Obfuscating Postmortem Wounds

"He kills with a single blow, using these other wounds to camouflage the skill with which the initial stroke was delivered... The very same method and the very same weapon that the killer employed... ten years ago."

— Dr. Clark Murray, Castle, "Sucker Punch"

A Mystery Trope in which after the victim is dead, the killer inflicts a subsequent wound or wounds upon the body in order to mask (or at least confuse) the cause of death. This could be done because the real cause of death would immediately implicate the killer; to frame someone else for the murder; or simply to confuse the issue and buy time.

May lead to a character learning their loved one Did Not Die That Way. If an animal is employed to provide the postmortem injuries, that's This Bear Was Framed.

See Revealing Cover-Up for when the attempt to obscure the cause of death is what ends up exposing the killer.

Related to Make It Look Like an Accident.

Compare The Coroner Doth Protest Too Much and Never Suicide for other tropes about a cause of death being reported incorrectly, often under malicious circumstances.

Contrast a Double Tap, a second wound inflicted to make sure that the target is dead.

As a Mystery Trope and a Death Trope, these examples contain unmarked spoilers. You Have Been Warned.

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Examples:

Comic Books

• In Detective Comics #828, a friend of Bruce Wayne's seemingly falls off a boat and is savaged by sharks. After recovering and examining the body, Batman learns that the actual cause of death was a strike from a weapon lined with shark teeth (part of a costume the killer was wearing for a masquerade ball being held on the boat), with the killer having expected the sharks to do enough damage to cover up the odd angle of the initial wound.
• In Identity Crisis (2004), Sue Dibney's body is set on fire after her death in order to cover up the actual cause of death (an aneurysm caused by someone walking on her brain.)
• Jon Sable, Freelance: In #44-45, Jon is present on board a yacht when a movie star seemingly commits suicide inside his locked cabin. Of course, it is Never Suicide, and Jon turns detective to work out what really happened. The victim had been given poisoned Dramamine by his murderer which he took inside his cabin and died. A second person, looking to protect the killer, had used a bang stick to fire a bullet into the victim's head through the porthole, hoping the police would not check for poison when there was an obvious gunshot wound to the head.

Fan Works

• Danganronpa Class Swap: When the group finds Hiyoko's body, they assume that the stab wound she had is what killed her. However, during the trial, Mikan reveals that the stab was delivered after Hiyoko was dead. What actually happened was that Sonia accidently poisoned her and Kazuichi (the actual target) stabbed her in order to hide the actual method of death, along with attacking Mikan so that she couldn't reveal the truth.
• Danganronpa: Paradise Lost:
  • Miyuki's body is found having been shot in the head with a flare gun to make it look like she killed herself, hiding that she had been killed via a poisoned drink.
  • Kenji's body is discovered decapitated with a table saw. It eventually comes to light that he had been strangled with piano wire beforehand.
• In This Means War by Jeconais, Harry fights and kills Fenrir Greyback while in his wolf form. Since the form is supposed to be a secret, Percy, when investigating the corpse, casts a few Cutting Charms over the bite marks. Kingsley, observing it, agrees there is no evidence to support rumours as preposterous as Harry already being an Animagus at his age.

Film — Live-Action

• This is how Demolition Man starts. Spartan comes to Phoenix's base looking for hostages from a bus the criminal captured. During the confrontation, Simon blows up the base, John gets him out, and then dozens of bodies are found around. Despite Spartan's reassurances his thermal scanner showed nothing, it is assumed that they died in the explosion due to his negligence, and the cop is sentenced to the cryoprison along with the criminal. Later, during a confrontation, Phoenix taunts Spartan with the fact that by the time the building exploded, the hostages were dead and cold already.
• In Green for Danger, Esther Sanson catches Sister Bates with Sanson's paint-stained surgical gown which will prove she murdered Higgins and murders Bates. Realising that someone else is approaching and that she does not have to hide or destroy the gown, Sanson cuts out the incriminating stain and then dresses Bates in the gown and knife carefully stabs the knife through the hole and into Bates' body to disguise the missing piece of fabric.
• In Knives Out, this is preemptively done by a dying Harlan, who in an effort to hide the fact his nurse accidentally overdosed him, slit his throat to protect her and prevent anyone from realizing the nurse's fatal error.
• In Pathology, Ted impresses Gallo by working out Gallo's latest victim had been poisoned with nitric acid, then stabbed 17 times while still alive before having a bullet put in his head to mask the cause of death.
• Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows: Moriarity's plot to launch a War for Fun and Profit involves having a sniper kill a prominent German arms mogul at a Franco-German peace conference, then having Bomb-Throwing Anarchists blow up the conference moments later. This is to cover up the targeted killing since nobody (except Sherlock Holmes, of course) would look for a bullet hole in a bombing.
• In A Study in Scarlet, the killer shoots Deering twice, with the second shot intended to mask the path of the first and make the death look like a suicide.

