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The Butler Did It
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One of the most familiar clichés of Mystery Fiction. The stereotypical example is that a bunch of people are invited to a dinner in a wealthy man's country estate (a Closed Circle), and the wealthy man is poisoned while they are all eating dinner. All the guests debate who among them is the killer, only to discover during the climactic summation gathering that the guilty party is none other than... the butler, who nobody bothered to think twice about; he's just part of the furniture, as if the table was the culprit. The butler is the avatar of the most unlikely suspect that turns out to be guilty because the author wasn't creative enough to come up with a better way to surprise the reader. It's the mystery writer equivalent of the Ass Pull, except that you can see it coming a mile away, making it, for modern readers, The Un-Twist. Ironically, because this trope is so well known, when an actual butler is involved he rarely "did it", or, when he did, it's often a parody and Played for Laughs. The expression "The butler did it" is commonly believed to have been coined by mystery author Mary Roberts Rinehart in her 1930 novel The Door, although this is actually a real-world example of Beam Me Up, Scotty!. The actual plot device goes back still further, and was already regarded as hackneyed even then; the earliest verified explicit statement of disapproval regarding its use dates to S.S. Van Dine's 1928 essay "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories". (It might be noted that these rules would disqualify the authors who defined the genre, including Wilkie Collins, Edgar Allan Poe, and Arthur Conan Doyle — indeed, rule 20 says that a good mystery should not include certain types of clues that Doyle introduced into the mystery genre on the grounds that they were now overused — and Van Dine's essay could more accurately be titled "Twenty Rules for Writing a Fair Play Mystery"). This article explores in detail the origin of this strange semi-existent trope, and says that suspicion of servants was noted as far back as Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Musgrave Ritual", from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893). There's also multiple Silent Films with the plot point. It's possibly related to the Real Life stereotype that, if something goes missing in a home, the hired help likely stole it. This is a Dead Unicorn Trope in murder mysteries, essentially a form of The Dog Was the Mastermind that's too well-known to use. It is okay, however, for a butler to be a suspect, primarily to mislead the reader. Not to be confused with A Wizard Did It, which is a form of Hand Wave (and doesn't have much to do with actual wizards). It is the case that this is an English-language trope: crime novels popular in Germany in the same period were notorious for the cliche that "the gardener did it", this transplanting the blame out of the house. Obviously, ending spoilers follow. |
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Home Alone 4: Taking Back the House subverts and averts this trope. The main character believes that the butler of his dad's rich girlfriend helped two burglars (his old enemies) get into her high tech Mansion. He made quite a mess driving them away so everybody believes its just an excuse (he was about 9 years old). It turns out it was the, erm, nice housekeeper who is revealed as one of the burglar's mum. | |
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Inverted in Max's Big Bust: A Captain Nekorai Tale in the murder-mystery chapter: the butler is the victim. | |
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In Thud!, Death is reading a mystery novel to pass the time while Sam Vimes has a near-death experience, and remarks It appears that the butler did it. | |
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In Trinity War, the Outsider's true identity is Earth-3 Alfred Pennyworth who has been working for years to bring his master Owlman and the rest of Earth 3's Crime Syndicate to Prime Earth. This is given a prompt Lampshade Hanging. | |
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Top Cat and the Beverly Hills Cats: Gertrude Vandergelt's butler Snerdly, third in line in her will, tries to do in Benny (who's second in line) and has also manipulated Amy Vandergelt into never visiting her aunt Gertrude and working at a car wash, keeping her from learning of her aunt's "death" and that she's the primary heir. T.C. actually dismisses him as a threat at first, saying it's an old cliche and that the butler never does it anymore, but eventually comes to realize that Snerdly really is a villain. | |
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The Far Side: In one cartoon, two detectives are summoned to solve a murder — at a butler's convention. Punchline: "I hate to start a Monday with a case like this". In another Far Side cartoon, a detective points to the Butler as the culprit when a victim is gored to death and trampled into the floor. Just ignore the elephant in the trench coat sitting next to him... |
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In the second case of Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, the Ultimate Maid Kirumi Tojo kills Ryoma Hoshi by drowning him. After he's dead, Kirumi then engineers an elaborate scheme to get rid of the body: maneuvering it into Himiko's tank of piranhas using a ropeway, where it's quickly Stripped to the Bone. | |
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Subverted in Professor Layton vs. Ace Attorney with Jean Greyearl. She is a witch who unintentionally framed Maya Fey for two murders, despite not having killed anyone herself. She believed that she killed her master Newton Belduke, who had really committed suicide moments before her attack. When accusing Greyearl, Phoenix mentions this trope by name. | |
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In one of the Murder Mystery episodes of Rocher Hotel, the culprit is revealed not to be co-host Frobman... but rather his robot double: Mecha-Frobman! | |
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This is what sets the plot of The Aristocats in motion, pretty much. Butler Edgar is second in line for the fortune his wealthy mistress wants to leave to her cats, and so knocks them out with sleeping pills and tries to get rid of them. This being Disney, the kitties live, and then have wacky adventures before Edgar's comeuppance is delivered. Also played within that the audience knows it's Edgar right off the bat. The characters, on the other hand, seem to have no idea - except for Toulouse, who figures it out not long after they wake up. Funnily enough, one of the characters even lampshades the trope, when Edgar's intentions are revealed: |
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In Kaori Yuki's Count Cain, a flashback chapter has the lead solving a mystery about a maid's murder. It turns out the butler didn't kill her, she died of her own greed and foolishness. He did, however, tamper the evidence to frame someone else. | |
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Episode "The Balooest of the Bluebloods" of TaleSpin has Baloo inheriting the title of Baron and the fortune that comes with it, only to learn later that there's a curse killing his relatives. It turns out there's no curse, the butler and the maid are the ones killing the barons in order to enjoy the mansion themselves. | |
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In one episode of Bones the butler to a British noble family confesses to the Murder of the Week. Bones and Brennan suspect the butler is taking the rap for his employers, but don't have any evidence to prove otherwise. Still, Booth can't resist saying the trope name as a Quip to Black. | |
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CSI: NY: Conversed by Stella and Flack in "Trapped". He lists the wealthy victim's hired help as potential suspects and the following exchange ensues: | |
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Happens in Lewis and its predecessor Inspector Morse occasionally, like in "Wild Justice". Never trust a college servant. Got a Lampshade Hanging in the Morse episode "Happy Families", with the murder of a wealthy industrialist in a mansion with a large family: |
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In the "100 Clues" episode of Psych, a rock star who Shawn and Gus had gotten busted for manslaughter once invited them to his mansion, where some of the other guests get killed. In one of several possible endings, it was his butler, who had written his boss's songs and was mad at not being credited for them, and had also killed the woman who got the rocker sent to prison. | |
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In "Out of Sight", the men are trying to figure out who could have copied some classified documents. A scientist had them, and had blurted out he left them lying around in his room while sitting behind a table in a restaurant with a few other people, but all had their backgrounds thoroughly checked. Henry points out that no one is supposed to notice a good waiter. | |
