifice to this to Ryoko surviving all in the course of three episodes.
• Bam in Tower of God. This, however, was cleverly staged, as he was supposed to be declared Legally Dead and go undercover for the next five years.
• In Utawarerumono, Hakuoro had Karula destroy a bridge suspended atop a high cliff with Touka standing in the middle of it. Everyone believed she died as the bridge collapsed, but in the next episode, she survived unscratched. It's different in the game. It's Touka who destroys the bridge (by accident) falls down the cliff, but manages to climb back... to the Wrong Side, and gets captured by Hakuoro's soldiers. Characters are understandably embarrassed by her silliness.
• Subverted in the Violet Evergarden anime, where the Major was last seen heavily wounded in an area that was bombed immediately afterwards, and his dogtags were found nearby. The fact that his body was never found causes Violet to insist that he's not really dead, but it's implied she's just in denial and he never shows up again. However, it is played straight in the Light Novel, where he did in fact survive.
• Witch Hunter Robin: The final fate of Amon and Robin in the last episode. In fact, it is heavily implied that none of their colleagues believe the official story.
• Occurred in Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds with Divine, who fell from the highest floor of the skyscraper he was in, after being attacked by Aslla Piscu. Coupled with the fact that the building's interior collapsed due to the damage, and everyone else in the series who lost a Dark Duel crumbled to dust upon defeat (later undermined when one returned), it seemed at the time like he was well and truly dead. However, as with many examples of this trope, this wasn't quite enough...
• Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL: Right before the Season 1 finale, Yuma, Kaito, Shark, and the supporting cast confronted Mr. Heartland and his army of Litterbots who were standing between them and Dr. Faker. Heartland was last seen falling down a shaft that led to a portal to the Astral World, and his true fate currently remains unknown.
• Patlabor: The Movie opens with Hoba, the programmer of the BABEL virus that was hidden in his operating system for the Labors, jumping from the Ark into the ocean. Gotoh notes that they never found the body. In the climax, when the protagonists go to the supposedly evacuated platform to destroy it to prevent the virus from spreading, they pick up a signal from one employee in the building they're trying to demolish: Hoba. Noa goes after him, but it turns out that he really is dead: he attached his employee badge to his pet raven, perhaps as part of a Thanatos Gambit.

Comic Books

• 52: Creator commentary in the trade-paperbacks for the series discussed the problems associated with killing a character. The writers knew that any reader would automatically view any character death as suspect, so they decided to deliberately avert this trope by showing Booster Gold's corpse. They initially scripted the panel as his body falling to the ground in several pieces, but they thought this came off as hilarious instead of dramatic, so they instead had his desiccated skeleton fall to the ground instead. It turns out he still was not dead, he just wanted to trick the villain.
• Age of the Wolf: Sister Sigrid, the female Alpha werewolf, is well aware of this. After it looks like Rowan might have been killed in a crash, Sigrid makes sure to leave another trap behind, since Sigrid's mother told her to assume prey isn't dead unless you've seen the body.
• Alix: Often Arbaces appears as the book's Big Bad, dies with or without leaving his body, and then returns in another story.
• Alpha Flight: Originally subverted with the death of Guardian. Guardian's suit malfunctions after a battle and his body is seemingly vaporized. A year later someone claiming to be Guardian returned from the dead gave Guardian's wife Heather an implausible story that he was warped through time and space and landed on Jupiter's moon Ganymede centuries in the past and repaired by aliens and sent back to earth in hibernation. The story proves to be false when Guardian is revealed to be the robot Delphine Courtney and that Guardian is really dead. Years later it is revealed that the bizarre story Delphine Courtney seemingly concocted was actually the truth and the real Guardian was indeed alive but now was a cyborg because of the aliens not understanding how human bodies work when they tried to repair Guardian.
• Atomic Robo: After Jenkins seemingly dies by suicide-bombing a Majestic-12 strike team, a horrified Robo asks if there's a body. Vik answers that there isn't one, at which point Robo instantly calms down and says that this means the man isn't actually dead. Sure enough, Jenkins returns sometime later, having survived the explosion and the ended up in the Vampire Dimension. It's then brutally subverted, as Jenkins ends up actually dying at the end of his return arc, this time in a completely unambiguous way that leaves behind a body and no denying his fate.
• Azrael: In the final issue, Jean-Paul Valley's body was already falling apart when he donned the Azrael armor one last time, being shot twice with armor-piercing bullets as he tackled his attacker off a balcony. The attacker survived, but Azrael's costume was the only thing left of Jean-Paul. Batman had a vision of Jean-Paul ascending to heaven, but he admitted to Alfred that he was already suffering from sleep deprivation and could have easily just hallucinated it. It wasn't until Blackest Night that it was confirmed Jean-Paul had died.
• Batman:
  • According to commentary on The Long Halloween, this is how most readers seemed to zero in on the killer. As it turns out, a cut scene showed the discovery of a body that was played as being Alberto's. It was not, of course.
  • The Joker is well known for his frequent use of this trope. One can probably find a handful of other comics and Batman-related media that will have the Joker falling to his "death" at the end (or something similar), only for him to show up sometime later without any explanation. One need only to go back to his comic debut, Batman numero uno. Intended as a one-shot character, he was apparently killed, but at an editor's behest Bob Kane scribbled up a final panel that left a back door open in case they wanted to bring back this clownish fellow...Lampshaded by Batman at the end of A Death in the Family, where the Joker is in a helicopter that crashes into the sea. Batman shouts at Superman: "Find the body!", but he already knows that it won't be found because the matters between him and the Joker always end up unresolved.
• Blaze of Glory: Reno Jones drops into a ravine, only to get dragged out of by Red Wolf.
• Captain America: Played for Laughs in one issue.
  The Falcon: See, we like things resolved. If we see a bad guy die, we know we gotta get the body or he might come back from the dead!
  Captain America: "Might"?
  The Falcon: Okay. Will. With alarming regularity, in fact.
• Diabolik: Happens with regularity whenever the titular Villain Protagonist wants to fake his death. Problem is, you can't be sure he's dead even when you do have a body: Diabolik has occasionally left behind someone else's body in such a situation it would be mistaken for his, in one occasion fooling even DNA tests (he had swapped the sample that was to be tested), and not even seeing him being shot and checking the body is a guarantee of him dying (when that happened the guy who checked the body was an accomplice).
• Ex Machina: Discussed. Ivan, Mitchell Hundred's old "mentor", is constantly on the lookout for Jack Pherson, the closest thing to a true supervillain they ever faced, even though Pherson was last seen in an exploding building. While Ivan would be Genre Savvy in a straightforward superhero comic, in this one he just gets written off. His arguments ring even more hollow when it turns out they found several pieces of Pherson, just not his head.
• The Eye of Mongombo: Jumballah, the Witch Doctor who turned adventurer Cliff Carlson into a duck, falls down an elevator shaft in the first chapter. No one knows if he really is dead or not.
• Hellboy: Implied with steampunk cyborg Nazi Kroenen's backstory comic in the Hellboy movie art book: "In 1956, an unmarked grave was found in Romania. Dental records identified the remains: Karl Ruprecht Kroenen. Many, however, do not believe he is dead...Chief among them: Kroenen himself!" Considering that he had already removed his own lips, genitalia, eyelids and replaced his bones with steel and his blood with sand or maybe cocaine by then, teeth don't seem like that big a deal, really.
• The Flash: In one issue, the villainous Abra Kadabra is caught in an explosion. A cop says, "There's no body. The blast must have incinerated the corpse. Guess that's the last we've seen of him." The Flash looks at him like he's an idiot and responds "you're new to this supervillain thing, aren't you?"
• Kid Colt (2009): After the rest of the Cole family were murdered, Blaine Cole - the future Kid Colt - didn't find his younger brother Jeb's body. He assumes Jeb died in the fire when the house was torched, but the other two bodies were left outside. Jeb's fate is never confirmed.
• Daredevil: In Born Again, The Kingpin realized immediately that Daredevil was still alive when he learned that the car he was locked in and thrown into the river didn't contain his body. Sure, he might have drowned trying to reach the surface and sunk into the mud but...
  Kingpin: There is no corpse. There is no corpse.
• Manhunter: Averted toward the end of the run, where Manhunter defeats an alien cyborg, watches him burst, burn, and fall from a great height. Then climbs down to confirm the kill, and FINDS him, dead.
• The Maze Agency: Invoked pretty much word for word in the Annual when Dr. Rune falls off a building roof into the river in the first issue.
• The Punisher'': After the Punisher is thought to have died after the destruction of Mutant Liberation Front's headquarters, the US army hire Federal Marshals to find him, since his body was never found. They contact Spider-Man and Daredevil, his most frequent team-ups, and even though they both know he's a human with no special powers, they won't rule out his survival.
• The Red Star: Maya tries to argue for her husband's survival on this basis.
• Robin (1993): Dodge ends up apparently disintegrated in a teleportation accident. Robin notes that there's a chance Dodge could come back but that he's probably dead, and Dodge never appears again.
• Runaways: Just before the series got cancelled, Old Lace's body suddenly (and conveniently) disappeared. She later turned up alive in Avengers Academy, albeit stuck in another dimension; supposedly, the explanation was that Nico Minoru sent her there sometime in all the chaos that surrounded her death.
• Supergirl:
  • Starfire's Revenge: When the titular villainess gets thrown into a moat from a great height, Supergirl and the police believe Starfire has fallen to her death, even though their body is not found. Unsurprisingly, Starfire would reappear two issues later.
  • Brainiac's Blitz: After watching Supergirl writhing on her Kryptonite trap, Brainiac averts his eyes to turn his force-field into a beam which blasts into atoms Supergirl's prison. He assumes Supergirl has also been annihilated, but by looking away he missed her slipping out of her cage.
• Superman:
  • At the end of their battle in Two for the Death of One, Satanis — still occupying Superman's body — fires an energy blast at Syrene and she disappears without a trace. Satanis is convinced that he has killed her and refuses to listen when Superman tells him she is not dead. Later, Superman reveals he tweaked Satanis' spell without him noticing so it sent Syrene away instead of destroying her.
  • In "Luthor Unleashed", Superman assumes that Luthor has been incinerated by planet Lexor's destruction and leaves, failing to notice Luthor crawling behind an asteroid. Subverted in Superman (1939) #385, which continues the storyline, and has Superman to ponder his nemesis surely survived and wonder when and how Luthor will resurface.
• Swamp Thing:
  • In the first issue of Alan Moore's run, Swampy goes picking through the remains of Arcane's airship looking for his body. Not, he muses, for the bodies of his friends — he's certain they're dead, given that they lacked superhuman powers and were, well, good guys. He finds all the relevant bodies, even Arcane's. Arcane still shows up again, possessing the body of Abigail's husband — a fact that Abigail doesn't discover until after several weeks have passed and she's had sex with him several times.
  • Another time Arcane is using an insect-hybrid body. Arcane is exploded, burned, and falls from a great height. And Swamp Thing goes down to check because this it the third time Arcane came back from the dead. Yes, that body is dead, but is that the end? NO! Of course not, this is ARCANE! Hell can't hold him.
• Teen Titans: Subverted in The Judas Contract. After Terra was revealed as The Mole, she fought the Titans and eventually used her earth-manipulating powers to destroy the underground lair they were in. As they start to dig through the rubble, Beast Boy says that she could've used her powers to escape...and then he finds her body a couple of panels later.
• Tintin: In "The Cigars of the Pharaoh", the unidentified drug cartel boss falls off a cliff near the end, but his body is not found. It is revealed in the follow-up, The Blue Lotus, that this is none other than Roberto Rastapopoulos, who was reported missing in a newspaper article in Pharaoh.
• Tom Strong: Subverted, as during a confrontation with his old archnemesis, Tom learns that one of his old enemies appeared to have pulled this trope in their previous confrontation at the Niagara Falls actually broke her neck and drowned that time.
• Ultimate Marvel:
  • Ultimate Spider-Man:
    • The Green Goblin is shot by the police and falls into the river. At the end of the story the police have ships around the crime scene, we see some bubbles in the water...the end. He turns up again some issues down the line.
    • Lampshaded by Nick Fury, after Peter's first fight with Venom, which ended with Eddie getting a face full of electricity and vanishing: "There's not too many actual rules to this game of ours but one of the big ones is: if there is no corpse the guy's alive." Nick is, of course, completely right.
  • All-New Ultimates: Crossbones, very badly injured, escapes into the sewers. The Ultimates go after him but find other people instead. And Crossbones? Of course, he survived after all.
  • The Ultimates: Defied by Herr Kleiser. Although the Ultimates fall into his trap and are caught in the ground zero of an atomic blast, he wants evidence that Captain America and his battalion are dead. Keep searching!
• Usagi Yojimbo:
  • Jei's first and second appearances in his last appearance no one actually saw him disintegrate, and he's a spirit anyway; teased for the ex-Neko Ninja chunin unfortunately the giant explosion from the gunpowder he was sitting on probably rules this out.
  • Tomoe has a nightmare where Noriko escaped the explosion/cave-in at the end of "Mother of Mountains", but Usagi assures her that even if they don't find a body she probably didn't survive.
• Wonder Woman Vol. 3: Alkyone went into the megalodon protected sea off a cliff on Themyscira and was presumed dead. A few issues later a megalodon that had been cut open from the inside washed up on Themyscira's shore, informing the reader that the villain was making a comeback.
• Young Justice: Lampshaded, then subverted, as after being caught in a massive explosion, teenage supervillain-in-training Harm's body can't be found. After being told nobody could survive that explosion, Robin responds, "guys like that have nine lives." Turns out Harm did escape, only to be shot and killed by his father, who'd spent the last two issues trying to stop him. He does come back as a ghost later, though.

