Never Found the Body



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

- Lady Margot Fenring, quoting a Bene Gesserit aphorism

""In other news, Lando Griffin, a popular student at a local high school was killed last night when his motorcycle careened off dead man's curve. Police were baffled when no body was found at the scene, but decided it was best not to ask questions and just let everyone get on with their lives.""

- Tom Tucker

A character is Killed Off for Real and assumed by all other characters to be dead, but the death occurs in such a way that no body is recovered. No matter how all laws of physics and biology indicate No One Could Survive That, this old rule trumps all: "Never count someone dead unless you have the body in front of you." (And in some cases, not even then.)

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

A common aversion of this trope can be seen in shows where Everything Fades; if there IS a body to be found, try not to get too used to his absence.

See also Left for Dead, when the body is seen but left behind without confirming it's dead.

When those left behind proceed to put the disappeared person's house in order, that's declaring the person Legally Dead.

If the mortal remains are eventually found, it's Finally Found the Body.

Anime and Manga

 * The first Patlabor movie opens with Hoba, the programmer of the BABEL virus that was hidden in his operating system for the Labors, jumping of a large sea platform. Gotoh notes they never found the body. When the protagonist go to the supposedly evacuated platform to destroy it to prevent the virus from spreading,
 * A rather sadistic version of this trope was featured in Tenchi Universe, near the end of the series, when it goes from Heroic Sacrifice to Never Found the Body to Ryoko surviving all in the course of three episodes.
 * Averted in a rather frightening way in Loveless, for while they did find the body of and even matched dental records—Guess what?
 * Subverted in Death Note - 's body was never found, but that was because Light stipulated in the Note that she would kill herself in a way that made her body unlikely to be discovered.
 * There are a couple of these in the Gundam multiverse.
 * This happens to in the final battle of Zeta Gundam, as  trashed mobile suit is discovered afterwards with the cockpit hatch open.
 * Averted in Gundam Seed when the cracked helmet of is seen floating in space after taking an anti-battleship cannon head-on. Then played straight in the compilation special as the helmet is edited out.
 * There was some speculation as to the fate of Lockon Stratos in Mobile Suit Gundam 00, but Word of God put a stop to all of that.
 * Not that it stopped almost anyone else who seemingly perished in the last couple episodes of the season from then being confirmed as alive.
 * The final fate of in the last episode of Witch Hunter Robin. In fact, it is heavily implied that none of their colleagues believe the official story.
 * Justified in Fullmetal Alchemist, the body missing is of a person who can regenerate any injury, and the leader of one of the two allied armies present knows enough to find the body first, or he plans to betray his allies, and grab power for himself, one or the other.
 * in Code Geass. Justified later on because.
 * A few episodes later, it was revealed that joined the club.
 * The series played quite a bit with this. You could say that if a character doesn't explode inside a Humongous Mecha or isn't shown lying on the ground in a pool of blood, they're probably coming back.
 * Unless they're Mao, who, even after shown lying in a pool of blood, comes back the next episode. His excuse? "Britannian hospitals are really something."
 * Actually, it's mentioned that Lelouch's Literal Genie Geass made it physically impossible for Mao to die then. So really, A Wizard Did It.
 * Well, not really. Lelouch just specified "shoot". Who'd guess that shooting someone a dozen times would prove to be non-fatal? They didn't specifically attempt to kill him, but even if they just shot him in the arms and legs, he'd have to get at least one limb amputated. Logically.
 * Allen Walker in D.Gray-man. Lenalee and Lavi watched a recording of him apparently dying, but all that was left was a card and a bit of a bloodstain on the forest floor. Then BAM! Guess who wakes up by the end of the episode?
 * They never found body either.  However, the circumstances that led to it (and whether he survived) have yet to be explained.
 * Subverted in Shaman King; Asakura Hao's preferred method of killing leaves no bodies, but it also leaves no doubt that the victims are dead.
 * One Piece did this with Pell, who was seen making a Heroic Sacrifice by flying a massive bomb out of the range of innocents, seemingly blowing himself up in the process. Sometime later, a limping Pell returns home, only to find his own grave. In One Piece, a character is not dead unless you see him die, otherwise he'll come back. After all, One Piece characters are Made of Iron.
 * Baccano! has a variation: a certain redheaded conductor was presumed to be dead because they did find the body...well, the horrifically mutilated remains that probably used to be his body, anyway.
 * Occurred in Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's with, who fell from the highest floor of the skyscraper he was in, after being attacked by Aslla Piscu. Coupled with the fact that the building's interior collapsed due to the damage, and everyone else in the series who lost a Dark Duel crumbled to dust upon defeat , it seemed at the time like he was well and truely dead. However, as with many examples of this trope, this wasn't quite enough...
 * Occurred in Full Metal Panic! with . Again, and again, and again, and I think again. He just refuses to stay dead. Let's see....
 * In Utawarerumono, Hakuoro had Karula destroy a bridge suspended atop a high cliff with Touka standing in the middle of it. Everyone believed she died as the bridge collapsed, but in the next episode she survived unscratched.
 * It's different in the game. It's Touka who destroys the bridge (by accident) falls down the cliff, but manages to climb back... to the Wrong Side, and gets captured by Hakuoro's soldiers. Characters are understandably embarrassed by her silliness.
 * In Kyo Kara Maoh, Conrart and Yuuri are trapped by a bunch of opposing soldiers, and the last thing Yuuri sees before being forced back to Earth is Conrart getting his arm cut off. When Wolfram and Gwendal get to the scene, all they can find of them is Conrart's arm. He later turns up alive (and with a new arm) as a general for the army opposing Shin Makoku, but everyone pretty much thought he was dead.
 * Also shown later, when Cimaron General!Conrart turns his sword on Yozak and basically pushes him off the side of a cliff. Everyone witnessing thinks Conrart had just killed his best friend since childhood, but at the end of the episode Yozak shows up with the Shin Makoku army as back-up, and with only minor bumps and bruises.
 * It's played with in Simoun, and they seem to enjoy poking the viewer with it. Aresia "dies" in the very first episode, but they never find the body and, perhaps even more telling, she remains in the opening credits to the very last episode. You constantly expect her to reappear, especially when it is revealed that the action that caused her death is also a Time Travel thing-a-ma-jiggy
 * In the Tower Of Paradise arc of Fairy Tail they don't even try to find Jellal's body. They just assume that since since Erza was still alive he must have sacrificed himself to save her (which makes less sense in context), give him a Really Dead Montage, and go on with their lives. When he comes back in a later they're all shocked.
 * They also invert this with, who's body is found immediately after her death but turns out to have never died two years later anyway.
 * Pokémon Hunter J's ship fills with water and explodes, leaving no sign but her glasses floating on the water. Did we just see our first actual human death in the anime?
 * In Bleach three of the Espada sort of vanish after losing.
 * fate is left ambiguous in the anime, as the anime omits the line from the manga where Orihime forgets about him, implying he may still be alive.
 * Happened to  in Mawaru Penguindrum.
 * Happened to  in Mawaru Penguindrum.

