The Perfect Crime: Difference between revisions

== [[Fan Works]] ==

* ''[[Harry Potter and The Methods of Rationality]]'': When considering this trope, Harry considers the standard proverb "there's no such thing as a perfect crime" and comes up with this disturbing thought:

And as soon as you looked at it that way, you realized that perfect crimes probably got committed all the time, and the coroner marked it down as death by natural causes, or the newspaper reported that the shop had never been very profitable and had finally gone out of business... }}

 

* Many episodes of ''[[Monk]]'' have the killer construct a seemingly perfect alibi for themselves, only for Monk to gradually unravel it.

* Some of the capers in ''[[Leverage]]'' get close to this. Quoth one detective:

* The Ariel raid in ''[[Firefly]]'' would have been this except for Jayne.

** And the Bellerophon raid would have been as well, except for Durran.

* It was [[wikipedia:Leopold and Loeb|Leopold and Loeb]]'s goal to commit the perfect crime when they murdered fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks. They were bright young things who thought they might be [[Ubermensch|Ubermenschen]]. They made about a frillion mistakes. Just to demonstrate how far from perfect this attempt was, some of the more notable ones are: Leaving the body right by railroad tracks, where it was quickly discovered. Leaving a pair of eyeglasses belonging to one of them with an unusual hinge mechanism that had been bought by ''three'' people in the area. And on questioning claiming that they had been out in their car, even though their ''chauffeur'' was repairing the car that night. Being seen together in their rented car at the time and place the kidnapping had occurred. Yeah, Moriarty these guys were not.

* In an early HBO special, [[George Carlin]] joked about what he considered the perfect crime; [[Grievous Harm with a Body|You pick up one person and use them to beat another person to death.]] [[Insane Troll Logic|They both die and there's no murder weapon!]]

* Two Malaysian men escaped hanging for drug trafficking because they were [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7876221.stm twin brothers], and the courts couldn't distinguish between the guilty brother and the innocent brother.

* Averted in Real Life according to David Simon's book, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. Rule #10 in Homicide: There is too such a thing as a perfect murder. Always has been, and anyone who tries to prove otherwise merely proves himself naive, romantic, and a fool who is ignorant of the first nine rules.