Fan Works

• In Lost Latte, Cure Wing finds Latte's collar, which leads him to believe she's dead.
• Weaver Nine features Derrida, whose power allows him to deconstruct and then reconstruct Society members who are about to be killed in battle. They emerge whole, alive, and sane as long as he has enough non-living organic matter gathered in one mass nearby. The deconstruction process only leaves a bloody smear behind, so no actual body is found.
• No one ever finds vampire corpses in Luminosity, since the standard method leaves ash that could easily come from several things, including another (Red Shirt) vampire.
• In 'Shadows Of The Past' Will is surprised to hear that both Megatron and Starscream had thought he was dead as they never found his body.
• In The Dilgar War, Jenny immediately asks if they have found Jha'dur's body on the relic of her battlecruiser. It's a curious example, as the story is told by a very alive Jha'dur many years after her supposed death, and the reader knows that.
• In The Vampire Diaries story "Let It Rain", Miranda Gilbert (Elena's mother) is said to have been ejected from the car in the crash and washed upstream. Though it shouldn't be surprising when she returns as a vampire.
• Jewel of Darkness: Robin lampshades this trope when explaining to Starfire his reasons for being certain that Midnight, who was last seen beaten half-dead, survived their climactic encounter and the destruction of her lair at the end of the Jump City Arc.
  Robin: No body, no death, in our line of work.
• In the Total Drama story, Legacy, Izzy was reported to have been killed in the sinking of a ferryboat, but her body was never recovered. This is part of the reason why neither Duncan nor Courtney believes that she is really dead.
• In this Glee fanfic, Kurt vanishes in the middle of a school day and is never heard from again except for his car, which is found three towns over with dried blood inside. The author confirms that Kurt is, in fact, dead.
• Remembrance of the Fallen: There are no bodies at the cluster of grave markers for the crew of the USS Wolfram in the cemetery on Goralis. They were all either turned into Fek'Ihri or incinerated when the Wolfram's shipboard Artificial Intelligence Raging Heart vented drive plasma into the infected compartments to stop the Zombie Apocalypse (see Faces in the Flames).
• Saetwo's Story: As noted in-universe, while Romelau seemingly suffers a Disney Villain Death during the Final Battle, his body is never found. Either way, however, he's never seen again.
• Mentioned in a backstory blog for The Empress Returns (sequel to The God Empress of Ponykind); some time after the Battle for Terra, Commissar Yarrik caught his old rival Ghazkhull Thraka on an unknown ice world. Yarrik eventually tackled the ork warlord into a crevasse, never to be seen again. Imperial records say Yarrik won, but the orks believe that the two are still fighting down there, and will do so until the end of time.
• The Haddock Chronicles: Elsa is presumed dead by Arendelle's royal family, the last person from there to see her being her nanny, who tried and failed to save her from the sinking ship.
• The Lucifer (2016) fic "Tragic Life Changes" opens with Chloe and Dan being apparently killed in a plane crash, although only Dan's body is explicitly identified; Marcus Pierce states that Chloe had to be identified by dental records. When Maze sees a still-living Chloe (Chloe was saved by God), she explicitly tells herself "Future reference, [..] If you don't see the body, they're not dead!"
• To Hell and Back (Arrowverse): Oliver and Barry, of course, though after ten long years, one can't blame their loved ones for assuming they were dead. In fact, when the U.S. Embassy in China called Joe to inform him about Barry's survival, he initially assumed they had Finally Found the Body and was ready to plan Barry's funeral.
• In The Institute Saga, Angel has his wings snapped by Galatea and is thrown into the ocean to drown. A memorial service is held for him and The Falcon takes up his mantle, but no one knows that Apocalypse rescued him and turned him into Archangel.
• RWBY: Scars:
  • Subverted with Ruby and Yang's Missing Mom Summer. Her body was never recovered after she left on a mission and never returned home, but Qrow mentions that he knows what happened to it. Summer is dead, and Qrow killed her himself, but Salem kept her body for herself.
  • Blake is considered dead after Beacon is destroyed but no one ever found her body. This is because she survived and ran off. Ruby was one of the few that didn't believe Blake was dead.
• The Seven Misfortunes of Lady Fortune has Marinette shot seven times and dropping off a bridge. A funeral with an empty grave follows.
• White Sheep (RWBY): After her battle with Cinder, a disturbing amount of Pyrrha's blood is found, but no body. Considering that there were plenty of monsters (including a dragon) running around, she was reported as dead. Cinder was forced to stop right before killing Pyrrha, when she realized that Pyrrha was in love with Jaune and Salem would not be happy with Cinder killing a potential source of grandchildren. She kidnapped her and took her to Salem instead. Jaune finds this out (and soon shows his friends) when his mom sends him a selfie of herself and Pyrrha.
• Beyond Heroes: Of Sunshine and Red Lyrium: As in canon, when the Inquisitor and her companions return from the Fade, it's revealed that a sacrifice was made in order to allow this to happen. Varric helpfully points out that this trope is in play.
• Bridge to Terabithia 2: The Last Time: How do you bring back a character who's canonically deceased in the original story? With this trope, of course — turns out that Leslie was dragged out of the creek where she allegedly drowned, but unfortunately, by her uncle / dad's younger brother, who planned to abduct her and sell her off when she reached teenage-hood...
• At the start of Ash and Petals. Ozai is only presumed dead, as no one saw him die and there was no body left behind.
• In What Tomorrow Brings, Ax and Tobias go on a mission to rescue Elfangor, who took Ax's place on the Dome Ship... and it turns out that he detonated it so it wouldn't fall into Yeerk hands, leaving no body behind. Tobias is frustrated about the lack of closure, but it's revealed a few chapters later that Elfangor is still alive.
• In When all is lost, then all is found, Anna refuses to believe her sister Elsa is dead because no one has found her body. Everyone else believes Elsa is dead because her magical creation Olaf died. Both answers are true: Elsa is dead, but her soul is stuck between life-and-death and she needs Anna to revive her.
• FIRE! (DarkMark): During one climactic battle, Doctor Doom exploits the chaos to try to blast both heroes and villains into oblivion. When the smoke clears, he cannot see the bodies of the Fantastic Four, but he knows better than believing them dead without evidence.
  But the bodies of the accursed Four had to be found. Nothing less would do. If needed to be, he'd take blood samples from every inch of this field, type them with his own equipment in Latveria, and verify the deaths of Richards, his wife, John Storm, and Benjamin Grimm.
  Nothing less would do.
• Chasing Dragons:
  • Aeron Greyjoy's body is never recovered when he's supposedly killed at the Battle of Fair Island. As such, when a Drowned Priest claiming to be him appears years later to lead an unsuccessful rebellion against mainland occupation of the Iron Islands, it's unclear whether it's really him or not.
  • Ned Stark's body disappears after he dies in the Second Battle of Ghoyan Drohe, carried away by the river he's killed in and never being recovered. This leads to the In-Universe myth being born that He's Just Hiding and will return when he's most needed.
• Wolfblood: Aiden's body was washed downriver after he died during a hunt with Jad, and Jad did not retrieve it.
• The Sun Will Come Up And The Seasons Will Change: Subverted in the final chapter, where Nora's corpse is returned to Earth after her Spiteful Suicide on the Infinity Train and found by the police near the hut she had built, but her family will never know what really happened to her.

Films — Animation

• In Despicable Me 2, ludicrously macho supervillain El Macho is said to have supposedly died in the most macho way possible, by riding a shark into the mouth of an active volcano, with 250 pounds of dynamite strapped to his chest, leaving behind a burnt pile of chest hair. Sure enough, he's still alive.
• The finale of Kung Fu Panda is surprisingly silent on this subject. While the Wuxi Finger Hold is never expressly claimed to be fatal, the reactions of Po and Tai Lung (and Shifu's expression when he threatens to use it) all suggest it is at least likely to batter someone to a pulp, if not unsurvivable — and the suspiciously-shaped cloud after Po uses it would suggest there isn't anything left. Whether to avoid the typical Disney Villain Death, as a Sequel Hook, or because the snow leopard is just too badass to kill off, however, his death — if such it was — happens off-screen... so it all becomes moot, due to this trope. And since Po's excited words to Shifu are "I defeated Tai Lung!" not "I killed him," then. It's finally revealed what happened to Tai Lung in Kung Fu Panda 3. It turns out the express purpose of the Wuxi Finger Hold is to banish those on whom it's used to the spirit realm (where Kai comes from). A Freeze-Frame Bonus shot reveals that Tai Lung was one of the masters in the spirit realm whom Kai captured and drained of their chi. Whether this counts as "dead" is debatable since Po was still able to return to the real world after having used the Wuxi Finger Hold on himself.
• In Rango, Bean tells Rango that while her father is deceased, and she keeps ashes into a jar, they never found his body. At least he didn't fall drunk down a mineshaft, according to Mr. Merrimack.