Comic Books

 * Originally subverted in Alpha Flight with the death of Guardian. Guardian's suit malfunctions after a battle and his body is seemingly vaporized. A year later someone claiming to be Guardian returned from the dead gave Guardian's wife Heather a implausible story that he was warped through time and space and landed on Jupiter's moon Ganymede centuries in the past and repaired by aliens and sent back to earth in hibernation. The story proves to be false when Guardian is revealed to be the robot Delphine Courtney and that Guardian is really dead. Years later it is revealed that the bizarre story Delphine Courtney seemingly concocted was actually the truth and the real Guardian was indeed alive but now was a cyborg because of the aliens not understanding how human bodies work when they tried to repair Guardian.
 * Pick a comic book character, any comic book character; this trend continues into their animated adaptations.
 * Lampshaded by Robin in the animated Teen Titans. Cyborg tries to assure him that Slade is dead, but Robin reminds him, "We can't be sure. He was never captured. Never found."
 * Lampshaded, then subverted, in Young Justice. After being caught in a massive explosion, teenage supervillain-in-training Harm's body can't be found. After being told nobody could survive that explosion, Robin responds, "guys like that have nine lives." Turns out Harm did escape, only to be shot by his father, who'd spent the last two issues trying to stop him, shoots and kills him. He does come back as a ghost later, though.
 * Despite the fact that Slade . Ironically, it turns out
 * Subverted in the Teen Titans comic. After Terra was revealed as The Mole, she fought the Titans and eventually used her earth-manipulating powers to destroy the underground lair they were in. As they start to dig through the rubble, Beast Boy says that she could've used her powers to escape... and then he finds her body a couple of panels later.
 * Also lampshaded by Batman at the end of A Death in the Family, where the Joker is in a helicopter that crashes into the sea. Batman shouts at Superman: "Find the body!", but he already knows that it won't be found, because the matters between him and the Joker always end up unresolved.
 * The Joker is well known for his frequent use of this trope. One can probably find a handful of other comics and Batman related media that will have the Joker falling to his "death" at the end (or something similar), only for him to show up sometime later without any explanation.
 * One need only to go back to his comic debut, Batman numero uno. Intended as a one-shot character, he was apparently killed, but at an editor's behest Bob Kane scribbled up a final panel that left a back door open in case they wanted to bring back this clownish fellow....
 * Lampshaded by Nick Fury in Ultimate Spider-Man.
 * "There's not too many actual rules to this game of ours but one of the big ones is: if there is no corpse the guy's alive."
 * Implied with steampunk cyborg Nazi Kroenen's backstory comic in the Hellboy movie art book: "In 1956, an unmarked grave was found in Romania. Dental records identified the remains: Karl Ruprecht Kroenen. Many, however, do not believe he is dead... Chief amongst them: Kroenen himself!"
 * Considering that he had already removed his own lips, genitalia, eyelids and replaced his bones with steel and his blood with sand or maybe cocaine by then, teeth don't seem like that big a deal, really.
 * Whenever the Green Goblin appears in a Spider-Man comic and there is doubt as to who it is, Dr. Bart Hamilton is certain to be a suspect. The third man to take the identity, he was presumed to have been killed in an explosion, but not only was his body never found, nobody was ever shown looking for it. Still, he has yet to reappear.
 * The Kingpin realized immediately that Daredevil was still alive when he learned that the car he was locked in and thrown into the river didn't contain his body. Sure, he might have drowned trying to reach the surface and sunk into the mud but...
 * The Flash has often been one of the more Genre Savvy superheroes, and this is no exception. In one issue, the villainous Kadabra is caught in an explosion. A cop says, "There's no body. The blast must have incinerated the corpse. Guess that's the last we've seen of him." Flash looks like him like he's an idiot and responds "you're new to this supervillain thing, aren't you?"
 * According to writer commentary on the Batman tale The Long Halloween,
 * Played straight by Jack Chick: the devil does it in this tract.
 * Averted toward the end of the run of Manhunter, where that incarnation of Manhunter defeats an alien cyborg, watches him burst, burn, and fall from a great height. Then climbs down to confirm the kill, and FINDS him, dead.
 * Again in Swamp Thing. Arcane is using a insect-hybrid body this time. Acrane is exploded, burned, and falls from a great height. And Swamp Thing goes down to check, because this it the third time Arcane came back from the dead. yes, that body is dead, but is that the end?
 * Creator commentary in the trade-paperbacks for 52 discussed the problems associated with killing a character. The writers knew that any reader would automatically view any character death as suspect, so they decided to deliberately avert this trope by showing Booster Gold's corpse. They initially scripted the panel as his body falling to the ground in several pieces, but they thought this came off as hilarious instead of dramatic, so they instead had his desiccated skeleton fall to the ground instead..
 * Invoked pretty much word for word when Dr. Rune falls off a building roof into the river in The Maze Agency Annual #1.
 * Seemingly averted when Calvin's dad once told the story Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablouie with a different ending, at least judging by the way that Hobbes afterwards remarked that "They never found Hamster Huey's body..."
 * In The Adventures of Tintin: Cigars of the Pharaoh, the unidentified drug cartel boss falls off a cliff near the end, but his body is not found. It is revealed in the follow up, The Blue Lotus, that this is none other than Roberto Rastapopoulos, who was reported missing in a newspaper article in Pharaoh.
 * In the first issue of Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing, Swampy goes picking through the remains of Arcane's airship looking for his body. Not, he muses, for the bodies of his friends - he's certain they're dead, given that they lacked superhuman powers and were, well, good guys. He finds all the relevant bodies, even Arcane's.

Fan Works

 * No one ever finds vampire corpses in Luminosity, since the standard method leaves ash that could easily come from several things, including another (Red Shirt) vampire.
 * In Shadows Of The Past Will is surprised to hear that.
 * In The Dilgar War, Jenny immediately asks if they have found Jha'dur's body on the relic of her battlecruiser. It's a curious example, as.

Film
"Marcus Penn: Ryback's gone, Dane. Travis Dane: Did you see the body? Marcus Penn: No, but I assumed... Travis Dane: Assumption is the mother of all FUCKUPS!"
 * In The Fugitive the title character leaps from the top of a dam to avoid being arrested by the feds; he survives the fall.
 * Averted in The Invisible, as Nick's body is eventually found, even though he is Not Quite Dead.
 * In the third X-Men film, body is never found after his death. The only mention of him after that scene is when Wolverine finds one of his personal effects. And the gravestone, of course. But you never hear anyone in that movie say "Gee, I sure miss him; maybe we should have a moment of silence for one of our MOST IMPORTANT teammates!"
 * Don't forget Sabretooth and Toad from the first movie. To this day, their fates are still unclear.
 * Brick Top from Snatch guarantees this by feeding the corpses to pigs. In a scene, he describes the animal's eating process.
 * Subverted in Star Wars Episode III twice. First, when Order 66 is executed and one character is shot off a cliff and falls into the sinkhole, Commander Cody orders his men to keep searching for a body. Again after a battle with Palpatine which ends in his opponent falling to what should be his death, Commander Thire reports that they haven't found the body. In response, Palpatine (or at least, one of his advisors) immediately (and rightly) assumes that he is not dead, and orders Thire to continue searching.
 * Played straight in Return of the Jedi with Boba Fett  up until his extreme popularity proved otherwise.
 * Star Wars actually has a number of these. Mace Windu being another prime example. Generally any Jedi who has a considerable fanbase will have somebody speculating their survival of Order 66 at some point.
 * The Bourne Ultimatum ends this way, but the audience is shown the truth; Genre Savvy Nikki knows the truth as soon as she hears the news report.
 * Stable Time Loop version: The Emilio Estevez movie Freejack, race car driver Alex Furlong appears to die in a car crash in 1991, but his body is secretly teleported into the futuristic year 2009 by a businessman for use as a transplant host. When Alex escapes and looks up his old friend, the friend is unsurprised to see someone who died 18 years ago, because... they never found the body.
 * The original cut of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining had an epilogue in which Wendy is visited in the hospital by the Overlook's manager, Mr. Ullman, who tells her that they never found Jack's body. Kubrick excised this scene shortly after the film's initial premiere.
 * That Hun swine Otto von Bruno's plane crashes at the end of Bullshot, and Professor Fenton states that "his body was never found", but after The Hero and his Love Interest get married, we see Otto disguised as their chauffeur. But that is another tale.
 * In Transformers, we're repeatedly told that they've found no survivors from the attack on the Soccent base in Qatar (save for that one squad). However, since we never actually saw him die, the base commander shows up for a minor role again in the sequel.
 * Wrong. Colonel Sharp (the base commander) and everyone on site was killed. Given that they wiped out their own planet, it's highly doubtful a Decepticon wouldn't be precise in making sure no-one lived through such an experience. The character seen in the sequel (General Morshower) is an entirely different character; different rank and military division. He just happens to be played by the same guy (Glenn Morshower) because apparently the crew liked him a lot.
 * Max Payne is shot by the bad guys and falls into the sea. The bad guys don't bother waiting around to see if he gets back up, they simply presume he is dead. All it took Max was some painkillers and the drug and he was good as new.
 * Rob Zombie's Halloween 2.
 * Every Halloween movie, for that matter. Michael has a habit of pulling disappearing acts after seemingly being killed.
 * Lampshaded twice in Under Siege 2: Dark Territory. With Penn already having bitch-slapped a subordinate for thinking a SEAL team captain could die so easily, he himself falls folly to it and the below dialogue takes place (close to an exact miror of his own earlier speech). As he immediately points out though, alive or not, Ryback is not on the train (since Ryback is the hero, this situation-redeeming fact obviously doesn't last very long):

