Make It Look Like an Accident

There's a person in the way. Maybe it's an Intrepid Reporter, or one of those Meddling Kids. It would be convenient if this inconvenient individual could be removed from the picture... permanently. But a murder rap would really make things even more inconvenient, especially if you're a Villain With Good Publicity who really cannot afford bad publicity. So your primary option as a Big Bad is to hire someone to take care of this little problem. But it can't look like murder, and it can't just be a mysterious death.

So what's the alternative? Make It Look Like an Accident. The villain or other inconvenienced party tells an assassin or other person that the inconvenient person has to die in a way that looks like an unfortunate happenstance, so suspicion will not fall on themselves or anyone.

Note that the simple invocation of this trope is usually considered justification enough that the villains are playing by "real world rules", even if what they actually do can't be construed as being an accident by any stretch of the imagination.

This trope is probably thought of by many soon-to-be murderers, and so, a Truth in Television. Remember, just because it was ruled as an accident doesn't necessarily mean it truly was. MWAHAHAHHAHA...

Note: One reason a character may do this is to quickly gain their inheritance. In America (and probably most other countries), a person convicted of a crime is forbidden by law to keep any money they make as a result of the crime, so anyone killing for inheritance would probably try to make it seem like an accidental death.

Often used as a method of attempting to Murder the Hypotenuse, and as an excuse not to just shoot the bastard. Compare with The Coroner Doth Protest Too Much, and contrast with Suicide, Not Murder. Hunting Accident is a subtrope; if made to look like a death by animal attack, This Bear Was Framed.

Anime and Manga

 * In Death Note, Light makes the deaths he wants to hide look like accidents (such as the bus-hijacking incident). The deaths he wants attributed to him, or at least his persona of Kira, are heart attacks.
 * Also inverted, as his stated long-term plan is for people to slowly become aware that he's killing non-criminals as well in subtler ways, which can't be distinguished from regular deaths. Once every single death is suspected of being his handiwork for that person's hidden sins, nobody will dare strive for less than perfection, creating a utopia and everything will go just as planned.
 * When the corrupt courts let a murderer go free and almost convict Togusa for trying to prevent the murder in Ghost in The Shell:Stand Alone Complex, the episode ends with a clerk at the garage of Section 9 watching a news segment about a man and his attorney being involved in a hit-and-run car accident. At the same time Bouma returns and leaves her the keys to a damaged car that needs to be disposed of. She just nods and barely looks up.
 * Many, MANY murder cases in Detective Conan are at first believed to be accidents. Then Conan (and sometimes other detectives) start digging in...
 * In Future GPX Cyber Formula, Smith makes Hayato's father's car crash to make it look like he lost control of his car in order to obtain Asurada's documents so he can use it to make Asurada a weapon of mass destruction. Thankfully, Schumacher reveals the truth while he's recuperating from the incident with Smith.
 * Cruelly subverted in Fullmetal Alchemist.
 * Within Stellvia of the Universe,.

Comic Books

 * In the X Wing Series, after Isard has an agent shoot Admiral Lon Isoto in the back, she tells the agent to make it look like a suicide. ...Exactly how you do this with a blaster wound in the back is unclear. Maybe the girl just shoved him into grinding machinery and told everyone he'd thrown himself in.
 * In Preacher (Comic Book)'s backstory, Starr is ordered to kill a defector to the Grail who has currently been committed to a mental hospital because nobody believes his stories about ancient conspiracies. He is asked to make the death as non-suspicious as possible, lest people start taking him seriously. Starr subverts the heck out of this trope, by blowing up the institution, killing all the staff and patients. He justifies his actions with the fact that, with so many victims, the assassination became so indiscriminate that piecing together the correct motive would be nigh impossible.
 * In All Fall Down, plot involves this, Siphon, and a Power Nullifier on the moon.