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In Umineko: When They Cry, although the "butlers" are more like servants, this is what Eva suspects during the first arc. During the second arc, Kanon goes missing after he and Jessica are killed in another 'closed room murder', and as he has a master key, Rosa comes to the conclusion that either Kanon (who had disappeared), Gohda or Kumasawa (neither of whom had an alibi) killed Jessica, as they were the only ones who could have locked the door to Jessica's room. Rosa goes even further after locking all the servants out with apologies and excuses about their possible suspicion. After they're thrown out, she openly confides to Battler that she doesn't have any doubt that they're all responsible. Late in the novel, Willard H. Wright is introduced to hold mysteries to Van Dine's 20 rules, including the one against a servant being the culprit... However, Eva was still technically right. To make a VERY long story short, from the Anti-Fantasy perspective, there was a servant named Sayo Yasuda (known better by the blessed name...Shannon) who as it was turned out was secretly the bastard child of Kinzo Ushiromiya and his other secret bastard daughter Beatrice. Sayo would actually become the true head of the family (so she's not really a servant anymore and slips past Van Dine's rules), but maintain the personas of Shannon and Kanon to preserve the illusion as they enact their murder-suicide plot on the Ushiromiyas. | |
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Race to the Mansion of Tomorrow: Zig-Zagged in Chicken Tech Inc. Oliver manages to blow up a whole building, Sochiebot asks who the culprit is and Peanut shows a photo of a shadow at the crime scene that looks like one of Sochiebot's butlers, Tropica, thus leaving everyone else to believe he is the culprit. | |
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In Ojojojo, Gramps claims he took the missing picture from Haru's photo album, when in reality Akane took it. | |
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Invoked and lampshaded in The Beekeeper's Apprentice: | |
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In an episode of Castle where Castle and Beckett are having trouble figuring out a suspect for the Murder of the Week: Played with in a later episode, where it looks like the butler may actually have done it, leading to significant lampshading on the part of Castle. (It's averted at the end - he was merely stealing from his employer). Much later, however, in an episode in season 5, a butler actually did do it. Castle was positively gleeful as they arrested the guy. He even begged Beckett to let him announce it, and of course said the trope name verbatim. Used in another episode where the killer turned out to be a guy who had turned up in exactly one scene beforehand. Namely, the apparent personal assistant to a near-senile political matriarch. Though the episode is ambiguous as to whether he actually did it, or if he is taking the fall for his employer. |
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Carltron, Professor Ruffleberg's robotic butler from Secret of Evermore, is revealed to have been the one behind his disappearance, and also those of several of his contacts. | |
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Played totally straight in Bradley's Summer, where the leader of the terrorist plot is the butler in the house where Bradley is staying for the summer. | |
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In The Amazing Spider-Man (Lee & Ditko), when Spider-Man defeats Electro for the first time and unmasks him, he thinks "If this was a movie, I'd gasp in shock and then I'd say: 'Good Heavens! The butler!'" but admitted that he had never seen him before. | |
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In both A Pocket Full of Rye and the short story "The Tuesday Night Club", the maid did it. However, in both cases the maid was heartlessly seduced/pressured into doing it by her lover, and in the former case ends up murdered herself after serving her purpose. | |
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Double subverted in Ninotchka. The butler seemed suspicious from the beginning. Then the jewelry is gone and the male lead becomes the prime suspect, but it turns out it was indeed the butler. | |
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In Three Act Tragedy, the butler is the prime suspect, having disappeared soon after the murder. Turns out the murderer posed as his friend's butler solely in order to murder him and then fled afterwards in a deliberately suspicious manner, returning in his usual guise as the victim's good friend. | |
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Whatever Happened to The Caped Crusader?: In "The Gentleman's Gentleman's Tale", Alfred claims to be the Joker, having created the Rogues Gallery with the help of actors he knew from his stage days before he became a butler, in order to keep Bruce Wayne diverted from his personal demons. The story opens with this trope being given in a murder mystery play. | |
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Subverted in one Magnum, P.I.. Magnum is following the "killer" of a rich and annoying person. It turns out the rich man faked his own death. When he comes out of hiding the valet holds him at gunpoint until he is well scared. And them shoots him with a stream of water out of a squirt gun. | |
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The Backyardigans plays with this trope in the genre spoof episode, "Whodunnit?". It was the butler (ie. Tyrone with his hair combed) who took the jewels, but only because the lady of the house (Tasha) gave them to him. Turns out it was all a put-up job in order to liven up a dull afternoon. | |
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Discussed in a Sweet Valley Twins book when the twins try to figure out who murdered a young heiress fifty years ago. Their older brother jokes that the butler must have done it because it's always like that in the movies. He was surprisingly close. It was the chauffeur. | |
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Sigma Harmonics - Played With. The butler is the culprit in Chapter Three and a victim in Chapters Four and Five, and the maid, who is a victim in every other chapter, is the culprit in Chapter Four. | |
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Lawrence from The Princess and the Frog is a lesser villain, but still needs mentioning; He was Prince Naveen's valet on his visit to New Orleans before he became an accessory to Dr. Facilier's plot to feed all the souls in New Orleans to his friends on the Other Side by being magically disguised as the Prince (the real thing being transformed into a frog). It's a Long Story. | |
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The panelists on a talk show joke during Bruce Wayne: Fugitive that Alfred might have killed Vesper Fairchild rather than Bruce, who has been arrested for the crime. Later in the same arc, Bruce Wayne escapes custody. The detectives in charge of the inquiry, after piecing various hints together, finally reach the conclusion that "The butler did it", after spending much of the inquiry snarking that it cannot be the butler, because the butler ''always'' does it. Then there's "Last Rites", a two-part Batman story set during Final Crisis, with one chapter called "The Butler Did It" and the other "What the Butler Saw". It turns out that Alfred the butler is actually the Lump, a telepathic parasite hiding inside Batman's memories as he is used for clone fodder by the gods of Apokolips. It's Grant Morrison, what can we say. |
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The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh turned this into a Running Gag in the episode Tigger, Private Ear. At the climax of the episode, Tigger cross-examines himself at a trial to get Piglet off the hook: | |
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Who Killed Markiplier? has Benjamin Butler, who takes the main character down into a dark basement, making it seem as if he's going to kill them. The camera then pans down to reveal a broken wine bottle on the ground, and Benjamin begins whining about how awful the mess is. The broken bottle being there actually does have story significance, but in the moment it just acts as a way to establish that Benjamin most definitely isn't the killer, and simply brought the protagonist into the basement to complain to them about the mess he had to clean up. | |
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Sakura Gari: The stinking rich Saiki clan has a butler named Katou and a housekeeper/cook named Ohatsu. Katou didn't do many things but was responsible for driving someone else to do them. Until the end, where he snaps and stabs one of the main characters. And Ohatsu did not do anything... But can't forgive herself for not doing what she should have done. Additionally, the Saikis are known in Tokyo for employing highschool and college-aged young men as a mix of boarding students and servants, sponsoring their education in exchange for their housework. Two of them are vital to the story: the protagonist Masataka (who gets pretty screwed up but isn't a criminal) and the Yandere/Mad Doctor Katsuragi (who is a Domestic Abuser, rapist and murderer, and commited some of his worst crimes when he still was a butler) |
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During the shooting rampage in the Rick and Morty episode "Total Rickall", Rick blasts Mr. Beauregard, the supposed butler of the Smith family, because he is an alien parasite. Rick finds that funny because of the inversion of the usual trope. | |
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Murder at Colefax Manor plays this amazingly straight and quite literally, although the butler was acting on the behest of his master. | |
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In Freefall, Helix watches a Godzilla movie and is disappointed to learn that the wrecker of Tokyo was not a giant butler. | |
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In The Dresden Files, it's not exactly the Butler, but has the Beneath Suspicion slot down pat: the traitor on the White Council isn't the Jerkass leader, the mysterious Asian, the noble Native American shaman, the Captain of the Wardens, OR Harry's Jerkass parole officer Morgan - it's Samuel Peabody, the secretary. | |