"Maverick: Well, Porkchop Slim owed me too but he died and his widow used the money for the funeral. Eugene: Oh, they never found the body. Maverick: What? Eugene: They never found his body. Maverick: The widow Porkchop conned me? What is it with people nowadays, anyhow?"
 * In The Film of the Book of The Lord of the Rings, Aragorn plunges off a cliff during the warg battle in the Two Towers. Naturally he proves to be Not Quite Dead.
 * Not to mention Gandalf (though as a Maiar, it's easier for him to come back).
 * In The Stendhal Syndrome, in spite of all the things she does to him before pushing him over a cliff into rapids, Anna refuses to believe the killer is dead.
 * In the American version of Godzilla 1985 Steve Martin pretty much says this about the 1956 version. "Just for the record, they never found a body"
 * Striking Distance: Early in the movie, cop His body is never found, but he is given a funeral.
 * Man on Fire: In the 2004 remake, At the end of the movie it is revealed she is still alive.
 * 28 Weeks Later: Robert Carlyle's character escapes the "zombies", leaving his wife to be killed by them. Later,
 * In his defense, he saw her get taken down but was unable to do anything at that point. Realistically, he had no way of knowing that
 * At the end of The Rock, Stanley Goodspeed claims that John Mason was caught in a missile blast and either vaporized or blown to sea. When this report is made, Mason is standing right next to Goodspeed, totally unharmed. Mason then uses the report of his death to allow him to start a new life.
 * Brazil: They never do find Buttle's body, despite his wife's repeated cries through the film. It's lost in the bureaucracy.
 * The Guard uses this twice- one with  then at the end with.
 * In Eddie and the Cruisers, overanguished Jersey rock star Eddie Wilson fakes his death by driving his car off a bridge into the Raritan River. They Never Found the Body, of course, and Eddie is seen in the last shot watching TV in a shop window. This becomes a plot driver in the sequel, when the Evil Record Company, which is cashing in on some previously unknown Eddie Wilson tracks, uses the lack of a corpse to build excitement by spreading the rumor that the tracks might have been recorded "after Eddie died." All this while Eddie is actually hiding out in Montreal, startled to be suddenly hearing his old music on the radio (sniff). As Agony Booth noted in their recap of the sequel, "Is it even possible in movies for someone whose body was never found to actually be dead?"
 * In The Dead Girl, one character's (Leah) sister was abducted fifteen years ago, and Leah insists (to her mother!) that her sister must have been raped, murdered and dismembered and then hidden somewhere she'll never be found. Much of her plotline deals with trying to find closure.
 * At the End of Batman Begins, Ra's al Ghul is apparently killed when the train car he is in derails and crashes. He has so far not returned, but the fact that we never see his body (along with some of his defining characteristics from the comics) has fueled much fan speculation.
 * Part of Truman's reasoning for why the man he saw could be his father after all in The Truman Show. Naturally, part of the reason for his dad's disappearance and the way he returns follow the soap opera model.
 * Messalina, Messalina insinuates that Messalina and Silius may have escaped the Gardens of Lucullus.
 * Played with in Maverick


 * The Avengers: Partial aversion. appears to die, but the scene cuts away before we find out whether  was really Only Mostly Dead and taken to a hospital room. Fury plays the death for all it's worth in getting the bickering heroes to put aside their differences, but is explicitly shown to be a Consummate Liar about other things . Furthermore, the actor who plays  has said  was assured by Joss Whedon that the character survives, and is rumored to be in talks to appear in future Marvel movies as that character.
 * The Agents of SHIELD television show later revealed that Agent Coulson had died -- or mostly died -- at the time Fury made the announcement to the team, but was later revived to health using highly risky and experimental alien medical science under circumstances that would not be repeatable. He still hasn't let his old friends know he's not dead, though.

Literature
"Mirax: "I could help myself get over this, I think, if I could just finally accept the fact that Corran's dead. Listening to the comlink call when he went in, that was pretty nasty, but we never found a body. I know it's stupid to make anything of that, what with the building coming down on him and all, but my father always said that if you don't see a body, don't count on someone being dead. He did once-" Wedge: "And it cost him his eye. I remember the story.""
 * In Twelfth Night, a supposed dead character is revealed to be alive
 * In Hunger Games trilogy, Katniss and her squad end up doing this as when the Big Bad airs the security footage from their apparent deaths, they only show their faces, as their bodies had not been found. They're still alive, obviously.
 * Ciaphas Cain has gone MIA so many times that the Munitorium gave up and "issued standing instructions that he should be kept on the active roster at all times whatever reports they received to the contrary". Which is why he is still on active roster despite being buried with full military honours.
 * In Dan Abnett's Warhammer 40,000: Gaunt's Ghosts novel The Armour of Contempt, Gaunt is shown MkVenner's grave and later told they had erected it as a propaganda tool after his team had been wiped out without their recovering the body.
 * Also in The Guns of Tanith, a shuttle blows up, but someone onboard  appears later.
 * In Watership Down, General Woundwort is last seen furiously attacking a vicious dog which has driven off most of his military. One of his followers later says that since they never found his body, it meant he wasn't dead, just gone to find a more worthy warren.
 * Eva, mother of Marco and, in the Animorphs books.
 * Agatha Christie used this several times, usually involving a supposed drowning in which the body was swept out to sea.
 * And Then There Were None: The 'Red Herring' death involves a putative drowning.
 * The Miss Marple short story "The Bloodstained Pavement" has an interesting variation. Person A was supposedly swept out to sea; the body washed up in a very battered condition sometime later.
 * In the Miss Marple short story "The Companion", a woman who seems like an obvious suspect for an earlier suspicious drowning leaves a suicide note and herself is presumed drowned; her body is not found. In fact, she
 * The faux-death of Sherlock Holmes at the falls left open the means for Doyle to return to the series after the public hue and cry against the seeming end of it all was so loud that nothing else he wrote had a chance of getting published.
 * Also happens to the villain of The Hound Of The Baskervilles.
 * In Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's Book of the Dead  since there seem to be several cases of this trope in each book of the Agent Pendergast series.
 * Even when there is a body, as with  in the same book.
 * The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: Ichabod Crane, of course. All that was left was his hat and a shattered jack-o-lantern. And they never found the head of the Headless Horseman.
 * Subverted in Rick Riordan's The Last Olympian, where Percy knows that
 * Looking even further back in time, around 200 C.E Achilles Tatius wrote a novel entitled Leucippe and Clitophone where the titular character Leucippe apparently is Killed Off for Real not once but twice. She is captured by desperados (and given up as Human Sacrifice) and after her miraculous return is later captured by pirates and beheaded. In the first case her body is carried away and in the second this trope is slightly subverted when they find the body... of the other women that got beheaded. This makes this trope Older Than Feudalism.
 * Dune expresses it as elegantly as anyone's ever gonna: "We Bene Gesserit have a saying. Do not count a human dead until you see the body; and even then, you can make a mistake."
 * Of course in the world of Dune, a dead person has a chance of coming back by "possessing" one of his descendants  But then, this only works if the descendent also  . And that's assuming.
 * Another counterexample occurs in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars Trilogy: A major character goes missing and never reappears during a raid in the second book.
 * Lampshaded and Subverted Trope in Forgotten Realms: The Lady Penitent Trilogy.
 * Just about everyone in the Star Wars Expanded Universe X-Wing novels, at least the ones written by Stackpole. Of course, counting off, we see...  and all of Rogue Squadron (in fairness, that last featured a couple getting Killed Off for Real, but not the main ones). Several characters note that they just won't stay dead; one even theorized that they were actually getting cloned, after the incident where they were all supposed to have died. Fittingly, he gets shot by one of them as they execute their incredibly over-complicated plan.