Films — Live-Action

• 28 Weeks Later: Robert Carlyle's character seemingly loses his wife this way, when the house they were sheltering in is overrun by the Infected while he's elsewhere, and he sees her get tackled by one of them before he can reach her. Given that the Rage virus has an almost 100% infection rate and an incubation period of minutes at most, believing she was dead was a pretty reasonable assumption at that point, but it turns out she's one of a tiny percentage of the population with a natural immunity. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean she's not carrying the virus...
• Abominable: CJ's body disappears soon after the main monster apparently kills her with a Finishing Stomp, although it's likely that the monsters merely spirited it away to hide the evidence or for food.
• Batman Begins: At the end, Ra's-Al Ghul is apparently killed when the train car he is in derails and crashes. He has so far not returned, but the fact that we never see his body (along with some of his defining characteristics from the comics) has fueled much fan speculation. The novelization of the film says, however, that his body was never found.
• The Dark Knight Rises: Bane's mooks capture Commissioner Gordon. Bane is furious that they brought him to his secret location. Gordon manages to fall into water and is washed away into a sewer pipe. The mook claims that No One Could Survive That!, but Bane demands to see the body before he'll believe it. When the mook tries to complain, Bane puts a radio-beacon on him and shoots him, letting the mook fall into the water (with the hope that wherever the mook ultimately washes out of the sewers, they can pick up Gordon's trail from there with the radio).
• The Bourne Ultimatum ends this way, but the audience is shown the truth; Nikki knows the truth as soon as she hears the news report.
• Brazil: They never do find Buttle's body, despite his wife's repeated cries throughout the film. It's lost in the bureaucracy.
• Bullshot: That Hun swine Otto von Bruno's plane crashes at the end, and Professor Fenton states that "his body was never found", but after The Hero and his Love Interest get married, we see Otto disguised as their chauffeur. But that is another tale.
• Daylight (2013): Ray was convicted thirty years ago of the murder of the prostitute Rosita and her infant daughter Anna, but Anna's body was never found. Part of the reason Iris thinks he's innocent is that she doesn't think he would have been clear-headed enough to hide a body. Sure enough, it turns out that Iris is really Anna, raised by her biological grandmother Ageeth.
• The Dead Girl: One character's (Leah) sister was abducted fifteen years ago, and Leah insists (to her mother!) that her sister must have been raped, murdered, and dismembered and then hidden somewhere she'll never be found. Much of her plotline deals with trying to find closure.
• DOA: Dead or Alive : The film-of-the-game starts with Kasumi being told by Ryu Hayabusa about her brother Hayate's death in the DOA tournament. Kasumi immediately demands to see the body. Hayabusa tells her that there is no body. Kasumi then flatly states that Hayate is not dead and goes to find him. On the other hand, Ayane, who is secretly in love with Hayate, doesn't question that he's dead. Later on, Victor Donovan personally tells her that, after his fight with Leon, Hayate fell off a cliff, and his body was never recovered. Naturally, Kasumi assumes Donovan is lying, especially after fighting Leon and finding out he's a mediocre fighter at best (i.e. no match for Hayate).
• Dredd: After wrecking a quarter of a floor with a trio of mini-guns trying to kill them, Caleb insists that the Judges aren't dead until they've at least found some pieces of them. He's right to do so — when he finds Dredd's body, it's still alive and is in the process of throwing him off a 76th story balcony.
• Eddie and the Cruisers: Overanguished Jersey rock star Eddie Wilson fakes his death by driving his car off a bridge into the Raritan River. Eddie is seen in the last shot watching TV in a shop window. This becomes a plot driver in the sequel, when the Evil Record Company, which is cashing in on some previously unknown Eddie Wilson tracks, uses the lack of a corpse to build excitement by spreading the rumor that the tracks might have been recorded "after Eddie died." All this while Eddie is actually hiding out in Montreal, startled to be suddenly hearing his old music on the radio (sniff).
  The Agony Booth: Is it even possible in movies for someone whose body was never found to actually be dead?
• Freejack: Stable Time Loop version: In this Emilio Estevez movie, race car driver Alex Furlong appears to die in a car crash in 1991, but his body is secretly teleported into the futuristic year 2009 by a businessman for use as a transplant host. When Alex escapes and looks up his old friend, the friend is not surprised to see someone who died 18 years ago, because...they never found the body.
• Friday the 13th (1980) has Jason Voorhees, who was said to have drowned in Crystal Lake in 1957, whose body was never found.
• Defied in The Fugitive. The title character, Dr. Richard Kimble, leaps from the top of a dam to avoid being arrested. Most of the pursuing Feds are sure he's dead and one of the Marshals says their quarry is likely "fish food". Gerard doesn't believe it without a body and he turns out to be right, their fugitive survived the fall:
  Gerard: Alright then, go get a reel and rod and catch me the fish that ate him.
• Gone Baby Gone: The missing girl is declared dead, although the body was never found.
• The Guard: Uses this twice — one with Aidan then at the end with Gerry.
• Halloween II (2009):
  • Michael's body at the beginning of this Rob Zombie film.
  • Every Halloween movie, for that matter. Michael has a habit of pulling disappearing acts after seemingly being killed.
• In an indirect way in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2. When Katniss is shot during the liberation of District 2, Snow knows she survived because the resistance doesn't immediately treat her like a martyr.
• The Incredible Shrinking Man: When Louise returns home she finds that Scott, her mouse-sized husband, is missing. She then sees that the dollhouse where he lives is smashed and finds their cat with a scrap of Scott's shirt in its mouth. This causes her to conclude that Scott has been eaten by their pet cat. which explains the lack of a body. However, Scott survived his encounter with the cat but ended up trapped in the basement. Since everyone thinks he's dead no one looks for him there and the rest of the film is Scott's day to day survival in his new surroundings.
• The Invisible: Averted Trope, as Nick's body is eventually found, even though he is Not Quite Dead.
• Kong: Skull Island: James Conrad mentions that his father was a pilot who was shot down over Germany in WWII, and his body was never recovered.
• The Lord of the Rings:
  • Aragorn plunges off a cliff during the warg battle in The Two Towers. Naturally he proves to be Not Quite Dead.
  • Not to mention Gandalf's fall in The Fellowship of the Ring. He actually died though, but not because of the fall, and, as he was a maia (angelic spirit), he was brought Back from the Dead by his employers anyway.
• The theatrical ending to Ma has the title antagonist presumably die in a house fire, but an alternate ending on the DVD adds a postscript where it's mentioned in dialogue that her body wasn't found — naturally this leads into a scene that reveals her to be badly burned but still alive and in hiding.
• Man on Fire: In the 2004 remake, Pita (Dakota Fanning) is kidnapped, and later said to have been killed. At the end of the movie, it is revealed she is still alive.
• Man of Steel: Sort of speculation here. Although the C-17 delivers its payload, the idea was to send Zod's mooks back to the Phantom Zone; this means they MAY not be dead, and all the people on the plane still kicking it may be trapped with everyone the Kryptonians ever threw into the Phantom Zone.
• Mandalay: Since they're on a boat, they don't really look for Tony's body after his "suicide." And even when Tanya does kill him, he conveniently falls out the window into the endless sea.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • The Avengers: Averted Trope. Agent Coulson appears to die, but the scene cuts away before we find out whether he was really Only Mostly Dead and taken to a hospital room. Nick Fury plays the death for all it's worth in getting the bickering heroes to put aside their differences, but is explicitly shown to be a Consummate Liar about other things (including lying about the Captain America trading cards being taken from Coulson's body, rather than his locker!). Furthermore, the actor who plays Coulson has said he was assured by Joss Whedon that the character survives. As of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., he's alive and kicking, and knowledge of this is restricted to 'level seven' clearance.