Film
"Angel: She tripped and fell on her own shears."
 * The villains of Hot Fuzz focus almost entirely on murdering people in such a way that it looks like an accident, to the point where the local police have been effectively brainwashed into reporting nearly every death as an accident without conducting a proper investigation . Poor Nicholas Angel is the Only Sane Man who believes otherwise. The fourth murder is actually witnessed by Angel and despite that, and the fact that she has a pair of shears stuck in her throat, the police still don't believe it wasn't an accident

"Hugo Drax: Look after Mr. Bond. See that some harm comes to him."
 * In The Secret of NIMH, this is how.
 * Has happened in several James Bond films, presumably to try and justify Bond Villain Stupidity or Why Don't You Just Shoot Him??. They are rarely if ever referenced as such, though, so they tend to get lumped in with the other over-the-top murder attempts.
 * In You Only Live Twice SPECTRE agent Number 11 gets Bond into a plane under the ruse that she is betraying her employer...then jumps out with a parachute after trapping him, leaving him to die in a plane crash.
 * In Moonraker Chang first tries to murder Bond by sabotaging the Zero-G astronaut training he was taking part in (the Bond girl believes something had went wrong with the controls), and later Drax himself tries to have him shot and make it look like a hunting accident. Both attempts take place when Bond was on Drax's property as a guest and, when Bond leaves, later attempts are even more over-the-top but not set-up as accidents.

"Doctor Kaufman: I am a professor of forensic medicine. Believe me, Mr. Bond, I could shoot you from Stuttgart und still create ze proper effect."
 * In A View to A Kill Zorin, playing a bit of Xanatos Speed Chess, takes advantage of a break-in by Bond and the Bond girl into City Hall, where the Bond girl worked under a Sleazy Politician in Zorin's pay, who had recently fired her. Zorin kills the guy and forces the pair into an elevator before setting the building on fire, making it look like they were responsible but were killed by the flames trying to escape.
 * In Goldeneye Bond and Natalya are strapped down in a stolen helicopter link to the firing of the titular satellite, and the missles set to fire and then return back at them. They escape but the Russian authorities show up immediately, and the Minister of Defence accuses them of being involved in both; presumably, they were supposed to find only the bodies and assume that the two of them were the criminals they were after, but accidently set off the missles.
 * In Tomorrow Never Dies, Elliot Carver sends a hitman to kill Bond and his treacherous wife and make it look like a murder-suicide- he even had a taped new story made in advance. Bond is too late to save the girl but turns the tables and when he shoots the killer instrad, at close range, making his death look like the suicide.

"Frazier: I don't care how you handle Sullivan. But it's got to look like an accident with that priest."
 * Angels with Dirty Faces (1938).

"Nick Portokalos: I've never seen my sister this happy, Ian. If you hurt her, I'll kill you and make it look like an accident."
 * My Big Fat Greek Wedding

"Conklin: You were supposed to kill him in such a way that the only possible explanation was that it was done by a member of his own faction!"
 * An inversion appears in Practical Magic. Sally is trying to get her sister Gillian safely away from abusive boyfriend Jimmy Angelov. Sally accidentally poisons him (she was only trying to put him to sleep), but the police officer who shows up is convinced it's really murder.
 * Legally, it is murder. At best, it's criminally negligent homicide.
 * In the Warren Beatty Dick Tracy, Big Boy Caprice orders Tracy killed and he was assured by Flattop and Itchy that they can make it look like an accident. Just how they can make a person found dead tied to a chair in a exploding boiler room look like an accident is never explained.
 * Well, they could have tried knocking him out, then untying him and removing the chair, then exploding the boiler room and hoping the body was mauled enough in the blast to cover up the little bump on the head. Of course, we just put more effort into thinking this through than the scriptwriter did.
 * Throughout the film A Fish Called Wanda, Ken attempts to kill a witness to a robbery while making it look like an accident. Unfortunately, he ends up accidentally killing her various pet dogs.
 * Ironically, the death of the third dog causes her to have a fatal heart attack.
 * The Boss in Lucky Number Slevin hires Good Kat to
 * The murderers in Double Indemnity have to make the death look like an accident -- specifically, a train accident -- in order to collect the insurance money they're after. It ultimately fails.
 * Cobras, the villain of Puma Man, uses the golden mask to make the eponymous hero commit suicide; when his henchmen arrive to confirm the death, he uses this as an excuse to keep them from just shooting him, not wanting to draw suspicion to himself. Of course, he doesn't know that the hero is Faking the Dead via a heretofore-unmentioned superpower.
 * As as pointed out later, the whole thing was moot since Cobras is mind-controlling the police.
 * The specialty of the Villain Protagonist in the 1972 Charles Bronson film The Mechanic.
 * In Blue Thunder, Murphy's rival Colonel Cochrane attempts to kill him by sabotaging his helicopter during an evaluation flight.
 * One of the villains in the Bruiceploitation flick The Clones of Bruce Lee does this - after one of the titular Bruce Lee clones infiltrates a movie shoot (actually a front for a gold smuggling racket) as a martial arts stuntsman, the director realizes that the clone could be a government agent and schemes to have him shot on-camera through a staged weapons malfunction...which sort of becomes a Funny Aneurysm Moment when you recall what happened to Bruce's son, Brandon...
 * Justified in The Howling. Karen White is a famous anchorwoman, and would definitely be missed.
 * In The Godfather, Don Vito Corleone shows some Genre Savvy about this, warning the Dons of the other four families that if his son Michael meets with an accident on the way back from Sicily, he will assume that at least one of them was responsible and restart the Mob War put on hold after.
 * In the game, there are at least three people you're asked to kill this way. Apparently falling off a high ledge counts as one of these for the game's purposes.
 * The Blue Max: When the German High Command learns that fighter pilot and propaganda hero Lt. Bruno Stachel, they give him the job of test-flying a dangerous deathtrap monoplane fighter.
 * The villains of North By Northwest try to kill Roger Thornhill, who they think is George Kaplan, an enemy spy, by pumping him full of whisky and making him drive a fast car on a cliff's edge. It doesn't work.
 * Variation in The Bourne Identity:

"Those of you I find lacking will quit. And those of you who refuse to quit will have a training accident. This base suffers three training accidents a year. Unfortunate accidents that I will not hesitate to repeat if you cross me!"
 * This is part of Scar's bastardry in The Lion King, when he murders Mufasa and convinces Simba that his father died an accident for which Simba was to blame.
 * This trope is the premise of Accident, Hong-Kong movie about a group of assassins who specialize on creating very cunning circumstances that lead to target's death.
 * The Dragon in Paycheck kills a scientist making it look like he fell out of his apartment window. Nobody buys it.
 * A Film With Me in It features the inverse; a whole load of people die in a Disaster Dominoes-prone flat in ways that are all completely accidental and which the protagonist had absolutely nothing to do with, but all happen to be either people who the protagonist would have a reason to murder, die in such a way that no one would possibly believe that the poor protagonist didn't murder them, or both.
 * Variation in military/mystery movie Basic, where Drill Sergeant Nasty West uses this as a threat to all of the potential recruits looking to get into his elite Ranger unit.

"Kirk: An accident wasn't good enough.
 * In the second War Games movie, a scientist is hit by a car while jogging but it was an assassination made to look like an accident.
 * Parodied in Mystery Men, where the father of the Bowler "Fell down an elevator shaft... onto some bullets."
 * The Shawshank Redemption: Apparently Tommy was killed by Hadley during the former's "failed escape attempt". Andy knows better.
 * Star Trek VI the Undiscovered Country: Once outside the Rura Penthe shield, Marta mentions this as such but the conspirators required a more "convincing" alternative.

Marta: Good enough for one. Two would have looked suspicious. (transforms into Kirk) Killed while trying to escape. Now that's convincing enough for both."


 * In Lethal Weapon 2, The Dragon, Vorstedt, reveals that Riggs' wife's death was not an accident after all and that he sabatoged the brakes to make her car go off the road, as he was trying to kill Riggs himself (who was not in the car).

