Despite being a Short-Runner, Ellery Queen has a great many sympathetic sufferers.
- Mrs. McKell in the pilot movie. Her husband was cheating on her. She, her husband and their son all become suspects in the murder of his mistress at various times, And then it turns out their son is guilty and gets arrested.
- Cathy Kendrick in "The Adventure of the Lovers Leap" due to caring deeply for a father who keeps getting himself in trouble, apparently being subjected to some whims of her stepmother and being guilty of an Accidental Murder.
- All three of the primary subjects of the titular Compromising Memoirs of Colonel Nivin in the seventh episode, assuming they were being honest about him twisting their stories out of context (and the narrative implies that they were). Sonja Dubrenskov was forced to be a Sex Slave to a Nazi Officer threatening her family, Marcel Fourchet was brutally tortured by the Gestapo to give up his fellow Freedom fighters and says he would have preferred death to what they did to him, and Colin Esterbrook was a British Spy forced to live in America due to being seen as a collaborator after the only man who knew he was a spy died in the war. The fact that all of them are being threatened with exposure for those acts in ways which make them sound like genuine traitors (and in Sonja's case this would destroy her husbands diplomatic career at best and perhaps even see them executed by the communist government) just so an unsympathetic Nivin can sell a few books makes them pitiable characters, as well as very good suspects.
- Sam Packer's widow Jennifer in "The Adventure of Veronica's Veils" between being accused of his murder and having to struggle with his enormous debts in the meantime. It's bad enough that she tries to kill herself.
- Harry the security guard in "The Adventure of the Pharaoh's Curse", who lost his son in the war, and can't bring himself to kill the war profiteer responsible only to drive that man to a fatal heart attack anyway, leaving him scrambling to cover it up.
- Flora Schumann from "The Adventure of the Black Falcon" lost her husband in the First World War, and gave up all of her money and possessions to an American to watch over their children during the war and keep them safe, only for that man to callously abandon the babies, causing an now impoverished Flora to spend decades trying to find them. And even when she's finally reunited with her son, it turns out her daughter had been Dead All Along.
- In "The Adventure of the Sunday Punch" Melinda Sanford was deeply in love with a Domestic Abuser, sees him murdered, and then finds out her father was the killer, trying to protect her from him. Joe Simpson from the same episode had his boxing carer destroyed by being made to look bad in a match with someone who outmatched him and gets repeatedly accused of murder.
- Mrs. Franklin in "The Adventure of the Eccentric Engineer" who is clearly devastated by her husband's death, as well as by the revelation that he was Obfuscating Insanity and didn't trust her with this information.
- Lillian McGraw in "The Adventure of the Two-Faced Woman" can feel this way with the gradual reveals about her past(being forced away from the lower-class boy she loved by her parents, ending up married to a sleazy and possibly abusive artist and then spending years thinking she'd killed him when it was really someone else) and for ultimately being one of the least offensive murder victims of the show. Her grieving husband can also count, especially after finding out the murderer was his own cousin
