Make It Look Like an Accident - TV Tropes

Cathy Salt: And then just recently Mr. Cleaver, the government's nuclear advisor?
Margaret Blaine: Slipped on an icy patch.
Cathy Salt: He was decapitated!
Margaret Blaine: It was a very icy patch.

• Astra Lost in Space:
  • Group B4 being stranded in the vacuum of space thousands of light years away from home is too much of a coincidence, considering their wealthy backgrounds and the backstory of a couple of the crew hinting at the truth behind their grouping. The truth of it all was that the children's parents wanted to make younger clones of themselves in order to body hop into them at one point. But cloning people is illegal, the clones were considered too young to body hop into at the time, and a paper trail was starting to add up, so they had to arrange things to get all the clones in one place and kill them off so as to not arouse suspicion.
  • Seira's death was designed to look like an unfortunate accident, as her assassin simply pushed her off a cliff and let her die from the fall.
• In Attack on Titan Season 3 Part 2, it's revealed that Marco's death was not an accident but a murder as he was stripped of his ODM gear and left to be eaten by a Titan after overhearing Reiner's and Bertolt's conversation revealing they were the Armored and Colossal Titans respectively. Annie also participated in the crime, although unwillingly.
• Jeremy plots (and succeeds) at this in A Cruel God Reigns by Vehicular Sabotage-ing Greg's car. He also ends up killing his mother Sandra in the process which causes him to suffer from some pretty bad My God, What Have I Done?.
• Many, MANY murder cases in Case Closed are at first believed to be accidents. Then Conan (and sometimes other detectives) start digging 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.
• Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai: Temujin and Baron's plot in Leona's introduction arc involves getting her killed in her baptismal ritual and blaming it on the monsters on the island where said ritual takes place. They even secretly bring a monster that is not native to the island and much stronger than any of the monsters on the island to make sure their plot would work for them. Unfortunately for them, Dai lives on the island in question and isn't going to let them have their way.
• Cruelly subverted in Fullmetal Alchemist. This is what Kimblee was supposed to do to Urey and Sara Rockbell, so the military would not be forced to waste resources ensuring their protection as humanitarians of their nation. He didn't get the chance, though: their last patient was a mentally and physically broken Scar, who had absolutely no control over his newfound powers, and ended up killing the Rockbells himself.
• 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.
• Pulled on the Minister of Justice in Gasaraki, courtesy of Kazukiyo Gowa.
• 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, saying that it needs to be scrapped and she should "lose the paperwork on it, too." She just nods and barely looks up.
• Gunslinger Girl:
  • It's strongly implied that Jean Croce had Raballo murdered and disguised it as a traffic accident, when Raballo tried to expose (and presumably shut down) the SWA.
  • This is Angelica's backstory. Her parents decided to run her over with their own car, in an attempt to cash on her insurance. They failed in making it look like an accident though, and Angelica ended up in the SWA.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders: The Stand User for Tower of Grey would cause public transportation like planes or buses to crash, hiding his Stand's activity.
• In Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, Yazan Gable pulls this when he gets Emma Sheen to fire at him, then dodges so that the blast will hit Jamaican, whom he hated.
• Queen Millennia: Hajime's parents were killed in an explosion at their home lab, but his uncle believes that an accident is unlikely and Hajime should tell to any suspicious person that they're simply hospitalized. A Millennial Thief trying to shoot Hajime shortly after that before being chased out by Yayoi gives them an idea who may be responsible. In the end it turns out the explosion was an accident and Selene is really sorry for it.
• Spirit Circle: The terrorist group Arion uses "traffic accidents" to kill off managers of the Sleeping Tower. Not long after becoming the co-manager, Lafalle is able to stave off the attempt on his life after one of the group members has a change of heart and warns him about the incoming car.
• Within Stellvia of the Universe, this is Ayaka's solution to anybody who she views as a threat to her status at the best student. She takes the unwitting rival on "practice", where "accidents" occur.
• Summer Time Rendering: Ushio appears to have drowned while rescuing Shiori from the same fate, but a few characters soon discover the telltale signs of strangulation on her neck that were hidden from the public. In reality Shadow Shiori strangled Ushio to death before evading detection by switching places with the real Shiori, then the Hishigata Clinic attempted to cover up the evidence to keep the existence of the shadows a secret.