Literature

 * David Gerrold's The War Against the Chtorr. The Uncle Ira Group attempts to kill two birds with one stone via this method. The rest of the world refuses to take the Alien Invasion seriously, arguing that the Chtorrans aren't particularly dangerous, while protagonist Jim McCarthy has unwittingly drawn attention to their secret organisation by publicly arguing otherwise. So they order McCarthy to stand guard at a public showing of a captured Chtorran worm, which 'accidentally' escapes from its cage and starts eating the delegates. Fortunately McCarthy took the trouble to practise with his newly-issued flechette rifle and succeeds in bringing down the creature on live television. Because McCarthy is now a hero, the Uncle Ira group makes the best of a bad situation and makes him a permanent member of their organisation instead.
 * Ira Levin's The Boys From Brazil has Nazis doing this, because the.
 * In the Destroyer series of adventure novels by Warren Murphy and Richard Ben Sapir, removing problems that cannot be removed legally by "making it look like an accident" is the entire reason for Remo Williams existence.
 * In the fourth novel about Erast Fandorin, the Big Bad goes beyond this, deciding that an accident would look much too fishy and arranges for his target to die on a heart attack.
 * A favored tactic of the Republic of Haven in the Honor Harrington series is to kill people in "accidental" aircar collisions - that is, when the people in question aren't simply "disappeared." This comes back to bite the new government of the Republic in the ass later on when a suspected traitor and his accomplice die in aircar accidents. One of them was actually genuine, and the other was arranged by the traitor's paymasters to cover their tracks.
 * A specific non-Peep example occurs in Honor Among Enemies, where someone tries to off  and pass it off as a suit failure. Unfortunately the culprit tried too hard.
 * Played for real in The Man Who Never Was: the Germans have to be convinced that a dead guy washed up on the Spanish coast with a suitcase full of Allied battle plans is a courier, and the battle plans are the Real Stuff. The book (and subsequent film) were based on the real-life Operation Mincemeat, which went to extraordinary lengths to Make It Look Like an Accident.
 * Inverted in And Another Thing where the dragons of Asgard are instructed to kill by accident, and to make it look intentional.
 * Max in the Codex Alera has been dodging "accidents" for years, courtesy of an Evil Stepmother who wants the inconvenient bastard son out of the way. His mother already succumbed to one, and he's spent the intervening years being almost killed by things like a jar of rock salt, which hurts wind furies, falling on him while he's learning to fly and dropping him 30 feet to the ground and a legionaire recruit he's training "inexplicably" having his sword twist out of his hand and fly at Max's neck.
 * In the convoluted traditions of combat between Great Houses in the Dune universe, it is considered an extreme breach of protocol to kill a defeated opponent without offering them exile first; violation of this rule may cause the perpetrator to be exterminated by the other Houses, and there are Truthsayers to investigate any suspicious deaths. The solution: issue indirect orders to one's minions (who are unlikely to be subject to Truthsayer questioning) along the lines of, "No bodies must ever be found," and leave it up to their creativity to make the proper arrangements.
 * In The Dresden Files an Entropy Curse tends to cause deaths like this. Harry notes that the victim effectively dies of what looks like seriously bad luck. And then in Blood Rites,, and while the deaths they cause certainly don't look like intentional murders, they are a LONG way from looking like mundane accidents, with the most prominent example being most accurately described as a guided frozen turkey missile.
 * In an early Nero Wolfe novel, The League of Frightened Men, the suspected murderer has sworn vengeance against a group of men who inadvertently crippled him. The first two deaths look like accidents.
 * Variant: When spy Simon Mead is murdered, his teammates disguise the death as a car accident.
 * Number the Stars.
 * Occurs in some of the Alex Rider books, including the death of a business man made to look like he missed his footing stepping into an elevator, and the mass-murder plans of some of the villains.
 * Newsflesh has a lot of this.
 * In the first book, Feed,  and the   were made to look like accidents.
 * In the second book, Deadline,  were made to look like accidents.
 * Done a few times in the Warrior Cats series:
 * Tigerclaw attempted this a couple of times: first the Thunderpath trap to try and get Bluestar to run onto the Thunderpath, and then when he told Fireheart to cross a branch over a flooded stream and then knocked it loose. Even Fireheart wasn't sure whether it was an accident or not until he noticed the way Tigerclaw was looking at him later.
 * Darkstripe gave Sorrelkit deathberries to eat; if Graystripe hadn't seen what happened, every cat would have just assumed she found the berries and didn't know what they were.
 * Pretty much every major death at Whistling Tor is made to look like an accident by .She would have gotten away with it if she hadn't tried to fire trick twice
 * In the Dale Brown novel Shadows of Steel, this is done with airplanes and military equipment. It Makes Sense in Context, but is justified in that the guy ordering it had to dance around the political sensitivities of traditional, highly visible overt action while still wanting to hurt the other side. It works.
 * In Matt Ruff's Bad Monkeys, the Department for the Final Disposition of Irredeemable Persons (aka "Bad Monkeys") which kills people who are determined to be truly evil, they use "NC guns". The NC guns cause the person that is aimed at to die of natural causes such as heart attack or stroke, hence the name.
 * The Smith brothers try to do this to James Bond in the Young Bond novel Double or Die; force-feeding him a bottle of gin and planning to throw him into the Thames so he drowns.
 * The drowning of Camille in Therese Raquin is made to look like Camille just fell out of the boat and couldn't swim rather than a murder.
 * The protagonist of Barry Eisler's John Rain series specializes in making assassinations look like accidental and (especially) natural deaths. The first kill he performs involves using a Palm Pilot to turn off a guy's pacemaker.