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The Closer had a parody, Lampshade Hanging, and subversion all in one in the episode "The Butler Did It". The butler had confessed to a previous murder and was working on a plea bargain when he apparently committed suicide, and the detectives in charge were looking forward to actually being able to say "the butler did it". Turns out, he didn't; he was likely to expose the true killer, who killed him instead and made it look like a suicide. | |
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In the Metalocalypse fanfic "Deth by Murder" this was Skiwsgaar's go to theory on who was behind the murders in the murder mystery, pointing at Offdensen (Dethklok's manager and CFO, whom Dethklok insists is their 'butler') the first time. Offdensen really was behind the murders, in order to 'clean house' and get rid of those who wronged Dethklok-he personally murdered Damien, and ordered the murders of Twinkletits and Seth, and promptly framed easy target Dr. Rockso for it. Skwisgaar goes to bed still thinking the butler did it, even after the murderer was caught. | |
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The Bonkers episode "Weather or Not" had a group of weather-reporting characters called the Weather Toons get kidnapped, with evidence strongly pointing to three disgruntled co-workers. But then it turns out the real culprit was a creepy and Obviously Evil butler named Rhett...who then reveals himself to be the Weather Toons in disguise and that they staged their own kidnapping. | |
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308 chapters in, Hayate the Combat Butler uses this one...extremely literally. Although it's not murder in this case, and if he'd left things alone it would have left everyone in-character. | |
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In Juuni Senshi Bakuretsu Eto Ranger, Bakumaru says this trope by name. Fractured Little Red Riding Hood's butler is the Monster of the Week for that world. Even before he's blasted with the Revealing Mirror, he reveals himself to be evil by trying to kill Urii when his teammates and Red are away. | |
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One of the few examples that admits that it doesn't really happen is a Daffy Duck cartoon where, after badgering the butler, Daffy notes that it's never really the butler. (It wasn't the Femme Fatale either; as it turned out, he was in the wrong house the whole time.) In a classic Chuck Jones cartoon, "Daffy Dilly", Daffy attempts to enter the mansion of an ailing millionaire who has offered a million dollars for anyone who can give him a good laugh before he passes on. After repeated attempts to get past an implacable butler, Daffy invokes this trope to get rid of the butler, and manages to convince the butler that he did do it and flee... |
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I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue: Spoofed in a round where the players had to improvise a detective story with the title "Murder by Moonlight": almost immediately, Barry Cryer established that "Moonlight" was the name of the butler. He was innocent, though. | |
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In a sketch on The Muppet Show, with Rowlf as Sherlock Holmes, the butler did it. However, because the butler is a Muppet monster, he then eats all the evidence, including the body and the only witness. Holmes therefore concludes that, in the absence of evidence, there was no crime at all (having briefly "deduced" that, in the absence of evidence pointing towards the butler, Watson did it). | |
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In The Berenstain Bears in Maniac Mansion, it LOOKS like the butler was The Mole working with the thieves, and a character who is an actress points out that in plays "The butler always does it" but it turns out to have been his Evil Twin brother impersonating him. The actual butler is totally innocent. | |
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The Rocky Horror Picture Show has Frank-N-Furter being done in by his "faithful handyman" Riff Raff. | |
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It's possible for this to be the case in the game Clue, if Mrs. White (the maid) is the randomly selected murderer. In the VCR Mystery Game, the butler's name is "Didit". But he's not actually a suspect. In the Mystery Puzzle series, the trope is averted, as the butler is usually the one who figures out who the real killer is. |
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On one episode of The Twilight Zone (1959), a group of people get off a bus and gather at a cafe where they are served food and drinks by the local counter jerk and dine. It is later revealed by the police that one of the people on the bus seems to have been an alien. Ten Little Murder Victims ensues, the resolution of which is only a half-subversion of The Butler Did It: one of the people from the bus was The Mole, but the cafe worker who served them all and remained very much in the background throughout the story was also an enemy alien from a different planet, and was two steps ahead of The Mole the whole time. | |
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The 1966 comedy film The Wrong Box had a convoluted series of events centering around a dead body and cloudy circumstances of his identity and death. At film's end the entire cast is being questioned by a police detective - the butler of one household gallantly takes the fall for his master and claims to have killed him. The detective says - everyone now - "The butler did it?!" | |
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In Death: At one point in Divided In Death, Eve talks to Baxter about his partner Trueheart. Baxter is letting Trueheart handle a case in which a woman was found manually strangled in Upper East Side, New York City. She had a lot of money, a miserable disposition, a huge mean streak, and a dozen heirs who are all glad to see her dead. Baxter then says, "I told him I thought the butler did it, and he just nodded, all serious, and said he'd do a probability. Christ, he's a sweet kid". Clearly, Baxter was just being funny. | |
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In The Night Mayor, the protagonists are trying to catch a criminal who's hiding out in a virtual reality realm based on film noir. While they're trying to figure out which of the realm's denizens is their quarry in disguise, Tunney jokingly mentions this trope before admitting that film noir is the wrong genre for it. | |
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In a 3rd Rock from the Sun episode, the aliens attended a murder mystery dinner (thinking it was real, of course) and Tommy suggests this at one point. Harry replies "You think the butler did it? Well, that's a little far-fetched". | |
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The original book version of Roots has a horrible deconstruction of this trope: the white plantocracy needed black house slaves, and therefore surrounded themselves with black butlers, maids and cooks, many of whom had excellent motives for murder. The book recounts how some black nursemaids would stab a pin into the brain of a white baby through the soft spot before the skull bones knitted, leaving the baby in a coma with no visible mark. | |
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In a non-mystery example, in Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice, both Mao and the player are lead to believe that Mao's Dad is the game's Big Bad. However, it turns out that Super Hero Aurum in the guise of Mao's butler Geoffrey is the game's actual Big Bad. | |
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There is a murder-mystery Affectionate Parody play out there called The Butler Did It. The show jokingly doesn't even have a butler in the cast and at the very end it is revealed that the maid is the murderer. The show also has a sequel entitled The Butler Did It Again. | |
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Lizzie McGuire brings it up during a murder mystery party. No, but there was the guilty maid. |
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In a Soul Eater Breather Episode, Excalibur tells a tale of how he helped Sherlock Holmes solve a murder in which the butler can clearly be seen twirling around a butcher's knife in the background. But it was Watson. Excalibur said it. |
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Cat Tales: Referenced in Trick or Treat, when the Gotham Museum of Mythology and Folklore is opening a new wing, sponsored by the Wayne Foundation, dedicated to murder mysteries. They're holding a Mystery Whodunit party for Halloween to celebrate, and Bruce and Selina attend; Alfred also agrees to attend as "Pennyworth the Butler". Selina, on hearing this, snarks that he'll be hearing "the butler did it" all night. This being Alfred, he's naturally completely innocent. It's Scarecrow who's responsible for hitting Bruce with fear toxin, making him hallucinate for a while that there's been a murder. | |
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The Happyhills Homicide: The Clown's real identity is John Wade, a former janitor at Westpine High who was horrifically burned in the fire that destroyed the school in 1982. Even worse, the fire was set by two jocks who wanted to mess with John and then didn't bother to save him when it got out of control. | |
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In Murder on the Orient Express, depending on which solution you believe, the butler did indeed do it along with everyone else in the Calais Coach, including the coach attendant. | |
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One of Christie's short stories, "The Adventure of the Italian Nobleman" also employs this trope, except that in this case the "Butler" is actually a valet. | |