• In Afterlife with Archie Cheryl's jealous brother Jason killed her puppy as a child but made it look like she had accidentally choked on her leash.
• In All Fall Down, AIQ Squared's plot involves this, Siphon, and a Power Nullifier on the moon.
• Blake and Mortimer: In The Voronov Plot, Blake convinced Nastasia to become a mole after he revealed to her that her father didn't die from a car accident, but from an assassination carried out by the KGB.
• Block 109: After Himmler becomes Fuhrer, he is killed in an automobile accident several years later, obviously orchestrated by either of his Co-Dragons Zytek or Heydrich.
• Drowntown: Grace Carter tries to dispose of Leo in a way that won't be identified as murder. Since he's frequently drunk, she figures that drowning him in sludge will work — people will just assume he fell in. When Leo manages to avoid that, she considers upgrading it to a bash on the head (again from "falling down drunk"), but she gets killed by a third party before enacting it.
• Enemy Ace: In "War in Heaven- Book 2", shortly after being shot down, and parachuting into the Dachau concentration camp, Von Hammer gives a speech to the men in the airfield telling them to stop fighting and to stop supporting the Nazi regime. When Engels, an ardent Nazi, points a gun at him and is about to shoot after Von Hammer calls Hitler a "piece of excrement," Von Hammer's wingman kills Engels with a burst of the quadruple 30mm cannons of an Me-262 fighter jet, while "testing" the firing mechanism that he thought wasn't loaded.
• In Judge Colt #4, a killer commits a string of murders designed to look like accidents: a railway engineer run over by a runaway locomotive, a miner killed in a mine explosion, a wrangler trampled by a horse, a gunsmith shot while repairing a gun, an engineer killed in a bridge collapse, and a stock agent trample by cattle. But despite this, the killer leaves behind a Calling Card: a medal pinned to the chest of each victim.
• The Killer: The Professional Killer protagonist often makes his assassinations look like either accidents or suicides to dissuade any further investigation that might ultimately lead to his capture.
• Nemesis the Warlock: Before his trial, Torquemada's followers assassinate the alien members of the jury in fatal tube "accidents".
• In Preacher's backstory, Starr is ordered to kill a defector from 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 the man seriously. Starr then subverts the heck out of this trope by blowing up the entire institution, killing all the staff and patients that were there that day. He justifies his action by saying that no matter how inconspicuous and innocent he made the guy's death look, it might still look suspicious to someone. With the hospital blown up entirely, any investigation would have to try to first see if it was an accident or not, whether it might be some kind of terrorism, and then try to check for a motive that would cause someone to want to kill any of the patients or employees that were in the institution. To any such investigator, their target's story would sound like just one more deranged fantasy from a disturbed mind, and there would be no more reason to follow up on it than on the delusions of any of the dozens of paranoid schizophrenics who also died in the explosion.
• Red Ears: A shamelessly adulterous woman tells her husband that she's having an affair with his best friend during a car ride, declaring her intent to divorce him and demanding possession of their house, their bank accounts, and full custody of their children. He's fine with it, since he only needs one thing (as he's driving up at full speed towards a concrete wall): he's got his seatbelt on.
• Long after Damian learns that he does not need to kill the then-current Robin Tim Drake to become part of the family, and even after Dick gives him the Robin mantle, Damian routinely sabotages Tim's equipment in ways that could kill him including cutting the line in his Grappling-Hook Pistol and damaging his glider cape.
• Shazam!: The New Beginning: Billy Batson's parents died due to Sivana having somebody sabotage the car so that it would crash and cause an accident.
• Squad: After Thatcher is killed by Becca, Arianna puts in body in the local stream. Said stream has a reputation for drunk kids hanging out near it, and she thought it was plausible that Thatcher could have stumbled into the stream while drunk, and drowned.
• In Star Wars: Darth Vader, the villain protagonist becomes adept at this, usually by using the Force to arrange a "stray blaster shot" that happens to silence a witness. The Emperor encourages this to the various competitors for his apprentice, telling them not to kill each other and if they do not to get caught. Vader then averts the trope by dumping the corpse of one such rival, complete with lightsaber wounds, at the Emperor's feet.
• Superman:
  • In Who is Superwoman?, Superwoman murders her ally Reactron's ex-girlfriend to eliminate a potential witness and makes it look like she died because of a fire caused by a gas leak.
  • The Unknown Supergirl: Lesla-Lar plans to pose as a hero as helping Lex Luthor kill Superman, and once the Man of Steel is dead, kill Luthor accidentally while pretending to capture him so he cannot reveal she was in cahoots with him.
  • In Starfire's Revenge, the titular queenpin is paid an exorbitant sum by a fashion designer to murder his greatest rival as making it look like an accident.

