Never Suicide

"Reporter: Is it a suicide? Richard Castle and Kate Beckett, in unison: It's not a suicide."

- Castle, "Deep In Death," after roughly twelve seconds of investigation.

The police are investigating Alice's death. It appears to be a suicide--there might even be a Goodbye, Cruel World--but no matter the evidence, resident Cowboy Cop / Defective Detective Bob isn't so sure. Maybe Bob is a personal friend of Alice's and can't believe she would kill herself, or maybe the evidence just doesn't add up. In any case, despite Da Chief's warnings to let it go, Bob decides to investigate further.

Sure enough, Bob is right. In any Crime and Punishment Series, people never seem to kill themselves; with a few exceptions, every apparent suicide is staged to cover up a murder. This happens because simply confirming that it's a suicide is not very exciting, and doesn't take an entire 40-minute episode. Presumably the police come across a few real suicides between episodes, but if they investigate one onscreen, start looking for the killer.

As the examples below show, it's sometimes subverted by having the suicide be a real suicide, but for the most part this trope is used straight because it's the lead-in for any number of cleverly executed murders. Another reason for this trope's existence is because most societies frown on people committing suicide, for any reason (even justified reasons).

A common inversion is to have a death which is actually an elaborate suicide staged to look like murder in order to either allow loved ones to collect life insurance (something of a Discredited Trope nowadays, as most life insurance companies will pay out for suicides, though sometimes not as much as with a murder, or after a 1-2 year cooling off period, so to speak) or to frame the person(s) they feel are responsible for the circumstances that drove them to suicide.

In Real Life, suicide is far more common than murder; in the United States suicide is about 2-3 times more prevalent than homicide, and in many countries the difference is much greater. Sadly, in Real Life, a lot of suicide is treated as a murder investigation, because it's easier to comprehend a loved one fell victim to a homicide than that person killing him/herself off without his/her vicinity noticing anything.

Compare The Coroner Doth Protest Too Much - that's when the scary authority figures insist that it's not murder despite significant evidence otherwise.

Sister Trope of Always Murder.

Anime & Manga

 * Death Note's L is suspicious of 's death.
 * One of the first episodes of Detective Conan had this in reverse. A man killed himself in a way that would look like murder in order to frame an enemy of his. Likely a Shout-Out to the Sherlock Holmes example below.
 * Later episodes/chapters have plenty of fake suicide and accidents, though.
 * One episode subverted this by having a victim's death actually be suicide, to the surprise of everyone who thought the boyfriend had killed her (Why the woman had the means to blow her car up with her and was able to set it up and use it on a moment's notice was never explored).
 * in Monster.
 * in Twentieth Century Boys, as well as the "banishment" of several Friend group chairmen.
 * In Tantei Gakuen Q, there are occasionally suicides and accidents where more than one death is being investigated - this suicide/accident serves to inspire the murders.
 * On multiple occasions they have dealt with murders that were engineered to look like accidents or suicide.
 * in Sakura Gari.
 * Double subverted in the Ace Attorney manga. Eddie Johnson meets with his boss Robin Wolfe, who wants to talk with him about his being disrespectful to others at work, and commits suicide on the way home. The police suspect that Robin killed Eddie, because he was the last person Eddie saw while alive, and Robin decides to hire Phoenix to represent him, but doesn't tell the whole truth about Eddie. However, after talking to the Wolfe family and Eddie's brother Brock, realizes that Robin may not have actually killed Eddie, but he essentially deliberately drove him to suicide, which is virtually the same thing, and which leads him to decide not to represent him.

Comic Books

 * Subverted in Daredevil; Matt refuses to believe that his ex-girlfriend Heather Glenn committed suicide, discovers that there was a break-in at her place that night, tracks down the thieves...and finds that she was already dead when they got there.