Live Action TV
"Client: But remember, it must look like an accident and nothing but accident!
 * used a staged accident to remove  in Babylon 5.
 * In Dossier on Detective Dubrovsky villains hire an assassin to kill.

Assassin: Don't you wory. It's going to be the most accidential accident possible."

"Tommy: "How should we get rid of him? You're the weapons expert!"
 * In Prison Break when "The General" ordered his Psycho for Hire to kill Don Self and "make it look like an accident"
 * Lost: Juliet asks Jack to kill Ben during surgery because some of the others want change, "but it has to look like an accident".
 * In Pushing Daisies, Emerson Cod urges Ned the piemaker to re-kill someone his power brought Back From the Dead, but make it look like an accident so as not to upset someone else.
 * In one episode of Walker Texas Ranger. The Big Bad says "make it look like an accident" and his Mooks promptly start destroying everything in sight with bullets. And fire.
 * On 3rd Rock From The Sun, Dick suggested they kill Judith and make it look like an accident. When Mary refused, he replied "We're not going to make it look like an accident?!"
 * A later episode delivered this gem when referring to Evil Dick -

Sally: "That doesn't mean I can just frag him with a grenade launcher while he's in the shower!"

Harry: "Why not? People explode in showers all the time!""

"Al: Anyways, Sheriff, I'm gonna walk past that bloodstain that mysteriously appeared in my office and go oversee my business interests."
 * Magnificent Bastard Al Swearengen says this early in the first season of Deadwood. Interestingly this is the only time he tries to conceal his involvement in a murder (it doesn't work), most of the time he doesn't care.

"Bob Briscoe: So, Roz, who's the proud papa? You got it narrowed down yet?
 * Frasier:

Roz: That's nice, very nice. Frasier, will you excuse us?

Frasier: Just remember the baby's future, Roz. Try to make it look like an accident."

"Dr. George O'Malley: He could kill me and make it look like an accident."
 * Greys Anatomy

"Nina Van Horn: She'll be gone by the end of the day.
 * Just Shoot Me

Dennis Finch: Great; just make it look like an accident.

Nina Van Horn: No, no, no! She's leaving on her own.

Dennis Finch: Got it; we never spoke."

"The previous governor met with an accident that took quite some time to arrange."
 * Titus episode "Tommy's Girlfriend". Titus tells Tommy to run into (meet) his old girlfriend and make it look like an accident. Tommy takes him literally, and does it with a car.
 * Parodied in a Mitchell and Webb sketch where one of the minions of a Diabolical Mastermind is attempting to get them to stop using so much Double-Speak and False Reassurance, and brings up the time they were informed "Let's hope he meets with an unfortunate accident" and it was several months before he clarified it was an accident they were supposed to make happen.
 * Oz. An undercover policeman (posing as a drug dealer) is told he has to kill someone to prove himself. But because the new manager of 'Emerald City' has promised to turn a blind eye to the drug trade as long as there's no violence, he's told to "do it a long way from here, and make it look like an accident." The undercover policeman decides to kill two birds with one stone by offing a corrupt ex-cop (now a prisoner) who's threatening to blow his cover. He pushes him down an elevator shaft, after tricking him into going there supposedly to murder another prisoner who knows they're cops.
 * In Dollhouse a woman's murder is made to look like a heart attack using
 * In Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Dead Things", Warren Mears makes Buffy believe she killed Katrina by accident.
 * Doctor Who: "The End of Time"

"Cathy Salt: And then just recently Mr. Cleaver, the government's nuclear advisor?
 * In The Time of Angels the security office chasing River Song on board the Byzantium tells his Goons to wait for River to run, and then shoot her so it doesn't look like an execution, but that she was shot when attempting to flee. Which isn't much better, really.
 * In "Boom Town", a reporter mentions to the Lord Mayor Margaret Blaine that nearly everyone opposing her proposed Cardiff nuclear power plant has died in a variety of mysterious accidents.