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Late season episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent has detective Zackery tell his partner about how he solved the murder of a rich, elderly man who was his friend, mentor, and ex-girlfriend's father. There are many Redherrings, including the man's self rightous son, his daughter and Zackery's ex who supposedly suffered a mental break down, but could be faking it, and his long time lawyer because of greed. But it turns out that it was indeed the bulter who did it for his own selfish reasons. | |
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The Brothers Karamazov, while it is a bit more complicated, ultimately plays this one straight. | |
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In one number of Zipi y Zape the twins volunteer to solve a robbery. The first thing they do is asking if the victim has a butler. She doesn't. | |
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Wax and Wayne has an attempted example. The butler of Waxillium tries to kill his master, but fails because Wax's friend Wayne tasted the poisoned tea first, and had a healing factor. Wax eventually figures out that the butler did this on the order of one of the bad guys, specifically his true employer, Wax's uncle Edwarn. | |
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Parodied in this Madam & Eve comic.◊ "The maid did it! The maid always does it!" | |
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Bob and George lampshaded it. | |
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Initially played with in New Tricks - near the end of case where a stage actor was apparently killed onstage, a character jokes that they at least knew that the butler didn't do it, since that was the victim's acting role... which leads to Brian Lane realising the "murder" was actually a suicide, thus playing it straight. | |
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Mocked by the Skulduggery Pleasant short story, The Horror Writers' Halloween Ball in reference to a case solved offscreen | |
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The Aesop Brothers, a National Lampoon cartoon strip by Charles Rodrigues about (non-identical) Siamese twins, once played this as an extended fart joke. The brothers as a Holmes-and-Watson pair are retained to find out who let go a wicked one in the presence of an elderly British nobleman. You can guess the ending. | |
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During the class trip arc of Kaguya-sama: Love Is War, it's revealed that Kaguya's valet Hayasaka has been spying on her under orders of her eldest brother Oko since the day they met. Unlike most examples, the drama comes from her guilt over the act and Kaguya learning to forgive her rather than the reveal that she did it in the first place. | |
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In Gilligan's Island, they discover from the radio that one of their group murdered a man. Gilligan naturally thinks that the butler did it, even as the Skipper points out they don't have a butler. Turns out, no one did it. | |
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Parodied in the German crime spoof Der Wixxer. The butler Alfons Hatler looks, sounds, and behaves exactly as one might expect from a character with such a name, but turns out to be guilty of nothing more than calling a few people nasty names. | |
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Dresden Codak presents "42 Essential 3rd Act Twists", the 37th of which is "All the Butlers Did It". | |
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The Butler Did It / int_72508928 | |
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Early hints in the first episode of Covert Front hint at the butler, Manfred, having done something to his master. At the bequest of his superiors in the Imperial hierarchy, as it turns out. | |
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It's played absolutely straight in Ann Neville's Barber Black Sheep, where Leslie Barry, Lord Issac Harrington's Butler, turns out to be the main villain behind his daughter's disappearance and the thefts occurring at his estate. He also tries to murder the protagonists when they realize this, although his plan of just shooting them and fleeing the country is not particularly well-thought out. | |
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Played straight in Spirit of Justice's DLC case where the culprit turns out to be the family butler, who committed the murder to avenge the death of his fiancée; by framing the fiancée of her brother, who caused the car accident she died in. The murder victim also happens to be a butler, who was trying to kill Ellen (the defendant) at the time. | |
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The Butler Did It / int_72e68fc6 | |
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Played with in the Lord Peter Wimsey murder mystery The Nine Tailors. A key part of the backstory involves a butler who stole a valuable emerald necklace from his employer's house and was sent to prison for it. The butler is a murderer (he killed a guard during a prison break), but not the murderer (he didn't do the murder that the plot revolves around, and is never even a suspect). In fact, as it turns out when the corpse is identified, he was the victim. | |
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The Sexy Brutale: Just about the only deaths that aren't directly or indirectly caused by the staff are Willow and Lucas. | |
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Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Butler, Valet, Gardener...Garak has held many perfectly legitimate jobs where his employer happened to suffer a tragic end. | |
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Steven Universe: In the Gems' Hive Caste System, Pearls are created to be personal attendants to other gems. Pink Diamond's Pearl (otherwise known as Our Pearl) was the one to "shatter" her, although she was actually helping her mistress fake her death. | |
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Steven Universe | hasFeature |
The Butler Did It / int_7832b74c | |
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The Butler Did It | |
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In Murder by Death, when the detectives are offering their solutions, one of them claims that it was the butler who did it and then faked his own death. In the end they leave without suspecting the real killer the deaf mute cook. | |
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An episode of Mega Man (Ruby-Spears) involved Dr. Wily programming one of Dr. Light's new housekeeping robots to kill Megaman. After one attempt fails, Megaman utters, "I have a sneaking suspicion the butler did it". Actually it was the maid. | |
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Fred Flintstone has to deal with a murderous butler when he inherits a property in one episode of The Flintstones. | |
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Played with in Knives Out. Marta Cabrera, Mr. Thrombey's nurse, is the protagonist, and as such the audience is experiencing the film through the eyes of the 'butler'. It's soon revealed that Marta was responsible for Mr. Thrombey's death, in that she gave him medication from the morphine vial by mistake, and he committed suicide in an attempt to protect her. (Then subverted when it turns out another malefactor had maliciously mislabelled her medicines. Subverted yet again when it turns out she only thought she'd given him the wrong meds (due to the mislabeled bottles)— she had in fact dosed him correctly and his suicide hadn't been necessary.) The film is very interested in the political nature of the relationship between the Thrombeys and their hired help. | |
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Then there's "Last Rites", a two-part Batman story set during Final Crisis, with one chapter called "The Butler Did It" and the other "What the Butler Saw". It turns out that Alfred the butler is actually the Lump, a telepathic parasite hiding inside Batman's memories as he is used for clone fodder by the gods of Apokolips. It's Grant Morrison, what can we say. | |
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Lampshaded in the MMORPG Runescape. During the quest "Murder Mystery" you can talk to gossips about the murder of Lord Sinclair. One of the options you can say is "I think the butler did it" in which case the gossip will say something along the lines of "you've been reading too many murder mystery novels my friend". This does not affect the quest's plot in any way, since the butler isn't a suspect. | |
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In an episode of Murdoch Mysteries the butler did not kill the original victim. However, he figured out who did it and, agreeing with the killer's motive, he then killed the witness who could have implicated the original killer. | |
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In an episode of Saved by the Bell, the show's characters go to a hotel in which a murder mystery is staged for the guests to try to solve. In the end, after exhausting several red herrings, it turns out that, indeed, The Butler Did It — and the episode ends with a character saying those exact words. | |
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Death in Paradise: One episode has a new bride shot with a speargun on a balcony of a high-class hotel. The killer turns out to be the butler for the floor, who mistook her for his intended target, one of the maids. | |
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Played with in The Shapla Case, where the Nuzu brothers's first course of action after the King's death is to arrest the royal butler just in case, because statistically he's the most likely suspect. It wasn't him. | |