 * In John C. Wright's Chronicles of Chaos, the assume   is dead, merely because he was shot with several arrows   and fell into the Abyss. Indeed, ap Cymru justifies talking with him on the grounds it's not disobedience, as he was never forbidden to talk to him.
 * 's "death" in Warrior Cats: no one bothered to try digging up her body after, and it turns out that she actually survived. A minor character - RiverClan elder Duskwater - got swept away in a flood and they never found her body.
 * Played completely straight in State of Fear.
 * Defied Trope in the Warhammer 40,000 novel Grey Knights: The Inquisition sends the Grey Knight expedition down to Khorion IX instead of simply calling Exterminatus on it because they need eyes on the ground to see Ghargatuloth's defeat.
 * A key problem the prosecution has in The Other Side of Midnight with their case against Noelle Page and Larry Douglas for the murder of Catherine, the latter's wife, is that her body was never found.
 * Referenced in Men At Arms. Because no one ever found Big Fido's body, legends that he's leading a wolf pack somewhere in the Ramtops live on, despite the fact that, as the narration points out, he more than likely got "recycled" by one of Ankh-Morpork's street people into a pair of gloves. May also be a reference to the Watership Down example above.
 * Not exactly. Gaspode did find the body, and did see the body get taken away by a vagrant who sold it for the pelt. But none of the other dogs saw the body, so they chose to not believe Gaspode's version of the story.
 * In Les Misérables, the recaptured Jean Valjean risks his life to rescue a man who fell from a ship's rigging; in the process he himself "accidentally" falls into the water, from which his body is never recovered. Guess who turns up a month later in Montfermeil?
 * Lampshaded at times in Andrew Vachss's Burke books with The Dreaded Shrouded in Myth Wesley, who supposedly blew himself up live on television. While Burke, as the closest thing to a friend the man had, is sure he is dead, the rest of the underworld is not because there was not enough left to tell.
 * A Song of Ice and Fire has several of these, some more debated than others and one that's heavily impled regarding an Ensemble Darkhorse.
 * At the climax of Lonely Werewolf Girl Big Bad Sarapen is killed on page Deader Than Dead with a magic knife and yet despite this his body proves to be unrecoverable and goes missing. Uh-huh, wonder who will be back for the sequel then?
 * in The Raw Shark Texts.
 * Simultaneously played straight and Inverted Trope in The Wheel of Time. At the end of the fifth book, Every character assumes them dead, particularly  Every fan assumes this to be an obvious case of No One Could Survive That, which just causes confusion when  But in the thirteenth book,
 * Subverted in the Harry Potter series with, whose body was never found, leading many fans to believe he was still alive. Turns out he really was dead. Specifically, , which is not a survivable or reversible event even if the spell he was hit by seconds earlier was non-lethal.
 * A similar thing happens later with . Special attention is given to the fact that his body is never found, and Ron even suggests he might really be alive.
 * Played straight with Voldemort- it's implied that his body sorta disintegrated by the rebounded Curse and was never actually found.
 * All they ever found of poor Peter Pettirgrew was a finger. Of course.
 * in the second book of The Rampart Worlds. The protagonist, Asahel Frost, worries occasionally about whether he's actually dead.
 * Jack McDevitt's Eternity Road initially looks like it's heading for an Everybody Lives ending, so this trope is used after the first sudden death during a lighthearted section. The second such death . . . not so much.
 * Used as a Survival Mantra by Murphy in Ghost Story and Aftermath. It is painful to read.
 * Invoked by the central character in The Highest Treason by Randall Garrett; facing death or capture, he arranges his death so that no body will be found, deliberately to promote a belief that he somehow got away and one day he'll be back.
 * Nothing but a few feathers is found of Bluddbeak, an old, blind, rheumy red kite from Triss. Considering he went up against a trio of adders, his demise is in no doubt.
 * In Cinder from Lunar Chronicles, it is mentioned that they never found the body of Princess Selene of Luna, whom had apparently died in a fire, since they did find pieces of her burnt flesh. Eventually.
 * Howard Tayler published an annotated compilation of The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries. One of the annotations, handwritten by Captain Tagon, is "If it's alive, it is dangerous. If it's dead, and somebody can't find the body, it is still dangerous."

Live Action TV
"Morgan: You checked for a pulse right? Chuck: ...Well he fell into a river. Morgan: He fell into a river? Of course alive. Haven't you ever seen a John Carpenter movie?"
 * All My Children is a prime offender. Characters go over waterfalls, drive off cliffs, or are lost in wreckage. Rarely is an established longterm character killed off without leaving such an opportunity to return.
 * The first death of Dennis "Dirty Den" Watts in Eastenders was perhaps the longest gap between killed and brought back, 14 years passed.
 * Every time Murdoc "dies" in MacGyver. You'd think Mac would learn to stop knocking him off cliffs.
 * When Harold Bishop was swept off a cliff in Neighbours (though he returned a few years later, alive and well.)
 * Neighbours seems to have a fetish for this trope, especially where the Bishop family is concerned. Liljana Bishop and Serena Bishop also supposedly drowned but no bodies were found. Not to mention Dee Bliss. Connor O'Neill was thought to have been murdered by Robert Robinson after his sudden disappearance but he was later revealed to be alive.
 * It's possible Connor was murdered and his body never found. Nobody has ever seen him in China and the mysterious appearance of his wallet and a gift from China seem a little too convenient in proving Robert didn't kill him.
 * Despite this, one later episode has Steph talking as though he's not only alive but they know how to contact him, so it seems that officially he's now alive.
 * Cigarette Smoking Man on The X-Files was shot by a sniper because of his increasing closeness to Mulder and distance from the rest of The Syndicate, early in Season Five. His body was never found, but there was supposedly too much blood for him to have survived the shooting. He wasn't mentioned again until February Sweeps, when he was revealed to be alive and well and living somewhere in Canada. This was perhaps a bit different from the usual way this trope is played out, since it was pretty clear that the writers intended the death to be temporary from the start and the fans knew it; there was, perhaps, one blind five-year old who'd never seen a TV show before that might have believed CSM was really dead.
 * Scorpius was shot and buried on-screen in an episode of Farscape but that didn't stop him from coming back anyway. Likely due to his huge popularity with fans.
 * The fact that he came back only episodes later makes it pretty clear that this wasn't as much of a Retcon as you make it sound.
 * The sixth season of 24 ends with two baddies - Grechenko and Philip Bauer - supposedly dead, but as their bodies are never actually recovered (and Philip may well have the indestructible Bauer gene), they will almost certainly return in future seasons.
 * Inverted with Stargate SG-1 baddies where finding the body is a prerequisite for the sarcophagus and resurrection. . Because of the number of times he actually survived things like this, the scene was complete with Replicators crawling across his Personal Shield, an inarticulate scream of rage and the viewers actually getting to see the ship crash.
 * It still didn't stop them from making a Lampshade Hanging in the very next episode, when Jack O'Neill, after claiming that there a 100 percent chance of being gone for good. He finds himself looking at the unconvinced faces of those around him and changes it to a 99 percent certainty.
 * Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis both frequently use this trope, with many of the Big Bads simply "dying" by ship explosion or freezing. See Anubis, a few dozen times, as well as most other system lords at least once, and in Atlantis.
 * Given the fact that Anubis has no body, this trope is conspicuously accurate.
 * The cast of Atlantis doesn't believe that Weir is actually dead until told so by her replicator-clone, when they finally pack up her quarters after she's taken out.
 * What with the deaths and returns of, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer variant seems to be "never count a vampire dead unless their bodies turn to dust." And even then, there are ways around it.
 * Invoked improperly after the Spike/Drusilla fight in "What's My Line, Part Two", which takes place in a burning church. Later, in "Surprise", the Scoobies suspect Dru may have survived, with Buffy saying, "We never found a body." Oddly, no one points out that vampires don't leave bodies, and checking for vampire dust in a burned-down church is nigh-impossible.
 * In Ashes to Ashes, it's said that the protagonist of Life On Mars, Sam Tyler, died in a car accident after spending seven years in 1973 onwards. One year later, when Ashes begins, his body has yet to be found.
 * In the opening episode of Series 3
 * It later transpires that
 * The Time Lords. All of them. Allegedly, all of them were erased from existence except for the Doctor. The Daleks were supposedly also wiped out as well, but that's been proved wrong many times now.
 * in the early second season of Dark Angel. It's revealed in the last book that.
 * Daytime soap As the World Turns has (a lot, like all soaps, but this one in particular is) Colonel Mayer, who jumped into the ocean to avoid being captured by the police. He is presumed dead by the entire cast, but the viewers just KNOW he'll turn up again the second something is needed to drive (another) wedge between Luke and Noah.
 * And it is confirmed, the Colonel will be back to Oakdale shortly.
 * Days of Our Lives, with the original "death" of Roman Brady.
 * A grisly subversion in Bad Girls - Prisoner Yevone Atkins. Apart from Jim Fenner (her prison officer killer) everyone else thinks she has escaped, which was her plan. The problem: the building plan she and her escape partner had used didn't feature a wall which turned a corridor into a cell because the door to the corridor only opened from the outside. Fenner shut the door behind her and left her there. Her escape partner after spending weeks in solitary confinement (for a different matter) saw the escape route as still being viable as it wasn't discovered by the prison officers. She goes to make her escape only to find the wall blocking her path and Yevone's rotting corpse.
 * In Moonlight, Mick stabbed his wife Coraline and left her trapped in a burning building. Taking a No One Could Survive That attitude, he never actually saw her ashes.
 * One of the earliest mysteries on Lost involved Jack seeing hallucinations of his dead father on the island. When Jack finally found his father's coffin, the body was not inside. Over the course of the series, Jack's father started appearing more and more often, and to other character to whom he may or may not have any connection, and even began interacting with them, casting obvious doubt on whether or not "hallucination" is really a good term to use.
 * Later, Eko discovers his dead brother's corpse in the drug smuggling plane. But when he returns sometime later, the body has vanished. Suddenly, his brother starts walking around and interacting with Eko. Eko finally has a conversation with the "hallucination" of his brother and addresses him as such. The person then replies "you speak to me as if I were your brother" and walks off, leaving Eko rather confused. When Eko pursues the individual, . This scene cemented in many fans' minds the theory that the smoke monster can impersonate others if it has a body to steal.
 * Confirmed in season 5, when is quite clearly the Smoke Monster judging.
 * This theory ends up being thrown for a loop in season 5. 's body is brought back to the island, and keeping with this theory, most fans assumed he'd come back to life. Sure enough, he did. Except then he began acting strange, turning into a Jerkass, and annoying Ben and Richard among others. In the season finale, a group of survivors from the new plane crash bring with them a container...and inside is  . As it would turn out, the mysterious archnemesis of Jacob (who had never been introduced before that episode) was.
 * In an instance not involving the smoke monster, Frank Lapidus is hit by a steel door pushed in . We see, but we don't see Lapidus' body and we were lead to believe this was the last we would see of him.
 * From that same scene, brutally subverted with . The audience knows he's dead, but Hurley says something to effect of "We gotta save too!" and Jack screams that there's no  left to save.
 * The original Stig on Top Gear, who drove off an aircraft carrier, leaving only a black glove behind. Word of God states, however, that he was Killed Off for Real.
 * On Smallville, Clark has a routine of x-raying the graves of anyone who's supposed to be dead, like Emily Dinsmoore or Chloe, determining whether or not there's a body.
 * When Lex was stranded on a deserted island his father buried a coffin for him thinking that he must be dead.
 * Subverted in Sanctuary.
 * "Your father said you fell into a bonfire, and were swept into the sea, and then your body was eaten by rats." "Well, yeah, but I didn't die."
 * This happens to Nicole Wallace in the Law and Order: Criminal Intent episode "Great Barrier."
 * Nicole again and is Goren's reaction on when Nicole Wallace's heart is found, but a lab tech confirms it is, indeed, a DNA match. (Of course, if anyone could spoof that...)
 * It is later confirmed that Goren's teacher admitted he did in fact kill her.
 * This confirmation is sketchy, since that entire conversation, as well as previous ones, make it clear that the guy is absolutely out of his mind. He may have only thought he killed Nicole, and Nicole is certainly capable of using that to her advantage. Still, we may never truly know whether Nicole really is dead or not.
 * Lynn Echolls in Veronica Mars. Her abandoned car is found by a bridge and her body was never found. Her death is confirmed when Logan discovers his stepsister using Lynn's credit cards and later learns that his mother had left everything to him.
 * Victor Comstock is struck and killed by a falling bomb during a broadcast from London at the end of Season 1 of Remember WENN.
 * Beautifully lampshaded on Chuck in regards to