Film

 * In Batman Forever, the Riddler fakes the death of his boss by modifying security tapes and leaving a fake suicide note with accurate handwriting. The police are quite fooled.
 * A large plot point in the movie I Robot.
 * Subverted in the film version of Constantine. Everyone believes Isabel killed herself except for her sister Angela, which leads her to Constantine and a supernatural plot. However, the investigation turns up that really did Isabel kill herself, specifically to avoid getting possessed by the Son of Satan; tragically, this has resulted in her being damned to hell, as Constantine discovers when he visits it halfway through the film.
 * Subverted in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. There is good reason to suppose that the suicide makes no sense, suggesting it was murder and causing further investigation. Turns out that though everyone else was killed like flies, and though this death was connected, the suicide really was a suicide (but we do find out what triggered it).
 * Inverted in Narc. Henry Oak is investigating his friend's murder
 * Subverted in The Shadow of the Thin Man, when the suspicious death of a jockey leads to more killings and the uncovering of a criminal gambling racket; Nick Charles eventually discovers.
 * Played Straight in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. Everyone thinks that Captain Gregg committed suicide by closing all the the windows and doors and turning on the gas. He takes extreme offense to this and explains that he closed the windows and doors that night because it was raining and accidentally kicked the switch to the gas on when he fell asleep in a chair.
 * Jo Nesbø's novel Nemesis.

Literature

 * Agatha Christie:
 * Murder in the Mews
 * The Market Basing Mystery: an older, Gender Flipped version of Murder in the Mews.
 * Inverted/Subverted in the Hercule Poirot mystery Wasp's Nest; events surrounding a young man and a nest of wasps on his property lead Poirot to believe that someone was planning to murder the young man, presumably with an insecticide used to kill wasps.
 * The Raven at the Foregate, a Brother Cadfael mystery by Ellis Peters:
 * Sir Henry Merrivale: In She Died a Lady, Dr. Luke spent the novel trying to prove the two deaths were not suicide.
 * Ellery Queen: The Greek Coffin Mystery: The second solution involves a "suicide" not meant to convince the reader.
 * Subverted in the Sherlock Holmes story "The Problem of Thor Bridge": The servant of the house is accused of murdering the mistress, the evidence initially points to the murder being likely, until Holmes realizes the gun he found wasn't the murder weapon, and it was an elaborate suicide made to frame the servant.
 * Inverted in Another Note: The Los Angeles BB Murder Cases, in which L and Naomi Misora investigate a series of murders, except for the last, which is a
 * In Altered Carbon, . Not only is the victim exceedingly powerful, wealthy and nigh-immortal (and hence unlikely to just off himself, especially as he'd be brought back to life from a backup soon enough), but there's a fair list of people keen to have him killed.
 * Extra points for the fact that the investigator is hired by the victim whose backed-up memories were restored to a clone body shortly after his death, who is determined to prove that his death was a murder.
 * And just for kicks
 * Dorothy L. Sayers liked subverting this trope, playing it straight for minor characters, but having one book where the main murder really was suicide and another where an accident that looked like murder really was an accident after all.
 * James Patterson's "Four Blind Mice" has this. Almost all the police think that a military man killed his wife and then himself, but the main characters are lucky to find the one guy who knows exactly that it was a staged murder done by three men. Well, isn't that convenient.
 * Subverted in the Honor Harrington series. The leaders of Manticore eventually rule a character's death a legitimate suicide, while at the same time fully acknowledging that his death would have been very convenient for someone else who'd had to make a quick getaway.
 * In the Mercedes Lackey book Four and Twenty Blackbirds, everyone except Tal Rufen is willing to accept the murder-suicides as an enormous series of unrelated incidents where a man kills a musician and then commits suicide. He figures out that they're actually a chain of double murders committed by a mage controlling the official killer from a distance.
 * Lillian Jackson Braun's Cat Who series. In "The Cat Who Played Post Office", the victim even leaves a note saying that if she apparently commits suicide, it was most likely murder at the hands of the most obvious suspect in the murder Qwill was originally investigating. However,
 * Averted in Michael Connelly detective novel The Drop. A mysterious death is written off as a suicide, but Harry Bosch doesn't buy it, and discovers there's a lot more to the case--but in the end it turns out that it actually was a suicide after all.