Literature

• Ben Snow:
  • In "The Only Tree in Tasco", the Victim of the Week is found with multiple stab wounds in his chest, making it look like he has been the victim of a frenzied attack. Ben works out the victim had actually been shot and the killer hacked up the corpse's chest in order to retrieve the bullet because the unusual calibre would have immediately identified them as the killer.
  • In "Banner of Blood", the murderers smash in a man's head with an axe handle, and then use a cattle stampede to Make It Look Like an Accident.
• Brisingr: After Eragon and Arya kill a squad of Empire soldiers, Arya and Eragon stab the corpses with a spear and a sword in order to make it look like they were killed by ordinary warriors, knowing the Empire is still searching for them. They make an exception with the soldier Eragon punched hard in the chest because they can't disguise an injury like that, so Arya tells Eragon that they'll just have to hope that whoever finds the body will assume a horse stomped on him.
• In Dodger, Dodger shoots the young woman's corpse that he obtained so that he could fake Simplicity's death. He feels bad about it and apologises to the corpse.
• Played with in the Lord Darcy novel A Study In Sorcery, in which a body is found in an Aztec pyramid with its heart cut out. Investigators posit that this was done after the victim's murder, so as to cast blame on a hypothetical Aztec cult. It turns out the killer was European, and cut out the heart to retrieve a bullet that would have incriminated him specifically.
• The Long Goodbye: When Sylvia Lennox is murdered, it's widely reported that she was bludgeoned to death with a small bronze statue, brutally enough to leave her face nearly unrecognizable. Only those directly working on the investigation know that she was actually shot in the head (with her own automatic handgun) and then bludgeoned postmortem to conceal the bullet wound.
• The victim of The Murder on the Links was stabbed, then beaten about the head with a pipe, in order to obscure the fact that he was not the supposed victim, Paul Renauld, but a random tramp. It turns out the tramp died of an epileptic seizure, so he wasn't killed by the knife wound to the heart, either.
• In G.K. Chesterton's short story "The Secret Garden", a beheaded body is further desecrated by several strange cuts about the severed neck. As Father Brown explains in the end, "It was done to make you take for granted that the head belonged to the body."
• A Series of Unfortunate Events: In The Reptile Room, Count Olaf kills Uncle Monty by injecting him with venom and then adds a second puncture wound next to the injection site to make it look like a snakebite.
• In Shady Hollow by Juneau Black, the killer stabs the first victim postmortem in an attempt to hide the fact that he died from a poisoned drink. It doesn't work, the medical examiner finds the poison.
• The canon Sherlock Holmes stories have an unintentional example in "The Adventure of the Crooked Man" where a person is found dead with a head wound and a murder is suspected. In reality, he died of a stroke and hit his head while falling.
• The Sherlock Holmes Stories of Edward D. Hoch: In "The Adventure of Vittoria the Circus Belle", the killer stabs the eponymous Vittoria to death and then places the body in the tiger's cage to be mauled by the big cat. However, the body is not as badly damaged as the killer had hoped and, after a brief examination of the corpse, Dr. Watson is able to determine that the tiger could not have inflicted the fatal wound.
• Solar Pons: In "The Adventure of the Perplexed Photographer", the killer plunges a javelin into the chest of his victim to make it appear he had been Impaled with Extreme Prejudice. The killer did this to erase the track of the actual murder weapon—a wavy-bladed kris dagger—and to frame the one suspect strong enough to have used the javelin as a murder weapon.
• Star Trek:
  • In the Star Trek: The Next Generation novel "The Devil's Heart" the elderly Vulcan archaeologist T'Sara finds a powerful stone called the Devil's Heart on an obscure planet. When a member of her team contacts a nearby Starbase and lets slip that the stone had been found, a group of Orions attacked and murdered the Vulcans. They moved the bodies around to make it look like the whole team killed each other and blamed it on T'Sara having Bendii Syndrome. After the Enterprise arrives Dr. Crusher quickly disproves that T'Sara had any sort of neurological disorder, including Bendii, and also finds clear signs that the other team members were moved after death.
• In Taken at the Flood, Rowley accidentally killed Charles Trenton when he punched Charles, followed by Charles suffering Death by Falling Over. Rowley, rapidly improvising, then bashes the newly dead Charles's head in with a poker in an effort to frame David.