    Starfire: I have been offered 1,000,000 dollars for it if I can accomplish the theft and get rid of Paul de Paris and make it look like an accident. So the Salon of Paul is going to have a fire that will destroy his entire collection and Paul too.

• Tintin: Bad guys often try to dispose of Tintin in ways that could possibly be construed as accidents if you squint hard enough. This has saved his life more than once.
• In Vote Loki, this is the most obvious conclusion about the traffic accident that seemingly killed off the Hydra agents. It also neatly ties into the fact that Angela is a mercenary who would kill if you pay her enough.

• In Amazing Fantasy, Tomura Shigaraki hates working with Mysterio or his cronies, but does so out of loyalty to All For One. But if he can get away with it, he'll take any opportunity to spite the super villain. During the USJ attack, once he's sure no one can hear him, Shigaraki orders Nomu to kill Mysterio's subordinates Frog Man and Kangaroo once he's set loose on the U.A. students. This way, he can claim plausible deniability and say the two were caught in the crossfire of Nomu's rampage.
• The side stories for A Brief History of Equestria showed that this was Princess Platinum's preferred way of dealing with those she felt endangered her plans for Equestria's future. Ultimately, she even did this to herself.
• The Desert Storm: At the end of the Remembrance arc, Palpatine tries to assassinate Obi-Wan by sabotaging his lightsaber, causing it to explode in his hands. This was done as retaliation for the latter's interference with the Sith's plans for Kalee and Corellia. Luckily, Obi-Wan narrowly survives thanks to his lightsaber's beskar casing absorbing most of the blast.
• In Dirty Sympathy, Klavier and Apollo always faced this threat early in the story. Kristoph would "hypothesize" what would happen if Apollo goes missing and Klavier knows that with Daryan's connections he can make it look like an accident. It nearly comes true when Klavier is nearly strangled to death by a "set malfunction".
• Echoes of Eternity: Rei was publicly executed in front of Maria in order to make her fear Shadow. Rei's family was told that he had accidentally ended up in the Biolizard chamber.
• Fallout: Equestria: Steelhooves is a quiet, taciturn pony in Steel Ranger armor who rarely makes his opinion on matters known. Which is why no one notices that racists and traitors have a surprising propensity for suffering terrible accidents around him. Littlepip sees in one of his memory orbs that he has been doing this for centuries.

  Steelhooves: (rehearsing to himself) There's been a terrible accident. No, I have no idea where he was flying in from. I could tell he was coming in too low, but I expected him to pull up before he hit the building. It was horrible. I feel it was my fault; I shouldn't have asked Wingright to fly in this weather. I should have known that the wind shear would be too much for him.