Margaret Blaine: Slipped on an icy patch.

Cathy Salt: He was decapitated!

Margaret Blaine: It was a very icy patch."

"Sheldon: At my age, do you know how I'm statistically most likely to die?
 * The killer in the Criminal Minds episode "Paradise" tries to do this, but he isn't very good at it.
 * A zigzag version in the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode "The Orderly World of Mr. Appleby (written by Roald Dahl): Mr. Appleby successfully kills his first wife by making it look like she tripped and fell on a rug (that he pulled out from under her), but
 * In City Homicide Sean Macready manages to light seven fires over nine years, killing over a dozen children, and each time makes it look like an electrical accident, each time convincing the arson squad.
 * Leonard threatens Sheldon with this after getting fed up with his latest insane stunt (staying in his room and interacting with the world via TV Head Robot) in The Big Bang Theory.

Leonard: At the hands of your roommate?

Sheldon: An accident.

Leonard: That's how I'm gonna make it look."


 * On Rubicon, tells  that this needs to happen to Will because He Knows Too Much, suggesting that they make it look like a drug overdose as a result of his wife and child's deaths.
 * Noah's Arc: A variation,.
 * From The Shadow Line:
 * is killed in what looks like a random traffic accident.
 * When is killed, it's made to look like he drowned after falling and hitting his head on the side of his pool.
 * The reason why some of the cases on Cold Case went cold in the first place. What was really a murder was made to look like an accident (like in the episode "Blood On The Tracks", where a fatal explosion was thought to be due to a gas leak, only for the remnants of a bomb to be discovered 26 years later), suicide, or even natural causes ("The Good Death", where the victim was thought to have died from a brain tumor, only for it be a Mercy Killing).
 * In The Wire  orders   murder because   was afraid   would become a snitch. The killer made it look like a suicide.

Print Media

 * A Far Side cartoon featured a "hit elephant" being hired by a dog to kill a cat, with the standard caveat applied.
 * A Nintendo Power comic dedicated to Blast Corps played this troupe ridiculously straight. While loading up the robot Cyclone to bust a scientist out of prison, the pilot is advised that "it has to look natural." The robot then proceeds to smash a single cell of the prison and get the scientist out. The crowning glory is that one of the prison guards says, "The fury of mother nature."
 * It makes more sense when one realizes that the scene takes place during a lightning storm, with the pilot timing his hit to coincide with the thunderclap, making it look like the scientist's cell just happened to get struck by lightning. Though one must wonder how they walked a giant robot up to a prison without getting spotted.

Tabletop Games

 * Because randomly gunning people down in Paranoia is considered poor form by Friend Computer, it's usually a good idea to make your shaftings look like accidents, treason executions, or - best yet - the work of some other Commie mutant traitor you'd like to see gunned down.
 * In Warhammer, the Tomb King codex specifies that it wasn't illegal per se for tomb architects to refuse being sacrificed and buried with their king, but it was accident-prone.

Theater

 * May be one of the oldest ones in the book as this happens in Hamlet. Claudius proposes a fencing match between Laertes and Hamlet in which Laertes will fight with a poison-tipped sword, so it looks like an accident.
 * He also gave out that Hamlet Sr. had died of a snakebite.