Live-Action TV

• Ancient Detective: Mr. Prescriptor is stabbed several times after his death. The initial assumption is that the killer just really hated him, but in fact, part of the killer's trick to convince Mr. Yin that he was the killer. Mr. Yin stabbed the alleged the supposed Mr. Prescriptor several times, so the killer had to stab the real corpse to match.
• Attila: Aetius presents a Hun body to Attila's uncle covered in torture wounds in order to get him to ally with Rome against another tribe that he Aetius alleges tortured the man to death. Attila points out that the wounds look too fresh to have been the cause of death and were probably inflicted by Aetius himself later.
• Better Call Saul: In "Breathe", Gus kills Arturo by suffocating him to death with a plastic bag over his head. At the same time, he forces Nacho to be his double agent against the Salamancas. To hide this fact, the following episode has Tyrus and Victor drive Nacho and Arturo's corpse out into the desert, shoot Nacho twice non-fatally, and Arturo's body and the car are riddled with bullets to make it seem like a random drive-by shooting by an unaffiliated rival gang.
• Used in an episode of the 1994 revival of Burke's Law, entitled "Who Killed the Starlet?" A woman is in the bath while listening to some music, when a killer sneaks in and drops her boombox into the bathtub, killing her. It turns out that the killer and lady are merely actors on a movie set, and they're filming a murder scene. Then it turns out the boombox had been plugged into a live outlet by an unknown party, and the actress in the bathtub really is dead. The special effects man is the first suspect, and protests that the voltage was kept too low to hurt anyone, as a matter of safety, which is standard procedure for filming this sort of thing in real life. It turns out that the water was poisoned with nicotine. The special effects man did so believing that the non-lethal voltage would clear him of suspicion.
• Cadfael: Subverted in "A Morbid Taste for Bones". The victim is stabbed, and then an arrow with unusual blue feathering is pushed into the body afterwards. The feathering is unique to Godwin, an English servant. Initially it appears that it was done by the murderer to deflect blame from themselves onto Godwin, but it really was done by a completely different person who came upon the body and took the opportunity to frame Godwin to eliminate him as a romantic rival.
• Castle: Rathbone kills with a single, precise strike, then stabs the victim multiple times to hide the precision of his kill, making it seem like the work of a random mugger or serial killer, not a pro for hire. Just like he did with Beckett's mother.
• On Crossing Jordan, Nigel and Macy are looking into the death of a pimp when one of his rivals comes in to pay his respects. He finishes a brief prayer by firing several shots into the corpse. It later comes out that the rival killed the pimp by shooting him and he ironically provided incriminating evidence in his attempt to obscure the cause of death.
• CSI: NY:
  • In "Hush", a shipyard worker gets in a knock-down drag-out fight with his supervisor and accidentally stabs him to death. To cover it up, he recruits a co-worker to help him place the body on top of a shipping container so that it gets smushed when another container is lowered onto it. When the top container is relocated later, half of the body goes with it.
  • In "Zoo York", a killer stabs a man to death with a meat hook, then tosses him into the tiger enclosure at the New York Zoo in hopes that he'll be consumed and that everyone will think he accidentally fell in.
  • The perp in "Air Apparent" stabs a female victim forcefully three times, killing her. Then he adds seven more stab wounds to make it look like a crime of passion, assuming that her junkie ex-con boyfriend will be blamed.
• Death in Paradise used this trope on several occasions:
  • In the episode "Missing A Body?", the killer used the fact that the victim had already sustained a gunshot injury from a previous attempt on his life (in self-defence) to make it seem like he had been killed during that first attempt. He even used the same gun (which the victim brought along with him) to inflict the fatal wound.