• In Pain And Blood: Aksel killed his father but made it look as if he died of his bear attack injuries, instead of poisoning.
• A variant is used non-maliciously in the Hyrule Warriors fanfic In Sotto Voce. The previous Zelda, Zelda's mother, was Driven to Suicide due to being forced into a loveless marriage by her family, who didn't like her affair with a Sheikah woman. The king, the current Zelda's father and the previous Zelda's husband, decided to tell everyone that his wife died of an illness instead. Princess Zelda is one of the few who knows because she's the one who found her mother dead.
• Lost Boy:
  • Snotlout tries to kill Hiccup by pointing a catapult at the forge while he was still in it. When questioned, he insisted that he was aiming for dragons attacking the village and that it would have been a bonus if he got rid of Hiccup.
  • During the Battle of Helheim's Gate, Spitelout tries to kill Stoick as a means of making Snotlout chief, hoping to make it look like Stock died from a dragon attack.
• In Mega Man Reawakened, Wily planned an explosion to kill Dr. Light, but ended up killing Robert's father instead.
• My Father's Son: This was how The Lannisters killed Catelyn to play into Tywin's plan to get Cersei as Lady of Winterfell. They sent a secret assassin to meet up with her, then tossed her down the stairs to induce labor. The Baby survived. She didn't.
• In Olivia Goes West, a crossover between The Great Mouse Detective and An American Tail, Professor Ratigan and Cat R. Waul employ this tactic in order to get rid of the snooping little kids Fievel Mousekewitz and Olivia Flaversham before they can ruin their carefully forged imago used to enthrall Green River's mouse community. They find out that Fievel has a secret raft in the eponymous river area where he's not supposed to go. When the children go to one of their rafting escapees, they are ambushed by the bad guys, trapped in the raft without oars and sent to float down the dangerous part of the river, cultivating them to fall down a waterfall (from which they survive though). Ratigan and Waul then feed Green River's people a sob story that the children lost their oars while rafting and couldn't be saved in time. To make it believable, both of the villains tarnish themselves with the muddy river and claim that they tried to find any trace of the children downriver. Finally, they present Fievel's hat and Olivia's bow they forcibly took, claiming them to be all they could find. The entire scheme is successful until Fievel and Olivia return weeks later and expose the villains' lies.
• Patchwork (FFVII):
  • After Tifa reveals she knows who Sephiroth is while he's introducing her to the mountains around the town he and Aerith have been hiding in, he decides She Knows Too Much and begins planning for her to have some sort of "hiking accident". Fortunately, she convinces him to spare her life without even realizing she was ever in danger.
  • While Zack and Angeal are observing Hojo and thinking of ways to get him to leave Costa del Sol before he runs into Aerith and/or Sephiroth, Zack advocates taking more direct action. Angeal says they can't kill him, unless they make it look like an accident, but even then he dismisses the prospect as too risky.
• Run at the Cup: A non-fatal version. Landsman is careful to make her collision with Vi look like it could have been an accident (or at worst get her a penalty). The Sumprats don't believe it for a moment, and Mylo retaliates in a manner that very much averts this trope.
• Spottedleaf was found drowned in Warriors Redux after having gone for a walk one night. It was thought to be an unfortunate accident until several months later another seer was attacked (but this one survived).
• With This Ring: The protagonist is not opposed to using this for particularly egregious villains.
  • In conversation with a Gotham City police officer, Paul asks why the Joker hasn't "fallen down some stairs" yet, and the officer replies that it's because he hasn't yet been the one to bring the Joker in.
  • In his reverse shovel speech to Sportsmaster, Paul warns him that if he attempts to contact his family ever again, then he will go to sleep, develop a series of bubbles in the blood vessels to his brain, and never wake up.
  • Before leaving Earth for a while, Red Lantern Paul informs Raven that she doesn't have to worry about demon cultists any more, because there aren't any in North America.

    Paul: They seem to... Have fallen down some stairs.
    Raven: All of them?
    Paul: They were slippery stairs.

• In Worldwar: War of Equals this is implied to be the fate of Hugo Chavez.

• In An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, during the train ride to Green River, Fievel stumbles upon the cats discussing their plan to eat the mice in Green River. He's discovered, but instead of killing him outright, Cat R. Waul recognizes that a freak disappearance would raise too many questions and lets the mouse go. The minute he's gone, Waul instructs his lackey Chula to make sure Fievel falls off the train;

  Cat R. Waul: Give him the Flying Ahh, and make it good.

• Ballerina: During the story's climax, Camille's mother tries to kill Félicie and somehow hopes to pass her victim's death as accidental.
• In Frozen, Prince Hans reveals that he planned to "stage an accident" for Queen Elsa after marrying Princess Anna, to get closer to the throne. When Anna is accidentally cursed by Elsa's ice powers, Hans uses this as an excuse to leave her for dead and then execute Elsa on grounds of having murdered her little sister, taking the throne himself.
• This is part of Scar's bastardry in The Lion King, when he murders his brother Mufasa and convinces Simba that his father died in an accident for which Simba was to blame, then tells the rest of the pride that Simba also died in the same accident after driving him away.
• In The Secret of NIMH, this is how Jenner almost gets away with murder.

• "Dad! My teacher today called me a mobster!"
  "Mobster eh? Don't worry, tomorrow he will pay for that insult."
  "OK, dad, but make it look like an accident."
• How many cops does it take to push a person down the stairs?
  None, he fell.
• "They ruled it a suicide. Cause of death: Two shots to the back of the head."
• Shortly before the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, when the bride's father was getting a lot of attention in the press over the fact that he hadn't been invited, Private Eye put a picture of Elizabeth II and Daniel Craig on its cover, with the following captions:

  Craig: And her father, ma'am?
  Queen: Make it look like an accident, 007.

• 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 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.

• Bleak Expectations: Should anyone at St. Bastards actually live long enough to reach their eighteenth birthday, they'll suffer a "horrible accident". And sometimes the headmaster will arbitrarily move someone's birthday ahead, just so he can kill them quicker.