Live Action TV

 * Subverted in an early episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. Olivia and Elliot are investigating the death of a young woman who fell from her apartment window onto a parked car. Suicide is ruled out about thirty seconds after the opening credits, and with good cause: there is evidence of someone else in the room, and the victim appeared to have been thrown through the windowpane all the way into the street.
 * Monk does it all the time.
 * Most notably, Stottlemeyer recalls a case where all the evidence pointed towards the victim committing suicide by overdosing on pills. However, Monk takes one look at the crime scene and destroys the suicide theory by asking, "Where's the water?" Turns out, the pills were too big to swallow unassisted and there was no evidence of any liquids in the room.
 * Psych, too. There was even an episode about a Serial Killer who went after people who had called a suicide hotline and made their deaths look like suicides.
 * Also, in a later episode of Psych,
 * Even Dexter had one. In a bit of a twist, the deaths actually were suicide, but the victims' therapist had purposely driven them to it.
 * Bones does it often too, normally either with Booth not believing it was suicide or Brennan finding some evidence that suggests murder even if suicide would have made sense.
 * Numb3rs did a subversion. Charlie, upset over the death of a student, gets Don to look into it to see if it was really suicide.
 * Subverted / inverted in Homicide: Life on the Street: when Crosetti dies, it's almost immediately apparent to everyone that it's a suicide (even if they'd rather not face up to it), but Lewis has a major case of denial and refuses to believe that Crosetti would kill himself, and under the cover of 'investigating' what 'really' happened attempts to undermine the investigation by tampering with witnesses. Eventually the call from the coroner comes in to confirm that it was suicide - and Lewis breaks down.
 * Double subverted later on when Beau Felton is found with his head blown off. Everyone including Lewis is sure it's suicide this time, since Felton was a troubled alcoholic whose wife had split with the kids. Then the medical examiner reconstructs the skull fragments and finds a bullet hole from a handgun in the back of his head. The killer used the shotgun to both stage it to look like suicide and obscure the actual cause of death.
 * Subverted in CSI: an investor shoots himself at a party. It originally looks like a staged suicide since he's still holding the gun, which usually doesn't happen, as the muscles relax after death, but this guy had a rare condition that made him an exception.
 * Another variation in CSI: The villain of an arc staged identical suicides of men who were born on the same date that his father was murdered in the same manner (this was also his father's birthday). Up to and including a faked suicide note (well, tape). He did all this to prove his father's murder wasn't a suicide.
 * Inverted in another episode of CSI: a man is found in some woods with all the evidence initially pointing towards murder... only it turns out to be an extremely elaborate suicide designed to look like a murder so his wife would receive his life insurance money.
 * And subverted YET AGAIN in another CSI episode, when one man throws himself in front of a car. The entire episode runs like an ordinary investigation, the suicide letter being the final twist, only seconds before the episode ends.
 * One more CSI inversion, when a Sherlock Holmes impersonator is found shot to death. Like the above example, the episode runs as a murder investigation, until the team discovers the gun tied to an elastic in the chimney, revealing that when the victim shot himself and let go of the gun, the elastic snapped it back into the chimney.
 * Which references "The Problem of Thor Bridge".
 * There's yet another subversion in CSI: Vegas: episode "The Happy Place" opens with a woman in a bikini jumping from her apartment window onto a bus and dying. The subsequent investigation throws The Erotic Mind Control Story Archive a bone by revealing that a hypnotist was behind it all. She got her clients to rob banks and forget about it via post-hypnotic suggestion; the woman's suicide was the result of the trigger phrase "It's time for your honeymoon." When the woman heard this, she began thinking she was in Hawaii and thought she was jumping from her hotel balcony into a swimming pool.
 * Another inversion in an episode where a man is found with stab wounds in his chest and back. Everything looks like murder until it's revealed that the man was deep in debt and had a life insurance policy that would pay out to his brother. He actually jammed the knife in-between a door and a frame and ran into it several times, making sure the knife fell.
 * In another odd inversion, an old lady drives her car through the window of a bar. The team either assume she died from something and the car went out of control or she was trying to kill someone inside; turns out she committed suicide so her grandson could use her life insurance policy to go to college (they were too poor to avoid it otherwise). Unfortunately, the company wouldn't pay out for suicides, so her death was meaningless.
 * A wonderful example from the Jonathan Creek episode "The Tailor's Dummy": The titular character and several other witnesses see the Victim of the Week jump from his bedroom window. In the end they discover
 * Though it was still played straight, however, this one was an interesting example, as the "suicide" in question wasn't actually the reason Creek got involved, and was assumed by everyone, including him, to be a normal suicide, so it seemed to be simply a background event, until further investigation began to cast doubt on it.
 * Jonathan Creek also subverted this.
 * It also combined this with a Locked Room Mystery in the first episode, where an old man apparently shot himself in the head within a sealed bunker, but would have actually been physically unable to do so due to his crippling arthritis.
 * Subverted on Veronica Mars with . It really was just a suicide. (Probably. They never did find the body.)
 * Played straight with
 * Inverted in the Law and Order episode "Bad Faith." There are signs that a detective's death might be murder, but it turns out that responding cops tampered with the scene so his widow would get benefits. The case is still a can of worms, because he and Logan were both altar boys under the same Pedophile Priest.
 * The Law and Order UK episode based on this, "Confession", also inverts this, as just like in the original, the cops tried to make the suicide look like a murder. But it's also subverted when the prosecutors manage to press manslaughter charges against the Pedophile Priest in question, arguing that the man was Driven to Suicide via PTSD that resulted from the sexual abuse he endured.
 * Pushing Daisies: at least twice (in "Pigeon" and "Bad Habits").
 * Played with in another episode. Turns out the deaths are suicides, but the... victims? were hired to test an experimental drug that drove them to do it, making the drug company culpable.
 * Played straight and subverted in an episode of Criminal Minds. A number of parents of children who died in a school accident begin committing suicide at a rate far above what would be expected for the situation. Sure enough, there's a serial killer disguising his murders as suicides. Except for one of the deaths, which turns out to have been a real suicide after all.
 * In another episode, a number of high school kids appear to be commiting suicide by hanging with little obvious connection between the victims. It turned out they were actually being tricked over the internet into playing a dangerous game whereby the kids hang themselves near to death and cut the wire at the last minute to obtain a natural "high"- the deaths are those who failed to cut it in time and thus "lost" the game. The mastermind turned out to be an abusive father who has Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy; he forced his son to hang himself near to death over the years in order to get attention and pity as the poor dad with the depressive, self-harming son. The idea of making this an internet game came about when he got tired of abusing just his own kid.
