The Perfect Crime: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
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{{quote|''"[[Locard's Theory|There is no one in the world who can be somewhere and leave without a trace]]. [[Pluto|Any man who could isn't human]]."''|'''Inspector Lunge''', ''[[Monster (manga)|Monster]]''}}
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* A number of murderers in ''[[Detective Conan]]'' intentionally arrange to have "[[Meitantei]]" Mouri Kogoro witness their crime, so confident are they that they can have the "Great Detective" himself provide them with a foolproof alibi. (And usually they would be right, too, even with Conan on the job, save for some completely coincidental bit of bad luck that provides the crucial evidence necessary to link them to it.)
* Every episode of ''[[Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro]]'' is about some killer who pulls off either a ridiculously intricate murder or a ridiculously intricate alibi. Or both, or both at once. Neuro only manages to solve the case because of his "777 Underworld Tools."
* In-universe example in ''[[Bakuman｡]]'': The latest of Ashirogi Muto's manga is about kids who pull off
* This is a big plot point in the third arc of ''[[Higurashi no Naku Koro ni]]''. Keiichi tries to figure out how to commit one by talking to [[Taught by Television|his mom]] with whose help he decides that the perfect crime is one that was never committed (or leaves no trace of being committed). He then attempts to do this and murders Satoko's uncle, although the method he actually uses - burying the body in the woods - is pretty shoddy. It winds up working anyway, but only because {{spoiler|of Sonozaki intervention}} that really only winds up screwing him up even worse than [[Ax Crazy|he already was]].
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* ''[[The League of Gentlemen (film)|The League of Gentlemen]]'''s heist would have gone off flawlessly if a random little boy hadn't been collecting license plate numbers outside the bank. This, coupled with the fact that they rendezvous at Hyde's house afterwards, allows the police to catch them all cash in hand.
* In ''[[The Life of David Gale]],'' this is played straight. An anti-death penalty activist is found dead, and the eponymous character, a fellow activist, is convicted and executed due to an abundance of evidence, despite claiming his innocence. Doesn't sound like the perfect crime, you say? Well, {{spoiler|the actual crime was the "victim" and the "murderer" conspiring to be respectively "murdered" and executed for the murder. Evidence would then be released that the "murder" was really a suicide, which would in turn show that an innocent man was executed and hopefully gain sympathy for their anti-death penalty views.}}
* In ''[[The Master of Disguise]]'' the [[Big Bad]] Devlin Bowman ''claims''
* [[Match Point]] explores how this trope could, in a sense, work in real life.
* ''[[Rampage]]'' the film, how to pull of the ultimate murder spree/robbery in small town hell.
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== [[Literature]] ==
* In [[Agatha Christie]]'s ''The Mysterious Affair at Styles'', the killer uses a very convoluted method and an obvious one for which he has an unbreakable alibi. He intended to be tried for the obvious method and produce his alibi, because the British law prevents you from being tried twice for the same murder. Unfortunately, he blabbed too much and Poirot saw through his ruse...
* Agatha Christie's ''[[And Then There Were None]]'' has one of these rare cases in which the criminal actually gets away with his/her crime in the
* Most of Agatha Christie's stories involve an attempt at the perfect murder. However, Curtain, her last story, topped them all, as {{spoiler|even Poirot calls the murderer the perfect murderer, as he could never be tried, couldn't even be connected to the crimes, and gets away with over 6 murders. In fact, the only way to stop him was to kill him.}}
* In ''[[Crime and Punishment]]'', Raskolnikov thinks that his research into why criminals are caught, and his own [[Ubermensch]]-iness, will give him the edge to murder and get away with it. He panics and very nearly gets caught during the crime, and gets stuck in playing cat-and-mouse with Inspector Porfiry Petrovich.
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* ''[[Hustle]]'', in a few cases. Mostly, something gets screwed up, though...
* Exaggerated in ''[[Meitantei no Okite]]'' when the criminal ends up helping the detective solve it (though it ignored the truth because of his pride).
* ''[[Jonathan Creek]]'' revolves around this, with Creek using his stage-magician knowledge to help suss out many a
* One episode of [[Psych]] involved a thief who never left any trace and managed to steal things out of sealed buildings. {{spoiler|The "victims" just gave him the stuff so that they could collect insurance}}.
* George Marks, a serial killer from ''Cold Case'', perpetrates an example of the second variety. He works filing the case reports, so his knowledge of the murders doesn't give him away, his home is totally clean of all evidence, and he says just enough that the detectives know it was him, but can't prove a thing.
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* [[The Man Who Never Was]] : in [[Real Life]] it worked so well that they had to [[Rule of Drama|throw a minor wrench in it]] to make a movie.
* The TV show Masterminds re-enacts real life cases, some of which might be considered the perfect crime. One episode was even titled "The Perfect Score" and had an FBI agent admitting that the crime was perfect. There were only a few clues that went straight to dead ends. The only reason the criminal was caught was that he tried to pull it off again, and the FBI noticed how similar the second (failed) crime was.
* 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
* 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!]]
{{quote|'''"Cop":''' [[The Coroner Doth Protest Too Much|Seems like a pedestrian accident to me. Must've been moving at quite a clip.]]}}
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