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Kadingir | hasFeature |
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Batman '66: There's a story titled "The Butler Did It!" but the butler's cousin is the true villain. | |
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In one episode of Monk, the introduction implies that the butler dislikes his new employer, the son of his former, now dead employer, while delivering a drink. Instead of drinking the Manhattan, the employer pulls out a pistol and shoots the butler. | |
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When the Police Chief is investigating Peter's murder in Soap one of the main reasons he suspects Benson is because he's the butler (the other being because he's black). | |
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Square One TV features this in a Mathnet series when George Frankly invites Pat Tuesday to join him at a mystery weekend in a mansion. Unfortunately, due to a road sign pointing the wrong direction due to a storm, they end up at a different mansion where six criminals have been invited to another party - they only show up because the invitations were to their real names instead of their assumed names they'd been living as for years. Over the week's episodes, they start disappearing one by one. When they all disappear, George finds a series of hidden passageways leading to a holding cell where they're being held by the butler. It turns out the butler was a court stenographer upset that these 'criminals' never went to jail, despite the fact that they've all proven their innocence with math. (For example, one man was exonerated from stealing gold when he pointed out that to commit the crime, he would have had to carry hundreds of pounds of gold by himself). When he was exposed and went to jail, he learned to like math, taught it to others, and became an advisor to Square One TV. | |
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Non-murder example, despite the deaths. In Blithe Spirit, the un-noticed person whose presence and personality is pulling back the dead spirit of the previous wife is the timid housemaid. | |
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The Cat in the Stacks Mysteries: Literally in book 2, where James Delacorte's butler Truesdale became his boss's primary heir and then killed him to speed up the process after finding out by means of a gossipy paralegal and her aunt, the latter of whom was having an affair with one of the other heirs and shared this information with Truesdale after learning of his status. Both Sean Harris and Kanesha Berry are rather incredulous when Charlie Harris figures it out, especially since two other major suspects have just been arrested, but that doesn't stop it from being true. (The two suspects already in custody at this point, it turns out, were guilty of something else - they stole part of Delacorte's rare book collection, which was being left to Athena College rather than Truesdale or any of Delacorte's family). | |
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In Sparkling Cyanide, the waiter did it, while in Death in the Clouds, the air steward did it. However, in both cases, this was one of the regular suspects disguised as a server. | |
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This trope is inverted in Rare's commercially unsuccessful Grabbed by the Ghoulies. Ghoulhaven Hall's looney master Baron Von Ghoul has a few servants, but all of them aside from the also-mad Dr. Krackpot seem like generally good folk displeased with his actions. It's revealed near the end that Baron Von Ghoul had been wearing a Latex Perfection mask to act as one of those servants: Crivens the butler. Since the house otherwise has no butler, the butler didn't do it. Rather, the one who did it was also the butler. Lampshaded when the Baron himself states that he didn't think Cooper expected the butler to have done it. The unproduced sequel would reveal that Crivens is a real person who escaped Ghoulhaven Hall and went to Ghoulsville-In-The-Gloom, the ending shows the main characters going to that town while being followed by the Baron, meaning that they were going to meet the real Crivens there. |
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A subtle version of this in the Fighting Fantasy gamebook House of Hell. The butler, Franklins, was the demon the cult was worshipping right under his master, the cult leader's, nose, and the Final Boss of the story. | |
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Played with in Justice For All. The butler technically did it—but he's not actually Matt Engarde's butler, he's assassin Shelly de Killer posing as a butler. The player knows this before Phoenix does, so it's a bit of Fridge Horror when you realize Phoenix is in the same house as the kidnapped Maya, but has no idea she's only two doors away. | |
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Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (Visual Novel) | hasFeature |
The Butler Did It / int_994af351 | |
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In the Bob's Burgers episode "Broadcast Wagstaff School News", Tina investigates a case regarding an anonymous student who was defecating in various places in the school. Tina herself refers to them as the "Mad Pooper" but in an attempt to invoke this trope, Linda suggests naming them the "Butt-ler". | |
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Bob's Burgers | hasFeature |
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Parodied in the Cow and Chicken episode "Red Butler", where the Red Guy presents a mystery story not entirely unlike Murder on the Orient Express, to the two title characters. Interestingly while the butler clearly had a motivation to injure his employer with his own dentures, Red's reasoning as to why he did it is because it's always the butler who's responsible. Made weirder by the fact that in the very same episode, he's employed as the family's butler. | |
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The Butler Did It | |
The Butler Did It / int_9a443a4b | comment |
In The Amazing Spider-Man (J. Michael Straczynski) #522, Spider-Man pauses while searching the closet of a HYDRA agent to deliver this line to an empty room, on the grounds that he's waited his whole life to say it. | |
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The Amazing Spider-Man (J. Michael Straczynski) (Comic Book) | hasFeature |
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The Butler Did It | |
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Despite being mentioned above, one can call Case Closed a "Zig-Zag" of this trope. There are a couple cases where The Butler Did It, yeah, but there about as many if not more cases where the butler clearly did not do it. Butlers, servants, nannies and housekeepers appear as characters in a lot of cases, but they are usually dismissed pretty quickly. Most commonly, a servant character appears in a case involving family drama, and is the Exposition Fairy, disclosing details about family drama that other family members don't want or can't reveal to outsiders and pesky detectives. And even on a couple cases where it looks like the butler or the housekeeper/groundskeeper could have done it because s/he had motive, it turns out it's not the case. One of the best examples is in Billionaire Birthday Blues wherein the two victims had caused the death of the housekeeper's granddaughter, which would give the "Butler" character the most visible motive out of anyone. But, it's shown that she's not only beyond any desire of revenge, but she even delivers a Shut Up, Hannibal! to her granddaughter's suitor who had just invoked Love Makes You Evil as his Freudian Excuse. She even closed the victim's eyes to give her the final peace, while saying that even when she doesn't really forgive her deeds, nobody deserves to be murdered since there will always be someone else in pain. Additionally, the Murder before the Wedding case features a butler and a young servant... The butler is the murder victim while the servant, the victim's adoptive son, is at first found guilty despite his claims of innocence... but he was NOT the killer and blaming him was a Batman Gambit from Heiji and Conan in order to flush the real culprit out. There's a case where a butler is one of the suspects in a murder case... but since he was disguised as another person, nobody knew he was a butler to start with. He was under a disguise as a request of his mistress Momiji, Heiji Hattori's Self-Proclaimed Love Interest, since she wanted him to keep an eye on Heiji's cases. In the backstory of the Detectives Koshien arc, a maid and a butler are suspects of having robbed and killed a rich young woman. Neither did it, but what the butler did do was not revealing that his boss was mentally unstable and actually committed suicide, because he greatly cared for her and knew that the very conservative Japanese society would cruelly judge her for her mental illness. The maid, now the sole suspect, threw herself into the sea in despair; her best friend, an Amateur Sleuth, would later create the whole Detective Koshien deal to find and punish all the people who drove the girl to her death, the butler included. |
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The DuckTales (2017) episode "McMystery at McDuck McManor" has Scrooge vanish for real during a magic act performed at his (unwanted) birthday party, with Huey determined to solve the case. Three of Scrooge's Rogues Gallery, Ma Beagle, Flintheart Glomgold, and Mark Beaks, are in attendance, and seem like natural suspects, but all were innocent (of that particular crime, at least). The magician who performed the trick is himself revealed to be "Black Arts Beagle", a legitimate magic user who tried to summon a real demon... but he too did not do anything to Scrooge. It turns out that the "demon" he called was actually the ghost of Scrooge's loyal butler Duckworth, who helped Scrooge sneak out because he wasn't enjoying the party. As an added bit of Foreshadowing, a Scrooge-themed Word Search can be glimpsed earlier in the episode, and "thebutlerdidit" can be spotted on it. | |