  • This trope was the driving force behind the murder committed in the episode "She Was Murdered Twice". During the episode, the killer suffocates the victim to protect his secret and immediately panics afterwards, as he'll surely be the prime suspect for the murder because of said secret. He then comes up with the idea to "kill" the victim a second time by shooting her and pleading guilty to attempted murder, which carries a lower sentence, while getting off scot-free for the actual murder. This would have worked too, if not for DI Goodman exposing the killer's true motive by discovering what the victim had found out about the killer.
  • The episode "Unlike Father, Unlike Son" had a variation on this trope. At the start of the episode, the victim had staged his own murder, with the help of an accomplice, by using a pack of fake blood to emulate a gunshot wound. The accomplice, however, wanted the victim dead and used the fake gunshot wound as a cover for the real gunshot wound, allowing him to shift the time of death by mere minutes, which was enough to give him an alibi.
• The Doctor Blake Mysteries: In "My Brother's Keeper", the killer clubs the Victim of the Week over the head with a shovel, dumps his body in a cattle pen, and then stampedes the cattle so they trample the body to conceal his wounds.
• Doctor Who: In "Deep Breath", the clockwork androids incinerate the bodies of their victims to hide the fact that they've been stealing organs and tissue from them, as no one in the Victorian setting would think to closely examine a burned body for missing parts.
• In From: Sara murders a man by stabbing him through the throat with a screwdriver because voices in her head told her to. She then brutally eviscerates his body further to make it look like the monsters haunting the setting did it.
• Harrow: In "Aurum Potestas Est" ("Gold is Power"), one Victim of the Week dies during an Erotic Asphyxiation session gone wrong. Someone looking to cover things up places the body on the railroad tracks where it is run over by a train; hoping that the massive damage will hide the real cause of death.
• Jonathan Creek:
  • In "Mother Redcap," the victim was stabbed through the heart to disguise the fact that he died by electrocution.
  • In "The Coonskin Cap", the Victim of the Week is found asphyxiated with what seems to be a ligature mark around her neck, it appears she has fallen victim to a Serial Killer who strangles their victims, despite her being killed inside a locked room. However, she had actually been killed by an airbag hidden in her protective vest that inflated and compressed her chest to the point where she could not breathe. The red mark on her neck came from having a necklace ripped off.
• Monk: The driver's gunshot wounds in "Mr. Monk Goes Home Again". Gilstrap shot him repeatedly when the man collapsed from being poisoned, in hopes that would be enough to make an autopsy seem redundant.
• NCIS has used this a couple of times:
  • In "UnSEALed", another coroner reported that two murder victims were killed by having their throats slashed. Ducky discovers that the throat wounds were postmortem, clearly inflicted to conceal the fact that both victims were actually killed by having their necks broken.
  • In "Outlaws and In-Laws", two men were apparently killed by Gibbs's old friend Mike Franks, using his signature .45-caliber pistol. But when Ducky examines them he finds two bullets in each wound, a .45 and a .22. Working together, he and Abby figure out that the men were actually killed by .22-cal rifle bullets fired from some distance away, then Franks stood over the dead bodies and fired a .45 slug into each wound to make it look like he shot them, and conceal the fact that the killer was someone else.
• Vera: In "Muddy Waters", the killer started to strangle the second Victim of the Week then, when that doesn't work, shoots him through the throat: to both mask the marks of strangulation and make it look like a suicide.
• Whodunnit? (UK): In "A Safe Way to Die", a scarf is wrapped around the neck of the Victim of the Week to make it look like she was strangled. However, she was actually poisoned with strychnine.
• In season 5 of The Wire, Detective McNulty starts leaving strangulation marks on fresh bodies of homeless men who have died of overdoses to make it look like there is a serial killer in Baltimore, as a way to get more funding to the police department, who are operating in a serious budget crunch, as well as using the supposed investigation into the killer to secretly surveil and investigate Marlo Stanfield.