    • This is only sorta accurate. The Wham Episode reveals that Coulson did indeed die at Loki's hands, but was resurrected several days later (against his will) via a few different types of extremely disturbing S.H.I.E.L.D. tech which included a memory wipe of the entire process.
    • In a blink-and-you'll-miss-it part of a deleted scene, Steve is reviewing files after thawing out in the 21st century. One of them lists Bucky Barnes as M.I.A., meaning that S.H.I.E.L.D. thinks he may be still alive, alluding to the fact that Bucky "died" by falling off a train, his body never being recovered. This was foreshadowing for the upcoming Captain America: The Winter Soldier film, where the identity of the eponymous Winter Soldier is a Foregone Conclusion for anyone who has any knowledge of the comics.
  • In general, the only way you can know for sure if a character who dies midway through a film is dead in the MCU is if they're shown having a funeral for said character — Coulson, Bucky, Loki, and Nick Fury all seemed to be killed at one point, but later turned up alive. This has led some fans to suspect Quicksilver will come back after seemingly being killed in Avengers: Age of Ultron.
• Maverick: Played with:
  Maverick: Well, Porkchop Slim owed me too but he died and his widow used the money for the funeral.
  Eugene: Oh, they never found the body.
  Maverick: What?
  Eugene: They never found his body.
  Maverick: The widow Porkchop conned me? What is it with people nowadays, anyhow?
• Max Payne: Max Payne is shot by the bad guys and falls into the sea. The bad guys don't bother waiting around to see if he gets back up, they simply presume he is dead. All it took Max was some painkillers and the drug and he was good as new.
• Messalina Messalina: This 1979 Italian comedy insinuates that Messalina and Silius may have escaped the Gardens of Lucullus.
• My Favorite Wife (1940) and its remake, Move Over Darling (1963): Ellen Arden was last seen falling into the ocean while trying to board a lifeboat to escape from a sinking ship. Her husband has her declared Legally Dead after seven years and remarries — only for Ellen to return just as he is leaving on his honeymoon.
• The Phantom of the Opera (1962): Professor Petrie fled the printers after his face was burned by acid and then jumped into the river. The policeman who witnessed what happened was certain Petrie then died as the current was so fast, and never bothered to have the river dragged for his body. As it turned out, though, Petrie survived and went to live under the local opera house as the Phantom.
• The Return of Godzilla: In the American version, Steve Martin pretty much says this about the 1954 version of Godzilla and its 1956 American cut. "Just for the record, they never found a body." Of course, in Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla, they did find the body...And turned it into the titular Mechagodzilla.
• Revolution (1985): Daisy is presumed dead when the British ambush her at Valley Forge. The ending reveals that she is alive and well.
• The Rock: At the end, Stanley Goodspeed claims that John Mason was caught in a missile blast and either vaporized or blown to sea. When this report is made, Mason is standing right next to Goodspeed, totally unharmed. Mason then uses the report of his death to allow him to start a new life.
• Ruthless People: Subverted Trope after the kidnapper and his car fall into the water at the pier. A short time later, we see the police fishing the corpse of the Bedroom Killer (who died earlier in the kidnapper's house by accident) out of the water (the kidnappers put him there as a decoy) while the kidnapper survives thanks to SCUBA gear and makes it to the beach to be reunited with his girlfriend and Mrs. Stone before the end credits roll.
• Sherlock: Case of Evil opens with Moriarty being believed dead after he is shot by Sherlock Holmes and falls down an open excavation into the sewer where his body is washed away. Holmes actually uses the phrase word-for-word after he realizes that Moriarty is still alive.
• The Shining: The original cut of this Stanley Kubrick film had an epilogue in which Wendy is visited in the hospital by the Overlook's manager, Mr. Ullman, who tells her that they never found Jack's body. Kubrick excised this scene shortly after the film's initial premiere.
• Snatch.: Brick Top guarantees this by feeding the corpses to pigs. In a scene, he describes the animal's eating process.
• Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022): After the destruction of the Giant Eggman Robot, G.U.N. finds no trace of Robotnik's body among the debris. The commander is convinced Robotnik's a goner, but Stone is seen to have survived at least.
• In Speed Racer, the body of Rex Racer was found, but it was so badly burned up that it was impossible to recognize. Speed later uses this as evidence that Rex possibly survived the "fatal" accident and came back as Racer X. This is subverted later in the movie, when Racer X takes off his mask to show Speed that he's a different person entirely and assures him that his brother is dead. Double-subverted when it turns out that Racer X is Rex, who faked his death and got Magic Plastic Surgery so he could fight corruption in the racing league without bringing danger to his family.
• Star Wars actually has a number of these.
  • Played straight in Return of the Jedi with Boba Fett falling into the Sarlacc up until his extreme popularity proved otherwise. The first episode of Season 2 of The Mandalorian confirms that he survived, his armor having been claimed by a different character named Cobb Vanth before being gifted to the title character and an unmasked Boba cameos at the end of the episode.
  • Mace Windu is another prime example. Generally, any Jedi who has a considerable fanbase will have somebody speculating their survival of Order 66 at some point.
  • Subverted twice in Revenge of the Sith: First, when Order 66 is executed and Obi-Wan Kenobi is shot off a cliff and falls into the sinkhole, Commander Cody orders his men to keep searching for a body. It happens again after a battle with Palpatine which ends with Yoda falling to what should be his death, and Commander Thire reports that they haven't found the body.
    Mas Amedda: Then he is not dead!
    Palpatine: Double your search!
  • Shaak Ti was definitely killed in a deleted scene of Revenge of the Sith, but since her death scene was deleted there have been other tie-ins, like The Force Unleashed video game, where she survived.
  • The Rise of Skywalker features the Emperor returning as the Big Bad. Even though at the end of Return of the Jedi he was thrown down a seemingly bottomless shaft and seemed to explode, and then the Death Star II itself exploded shortly afterward, we never actually saw his body. Rise of Skywalker is vague on whether he really did survive or whether the body he has in that film is a clone instead.
• The Stendhal Syndrome: In spite of all the things she does to him before pushing him over a cliff into rapids, Anna refuses to believe the killer is dead. Turns out, she's wrong. But there's a copycat. And it's her.
• Striking Distance: Early in the movie, cop Jimmy Detillo apparently commits suicide by jumping off a bridge into a river. His body is never found, but he is given a funeral. Jimmy Detillo reappears at the end of the movie and reveals he was the mystery serial killer all along.
• Too Many Husbands: Bill Cardew is declared legally dead after a boating accident, based on a coast guard's report, so his wife marries his best friend and business partner Henry Lowndes. Then Bill shows up, having been on a Deserted Island in the meantime. (Like My Favorite Wife, this story was Inspired by… Enoch Arden by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.)
• The Truman Show: Part of Truman's reasoning for why the man he saw could be his father after all. Naturally, part of the reason for his dad's disappearance and the way he returns follow the soap opera model.
• Under Siege 2: Dark Territory: Gets a Lampshade Hanging twice. With Penn already having bitch-slapped a subordinate for thinking a SEAL team captain could die so easily, he himself falls folly to it and the below dialogue takes place (close to an exact mirror of his own earlier speech). As he immediately points out though, alive or not, Ryback is not on the train (since Ryback is the hero, this situation-redeeming fact obviously doesn't last very long):
  Marcus Penn: Ryback's gone, Dane.
  Travis Dane: Did you see the body?
  Marcus Penn: No, but I assumed...
  Travis Dane: Assumption is the mother of all FUCKUPS!
• X-Men Film Series:
  • Sabretooth and Toad from the first movie. To this day, their fates are still unclear. Sabretooth was confirmed to have survived in the official video game prequel to X-Men: The Last Stand, but the game itself has since been rendered Canon Discontinuity by the events of The Wolverine. So basically his fate is once again up in the air.
  • In X-Men: The Last Stand, Cyclops' body is never found after his death.