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In One Piece, Merry the butler survived an assassination attempt on his life. The OTHER butler did it- Klahadore. Real name, the infamous CAPTAIN KURO. Also, Kaya's parents died shortly after he enrolled as a butler... However, Kuro states to his partner-in-crime/right-hand-man Jango - which he would have no reason to lie to - that Kaya's parents died naturally, so they probably did. Though he probably would have killed them himself if they had lived on for much longer... | |
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In Hell To Pay, John Taylor admits that he was reluctant to suspect the Griffins' butler because it's such a cliche. The butler did do it, but charging him with the crime becomes a bit beside the point when his true identity as an archdemon is exposed. | |
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In the Jeeves and Wooster novel Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit (Released in the U.S. as Bertie Wooster Sees it Through), when Bertie meets the author of the murder mystery he's reading, he asks him who's the killer, and he answers that it's the butler. | |
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In the Murder, She Wrote episode "Christopher Bundy ... Died on a Sunday", Jessica points out to the police detective that Bundy's ... manservant ... was acting suspiciously and lacks an alibi. Despite her attempt to avoid using the word, the detective asks her if the renowned mystery writer is actually saying she thinks the butler did it. (It turns out he's not the murderer ... and not a butler. His suspicious activity was because he's actually an undercover federal agent.) | |
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Gosford Park is an exploration of this trope and other murder-mystery-related tropes: Lampshaded when one character, an American movie maker working on a new murder mystery set in England, calls his studio: The cast is separated between "above stairs" characters (the upper-class guests of a shooting party) and "below stairs" ones (their servants). During the first part of the movie, it's revealed that every single above-stairs character has a reason to murder the future victim, but he's murdered by a below-stairs character, whose motivations are revealed in the second part of the movie. Basically, it's not "the butler did it" but "a servant did it".. The butler acts strangely after the murder because other characters suspect he's the murderer and since he went to prison for desertion, he fears he'll be arrested even though he's innocent. Following the trope, the lead detective who investigates the murder questions the servants, but only on their masters. Later, knowing nothing of the servants, he explains that all of them are free to leave as there's no reason to suspect them. His less classist underling does suspect the servants, but still comes up with nothing. |
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One Jonathan Creek Christmas special actually used this, though, as usual for the series, half of the mystery was realising that it had been a murder in the first place, and then how and why it had been done. The victim was a magician who had apparently killed herself, but it ultimately — and appropriately — turned out that The Butler Did It. How? It was all done with mirrors. | |
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The Haunted Mansion (2003) lampshades and plays it straight. While the butler did indeed do it heavily implied that the butler was racist, the main character immediately after invokes this trope. | |
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The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries episode "Dangerous Waters" plays with this: the kidnap victim doesn't recognize her mother's butler when he greets the Hardys at the door. Naturally, he turns out to be part of the plot, and the non-recognition turns into a vital clue for Joe & Frank to crack the case. | |
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Definitely played with in MySims Agents. In one part of the story, a fortunite crystal, which is able to let people see the future, is the most-sought part of Cyrus LeBodreaux's estate. However, when Madame Zoe goes into the crystal room for a pre-dinner reading, you find that the crystal there has been smashed! You follow the evidence which leads you to the conclusion that Carl, the zombie butler, was the one who smashed it. However, it turns out that Zoe, a skilled hypnotist, was whispering hypnotic suggestions to him as he slept. Not only that, but it turns out that the crystal in the crystal room wasn't even the real fortunite crystal! Zoe, having foreseen that she wasn't the named inheritor of her uncle's estate, had intended to make people believe the fortunite had been destroyed so that the other potential inheritors would leave, allowing her to keep the estate anyway. | |
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Quizzical: Quizzical Greystone And The Basements Of Doom: In "Villain's Monologue", the titular Evil Gloating mentions this: | |
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One particularly old example: in The Bible, while Joseph is imprisoned in Egypt, two prisoners ask him to interpret their dreams. One was the Pharaoh's butler, and the other was his baker, and they had been jailed after an attempt on Pharaoh's life. While we never find out who actually tried to kill Pharaoh, Joseph tells them that in three days, Pharaoh will decide the butler was innocent and will allow him to return to work, but he will have the baker executed. Sure enough, that's what happens. | |
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In The Adventure Zone Arc "Murder on The Rockport Limited", Jenkins, The Wizard Assistant, is beheaded by a Serial Killer called the Rockport Slayer. However, it is Later Revealed that Jenkins, is actually the Rockport Slayer, and he Murdered and switched his clothes with the Rockport Limited's Engineer to act as a decoy. | |
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In one Garrett, P.I. novel, a side plot is that various minor knickknacks vanishing from the client's house. It eventually turns out that the butler was stealing and selling them because his employer hadn't revised the household budget to allow for inflation in years, and he needed the extra money to keep the estate going. | |
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Studio C's aptly named, "Blame It On The Butler" has the guy who obviously is the killer repeatedly try do just that, though nobody seems to believe him. | |
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In And Then There Were None, the butler, Mr. Rogers, and his wife Ethel are two of the suspects, but are two of the first victims. They're guilty of something else, though (killing their former boss, a rich and sickly spinster whose meds they tampered with so they could inherit her estate), and that is why they got killed. (Ethel dies first and in her sleep since her husband pressured her into helping kill their old employer; Rogers is killed in a far more bloody manner awhile later). | |
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Wallenstein Not Wallenstein's butler, but A Colonel But(t)ler, assassinates the title figure. | |
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The Sound of Music: While it's never stated outright, it's implied that the Von Trapp's butler is the one who alerted the Nazis to the family attempting to escape the Third Reich. He's seen watching them sneaking out of the house and was previously seen discussing "developments" with Rolf (a confirmed Nazi), making him the most likely culprit. | |
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Clue (1985): In one of the endings, "Wadsworth" murdered the singing telegram girl, but then it turns out he's really Mr. Boddy; and the "it" that started the whole thing was Professor Plum murdering "Mr. Boddy" (really Mr. Boddy's butler, much to Plum's disappointment). In the lost fourth ending, he actually is the butler and murdered everyone out of a sick need for perfection, and reveals he poisoned everyone and locked the doors, then tries to escape in a police car, only to be mauled by a doberman. | |
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A hilarious play on this trope appears in the Czech movie Adele Hasn't Had Her Dinner Yet. In Czech, this trope is known by the phrase "The gardener is the murderer!" — a clichéd solution to pulp detective stories. What a surprise when the actual culprit of the original curious disappearance is a man who is known as "The Gardener", the most mysterious criminal mastermind of the century. And his most loyal minion is his butler/chamberlain. | |
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Spider-Man: In The Amazing Spider-Man (Lee & Ditko), when Spider-Man defeats Electro for the first time and unmasks him, he thinks "If this was a movie, I'd gasp in shock and then I'd say: 'Good Heavens! The butler!'" but admitted that he had never seen him before. In The Amazing Spider-Man (J. Michael Straczynski) #522, Spider-Man pauses while searching the closet of a HYDRA agent to deliver this line to an empty room, on the grounds that he's waited his whole life to say it. |