"Ryan:, alive? Castle: Her body was never found. Beckett: Yeah, because she was vaporized in the explosion. Castle: Well, maybe she was thrown clear."
 * In The Avengers, Mrs. Peel's husband Peter is discovered to be alive in the Amazon after a plane crash years ago, signaling her character's exit from the series.
 * Babylon 5:, on a hostile planet, drops a nuclear bomb on his own location. While jumping into a bottomless pit. The other cast members can't even make sense of the reports about what happened, let alone find the body.
 * In the Distant Finale, his ship was found with sealed airlocks and no trace of him on board. Some of the Minbari believe he'll eventually return.
 * In the TV miniseries of Dune, Genre Savvy villain Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, upon receiving news that Paul and Jessica Atreides were dead after flying into a sandstorm, asks explicitly, "You've...seen the bodies?" He was right to doubt. The interesting part, though, is whether the Baron is truly Genre Savvy or not. In the novel it is more explicit, but his entire plan is based upon the fact that this means of executing Paul and Jessica would not leave bodies. Once his underlings are gone he himself states that they are undoubtedly dead, that nothing could possibly survive a sandstorm, and he was stressing the need to find the bodies as an educational experience to never take anything for granted, not because he actually feels this situation requires a body to be definite.
 * To be fair, the Baron's original plan was for Paul and Jessica to be stabbed to death and then have their bodies disposed of in the desert, so that the Baron would not have to officially account for their deaths. So there would be a point in his original plan at which their corpses were definitely visible to, and confirmed to be dead by, the Baron's minions. The part that has the Baron upset is the fact that at the last moment they were visible to anyone else both of his intended murder victims were visibly still alive, and so he has no assurance that they won't continue to stay that way.
 * Romana in Doctor Who. While the Time War is believed to have wiped out all the Time Lords but the Doctor and the Master, Romana had gone to E-Space a while beforehand, and it's never been stated if she came back for the war or not. She's potentially still out there.
 * In one episode of Castle, a murder makes no sense... until near the end, Castle realizes this about an important participant in an event that took place 20 years earlier:


 * Invoked in Band of Brothers when Easy Company is pulling out of a Danish town swarming with Germans. Denver "Bull" Randleson was seperated from the main force and forced to hide until he can escape. Meanwhile his friends are trying to organize a rescue, and when told he was probably dead one responded "If there ain't no body then there ain't nobody dead."
 * At the beginning of Power Rangers Zeo, the rangers find out Rito and Goldar had been caught in the explosion that destroyed the Command Center. No sign of their bodies had been found but Adam Park was sure there was no way they could have survived the explosion. Unlike the rangers, the viewers soon learned Adam was wrong.
 * At the end of the Burn Notice episode "Dead to Rights," a building explodes, killing recurring villain Larry and two Red Shirt security guards. However, the next day's newspaper headline simply said that two people were killed in the blast, indicating that Larry (who makes a habit of this) is still Not Quite Dead.
 * CSI New York: Det. Taylor's wife died on 9/11 and not a speck of her DNA has ever been found . Considering that, you know, 9/11 actually happened and thousands of real people died and haven't been found she's probably not going to show up with amnesia in the season finale.
 * In the CSI episode "The List", the cops Never Found the Body but did find a torched car filled with the victim's blood and believed that proved she was dead.
 * In Once Upon a Time, the only thing found of  is the heart. In The Stable Boy,
 * Subverted three times on Sherlock. First,  fakes her death. Sherlock views the body himself and confirms that it is hers, but she's still alive. They reconcile, and later she fakes her death again. Mycroft is positive that she is, in fact, dead this time, he says   Finally, in the season finale,
 * Also invoked by many fans of . However, a tie-in news report posted online doesn't mention a body being discovered, so many people think he'll return.

Music

 * The pilot in Kim Wilde's song "Cambodia" goes missing in action just when his wife is expecting him to return home.

Professional Wrestling

 * WWE chairman Vince McMahon's on-screen death in a car bombing already had wrestling fans speculating about how long it would take him to come back the day after it aired, both because this trope was repeatedly invoked, and because, even off-screen, McMahon is a Large Ham who has a problem taking himself off TV voluntarily. It eventually became a moot point, as the storyline was largely abandoned in the wake of wrestler Chris Benoit's real-life murder/suicide, with McMahon returning a few weeks later and handwaving the whole thing.

Tabletop Games

 * Outright suggested to the DM in Shadowrun's fourth edition rulebook, as a story-telling sleight of hand to avoid having to do in important NPCs before their time, regardless of what the rules and dice would otherwise say.
 * Dungeons & Dragons
 * The original Dragonlance modules for Dungeons & Dragons suggested this tactic to the Dungeon Master, as the Myth Arc of the adventures relies on several key NPCs surviving until the end.
 * Module 16 Ravenloft. In the Backstory, Tatyana threw herself from the walls of Ravenloft castle and disappeared in the mists. Her body was never found. She appears in the module in another body, under the name Ireena Kolyana.
 * This is later expanded in the Ravenloft setting. Strahd continually obsesses about Tataya, even centuries after her supposed death, and for his crime he is continually haunted by her image, or women that look just like her. Even if she somehow survived, the Dark Powers torment him endlessly with the possibility that he can find and have her, even though in the end, he never will.
 * The GURPS Advantage Extra Life is designed so that "no matter how sure your enemies are that you have been killed you'll come back". Of course, for purposes of game balance you have to pay points of each Extra Life.
 * Encouraged for Game Masters in the PDQ-system superhero game Truth & Justice. Where heroes get Hero Points to spend on bursts of luck and desperation-fueled skill, villains get Villain Points to spend on "really" being robot clones (and thus never being in the fight in the first place), to have their body never be found, or to make miraculous escapes from prison. Given the free-form nature of power acquisition in the game, it's entirely reasonable to have "Body Never Found" be a standard power for some villains, as a form of immortality.
 * In Warhammer Fantasy Battles vampires are quite fond of this.
 * Warhammer Fantasy Battle and Warhammer 40,000 in general now tend to use this when special characters come to grief - if one "falls" in battle, expect them to make a miraculous (or diabolical) recovery, have the reports of the death somewhat in doubt as propaganda or simple error, or just have them "falling in the swirl of battle" somewhere and coming back. Somehow.
 * The Death Defiance Heroic Knack in the Adventure! RPG allows for cases of this in order to come back when people think you're dead.
 * Spirit of the Century has a stunt that lets Player Characters do this, but it's generally assumed that if anyone dies offscreen, then they're liable to come back. The stunt just lets you come back in the same session.
 * In Hong Kong Action Theatre, a character with the Mysterious Death signature move never dies in a way that would leave no doubt, and usually involves something that engineers a Never Found the Body situation. Then, upon spending all your Chi pool or a number of Star Power points, the character can come back.
 * When someone in Magic: The Gathering dies and doesn't leave a corpse, chances are they just became a planeswalker.