Music

• The pilot in Kim Wilde's song "Cambodia" goes missing in action just when his wife is expecting him to return home.
• The song To Keep My Love Alive, there's Sir Alfred, who's sent on a hunting trip. As the song goes, "They're hunting for him still".
• In the song "Hazard" by Richard Marx, a young woman goes missing and the narrator is blamed for the disappearance, but they never find the body. Averted in the accompanying video however, which adds a lot of backstory, several additional suspects not mentioned in the song, and importantly a corpse.
• In the song "The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia", by Vicki Lawrence, the female narrator of the song admits she was the actual killer of her brother's friend Andy (whom the brother has been wrongly executed for murdering). She murdered Andy and the brother's cheating wife (Who'd also slept with "That Amos boy, Seth") and confesses that the the wife "never left town" as most people thought but rather was killed by her but "That's one body that'll never be found".

Myths & Religion

• Practically a staple of Cherokee folklore. Ulagu, Spearfinger, and other monsters are given uncertain demises that suggest they may just be biding their time.
• Also a staple of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures. There's Elijah, Enoch, Moses, Mary mother of Jesus, and Jesus himself. The first two are explicitly confirmed not to have died, the latter died and were buried, but God never disclosed where Moses' body went, Mary's tomb was later found to be empty (and many believe she was bodily assumed into Heaven), and Jesus came Back from the Dead, bodily ascending to Heaven in full view of his original band of Disciples later on. (What he did with his body after that is not known, though Christians, not sharing the Gnostics' presumption that flesh and blood are evil, presume he's still using it). The ultimate form is the Rapturos ("Catching Away") a.k.a. the Rapture, which will involve the resurrection of the dead, and every living member of the Faithful ascending into Heaven, presumably leaving many more empty graves and tombs.

Pinball

• In WHO dunnit (1995), the brakes on Tex's car are sabotaged by Butler after he overhears Tex threatening Victoria. Tex drives off a cliff and the car explodes, but the body was never found. He gets plastic surgery, renames himself "Bruno", and plots revenge on Victoria.

Podcasts

• In In Strange Woods, unlike Jacob, Howl's body was never found, leading some characters to speculate that he survived and went elsewhere.

Tabletop Games

• The Death Defiance Heroic Knack in the Adventure! RPG allows for cases of this in order to come back when people think you're dead.
• A villain flava in Badass called "They Never Found The Body" allows the villain to "die" in a way that allows them to come back to haunt the Badasses in the future.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • The original Dragonlance modules for suggested this tactic to the Dungeon Master, as the Myth Arc of the adventures relies on several key NPCs surviving until the end.
  • Module I6 Ravenloft. In the Back Story, Tatyana threw herself from the walls of Ravenloft castle and disappeared in the mists. Her body was never found. She appears in the module in another body, under the name Ireena Kolyana.
  • Breaking a Staff of the Magi causes a titanic explosion — but has a 50% chance of sending the user to the Astral Plane instead of killing them.
  • Vampires have a nasty habit of turning into Super Smoke to escape defeat. If no body is found, make sure it's because it was destroyed by sunlight.
• Invoked by name in Exalted, where a character called Mist, the Eternal Revolutionary made a strange pact with The Fair Folk for the power to overthrow Tyrants (and anyone else he deems unfit). If he should die by unverifiable means, somehow the Fae magic that protects his destiny is changed and he shows up again later, miraculously saved.
• The GURPS Advantage Extra Life is designed so that "no matter how sure your enemies are that you have been killed you'll come back". Of course, for purposes of game balance, you have to pay points of each Extra Life.
• In Hong Kong Action Theatre, a character with the Mysterious Death signature move never dies in a way that would leave no doubt, and usually involves something that engineers this situation. Then, upon spending all your Chi pool or a number of Star Power points, the character can come back.
• When someone in Magic: The Gathering dies and doesn't leave a corpse, chances are they just became a planeswalker.
• In Savage Worlds, the ''Harder To Kill' Edge gives you a 50% chance of miraculous survival after being 'killed'.
• Outright suggested to the DM in Shadowrun's fourth edition rulebook, as a story-telling sleight of hand to avoid having to do in important NPCs before their time, regardless of what the rules and dice would otherwise say.
• Spirit of the Century has a stunt that lets Player Characters do this, but it's generally assumed that if anyone dies offscreen, then they're liable to come back. The stunt just lets you come back in the same session.
• Encouraged for Game Masters in the PDQ-system superhero game Truth & Justice. Where heroes get Hero Points to spend on bursts of luck and desperation-fueled skill, villains get Villain Points to spend on "really" being robot clones (and thus never being in the fight in the first place), to have their body never be found, or to make miraculous escapes from prison. Given the free-form nature of power acquisition in the game, it's entirely reasonable to have "Body Never Found" be a standard power for some villains, as a form of immortality.
• Warhammer:
  • In Warhammer Fantasy Battles vampires are quite fond of this.
  • Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 in general now tend to use this when special characters come to grief — if one "falls" in battle, expect them to make a miraculous (or diabolical) recovery, have the reports of the death somewhat in doubt as propaganda or simple error, or just have them "falling in the swirl of battle" somewhere and coming back. Somehow.