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Subverted and lampshaded in a couple of Scooby-Doo cartoons: In the Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! episode "Go Away, Ghost Ship", the Scooby gang has to chase a ghost pirate. Their employer, Mr. Magnus, has a big, creepy-looking butler who is an obstacle into going to see him. At the end of the episode, when the pirate is unmasked, Shaggy is surprised: In Where Are You!'s "Nowhere to Hyde", all clues initially point to the housemaid Helga, but in the end it turns out that all those clues were planted by the true villain, who reveals himself when Shaggy accidentally finds a real clue. In The Scooby-Doo Show episode "The Headless Horseman of Halloween", there is also a creepy butler, who turns out to have pale hands like someone who tried to steal a jewel from a Woman. This turns out to be flour and the Horseman turns out to be a relative of the Woman attempting to steal the Jewel. At the end of the Video Game Night of a Hundred Frights, Shaggy (incorrectly) blames the spooky groundskeeper, who then appears and starts a long rant about how everyone always blames the spooky groundskeeper, including the line "Why don't you just say the butler did it?" |
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In the setting of the role-playing game Over the Edge there is a Milkman Conspiracy of butlers and personal retainers around the world. They usually don't murder their patrons, but if there was a good reason... | |
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Played with in PvP by having the butler secretly playing the role of "hero". Creator Scott Kurtz's explanation of the idea was essentially "if anyone ever discovered the secret lair beneath the mansion, they would obviously suspect the millionaire playboy as the hero's secret identity. Meanwhile, the butler would have skipped town and hired his services out to the next rich employer far away, where he would start his hero gig anew". | |
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The Weather: Implied in a "Spooky Fog" skit; A group of four, snooty, rich characters get invited to a mysterious mansion. One by one, they get murdered, until only the Butler is left. | |
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Jannah Station: This is one of the possible outcomes, depending on the reader's point of view. | |
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Subverted in the Hurricanes episode "Lord Napper of Stepney". Napper inherited his Uncle's fortune on the condition he never plays soccer ever again. It's never been stated who would be the next one to get the inheritance until Napper lost it. Until then, the only people who ever hoped to get the money were a relative and the deceased one's business partner and the two of them ever tried to rid themselves of Napper. In the end, the money went to the valet. | |
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In Vicki, Jill meets up with Steve at the all-night movie house. Steve tells her that he has sat through the movie three times and "the butler did it". He is being being jocular because the movie showing is Laura. | |
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The third episode of Devil May Cry: The Animated Series, where the butler is the one who uses his master's blood as part of a demon summoning ritual. Partially subverted, in that this doesn't occur until late in the episode, we actually see the butler telling the master, and the master is eventually healed after the demon and the butler are vanquished. | |
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See How They Run: The usher at the theater did it, not any of the high-profile suspects. Lampshaded by Stalker, who realizes Dennis was Beneath Suspicion due to his position. | |
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Joe from Statless and Tactless assumes this is the case. Poor Archibald... | |
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To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis plays with this trope. First it's discussed, when time-traveling main character Ned muses that the mystery they're solving is nothing like old-school detective stories, where the butler always does it. It actually becomes a Running Gag in the book, as when he travels to a Genteel Interbellum Setting, people are complaining that it's becoming cliche in stories for the butler to do it. And then in the end, it turns out the running gag is a Chekhov's Gun, and butler really did do it... but the "it" that he does is "elope with the beautiful daughter", not "murder the victim". | |
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A common joke about The Mousetrap is that a couple take a cab to go see the play and tip poorly, to which the frustrated cabbie yells "The butler did it!" at them. The joke here being that the butler can't have done it, because there are no butlers (or other service staff) in the play. Of course, another variant has the cabbie having seen the play before and spoiling the real, non-butler culprit. | |
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Arcane Ascension: When the heroes are in what is, essentially, a historical re-enactment of a famous unsolved murder, they discover that the butler was the one plotting to murder a pair of twins because this culture believes One Twin Must Die. Hilariously, their world apparently doesn't have this as a trope, so everyone is completely blindsided, and the heroes talk about how it's an awesome twist that no one could have possibly seen coming. | |
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In Danganronpa 3, the (most important) traitor turns out to be that housekeeper who was going around serving tea to everyone in the first episode. To be fair the housekeeper did start out as a genuinely good person, but later was brutally tortured and ended up Brainwashed and Crazy. | |
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Ripping Yarns. Manners the butler confesses in "Murder at Moorstones Manor", citing resentment over years of servitude, but everyone else in the Big Fancy House confesses to the same murder, so they all end up killing each other. At the end the phone rings (with someone else calling in a confession) and the dying butler can't resist trying to fetch his mistress the phone as he's always done. | |
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Doctor Who: In "The Unicorn and the Wasp", a murder mystery featuring Dame Agatha Christie as a character, the butler at one point quips that "Well, at least we know the butler didn't do it". | |
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The loyal butler Cadbury in Richie Rich was framed by the villains for the bombing of the Rich's plane to kill Richie's parents. Since Cadbury also happened to be Richie's guardian in light of Richie's parents being missing, by removing Cadbury from the picture, the villain placed himself as Richie's new guardian so he could effectively isolate Richie from the outside world. | |
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Boardwalk Empire: Parlor maid/servant Louanne is the one poisoning the Commodore. | |
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In a televised version of one of the Hercule Poirot mysteries, Poirot and Hastings attend a murder-mystery play. The two agree to a game: Poirot will try to figure out which character is the murderer, and write it on a slip of paper which Hastings will read during the third act. Poirot's paper reads: "The butler did it". The play's butler turns out not to be the culprit, much to Poirot's annoyance, and the Belgian detective spends several minutes complaining to Hastings about bad scripting. | |
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Ace Attorney: Played with in Justice For All. The butler technically did it—but he's not actually Matt Engarde's butler, he's assassin Shelly de Killer posing as a butler. The player knows this before Phoenix does, so it's a bit of Fridge Horror when you realize Phoenix is in the same house as the kidnapped Maya, but has no idea she's only two doors away. |
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In Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears, the perpetrator of the murders (although not all of the other skullduggery that is going on) turns out to be Crippins, the Lofthouse's extremely competent butler. He is also the real father of the younger Lofthouse brother Jonathan. | |
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In an episode of The Looney Tunes Show, Bugs Bunny is reading a mystery novel. And by the time he finishes it, this is how he said it went: | |
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Subverted in Professor Layton and the Last Specter. The butler did it. But this time it is not the butler, the real one had been kidnapped and locked in a cellar while the mastermind took his place. | |
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In the Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! episode "Go Away, Ghost Ship", the Scooby gang has to chase a ghost pirate. Their employer, Mr. Magnus, has a big, creepy-looking butler who is an obstacle into going to see him. At the end of the episode, when the pirate is unmasked, Shaggy is surprised: | |
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In an episode of The Golden Girls, they're participating in a murder mystery weekend. The accusations start flying for the first mystery, Rose stands up, points to the waiter and the following exchange occurs: In another episode, they're following a murder case on the news. |
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In an episode of Power Rangers Zeo, this trope is invoked in a murder mystery game set up by Detective Stone. Rocky, who is playing the butler role, is understandably annoyed. | |