Toys

 * In Bionicle, Word of God made it the official rule. Death off-screen, not found the body? So don't believe what other character say, they will come back.

Video Games

 * Played straight in Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist by Sierra, where at the end of the game.
 * Kane in the Command & Conquer series.
 * GDI had an excuse the first time: Kane stood at ground zero of an ion cannon blast. Given the shown power of an Ion Cannon of the period, there wouldn't be a body left to find.
 * Amanda in Tomb Raider Legend. She apparently drowned during the flashback sequence, but when Lara returns to the cavern in the present day, there are no remains except an untied shoe. Later revealed to be Not Quite Dead.
 * At the end of Last Revelation, the temple of Seth collapses, and there seems to be no way Lara could survive it. As shown at the end of Chronicles, the recovery team found her backpack, but not the body. She was Not Quite Dead yet. Although she suffered a Fate Worse Than Death gameplay-wise in Angel of Darkness. Heck, this whole story arc was retconned out when Crystal Dynamics took over the series.
 * Played straight in Call of Duty 4, where at the end of a special flashback mission the target you are assassinating gets hit in the arm. Your commanding officer congratulates you "Good shot Lieutenant, I think you blew off his arm. Shock and blood loss should do the rest.". Cut back to the present and it turns out that target
 * This happens in Call of Duty Black Ops. During the mission Vorkuta Reznov and Mason orchestrate a prison break from a Russian Gulag that ends with them being the only two prisoners that successfully escape. Once outside the prison Reznov distracts their pursuers by drawing the Russians away from their escape train believing that freedom could only be achieved for Mason, though Reznov is seen later on. Later it is revealed that  Though it is revealed that the body was never found and   things are looking up for his survival.
 * Jankowski in FEAR vanishes early on in the game. Although he continues to appear as a ghostly figure from time to time, his eventual fate is left unknown.
 * The World Ends With You, averts, inverts and subverts this trope repeatedly. In the game world losers bodies are erased. Averted because despite erasure being a kind of super-death, no trace of the body is found (at most an item of importance to the npc will found post-erasure.) Inverted because Dragon #2's/'s body is found intact, some fans speculate he's still alive. Subverted in a previous battle between  the latter explodes a 'nuke' that presumably erases them both. Although they both turn up alive again, it's only through use of a revival. planned his own death.
 * In The Matrix Online, they Never Found the Body of Neo... leading to several Epileptic Trees and Urban Legends about his current status. (Alive? Dead? Reincarnated? Assimilated by the Machines? The world may never know.)
 * Despite the backstory not being revealed until, well, the final act, the main villain of Killswitch had this happen.
 * The Ace Attorney series had this happen with . She turned out to be alive.
 * Pulled in an earlier game with  though we knew she was alive before the trope came up.
 * And played with
 * SNK pulled this with Geese Howard and Rugal Bernstein. Geese's version was more complex: he plummets off of the top floor of his tower in the first game, but manages to survive by the skin of his teeth. Then his next plot involves him achieving Immortality by using the Jin scrolls. It's implied that when he is Killed Off for Real (by getting a second boot off the tower from Terry) that when he falls to his apparent death, the body is not found. Rugal's was more subtle. He self-destructs his own aircraft carrier, and is presumed dead because there were no remains after the crash. This has caused speculation that the Rugal in '95 is an experimental clone used to monitor the Orochi power. It's also implied that he's working with NESTS somehow, as seen in 2002. Also, he doesn't flicker away like all the other "dead" strikers like Goenitz.
 * Invoked in Final Fantasy VIII. At the end of one disc, Squall is impaled on an ice lance by Edea and falls off a parade float, and the rest of the party are unable to recover his body. This is because the next disc opens with Squall having been captured, and he's sitting in a Galbadian prison. Might have been intended to trick the players into thinking Square Would Really Do It, by evoking another main character who was Impaled with Extreme Prejudice at the end of a disc and didn't fare so well.
 * Turned Up to Eleven in Final Fantasy Legend 3 when Dion reveals he has a bomb built into his body as a last resort - which he then uses, blowing himself to kingdom come to eliminate an enemy forcefield. With just a couple tissue samples, the local super-scientist is able to fully reconstitute both Dion and the hero's years-dead father in a matter of moments - all memories intact.
 * Resident Evil does this frequently; the most recent example though has  out a window and they proceeded to fall off a cliff. Their bodies were never found and they're presumed dead. Turns out
 * Of course, considering the series, sometimes the person is dead, but you don't find the body because it got up and walked away anyway.
 * Somewhat subverted in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, where the game's intro has Solid Snake infiltrate a tanker carrying a new Metal Gear, and then watch as a group of Russian terrorists take over. He goes into the hold where the Metal Gear is kept, and then witnesses . Shortly afterwards, the tanker explodes, and Snake is presumed dead. From then on, you play as Raiden, and soon enough you encounter and team up with the oddly-familiar Pliskin, who makes repeated attempts to assure you that Snake is dead. It's mentioned that they did find the body. Although it was missing an arm for some reason. Minor detail.
 * in the Mega Man Zero series, after . All that remained.
 * Kirei Kotomine of Fate Stay Night in UBW where Tohsaka asks Caster if she made sure Kirei was really dead, and had she made sure to check the body?
 * Inverted in a particularly bizarre way in Planescape: Torment. Your character is an amnesiac, regenerating immortal. At one point, you find your own corpse, and can wield your own desiccated, mummified arm as a club.
 * Subverted in Devil Survivor. Aya is a major character in the backstory, who Even when you go there at the game's end, you never find her.
 * In Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom, Irene Lew is proclaimed dead after she falls from a cliff and into the sea while being chased by Ryu's evil Doppelganger. It turns out she was just hiding.
 * Also, Ken Hayabusa in the first NES game.
 * In the Return to Ostagar DLC for Dragon Age Origins  is noticeably missing. You can find   but.
 * A Dalish Elf Warden can play this card throughout their origin whenever they're discouraged from
 * Ad Avis in Quest for Glory.
 * Halo: For troop morale, "Spartans never die!", they only get listed as Missing in Action. Given the missions they are sent on, there are rarely any bodies to cover up.
 * Turalyon and Alleria in World of Warcraft.
 * Bolvar Fordragon and Dranosh Saurfang, whose shield and armor respectively were all that could be found of them after their would-be deaths at the Wrathgate. To the surprise of the other characters, but not the playerbase, both of them showed up again in Icecrown Citadel.
 * Many characters in the old world, after a big dragon re-emerges with a vengeance in the Cataclysm expansion.
 * In the Red Ridge Mountains, takes on the black dragon Darkblaze and die in a Heroic Sacrifice; while the rest of the team dies during the fight, their leader,  leaps on the dragon and kills it mid-flight. His body does show up, alive and well, continuing the fight after taking another 30 levels of Badass.
 * Occurs in Far Cry 2 with.
 * The Tekken series does this a lot. In Tekken 3, Ogre killed a bunch of people and absorbed some of their moves. However, since it wasn't said outright, there is a plausible out for future games. Wang, Bruce, Lee, Anna and Baek were revealed to be OK, but Kunimitsu is "probably" dead. As for ... Well, Word of God is still avoiding a straight answer 12 years later.
 * There are also several characters that, if not immortal beings, have identical successors (King and Armor King, Roger, Kuma, Law, possibly Yoshimitsu) or cyborg reincarnates (Alyssa, Brian), or are robots (All the various Jacks).
 * By the way, that is before counting the Mishimas, who frequently get shot, laser blasted, burnt, blown up, trapped, flung off cliffs, thrown out of helicopters, and in one notorious case dropped into a volcano, with no ill effects.
 * In Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, when you defeat a boss they fade away. however, does not., leading fans to wonder whether he's actually dead or not.
 * While Demise is pretty soundly defeated in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, the fate of his servant  Ghirahim (arguably the true main antagonist of the story) is left ambiguous - when Demise is freed, Ghirahim assumes his true form, that of the of the Demon King's Sword, which Demise uses in the Final Battle against Link. When Demise is defeated, Ghirahim simply disappears, and he has yet to return in any of the canon timelines. Some fans have theorized that other Evil Weapons in the franchise such as those used by  Vaati and  Majora might have been him, but this is unconfirmed.
 * While Demise is pretty soundly defeated in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, the fate of his servant  Ghirahim (arguably the true main antagonist of the story) is left ambiguous - when Demise is freed, Ghirahim assumes his true form, that of the of the Demon King's Sword, which Demise uses in the Final Battle against Link. When Demise is defeated, Ghirahim simply disappears, and he has yet to return in any of the canon timelines. Some fans have theorized that other Evil Weapons in the franchise such as those used by  Vaati and  Majora might have been him, but this is unconfirmed.