• The boardgame 13 Dead End Drive has players committing an Inheritance Murder through this trope, positioning other characters below heavy objects, atop slippery stairways, or in front of faulty fireplaces to bump each other off.
• In Mysterium, players must solve the murder of a ghost whose death was ruled an accident.
• 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.
• Happens all the time in Shadowrun. Often the PCs will be hired to do so. Or stop someone else from doing so. Or to get back at someone who did so...
• 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. Oddly enough, this actually happens less often then you'd think: Necrotects really did view it as an honor to serve their king in the afterlife (that, and the prospect of being around to maintain their monuments instead of letting them fall to wind and sand).
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • One of the 5th-edition Necron Lords (the one that made them Tomb Kings In Space) is brain-damaged, so he sees everything as it was prior to his awakening, when Necrons were the only living creatures in the galaxy, and so thinks captured enemy leaders are rival Necron claimants to the Throne. His bodyguard has no such problems, and is always regretful to announce to his master that his latest guests have suffered an "unfortunate accident".
  • The Catachans used to have a special rule to reflect their independent nature. Whenever attaching a Commissar to a squad, you had to roll to make sure the Commissar hadn't suffered an equally unfortunate "accident" preventing him from carrying out his duties.

• 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.

• Seven Kingdoms: The Princess Problem:
  • In the second week, someone puts a thorn under your horse's saddle blanket to agitate it into running away with you. It's obvious that it's an attempt to kill you in a way that looks like an unfortunate accident, and if you're playing on Challenge Mode and don't have the necessary self-preservation skills or someone who cares about you looking out for your safety, it can succeed.
  • In Week 5, the protagonist is lured to the set of the play the delegates are putting on the next day, awhere someone attempts to drop a heavy set piece on her.

• Helluva Boss has a variation. The pilot mentions making their kills look like suicide to avoid police suspicion.
• Played with in Society of Virtue episode "Guardians of 0.01% of the Galaxy", where the aliens make a laughably token effort to pretend it wasn't murder.

• 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 & Droids:
• El Goonish Shive: Discussed in an internal dialogue by Grace regarding revealing magic to a minor character.

  Emotional centre: Yeah, but if Sam finds out we have magic transformation stuff by accident...!

  Logical centre: If it's an actual accident? Potential loophole, yes.

  Emotional centre: Actual accident. Right. Darn it.

• Gunnerkrigg Court: In chapter "Quicksilver", Hetty strongly alludes to having murdered its previous owner in an "accident".
• Plume: The Evil Prince gets the throne by drowning his older brother and making it look like an accident. Playing with the trope a bit, he's genuinely surprised that the third brother hasn't caught up on this until he pretty much spells it out for him.
• Odie invokes this trope at Garfield's behest in this Square Root of Minus Garfield to destroy a snowman.
• Unsounded: Once he is married into the nobility Karl plans to kill his wife and ensure it looks like she died of complications while giving brith to their son.

• This is not recommended in the Evil Overlord List Cellblock A:

  "I will not waste time making my enemy's death look like an accident — I'm not accountable to anyone and my other enemies wouldn't believe it."

• In A Golden Island To The West, the time-displaced California government, aware of the downtime US attempt at blockading the Pacific, dispatch a sub to to destroy the incoming fleet and invoke this trope. Ambushing them at the Strait of Magellan, all the sub has to do to destroy six of the seven incoming warships is to fire a single torpedo, and Disaster Dominoes does the rest.
• A non-fatal Invocation occurs in this Not Always Right story; an elderly customer suffers a seizure while shopping, and after being informed that his insurance will kick him off if he has another seizure the manager on duty grabs a water bottle and starts pouring it on the floor while telling the OP (another customer) to tell the paramedics that he slipped. This has the double purpose of screwing over the store owners, who are bleeding the story dry to line their own pockets, and when the store closes down a few months later the OP learns that the insurance company stuck them with a hefty fine for negligence.

• In his "The Sixth Day" crossover with That Sci-Fi Guy, The Nostalgia Critic threatens that if he doesn't do most of the work, he'll slit TSFG's wrists and leave him for housekeeping to find.
• Sips has a comedic version during his Skyrim playthrough. After killing someone (even if they are a bandit), he puts a bucket on their head to make it look like they somehow killed themselves with one. It doesn't really affect the gameplay.
• In SMPEarth's Octangula ARG, Laramie Online attempt to murder Mariah by "disconnecting her from BIGPRISM without following protocol", with the intent of making her disappearance look like an accident.
• Inverted in a discussion by Pat from Two Best Friends Play about how to prepare yourself if you end up dying like David Carradine.