 * Subverted several times in Inspector Morse. Morse insists on investigating several cases of suicide which are actually suicide. He has become quite knowledgeable on what details to look for.
 * Inverted in the Law and Order: Criminal Intent episode "A Murderer Among Us". The detectives determine that the victim staged her suicide
 * NCIS has an interesting take on this trope. When investigating the death of two women, an agent suggest it might be suicide only to be told that it didn't matter, standard procedure insists that all deaths are to be treated as murders until proven otherwise..
 * Played with on Lost: Upon hearing that "Jeremy Bentham" has committed suicide, Jack is driven to suicide himself, but fails to kill himself. Sayid remarks that "they said it was suicide," to which Hurley responds "what do you mean, they SAID it was suicide?" Finally, after Bentham's identity is revealed as, we are shown that he really did intend on killing himself via hanging....
 * Subverted in a fairly painful way on an episode of The Closer.
 * Subverted in The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. The cancer-ridden Asshole Victim and his accomplice set up his death so it looked like the man sleeping with his wife had killed him.
 * Played with on House.
 * Subverted in Heroes, where Claire discovers her college roommate apparently having committed suicide by jumping out the window, even leaving a note about how depressed she was, despite having planned out her whole life. Learning that being pushed will send a body a further distance than jumping, Claire jumps out the window herself (Good Thing She Can Heal), only to land on the same spot.
 * The episode "Second Soul" of the revived Outer Limits series involves aliens using human corpses to survive. The best friend of the man in charge of the operation to help the aliens appeared to have committed suicide after his wife's corpse is used. His friend isn't so sure, since he had been investigating the aliens and thought they were conspiring right before he died.
 * An apparent suicide sets the events of State of Play in motion. Proving it was actually murder is just the start.
 * In Stargate Universe everyone assumes that the emotionally unstable marine with discipline issues was murdered. And to be fair, he didn't get along very well with a large number of the crew. However,.
 * Unsolved Mysteries did this with about half its cases. Nearly every next-episode preview featured at least one case in which someone had been found dead, and narrator Robert Stack would always end it with "the police ruled it a suicide, but the family says...murder."
 * When the segment aired, it would always be highly sympathetic/slanted in favor of the family's claim that the victim had been murdered, and dismissive of the police's theory, even when all the evidence pointed to suicide and the only thing the family had to go on was a vague insistence that "she would never kill herself." Of course, basic logic would dictate that the family is far more likely to let their affection for the deceased cloud their judgment, and anyway, they're not trained professionals at this sort of thing like the police are. But "Unsolved Mysteries" would routinely imply that the police in a given case had no idea what they were doing.
 * A better name for the show might have been "Mysteries That Have Been Solved but Which Victim's Family is Still in Denial About."
 * The Rockford Files uses this trope a lot. A common plot is for a relative or friend of someone whose death was deemed suicide by the police to hire Rockford to prove that it was actually a murder. It always is.
 * The first episode of Sherlock revolves around a series of near-identical suicides. You don't need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out that after four people commit suicide in almost exactly the same way, something else is probably going on...
 * Da Vincis Inquest averts this more than once. More unusually, the accidents sometimes really are accidents.
 * Boston Legal subverted this in one episode that started where the girlfriend of Missi Pyle's recurring character was found by police (hanged) in a manner that suggested murder (hands bound behind back, etc.), then it's later revealed that Missi actually found her dead (still hanged, but that was all) of suicide and staged it to look like a break-in murder. She'd altered the scene since most (if not all) insurance policies (one of these which her girlfriend had had) don't pay out on suicides.
 * A fair number of episodes of Supernatural have the boys investigating "suicides". Given that ghosts, demons and other creature can easily enter locked rooms, and often don't leave any evidence, it fairly justified that these are ruled as such by Muggles.
 * One episode had a man whose death was ruled a suicide when he shot himself in the head...4 times.
 * More episodes of The X-Files than you could count. If the victim looks like a suicide, rest assured that they were rather cleverly murdered or Driven to Suicide by supernatural creepiness.
 * It's never suicide in Foyle's War, although in one episode it wasn't actually murder either, but a spy organization staging the suicide of one of its members to cover up that he had died about a minute into his mission due to his superiors' incompetence.
 * The second episode of Moonlight has an alleged murdered acquited, when a book writer lobbies that his case is reviewed and inconcistencies are found. It turns out he did shoot his wife and stage it as suicide. Mick knew it all along, as he was the one who warned her not to get a gun, afraid something like this would happen. The worst part for Mick is that the guy knows he's a vampire and is out for revenge, having spent years reading up on his vampire lore.
 * Inverted in a Moonlighting episode, the protagonists are hired by an old man in a wheelchair and on life support to witness his murder that he plans to stage by hiring a killer in order for his daughter to get life insurance. When David shows up, the old man is already dead with no killer in sight. Instead, the police are after him as the murderer. In the end, Maddie figures out that the old man was only partially paralized and could walk. He shut off his own life support just before David got there, planning to frame him all along.
 * Subverted in a Murder, She Wrote episode, "To The Last Will I Grapple With Thee". Sean, a friend of Jessica's from Ireland was arrested for the murder of an old enemy of his from Ireland. Jessica proved that the victim(whom she learned was terminally ill anyway) committed suicide, but staged his death to look like murder so that Sean would be convicted of murder.
 * Inverted in a Moonlighting episode, the protagonists are hired by an old man in a wheelchair and on life support to witness his murder that he plans to stage by hiring a killer in order for his daughter to get life insurance. When David shows up, the old man is already dead with no killer in sight. Instead, the police are after him as the murderer. In the end, Maddie figures out that the old man was only partially paralized and could walk. He shut off his own life support just before David got there, planning to frame him all along.
 * Subverted in a Murder, She Wrote episode, "To The Last Will I Grapple With Thee". Sean, a friend of Jessica's from Ireland was arrested for the murder of an old enemy of his from Ireland. Jessica proved that the victim(whom she learned was terminally ill anyway) committed suicide, but staged his death to look like murder so that Sean would be convicted of murder.