Web Comics
"Sam: He's gone for good. Fuzzy: You don't know that! Sam: Fuzzy... Fuzzy: We only saw him fall! He might have survived! We never saw the body! Fuzzy: Oh... Nevermind, there it is. And there's some more of it over there!"
 * Lampshaded, subverted and parodied in short order in Sam and Fuzzy after arc villain takes a dive down the side of.

""I always wondered how he planned to run off and leave you holding the bag. Impressive.""
 * Oasis, from Sluggy Freelance, has been killed and returned several times; the trope was lampshaded here. Later on, it became a plot point that you might actually
 * Subverted brutally with . Torg sees their piloted robot burn up, but since there are no bodies and he knows the DFA is built in, he assures Gwynn it will be okay.
 * Subverted in this strip of Narbonic: "I watched the villagers burn you at the stake, chop your corpse into little pieces, and hop all over them!" "There's always an out, Beta. Remember that."
 * Also, this strip about ANTONIO SMITH, FORENSIC LINGUIST.
 * In Adventurers!, a dimensional distortion swallows Argent and Garshask while they were fighting. Genre Savvy Karn insists that since no bodies were found, they're obviously still alive.
 * And in another incident, after Big Bad Khrima accidentally destroyed a magic crystal, wrecking a sizable part of his fortress, Drecker mentions that Khrima hasn't been heard from in months. Ardam speculates that he might have died in the accident, and wonders if they've seen the last of him. There is a pause, then both heroes burst out laughing.
 * Subverted in The Adventures of Dr. McNinja. Though Frans Rayner's body is never recovered, his death is confirmed when Death is heard inviting Frans Rayner to purgatory.
 * ...but played straight with.
 * ...And now possibly Double Subverted or at least lampshaded.
 * In The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob, Fructose Riboflavin was presumed dead for centuries before he turned up alive in Earth's solar system.
 * Several times in Kevin and Kell; Fenton, Vin,.
 * Discussed and lampshaded in The Order of the Stick, here. Apparently, being Genre Savvy requires you to be Genre Blind.
 * Seems to be going on in Girl Genius. Baron Wulfenbach died when his hospital exploded—but his body wasn't found, and indeed, one of his aides tried to rescue him before the hospital exploded and couldn't find him. When his son notes this, he's told that the Baron left clear orders: if the Baron ever seemed dead, they should immediately proclaim his son the new Baron.

Web Original
"Grif: I'll tell you what: you produce a corpse, I'll believe it. Simmons: Huh? Grif: Listen, once when we were kids, we went ice skating, and she fell through the ice. She was under there for three hours, and when they pulled her out, not only was she still alive, she was pregnant. If you can explain that to me, I'll believe you when you tell me she's dead."
 * In Red vs. Blue,  fell off a cliff after suffering injuries that no one else could survive, hooked to a falling Pelican. His body was ID'd by the army, as implied by the fact that the guy debriefing the Reds and Blues saying that they'd found three freelancers, and there were only three at Avalanche, including the aforementioned.
 * Played straight with . Invoked and lampshaded while he's hanging there.
 * Invoked in Relocated. Lopez claims he killed Sister back at Blood Gulch. Grif doesn't believe it.

Western Animation

 * Many times throughout Batman: The Animated Series and in the rest of the DCAU The Joker seemingly faces his demise, only to turn up later unharmed.
 * Batman: Mask of the Phantasm has Joker being taken away by The Phantasm, presumably to be killed. Guess who showed up later in the series, unharmed? Go on, guess!
 * An episode of the animated series called "Mad Love" (which was based off an earlier DCAU comic story) had Joker plummeting into a smoke stack. Later on, Harley Quinn is in her cell at Arkham, and she sees a rose from Joker next to her bed.
 * In The Batman/Superman Movie Joker is left for dead in a falling airplane; with explosions going on all around him, Joker simply laughs as the aircraft plummets into the water. A news reporter says that it is unlikely that Joker survived.... yeah right.
 * Batman Beyond (which is part of the above mentioned DCAU) has a few examples:
 * After Blight is trapped in a sinking/exploding submarine, Going Critical, Batman drops by Paxton Powers' office. The Coincidental Broadcast mentions that Blight's remains have yet to be found. Paxton smirks and says "So, he melted with the sub." Batman responds "Sure he did," and walks off. Possibly a subversion, since Blight never showed up again.
 * The situation is repeated in "Inqueling" after Inque's daughter Deanna doublecrosses her mother. In an echo of the previous scene with Paxton Powers, Batman turns up to warn Deanna not to get too comfortable: "She's been dead before." Sure enough, Inque reappears in "The Call, Part 1," proving Terry right. Deanna's fate is never mentioned. She's last seen reacting fearfully to every shadow, as her shapeshifting mother could be literally anywhere.
 * In The Movie, Harley Quinn seemingly falls to her death after her fight with Batgirl. Gordon does point out that a body was never recovered, but doubts Harley would be starting trouble again after decades.
 * Other examples in the DCAU:
 * In the Batman: The Animated Series Batman's second encounter with a villainous ninja, Kyodai Ken, ends with the ninja stranded on a rock in the middle of a lava flow. Despite all that has passed between them, Batman throws a line and offers to try and pull him to safety. Kyodai refuses to take it, and he presumably dies seconds later. While this may have set up the possibility for a return, he never appeared again, so he most likely did perish.
 * In "The Clock King", Fugit's body is never found when the clock tower collapses, but Batman doubts he was killed, telling Gordon, "If I could escape, he could". And Batman is right on this one.
 * In part 2 of "Secret Society", Clayface is seemingly blown to pieces by a cache of fireworks, and no trace of him remains. Again, this was his last appearance in the series, so one can assume he didn't survive.
 * At the end of "Moon of the Wolf", Anthony falls into a river; his body is never found, and the episode ends with his house being sold off to pay his creditors. While Bullock suggests the police are still looking for him, he never reappeared, so he likely didn't survive. Even if he did, the antidote is destroyed, meaning he would be a werewolf forever, possibly an even worse fate.
 * A crime in the Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers episode "To The Rescue" has all the earmarks of a crime committed by Aldrin Klordane, who is supposed to have drowned over a year ago. However... . Detective Drake points out the possibility of his survival using the title of this trope.
 * The finale of Kung Fu Panda is surprisingly silent on this subject. While the Wuxi Finger Hold is never expressly claimed to be fatal, the reactions of Po and Tai Lung (and Shifu's expression when he threatens to use it) all suggest it is at least likely to batter someone to a pulp, if not unsurvivable—and the suspiciously-shaped cloud after Po uses it would suggest there isn't anything left. Whether to avoid the typical Disney Villain Death, as a Sequel Hook, or because the snow leopard is just too Badass to kill off, however,
 * In the original Star Wars: Clone Wars animation,  is thrown off a temple on Yavin 4 and is presumably killed.
 * Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has a variation. The Shredder at first presumes the Turtles are dead after the villain purposely ruptures a gas main to destroy April's antique store while she and the heroes have barricaded themselves in a storeroom. Naturally, they escaped, and hide out at her parents' farm for a while. Shredder, meanwhile, starts to have doubts about it, despite Baxter Stockman assuring him that his foes are gone; so Shredder orders him to prove it. Stockman thus uses his Mouser robots to search the burnt-out ruins with a fine-toothed comb, but to his regret, finds no forensic evidence whatsoever that anything died in the explosion. Fearing what Shredder will do to him if he comes back empty handed, he decides to plant some genetic material from a common turtle, and this fools Shredder into thinking he's finally seen the last of them... until the Turtles actually show up to challenge him again.
 * In the Season 2 finale of Teen Titans Slade is thrown into a pit of lava. Later, in the third season, Robin comments that "he was never captured, never found" to justify his Slade paranoia. Cyborg immediately points out the absurdity of it all, "The dude fell in a pit of lava, who lives through something like that?"
 * In one episode of Justice League, some of Superman's enemies teamed up and attacked him with a gun that makes everything disappear. There was no sign of Superman's body or anything that might have been his body but Batman was the only one who saw it as a reason to doubt Superman actually dying. Vandal Savage also figured out Superman was alive (he was sent to the future) but it's not clear if he already suspected it from the beginning.
 * 1973/74 Superfriends episode "Dr. Pelagian's War". Professor Ansel Hillbrand was a brilliant marine biologist and engineer. Aquaman suspects that he's actually the Big Bad Dr. Pelagian, but an investigation discovers that Dr. Hillbrand died five years earlier in a deep sea diving accident. Oddly enough, his body was never discovered. Guess who Dr, Pelagian turns out to be?
 * Heroic example, in an episode of DC Super Hero Girls, Supergirl gets beaten up by Livewire in a very public battle, and with no body found, everyone assumes she is dead. She is not, of course, and decides this is a good opportunity to start afresh and improve her image with a new identity - she becomes Power Girl.