Video Games

 * In the Hitman Blood Money video game, the best way to make Silent Assassin rank is to make the killings of your targets look like accidents, which you can do by many means in the game (falling chandeliers, explosively igniting grills, and other creatively nasty things). This is also the only means of killing non-targets without affecting rank or getting a cash penalty.
 * The Big Bad of Full Throttle arranges for Ben to die in what appears to be a road accident (when, in fact, his goons sabotage Ben's bike), so that he can lead Ben's gang into a trap. Needless to say, Ben survives and gets back at him.
 * Grand Theft Auto San Andreas:  that died in a traffic accident". Also, San Fierro police occasionally shout "You know, I can make this look like a suicide".
 * Actually,  actually dies in a traffic accident.   The main character wants to shoot his body a couple of times just to be sure, but his brother tells him not to do so because the deceased now just died in an accident and nothing can lead the cops to the main character.
 * A mission in Vice City similarly has you assassinating someone and your goal is to make it look like a car accident. Of course, in practice it's less an 'accident' and more 'relentlessly hounding the person until you make their car explode'.
 * Sandbox games tend to have 'Make it look like an accident' as a theme for many of their assasination missions. Just running up to the victim and firing off a clip doesn't always finish the mission.
 * One of the assassin missions in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion will give you a bonus if you can make the victim's death look like an accident by dropping a moose minotaur head on him.
 * Another one will give you a bonus if you can make the death look like natural causes, by secretly poisoning the already ill victim's medicine supply.
 * Also Fallout 3, in Tranquility Lane.
 * And Fallout 2, with the mission to kill Westin.
 * Also Fallout 2, every crime boss in New Reno has some unique way to die "accidentally"- changing the combination on a trapped office safe, or setting up a little kid to accidentally shoot his father in the face.
 * In Jade Empire, you're "encouraged" to kill your boss' boss in the Lotus Assassin fortress, which in this case means "kill him and then stick his body in the golem press" (you can also drop a golem on your boss as well, doubling the trope).
 * A more satirical example is Kang's suggestion you make Gao the Greater "fall down a flight of punches".
 * In The Godfather: The Game, you occasionally have to make some assassinations look like an accident in order to get bonus benefits.
 * In Dragon Age, during the Dwarf Noble origin story, you can potentially order the death of another dwarf this way in the first five minutes of the game.
 * Zevran once did this by accident. He had fallen in lust with his mark and was going to let her go until she tripped and broke her neck.
 * "Foxdie" in Metal Gear Solid is a genetically engineered virus that can be customized to only infect people with specific DNA sequences to make them either a carrier or cause a heart attack within 5 to 15 minutes.
 * Dwarf Fortress provides plenty of opportunity to orchestrate fatal "accidents" for nobles, who are generally annoying and often useless.
 * A rare benevolent variation from Disgaea.
 * Deus Ex Human Revolution has a side quest in China that calls for this to take place.
 * Another sidequest in the same location has you investigate a murder that was made to look like an accident.

Web Comics
"Darth Vader: Everyone concerned will meet with an unfortunate accident.
 * The Principal in Birthday Gift killed an old rival of his to get the "inheritance", his 18-year-old-daughter. She seems to know it was him, and he makes no secret pointing out "it was an accident" with a glee. Nobody really cares to put him away, although you'd think at least some students would try to blackmail him with it...
 * Parodied in Darths and Droids:

Daine Jir: Oh no. I'll inform our occupational safety committee immediately."


 * Used in this Square Root of Minus Garfield

Western Animation
"Donbot:I think he's gonna have a little on the job accident in the near future.
 * Futurama:

Joey Mousepad: With all due respect, Donbot, I don't think we should count on an accident happening. Let's kill him ourselves."

"Mcguirk: Drew is a nice guy, right?
 * Subversion: In an episode of The Simpsons, Moe wants to get Mr. Burns off the bowling team because of how terrible he is, so he sinisterly suggests that Mr. Burns "just might have a little accident on his way to the tournament". Mr. Burns then walks into the building sporting a leg injury, but it's the result of an actual accident. Moe then sneaks up behind Mr. Burns in disguise and hits him in the leg with a lead pipe, but it actually pops his leg bone back into place.
 * Also parodied in "Mayored to the mob": The mayor, due to plot unrelated actions, got the mob anger on himself. cue Fat Tony to say on television that the mayor has to look out. "Because accidents happen all the time. Like the killing of you. By us."
 * Also added as humor by Willie, stating he could kill Bart with a hoe to the back, claiming he could make it look as if Bart committed suicide.
 * The doppleganger Race Bannon tells the Thai Jungle Guide to get rid of Jonny Quest and Hadji, and to make it look like an accident.
 * Mandragora taunts Faraday in Justice League Unlimited by describing a witness as having unfortunately wandered in front of a train.
 * In one episode of Cow And Chicken, The Red Guy plays a collection agent who threatens the titular duo with an accident. When they ask what kind, a train spontaneously runs The Red Guy over. "This kind."
 * Played for laughs in Home Movies.