Theatre

• In Twelfth Night, both main characters assume that their sibling was lost in a shipwreck and that they alone survived.

Toys

• In BIONICLE, Word of God made it the official rule. Death off-screen, not found the body? So don't believe what other characters say, they will come back. This is possibly subverted with Matoro, though his body was turned into energy on-screen. This includes Makuta Teridax whose death is left ever so slightly ambiguous with Tahu hoping that he is indeed dead for good this time.

Visual Novels

• Ace Attorney:
  • Happens in Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney with Thalassa Gramarye. She was shot by accident by either Zak or Valant Gramarye (it's never determined) 7 years ago and disappeared before her killer could see her body. She turns out to be alive under a new name, Lamiroir, a character you actually meet before knowing about Thalassa. Valant Gramarye even lampshades this trope:
    Valant: ...I realize that I, no...we never saw proof of her demise. We never saw her body.
  • Pulled in Trials and Tribulations with Dahlia Hawthorne. You learn in case 4 that she dived into a river famous for taking corpses when she was a child, but because she appears in case 1 (which chronologically happens after 4), you know she survived.
  • Played with in Justice for All with Ini Miney. Her body was seen, but so badly burned that she was mistaken for her sister Mimi, who went on to have plastic surgery to imitate Ini.
  • Becomes a heavy plot-point in the sequel of Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth, as due to a series of tragic coincidences led to the accidental theft of the victim's body in the IS-7 incident, Manfred von Karma was forced to use a forged autopsy for it in order to avoid losing the case. Gregory Edgeworth finds this out and slams him with it and other evidence tampering that took place during the trial, leading to DL-6.
• In Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, Mikan Tsumiki's execution is different from the rest in the sense that she's never shown dying on-screen. Back in the day, this, combined with the theories of her beloved being the previous Big Bad (eventually proved correct), resulted in a theory that she would turn out to be the mastermind or at the very least an accomplice, although it doesn't happen.
• Happens in the past to Kyousuke's elder brother Kyouhei aka "Maou" in The Devil on G-String whereby his body was never found in the London bombings, thus was presumed dead by the world prior to events of the game.
• In Double Homework, after the second avalanche on Barbarossa, both Dennis and Dr. Mosely are presumed dead by the authorities, but their bodies are never found.
• In The Empty Turnabout, Arts's body was found shortly after his murder and was declared dead by Mary Adair, a witness, but it was gone when the police arrived. The trial goes in circles as the defense, the witnesses, and the prosecution debate about the murder method and the body's whereabouts. Even Mary's report is called into question late in the trial by herself to complicate matters even more.
• In ClockUp's Euphoria, Andou Miyako's is never stated as dead in the game. Her dying body just disappears from the electric chair room after the events of the first "Keyhole" room, no matter who you choose. This is something even her VA brings up in the extras.
• Kirei Kotomine of Fate/stay night in UBW where Tohsaka asks Caster if she made sure Kirei was really dead, and had she made sure to check the body?
• At the start of Hotel Dusk: Room 215, the body of Kyle's traitor partner, Bradley, isn't recovered after he was shot. Kyle naturally suspects that Bradley is still alive and goes looking for him.
• When They Cry:
  • Higurashi: When They Cry: Oyashiro-sama's annual curse results in one corpse and one disappearance, with both victims supposedly having angered Hinamizawa's local god. They're really just a string of coincidences (ex. Satoshi being secretly taken to the clinic for treatment of the Hate Plague after killing his abuisve aunt), and occasionally the Big Bad taking advantage of the superstition.
  • Umineko: When They Cry: The Rokkenjima incident of 1986 resulted in the apparent deaths of nearly the entire Ushiromiya family, leaving Eva as the Sole Survivor and Ange, who'd avoided that year's family meeting because of illness. Most of the island is gone, and only a piece of Maria's jawbone could be recovered that placed little chance for anyone else surviving. It turns out that 900 tons of explosives left over from World War II were set off to cover up a Gold Fever murder spree.

Web Animation

• At the end of "Mr. Puzzles Wants You to Be Less Alive" (aka. "The First Horror Movie Written Entirely by Bots"), Mr. Puzzles gets shot near the end, and after one final deadly puzzle that he had presumably recorded and set up in advance, he's nowhere to be seen and the detective remarks: "Mr. Puzzles is not here. He must be forever dead and gone." The woman, relieved, sits down, but then she receives a text from Mr. Puzzles, revealing that she's just failed one more puzzle, because the chair she sat down on was really a chair saw.
• Red vs. Blue:
  • The Meta fell off a cliff after suffering injuries that no one else could survive, hooked to a falling Warthog. His body was ID'd by the army, as implied by the fact that the guy debriefing the Reds and Blues saying that they'd found three freelancers, and there were only three at Avalanche, including the aforementioned.
  • Played straight with Grif. Invoked and lampshaded while he's hanging there.
  • Invoked in Relocated. Lopez claims he killed Sister back at Blood Gulch. Grif doesn't believe it.
    Grif: I'll tell you what: you produce a corpse, I'll believe it.
    Simmons: Huh?
    Grif: Listen, once when we were kids, we went ice skating, and she fell through the ice. She was under there for three hours, and when they pulled her out, not only was she still alive, she was pregnant. If you can explain that to me, I'll believe you when you tell me she's dead.
  • Near the end of Season 13, the heroes wonder if blasting Felix off a precipice was really enough to kill them. Immediately after, Locus subverts this trope's implications by taking Felix's Great Key and activating it — something that would have been impossible had Felix survived his fall.
• RWBY: At the climax of volume 3, Ozpin fights Cinder and appears to be winning when the scene cuts away to Jaune and Pyrrha. As they debate what to do, Cinder suddenly bursts up the lift to the top of Beacon Tower; the students assume Ozpin's dead while the audience assumes He's Just Hiding At the beginning of Volume 4, Salem interrogates Cinder over whether or not she really killed Ozpin because the idea of Cinder succeeding makes her suspicious. When Cinder insists she's telling the truth, a baffled Salem wonders what Ozpin is planning. Salem knows that Ozpin was a reincarnation of her ancient lover and nemesis Ozma, and that every time the physical body dies, Ozma's soul, Aura, memories, and abilities transfer to a new host. The transfer begins a process of merging between Ozma and the identity and abilities of the new host to become Ozma's newest reincarnation. While Salem remains mysteriously disturbed by Cinder's success, Ozma's legacy transfers from Ozpin to Oscar.