Tabletop Games

• GURPS: At zero HP, a character collapses. If they take another max HP's worth of damage, they need to start checking for death. If a character takes five times their HP after collapsing, they're dead without a save. Twice that, and they're Deader than Dead, and recognizing the corpse is unlikely.
• Mage: The Awakening: Exaggerated — Death magic can alter a corpse to display a different cause of death under any non-magical scrutiny, even to the extent of making an incinerated burn victim look like they'd only had a heart attack. Given the Masquerade and the Crapsack World, the spell is often used to cover up monster victims and paranormal killings.

Video Games

• Disco Elysium: The Hanged Man has a lot of post-mortem and possibly pre-mortem wounds, inflicted by the ones who hanged him and by local wildlife/street urchins. Trying to put any of these down as the victim's cause of death (as opposed to the hanging) during the field autopsy will do nothing except make Kim snark at you. More damning is the bullet you can potentially dig out of his head with a series of very difficult skill checks, which Kim will accept as cause of death and reveals the hanging was itself done post-mortem and thus a case of this trope in order to protect the shooter — a gunshot can be traced to a single murderer, but a lynching is a collective action and everyone involved would have to be collectively punished. In a further twist, it's revealed even later that none of those present for the lynching fired the bullet, several of them didn't even know he had been shot, and they did it to take the heat off the only witness to The Hanged Man's death. The real killer sniped him from far away and has had nothing to do with the cover-up.
• In chapter 4 of Master Detective Archives: Rain Code, Yakou Furio is found dying with a knife in the chest, after being attacked by the same hitman who already went after the chapter's victim. Except the former victim, Dr. Huesca, was killed by Furio himself. Due to the fact that to reach the doctor's lab, he had to pass through a room filled with toxic gas that kills everyone who came in contact with it after 30 minutes, he asked beforehand the aforementioned hitman — who helped him stage everything — to stab him afterwards so that people would believe that's the reason of his death.
• During the Bounty Hunter's quest line in Star Wars: The Old Republic, one of your companions is Gault Rennow, who also happens to be your target. As such, recruiting him involves handing over a clone corpse of his... with you adding a few (or a lot) bullet holes to make it look authentic.

Visual Novels

• Ace Attorney:
  • Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: The victim of Case 5 was stabbed in the chest, and the defendant was caught stabbing the victim with a knife from the trunk of the car where the body was found. The culprit had forced the defendant to stab the corpse after it was transported to the crime scene to frame her for the murder.
  • Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth: In the second game:
    • The victim of Case 2 is killed by a stab wound in the neck, and the murder weapon appears to be a chisel belonging to a prisoner. The culprit actually stabbed the victim with the chisel after killing him with a knife.
    • The victim of Case 4 suffered a head wound and a stab to the chest, with one of them being inflicted after death. The culprit blackmailed the coroner into listing the fatal wound as the postmortem wound and vice versa.
• Danganronpa:
  • Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc: In the sixth and final case, which is a direct continuation of the previous one, the Monokuma File notes that the victim's most obvious wound was the knife to their heart, but their body was riddled with old wounds as well. The surviving students intially assume these old wounds are irrelevant, but in fact the knife wound was inflicted days after the victim's death; the old wounds are what really killed the victim.
  • Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair: Played with in Nagito Komaeda's scheme to expose the "traitor" among the students in Chapter 5, which involves getting the students to unwittingly cause his death. Nagito inflicts numerous wounds on himself while alive, as Red Herrings indicating his cause of death once he's killed by one of the students throwing a poison gas grenade Nagito prepared himself; this culminates in a seemingly mortal spear impalement the moment he inhales the gas and lets go off the rope holding the spear. Whether it was the gas or the spear that killed off Nagito can't be exactly figured out, as Hajime Hinata notes in the chapter's Closing Argument at the class trial.

Western Animation

• In the Justice League episode "Starcrossed", a Gordanian ship is destroyed by Thanagarians while invading Earth. Batman believes the Contrived Coincidence to be too much, so he examines the corpses aboard the destroyed ship and, sure enough, there is evidence of Corpse Temperature Tampering.

Real Life

• In 1934, 8-year-old Helen Priestly was found strangled to death after going out to buy a loaf of bread from the local shop, and there were wounds on her genitals that made it appear as if she had been sexually assaulted. The culprit was initially thought to be a man, but no semen was found on the body, suggesting they were instead a woman who had inflicted the wounds to make it look like a rape and murder. The killer was Helen's adult neighbor Jeannie Donald, who hated the girl for making fun of her and calling her "Coconut" in reference to her frizzy hair.
• X-ray evidence showing splinters of bone inside Tutankhamun's skull once led historians to believe that the pharaoh was murdered by his vizier, Ay, as part of a palace coup. Scans of the mummy using modern diagnostic imaging devices proved that the skull was splintered from the inside after death, probably as part of the mummification process, and that Tutankhamun likely died from a massive infection arising from a fractured leg (this does not disprove that Ay killed him, but it makes it less likely—broken bones were not necessarily fatal even then). This mistake is a plot point in The Egyptian, the Papyrus comic "Tutankhamun, the Assassinated Pharaoh", and Mummies Alive!

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