  Pat: Girlfriend, if,somehow for whatever reason,you find me in such an uncompromising position, there is a baseball bat in the other room, I want you to cut me down and I want you to fake a murder by thugs. And yes I know it's gonna look like you murdered me but you need to take that risk for my pride.

• Unwanted Houseguest: In issue 3 of the comic Melody and the Houseguest do this to cover up their role in Dr. Tigani's death. In this case it technically was an accident since they were trying to torture him, not kill him.

• 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.

    Candace: With Batman out of the way, Gotham could be yours. So could I.
    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".
• Blue Eye Samurai. In "Peculiarities", Mizu is contracted to Mercy Kill a gangster's Sex Slave, so she snaps her neck and leaves a dead mook on top of her with the hairpin used to take him out in the girl's hand, making it look like they were both killed during an attempted rape. Unfortunately, Mizu's seen on the way out of the building and could not bring herself to murder another innocent. This brings the gangster and his army of killers down on her and she has to spend the next episode killing them all.
• 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."
• Futurama introduces the trope with some dialogue among the Robot Mafia.
• In a rather chilling scene from Green Lantern: The Animated Series, Sinestro arranges for a criminal he deemed too dangerous to slowly suffocate to death. His reply when questioned by his fellow Green Lanterns?
• Played for laughs in Home Movies.

  McGuirk: Drew is a nice guy, right?
  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.

• 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.
• Jonny Quest:
  • "Double Danger". The doppleganger Race Bannon tells the Thai Jungle Guide to get rid of Jonny and Hadji, and to make it look like an accident.
  • "Werewolf of the Timberland". The Big Bad of the episode tells Pierre over the radio that the Quest team team must not be shot, but must be killed in a way that makes their deaths look like an accident.
• Mandragora taunts Faraday in Justice League Unlimited by describing a witness as having unfortunately wandered in front of a train.
• The King of the Hill episode "Fun with Jane and Jane" opens with Buck Strickland telling Hank to go shoot his emus because the bottom fell out of the market. The last thing he says before he leaves is "Make it look like a heart attack."
• Looney Tunes:
  • In the short "From Hare to Heir", Yosemite Sam plays the nephew of a king who is desperate for money. Bugs comes by his castle offering him 1 million pounds if he can prove himself a man of mild temper (with penalties deducted from the sum for every time Sam loses his cool). After failing to control his fits of rage, Sam decides the easiest solution is to simply off Bugs and make it look like an accident (saying so out loud, no less). Needless to say, he fails in rather spectacular fashion.
  • In the Looney Tunes short "Show Biz Bugs", Daffy Duck is resentful at being upstaged by Bugs, his performance partner, and tries to compete with him. When he learns that Bugs is going to play a tune on a xylophone, Daffy decides to off Bugs and make it look like an accident, by booby-trapping the xylophone Bugs is going to play on so that it blows him up. Again, naturally, the duck's attempt on the rabbit's life backfires spectuarly.
• The Simpsons:
  • Subversion: In an episode, 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.
  • Taken to an extreme in "Double, Double Boy in Trouble" when Mr. Burns explains how he came by his inheritance, despite having 10 older siblings:

    Mr. Burns: You know, Master Simon, I too was once the youngest in a wealthy family.
    Bart: [disguised as Simon] You were once the youngest of something?
    Mr. Burns: But fortune ended up smiling on me while snuffing the life from my siblings. [pulls out photo] My older brother was trampled by a horse. My sister died of a poisoned potato. My twin was shot. That girl was stabbed. He ate another poisoned potato. Spontaneous combustion. Fell down a well, potato, potato, and impaled on the Chrysler Building.

  • 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."
  • 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.
• Star Wars Rebels. In "Call to Action", Ezra Bridger uses a loth-cat to disable a probe droid so the Imperials won't be alerted to the fact that they're scouting a communications tower. Unfortunately, a feral cat isn't quite as thorough as a blaster, so the probe droid is still able to transmit an image of them back to base.
• Woody Woodpecker: "Wet Blanket Policy" features Buzz Buzzard trying to kill Woody to collect insurance. Because of the policy's terms, Woody's death must be ruled as an accident otherwise Buzz won't collect even if he's not proven to be the killer.