Webcomics

• In Adventurers!, a dimensional distortion swallows Argent and Garshask while they were fighting. Karn insists that since no bodies were found, they're obviously still alive. He's right. And in another incident, after Big Bad Khrima accidentally destroyed a magic crystal, wrecking a sizable part of his fortress, Drecker mentions that Khrima hasn't been heard from in months. Ardam speculates that he might have died in the accident, and wonders if they've seen the last of him. There is a pause, then both heroes burst out laughing.
• Subverted in The Adventures of Dr. McNinja. Though Frans Rayner's body is never recovered, his death is confirmed when Death is heard inviting Frans Rayner to purgatory.
  • ...but played straight with Knickerbockers.
  • ...And now possibly Double Subverted or at least lampshaded.
• The i-Jin of Jeeves tried to use this trope in And Shine Heaven Now to convince Walter that he was who he said he was: Jeeves had gone missing during World War 2 and was presumed dead, but they never found the body, so it was reasonable that he was still alive. He didn't count on one thing though: Walter was the one to Mercy Kill Jeeves in the first place.
• Awkward Zombie invokes the trope, lampooning a quirk in Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker where destroying a vehicle technically doesn't count as killing its occupant, even if No One Could Survive That!:
  Big Boss: (after blowing up a helicopter with a rocket launcher) Kaz, I said non-lethal!
  Miller: Do you see the pilot's body?
  Big Boss: No, just smashed-up helicopter parts. It's pretty bad.
  Miller: How can you prove anyone died if you don't see a body?
• Girl Genius: Baron Wulfenbach seemingly died when his hospital exploded — but his body wasn't found, and indeed, one of his aides tried to rescue him before the hospital exploded and couldn't find him. When his son notes this, he's told that the Baron left clear orders: if the Baron ever seemed dead, they should immediately proclaim his son the new Baron. When he does turn up alive, both his son, Gilgamesh, and his rival Tarvek both exclaim "I knew it!"
  Bang: I always wondered how he planned to run off and leave you holding the bag. Impressive.
• In The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!, Fructose Riboflavin was presumed dead for centuries before he turned up alive in Earth's solar system.
• The Irregular Webcomic! version of the Mythbusters, having died in a broken submarine on the bottom of Loch Ness, again, successfully argue to the Death of Inadvisable Airlock Opening that since Mythbusters is a TV show, and nobody found their bodies, they can't really be dead.
• Several times in Kevin & Kell; Fenton, Vin, basically all the Witnesses Relocated by the bird conspiracy.
• Helen's mother pulls this off twice in Narbonic:
  Helen: I watched the villagers burn you at the stake, chop your corpse into little pieces, and hop all over them!
  Dr. Narbon: There's always an out, Beta. Remember that.
  • In the "filename story", it turns out that what she actually saw was a video brought by the family lawyer.
  • In a later arc, she's marked for death by the Dave Conspiracy (long story), who demand really solid evidence. Unfortunately, they're trying to get rid of an Evilutionary Biologist with Science-Related Memetic Disorder; we don't see exactly what she leaves in a cardbox for Dave and Artie that will convince the other Daves, but it's easy to guess.
  Artie: I'm sure the explanation for this is very clever, but I'm equally sure I never want to hear it.
  • Also said about ANTONIO SMITH, FORENSIC LINGUIST:
    Helen: You did kill him, I assume?
    Mel: I blew up the English department. No bodies were recovered.
    Helen: Oh well, I suppose it'll keep him out of my hair a little while.
• Discussed and lampshaded in The Order of the Stick, here. Apparently, being Genre Savvy requires you to be Genre Blind.
• ReBoot: Code of Honor: Sprites hit with a Code Master's Gibson Coil Pike are believed to have been deleted, but in reality, they are transported directly to the Big Bad.
• Lampshaded, subverted and parodied in short order in Sam & Fuzzy after arc villain Mr. Blank takes a dive down the side of a flying skyscraper.
  Sam: He's gone for good.
  Fuzzy: You don't know that!
  Sam: Fuzzy...
  Fuzzy: We only saw him fall! He might have survived! We never saw the body!
  Fuzzy: Oh...Nevermind, there it is. And there's some more of it over there!
• Sluggy Freelance
  • Oasis has been killed and returned several times; the trope was lampshaded here. Later on, it becomes a plot point that you might actually be able to find a body and still count on her coming back.
  • Zig-Zagging Trope at the ending of "bROKEN" and the following stories. Riff and Zoë are inside a mecha that burns up and explodes, but Torg assures Gwynn that they must be alive because there were no bodies found and because he knows Riff had installed an emergency escape device that could teleport the pilots to a random dimension. But we subsequently see that the way the events were shown unfolding was not the real truth but false memories of Torg's born from his denial that it looked as though Riff and Zoë really had died. And we're shown that Riff and Zoë indeed ended up in a random dimension, but it looks as though they die on arrival. And then... well, there are just a lot of layers to this Story Arc.
• Unsounded: After Duane and Miki's murders the scene is shown with Duane's body lying alone in the snow. Nearly a decade later in both the comic and realtime it's revealed that Miki actually survived the night, though with serious life-threatening injuries.

Web Original

• In The Crawlspace, Stephanie, Alisha and Lindsay went missing soon after the narrator fled back to America, and no trace of them was ever found, though the narrator is convinced they are dead.
• Dragon Ball Z Abridged:
  • Cooler is savvy enough to never believe an enemy is dead unless he sees a body to the point where he refuses to pay his underlings unless they find Goku's corpse as proof and later even states that his brother Frieza did a better job at killing him than them if Goku wasn't found, bear in mind Freeza not only failed to kill Goku but nailed himself with his own attack instead.
  • Vegeta mentions having shot down a pod carrying his brother Tarble while trying to hit Santa's sleigh as a child, specifying that they never found the body. Team Four Star has gone back and forth on whether he's still alive.
• In the story Sliced Bread 2, Dennis's response to Greyghost describing that his archnemesis was finally dead:
  "Hold on a second," I said. I was never a big comic book guy, but I've read enough to know what kind of a deal this was. "Did you actually see him dead? You personally saw his corpse and verified beyond doubt that it was him and he was dead?"
  "Mm? Yes."
  "Okay then."