Brendon: Very nice.

Mcguirk: He means well, he knows soccer, kids seem to like him…

Brendon: Kids love him.

Mcguirk: He could have my job, couldn’t he?

Brendon: In a heartbeat. But why would a guy want a dead end job like that?

Mcguirk: I can’t take that chance, Brendon. That’s why it has to look like an accident.

Brendon: What does?

Mcguirk: The accident.

Brendon: Oh, right…well that’s it! Dwayne, The strings on Dwayne’s guitar, would suddenly just, strangle him, it would be perfect!

Mcguirk: Or I could just frame him…

Brendon: We could exchange murders. Criss-cross.

Mcguirk: What are you talking about, Criss-cross?

Brendon: I’m talking about Christopher Cross."

"Candace: With Batman out of the way, Gotham could be yours. So could I.
 * In every iteration of the Xylophone Gag, the schemer says this line. How a xylophone/piano rigged with explosives is supposed to look like an accident is an exercise best left to the reader.
 * Commonplace in the Batman related animated shows:
 * Batman the Animated Series: In "Bane", Rupert Thorne's moll, Candace, suggests that this might be a way of getting rid of her employer/lover.

Bane: What about your employer?

Candace: Accidents do happen."


 * In the Batman the Brave And The Bold episode "Chill of the Night" Batman, with help from The Spectre, witnesses Joe Chill being contracted to kill Thomas Wayne, complete with "Just make it look like an accident." Since a mugging gone bad does not look like an accident, this shows the blurry line between "make it look like an accident" and "make sure it can't be traced back to me".
 * In Iron Man Armored Adventures Magneto wants to get rid of Senator Kelly, but doesn't want to create a martyr for the Senator's cause. So he kidnaps Jean Grey to use her mental powers to make it look like a heart attack.

Real Life

 * After The Great Escape from Stalag Luft III, fifty prisoners were shot after recapture as revenge but to cover their tracks, the Germans attempted (but Epic Failed) to use this trick in the reports of the shooting. Claiming that around fifty men had all tried to overpower their guards and escape after stopping to relieve themselves at the roadside in multiple incidents across the German countryside (with none wounded) was too unbelievable to take anyone in, and the perpetrators were hunted down after the war.
 * In 1994, a FedEx cargo plane was hijacked by disgruntled employee Auburn Calloway, who intended to use the plane in a suicide attack on FedEx headquarters while somehow making it look accidental, as his death in an accident would enable a payoff from the $2.5 million life insurance policy he had taken out on himself. Riding along in the jumpseat, he used hammers to attack the flight crew, hitting each in the head, injuries which would be virtually indistinguishable from those incurred in a crash. Despite severe injuries, Captain David Sanders and Flight Engineer Andrew Peterson retaliated, and a struggle began with the two attempting to pin their attacker while co-pilot James Tucker stayed at the controls. Tucker being a former Navy pilot, he began turning the plane in a wild, unpredictable manner intended to keep Calloway off balance, nearly rolling it on its back and taking it near uncontrollable speed. Eventually Calloway was pinned, and the captain, also former Navy, took control and began an immediate landing. Due to trauma and blood loss, all three were losing strength, and they needed to get on the ground or risk Calloway breaking loose again, so there was no time to dump fuel. They had to land overweight, at a dangerously steep angle, at a recklessly fast speed, but the captain pulled it off. Calloway was arrested, but the flight crew was too injured to ever fly again.
 * Truth in Television for the Indian Police, who would often cut the heavy red tape that would ensue by catching a criminal by shooting them instead, and they always play it off as an "encounter", i.e. shooting in self-defense.
 * Ronald Clark O'Bryan poisoned his son's Halloween candy to collect on a life insurance policy, hoping to take advantage of the widespread Urban Legend about the dangers of Halloween. It didn't work, though.
 * Omnipresent in the brutal dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina in the Dominican Republic. The most famous case perhaps is the one of the Mirabal Sisters, who were brutally murdered by Trujillo’s own right hand men, and then put inside a car, to simulate a car accident. This particular crime may have played a vital part in the fall of his dictatorship, as the crimes 'massively pissed the Dominicans off due to how loved the Mirabal sisters were by the populace AND the USA government wasn't exactly happy either... and in less than a year, Trujillo was murdered.