Theater

 * When Agatha Christie adapted her novel Appointment With Death into a play, she wrote a new ending which is

Video Games

 * In the fourth Ace Attorney game,
 * in Higurashi no Naku Koro ni. Turns out it's
 * In the first Chzo Mythos game the characters are trapped in a house whose original owners supposedly died in a murder-suicide. Over the course of the game they discover
 * The first Tex Murphy game is kicked off by a suicide investigation. The victim's daughter needs to prove that he didn't kill himself so she can claim his life insurance. The twist.
 * Deadline has you investigate a suicide, with the possibility that it was a murder. The game would be over pretty quickly if it actually was.
 * Trauma Team's Naomi Kimishima has a Locked Room Mystery as her first in-game investigation.

Web Comics

 * Inverted and parodied in Schlock Mercenary's CSI tribute storyline: A crime-solving AI takes one look at an obvious murder scene and declares it to be an attempted suicide. The AI immediately catches itself by nothing that their victim is dead, and tries to figure out an alternate solution.

Web Original

 * In Kikaider The Abridged Series, every homicide seems to get written off by the police as a suicide case that is then promptly ignored.

Western Animation

 * Inverted on King of the Hill--the death of looks like a murder and there are plenty of people with a motive to kill her, but it turns out she accidentally killed herself.