Western Animation

• Archer had one target shot by Archer and promptly buried under an avalanche. Archer, Ray, and Lana decide it'd be a lot easier to just assume that he's dead.
• DC Animated Universe:
  • Many times had The Joker seemingly faces his demise, only to turn up later unharmed.
    • Batman: Mask of the Phantasm has Joker being taken away by The Phantasm, presumably to be killed. Guess who showed up later in the series, unharmed? Go on, guess!
    • The Batman: The Animated Series episode "Mad Love" (which was based on an earlier DCAU comic story) had Joker plummeting into a smokestack. Later, Harley Quinn is in her cell at Arkham, and she sees a rose from Joker next to her bed. Discussed by Batman when he tells Harley that, even if she succeeded in killing him, the Joker wouldn't believe it, because any proof of it would seem faked. He does this specifically to trick Harley into telling the Joker to come over, and the Joker would stop Harley, during which argument Batman would escape.
    • In The Batman/Superman Movie Joker is left for dead in a falling airplane; with explosions going on all around him, Joker simply laughs as the aircraft plummets into the water. A news reporter says that it is unlikely that Joker survived...yeah right. (Curiously, this was one time even Batman seemed to have doubts whether he had survived. When Harley — whom Batman had managed to rescue — shouted, "Puddin'!" in anguish, he replied, "Right now, he probably is.") Joker is later confirmed to have somehow survived thanks to appearances in Justice League and Flashbacks in Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker.
  • Batman Beyond:
    • After Blight is trapped in a sinking/exploding submarine, Going Critical, Batman drops by Paxton Powers' office. The Coincidental Broadcast mentions that Blight's remains have yet to be found. Paxton smirks and says "So, he melted with the sub." Batman responds "Sure he did," and walks off. Possibly a subversion, since Blight never appeared again on the show. He did return in the comic books based on the series but was frozen at the end of the issue.
    • The situation is repeated in "Inqueling" after Inque's daughter Deanna doublecrosses her mother. In an echo of the previous scene with Paxton Powers, Batman turns up to warn Deanna not to get too comfortable: "She's been dead before." Sure enough, Inque reappears in "The Call, Part 1," proving Terry right. (Deanna's fate is never mentioned. She's last seen reacting fearfully to every shadow, as her shapeshifting mother could be literally anywhere.) The storyline with Deanna is actually resolved in the comics, where an origin of Inque is also revealed. In the comic story, Deanna is in the hospital, with the same disease her mother had that forced her to adopt her powers, and Inque seems willing to forgive, pausing to feed a small droplet of her own substance into Deanna's IV cord before vanishing.
    • In a Flashback scene in The Movie, Harley Quinn seemingly falls to her death after her fight with Batgirl. Gordon does point out that a body was never recovered, but doubts Harley would be starting trouble again after decades. She is alive, and is not amused with the criminal activities of her granddaughters.
• A crime in the Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers episode "To The Rescue" has all the earmarks of a crime committed by Aldrin Klordane, who is supposed to have drowned over a year ago. However...he still manages to be the mastermind behind a new crime, in addition to very much alive. Detective Drake points out the possibility of his survival using the title of this trope.
• In DuckTales (1987), "Hero for Hire", the police only find the Webbed Wonder's costume, not the body, after a supposedly fatal crash. This raises no one's suspicions.
• In the Justice League episode "Hereafter", some of Superman's enemies teamed up and Toyman attacked him with a gun that makes everything disappear. There was no sign of Superman's body or anything that might have been his body but Batman was the only one who saw it as a reason to doubt Superman actually dying. Vandal Savage also figured out Superman was alive (he was sent to the future) but it's not clear if he already suspected it from the beginning.
• In The Legend of Korra, Bolin and Varrick escape from Kuvira's custody when Varrick sets off a mini-nuke on Kuvira's train. They narrowly escape alive, thanks to some quick earthbender tunneling, but Kuvira puts out wanted posters for them anyway, just in case they didn't die.
• Ninjago: In season 8, Garmadon uses his colossus to crush the Destiny's Bounty with Zane, Cole, Jay, Kai, and Wu onboard. They're presumed dead, and Lloyd and Nya mourn them as such, but no one investigates the wreckage. When Lloyd and Nya stumble upon it later, they realize there are traveler's tealeaves, which allow for interdimensional travel. With new hope, they search and realize there are no bodies and only half of the ship, which means everything else has to have gone somewhere. (Of course, the audience already knew they'd been transported to the First Realm.)
• Laserblast from OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes entered a donut shop which was then sucked into a black hole created by a strange weapon. His teammates immediately assumed he was almost certainly dead, and that whether he was alive or not, he was definitely not in their world any more. It turns out that he's still around, having escaped and decided to live in hiding under another name.
• Jack at the end of the Samurai Jack episode "Jack and the Spartans"; he seemingly sacrifices himself to protect the Spartan King from an explosion, and all that's left are the two shields he used. The Spartan King, however, believes that Jack survived, as anyone as badass as Jack wouldn't die like that. Naturally, Jack does, in fact, survive.
• Space Ghost: In the episodes in which they originally appeared, most of the major villains (Brak, Creature King, Metallus, Moltar, Spider Woman, and Zorak) suffered defeats in which they might have died but no body was found. Space Ghost even lampshades this: when Jan or Jace asks him if a villain survived or might return, he admits that they could have survived or that they might see that villain again.
• Toffee from Star vs. the Forces of Evil was last seen getting a face full of exploding wand at the end of Season 1 (said explosion being strong enough to level a castle). All that remained was the business suit that he had hung up earlier and the skeletal remains of his right hand clutching the gem fragment that forms the center of Ludo's wand. Toffee was shown to have impressive regenerative powers (regrowing an arm in seconds after Star vaporized it) and later details about his battles against Star's mother describe him as "the immortal monster", so his death remains up in the air. Turns out yes, he did die, but he sealed his spirit into the missing half of Star's wand. He had to wait for someone to take his discarded arm so that he could free himself from the crystal and possess his new host.
• In the original Star Wars: Clone Wars animation, Asajj Ventress is thrown off a temple on Yavin 4 and is presumably killed. She actually survives in the Expanded Universe. And survives more "death scenes", including one where they did "find the body", because she knows a technique that can fool even a Jedi into thinking she's dead.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars: In "Counterattack", ARC trooper Echo is caught in an explosion, with the only thing seen afterwards being his damaged, smoking helmet. Come Season 7's "The Bad Batch", he's revealed to have survived and been captured by the Separatists, having been kept prisoner in horrific conditions while they extracted information from his brain.
• Steven Universe: The Crystal Gems believed Bismuth had gone MIA during a nasty battle and presumed her dead, when actually she was poofed and bubbled by Rose Quartz. They'd had an argument over Bismuth's new weapon designed to shatter Gems, which Rose refused to approve for reasons relating to her "all life is precious" worldview, and Bismuth believed was necessary for them to win the war they were fighting. Bismuth attacked Rose, and Rose poofed her in response and hid her away inside Lion's mane. She could never tell her teammates what happened, given Bismuth's popularity, and so Bismuth was presumed to be missing and likely dead.
• 1973/74 Super Friends episode "Dr. Pelagian's War". Professor Ansel Hillbrand was a brilliant marine biologist and engineer. Aquaman suspects that he's actually the Big Bad Dr. Pelagian, but an investigation discovers that Dr. Hillbrand died five years earlier in a deep-sea diving accident. Oddly enough, his body was never discovered. Guess who Dr. Pelagian turns out to be?
• In Sym-Bionic Titan, Young Lance notes at his Father's funeral that "He's not even in there" (the coffin). At first, Lance believed he might still be alive. Also, Scary Mary's body was never found the night of the Deadly Prank because she didn't really die.
• In the Season 2 finale of Teen Titans (2003), Slade is thrown into a pit of lava. Later, in the third season, Robin comments that "he was never captured, never found" to justify his Slade paranoia. Cyborg immediately points out the absurdity of it all, "The dude fell in a pit of lava, who lives through something like that?" Ironically, it turns out that he did actually die, but he manages to come back anyways with some help from Raven's demon father.
• Wreck-Gar of Transformers: Animated is seemingly killed when microbots react negatively with his backpack and he falls into a river. Ratchet is unable to recover his remains and only manages to fish out trash. The episode ends with him at the bottom of the river trapped with no way of escape...until the next season where he simply frees himself when he hears of a new opportunity to be a hero.
• This wound up being very useful in X-Men: The Animated Series. Initially, they intended to kill off Morph for real, but, after he "died" off-screen, they just happened to never show his body or say what happened to it (probably for censorship reasons). As a result, when the character became unexpectedly popular, Season 2 was able to easily retcon Morph as having been rescued by Mister Sinister. The X-Men Adventures comic, a spin-off of the show, winds up partially averting this trope. In it, Morph is given an on-screen death, with Beast at his side, and Gyrich even mentions having possession of his corpse. This is completely ignored come Season 2 of the comic.

Real Life

• In real life, this usually leads to legal presumption of death. Occurs when no identifiable remains have been found, but either the circumstances (i.e., a plane crash) make it extremely unlikely that they have survived, or they have been missing for a very long time (typically at least seven years) and there is no evidence that they could still be alive. Of course, there have been very rare cases where people have been found to be alive after being legally declared dead, such as a particularly infamous one that occurred in the 17th century.
• The Other Wiki has an article explaining how people can be charged and convicted with murder without the body of the victim to prove the murder even happened, and also a list of those cases.
• Welsh rebel and self-styled Prince of Wales Owain Glyndŵr (Owen Glendower in Shakespeare's Henry IV pt. I) led an initially successful rebellion against the English in the 1400s. He was last sighted in 1412 and his exact fate is unknown: despite many offers of rewards for his capture, and even royal pardons, he was neither killed nor betrayed. Most likely he died some time around 1415, however according to some legends he lived out a long retirement in disguise, and other more fanciful tales suggest he is hiding in a cave, possibly the same cave as King Arthur, awaiting the right time to return and defeat the English...
• Sticking with Welshmen, the infamous pirate Bartholomew "Black Bart" Roberts had specific instructions for his crew if he were ever to die. On February 10, 1722, he was shot dead during a battle with a ship from the Royal Navy. His crew wrapped his body in the main sail of his ship, the Royal Fortune, weighed it down with treasure, and tossed it overboard. His remains were never found.
• Harold Holt, a former Prime Minister of Australia, has the dubious distinction of having gone missing after going for a swim at a now infamously hazardous beach. A swimming pool in Melbourne is named in his honor.
• The first victim of the Chernobyl disaster, Valery Khodemchuk, was in one of the main pump circulation rooms of the reactor 4 building when said reactor exploded, which presumably killed him instantly. His body is assumed to be under the debris of the circulation pumps. A memorial dedicated to him was built just outside of the reactor 4's now defunct control room.
• Pretty much the basis for anyone who thinks Osama bin Laden was not killed by a team of US Navy SEALs, as President Obama announced he was. Although it has been officially confirmed, some still have doubt due to the fact that the Obama Administration never released any pictures of Osama's body before it was given a burial at sea. Not that a post-mortem photograph would have helped much; he took a bullet in the head.
• Alejandro Bello was a lieutenant in the Chilean army who in 1914 took a qualifying flight to become a military pilot. Neither him or his aircraft were ever heard from again.

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