Real Life

 * Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt went swimming and never came back.
 * To say nothing of Jimmy Hoffa, Amelia Earhart, Richey James Edwards, the crew of the Mary Celeste, and all the other examples.
 * Also John Darwin, whose empty canoe was found in the sea after he disappeared on a canoeing trip. Five years later, he appeared at a police station claiming to have lost his memory- and eventually convicted, along with his wife, of defrauding his insurance company.
 * There's also musician Gerry Rafferty, who hadn't been seen since August 2008 when he left all of his belongings behind at a London hospital and eventually died in early 2011 of complications probably related to his history of alcoholism.
 * Though Amelia's things were possibly found.
 * Similarly to Amelia Earhart, they never found out what happened to Antoine Saint-Exupery, the author of The Little Prince, who vanished in his plane. They did find his plane after 60 years.
 * Natalee Holloway. According to one of Joran's confessions, she apparently had a seizure and passed out or died in his arms, then they dumped the body in the ocean. The chance of finding her now is pretty much nil. Hence, no closure.
 * Famous latino lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta, close friend of Hunter S. Thompson, and inspiration for the character Doctor Gonzo in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, in 1974 went sailing on the Gulf of Mexico, on a really small boat, right before a big storm. Never been found.
 * Spartacus. It's generally accepted by historians that he died in the final battle, but his body was never found.
 * Roald Amundsen, and the other passengers of the disappeared plane he was on.
 * Percy Fawcett went into the Brazilian wilderness with his son and his son's best friend looking for a Lost World. Like Earhart he got something of an Elvis legend with his fanclub. Unlike her Fawcett had the fact that he could be termed "odd" or less kindly, completely bonkers to give his disappearance added zest. Naturally it is assumed that something interesting happened even though skeptics might say he just died of fever like most people who die on the trail in the tropics. And there is no particular reason for the body to be found as the jungle is a pretty big place and Fawcett was going off the main routes.
 * Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon King is a Zig-Zag. There were all sorts of accounts of what happened to him. The best that can be determined is that he was mauled unrecognizably and then stripped naked by looters. According to one romantic and gruesome legend his grieving lover, Edith Swanneck was forced to identify the remains by his killers by means of using "private" marks (presumably right in front of irreverent Normans). Then he was supposedly buried under a pile of rocks by the sea instead of a Churchyard, so it could be said that his ghost forever after watched England in death in case more enemies came. That is just one of the tales. There are several other tales one including the possibility that he survived and became a monk or a hermit.
 * Azaria Chamberlain, in Australia.
 * Henry Hudson was cast adrift by his mutinous crew, never to be seen again.
 * Keith Anderson, father of Jake Anderson from Deadliest Catch. His truck was found locked with the keys in the ignition and blood on the steering wheel, and that's about it.
 * Brazilian footballer Bruno was arrested due to the disappearance of a former lover. Police consensus is that she's dead (the corpse was allegedly fed to dogs).
 * Byzantine Roman Emperor Constantine XI's body was never found after he went down fighting in the fall of Constantinople. Legend has it that he did not die, but got turned to marble and awaits beneath the city, ready to return one day and take it back.
 * Ambrose Bierce, American author and journalist, went off to Mexico in 1913 to observe the revolution and disappeared without a trace.
 * New York State Supreme Court Justice Joseph Crater vanished after having dinner with friends on August 6, 1930.
 * In 1944, swing musician Glenn Miller was on a flight to France to entertain the US troops when his plane disappeared over the English Channel.
 * A BBC documentary unearthed compelling evidence that his aircraft had the misfortune to stray off-course into a designated ordnance jettison zone over the Channel, just as a Lancaster bomber that had been forced to break off from a raid with mechanical problems was ditching a particularly large "blockbuster"; one of its crew testified to seeing an aircraft of the type Miller was aboard in the area shortly before the bomb-load was ditched. Nevertheless, a search of the seabed in the area failed to turn up an identifiable wreck of the same plane.
 * The Russian Civil War hero Chapaev officially perished in 1919 while trying to swim across the Ural River under enemy fire. His body was never found (although some claim he was actually buried on a spot which is underwater now). Several works of fiction (published both during the Soviet times and after the collapse of the Soviet Union) have played with the idea that he had survived and had further adventures.
 * One such work was an official 1941 propaganda short film featuring Chapayev getting out of water and leading the people against the invaders. Talk about a slow swimmer...
 * Pretty much the basis for anyone who thinks Osama Bin Laden was not killed by a team of Americans as Obama announced he was. Although it has been officially confirmed, some still have doubt due to the fact that Obama never released any pictures of Osama's body before it was given a burial at sea.
 * Actor Pierre Kirby, who played in a few martial arts movies made most of his money through... delivering yachts in South East Asia. He didn't come back after one of those. Someone presumably saw him some time later in a hotel in Hong Kong. After calling out his name he turned around and walked away, never to be seen again.
 * This is the reason people generally aren't declared dead until a body is recovered. There is "Missing, Presumed Dead" for those No One Could Survive That situations, but you never can tell...
 * Many 9/11 victims. Some may have been vaporized in the fires and explosions.
 * This caused concern when it was realized the debris that had to be cleared might include (unrecognizable) human remains.
 * During World War I Major Whittlesey and his Battalion had been cut off from all Allied Support and was stuck behind the enemy line of the Germans. Despite having hundreds of his men killed and wounded, and having very little ammo and food to survive with he decided to hold the line so that the Germans would not be able to advance forward and compromise the positions of the nearby American command who they had lost contact with. It even got to the point that the Germans demanded that the Major and his Battalion surrender, which he treated with contempt and threw the white flag they offered as a sign that he agreed with the surrender back at them. American reinforcements eventually came and the Major was promoted to Lt. Colonel and given a Medal of Honor. After the war he went home to America and was viewed as a war hero who was requested upon to attend numerous social gatherings and the stress of the war and all the societal demands being made on him began to bother him. One day in 1921 he was on a boat to New York and by morning he was gone and never seen again; it is thought to have been suicide as he had many letters in his room relating to what would happen to his property after his death.
 * Adolf Hitler's body was believed to not have been found. In fact, the Russians did find it and didn't tell anyone.
 * That's been called into question; recent forensic testing on the remains show that the skull the Russians claimed was Hitler's is most likely a woman's skull. The test themselves are suspect, however, as the Russians cut the time the team was promised to examine the remains from three days to three hours.
 * The US military uses the "foot on the body" standard for counting sniper kills for this reason: an enemy killed by sniper fire isn't counted as dead unless a US or allied soldier is able to put his foot on the body, or a similar level of certainty is obtained through other methods.
 * Cases of a man dissappearing, missing for over a year and getting declared legally dead, his wife remarrying and his belongings inherited by his legal inheritors, only for him to turn up alive three years later are very common case studies in law school. "Based on a real case" disclaimers optional, but are usually there.