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Every episode of Police Squad! has two titles, one of which is misleading and one of which is completely accurate. The episode about a kidnapping case is named, "The Butler Did It (A Bird in the Hand)". The butler is, in fact, the one responsible for the kidnapping. He needed the money. | |
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Subverted twice over in the Cabin Pressure episode Paris. It's Birling Day, when once a year the airline flies the extremely rich and obnoxious Mr. Birling to a rugby match. Every year Carolyn (the airline's owner) provides him with a bottle of very expensive whisky, and every year Douglas (the first officer) steals it. This time Carolyn charges Martin (the captain) with stopping Douglas, and Martin enlists the help of Arthur (Carolyn's son, the steward; he's an idiot, but there's no one else). When the whisky disappears, Douglas insists that he hasn't stolen it (yet). Martin and Douglas come up with a theory as to the guilt of each of the four regular characters (Martin, Douglas, Carolyn and Arthur), in some cases more than one theory per suspect, and one for Mr. Birling himself - and one for the 'butler' figure of Philip from the airport fire crew, whom Carolyn had frisk Douglas before he got on the plane. But it wasn't Philip. The one person whom nobody suspects is Mrs. Birling (who appeared briefly near the start of the episode to see off her husband, whom she hates and who hates her)); because of this, Genre Savvy listeners will realise that she must have done it. Except that, as the writer explains here, he carefully put her in and had nobody suspect her to trick such listeners into thinking just that - but she didn't steal it either. (Douglas stole it. Douglas always steals the whisky on Birling Day). | |
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The Outsiders: In Frank Tieri's run on Batman And The Outsiders 2007, The Riddler, investigating a rich man's murder, declares the butler the killer by directly quoting this trope, calling it "the greatest cliché of all". | |
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The Butler Did It | |
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Veronica Mars, solving the case in "An Echolls Family Christmas", muses that she's ticked because she was "this close" to being able to say The Butler Did It. | |
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No murders involved, but Fitzwilly stars a butler who's a Con Man criminal mastermind. Subverted in that all the other domestic servants in the household also Did It. | |
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The Avengers (1960s) episode "What the Butler Saw" involved an entire school for butlers, which turned out to be a criminal enterprise. At the end, there's an exchange along the following lines: | |
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In The Scooby-Doo Show episode "The Headless Horseman of Halloween", there is also a creepy butler, who turns out to have pale hands like someone who tried to steal a jewel from a Woman. This turns out to be flour and the Horseman turns out to be a relative of the Woman attempting to steal the Jewel. | |
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In the 1949 Batman and Robin (Serial), the valet of the crotchety inventor was the Big Bad. | |
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In Honoo no Alpen Rose, the Durant family has bot a butler and a maid. The butler is a good guy. The maid is a spy from a local Manipulative Bastard. | |
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The Butler Did It | |
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Black Coffee, originally written as a play, has this ending. In the book adaptation, not by Christie, it's spoiled the moment it happens by outright stating, before the detectives even arrive, that the character placed the poison into the victim's coffee cup before giving it to him. | |
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Diabolik: Played with. The actual butler is always innocent, but Diabolik tend to take his place (or the place of another house servant) to take a look of the place he's about to steal from and/or drug/kidnap his victim. | |
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In All That, Detective Dan skit has a butler stealing in the background while the detective tries to find the culprit. | |
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The Three Stooges episode "If a Body Meets a Body". Moe even lampshades it in the short "Who Done It", where the stooges are detectives. As soon as they get into the house they search the butler, Moe saying "The butler is always a suspect!" As it turns out, the butler was one of the four people behind the crime. |
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Ace Attorney: Played straight in Spirit of Justice's DLC case where the culprit turns out to be the family butler, who committed the murder to avenge the death of his fiancée; by framing the fiancée of her brother, who caused the car accident she died in. The murder victim also happens to be a butler, who was trying to kill Ellen (the defendant) at the time. |
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Midsomer Murders: In "Dead Man's Eleven", the culprit turns out to be the Cavendish's rarely seen housekeeper, who is actually the wife of a man killed by Cavendish's corporate negligence in the past. In keeping with the trope, most of the hanging mysteries are solved by the fact that she had access to the whole house while remaining beneath everyone's notice. | |
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In Where the Truth Lies, Lanny believes Vince killed Maureen and Vince thinks Lanny is the murderer. It turns out that Reuben, Lanny and Vince's valet and "fix-it man", strangled her to keep her from blackmailing Lanny and Vince with the audio she had recorded during their sexual encounter. The reveal hurt the movie; as one critic noted the ending was "straight out of the big book of mystery clichés". | |
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A variation appeared in the film Short Circuit 2. Johnny Five notices the novel The Hound of the Baskervilles. He begins speed reading through it, pauses halfway and says, "I think the chauffeur did it". He speeds through the rest of he book and, on finishing, says, "He did". Of course, as everybody knows, the murderer was the nephew of Sir Charles, and he had trained a vicious dog to murder the rest of the family in order to claim the Baskerville fortune for himself. | |
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Plumbing the Death Star did an episode about The Force Awakens fan theories, and how they mostly involve some minor character, generally one none of the main characters' have a relationship with, secretly being the Big Bad, Snoke. The theory they find, if not the worst, the most boring is the one where the Supreme Leader of evil is actually a grown-up version of Darth Vader's butler from Rogue One who appeared for five seconds to get Vader out of his evil bubble bath once guests arrived. | |
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John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme: A Storyteller sketch manages to both parody this and ultimately play it straight. The parody comes at the start, when the inspector whose job it is to make a patently false deduction states that in keeping with the genre it obviously can't be the butler, especially since the butler points out he was the one who showed the storyteller and inspector the body. Then the butler turns out to in fact be the actual inspector in disguise, and the inspector is actually the duchess. The real butler turns out to have been disguised as a dog, and actually is the killer of the duke, having been trying to kill the duchess for making him disguise himself as a dog (the duke having been dressed as the duchess for reasons she feels it's best not to go into). | |
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Sherlock Holmes: The butler did it in "The Musgrave Ritual", although in that case it's only theft, not murder, and not the mystery; the question is why he did it, and what happened to him afterwards. It eventually transpires that he's dead, possibly at the hands of his accomplice. The maid did it (or at least let it happen). In The Hound of the Baskervilles, suspicion initially settles on the butler John Barrymore and his wife Elisa, but both are later shown to be innocent. What they are guilty of, however, is giving shelter and supplies to a fugitive — who turns out to be Elisa's younger brother Selden, a local Serial Killer. A very prototypical version of this arguably happens in Holmes' debut in A Study in Scarlet, where the killer is the similarly-overlooked cabbie who drove both victims around. The following novel The Sign of the Four plays it a little straighter - the butler wasn't the mastermind or anything, but he was the inside man crucial to enabling the central murder. |
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The Mentalist: In season 3's "The Red Mile", Jane gleefully exclaims this, while running around nearly beside himself with excitement. Though the butler was driving the car to Jane's pre-arranged trap, it was actually the rich mother-in-law that did it. | |
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Brat Pack: The Big Bad Doctor Blasphemy, responsible for the deaths of... the entire cast, is revealed to be King Rad's butler Fredo in the final pages. | |
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An episode of The Batman in which Spellbinder brainwashes several rich people's butlers (Alfred included) to steal for him is actually titled "The Butler Did It". | |
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Used for a pun in an episode of Quincy, M.E.. "Butler" was the surname of the Killers of the Week. | |
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Hitman 3: In Dartmoor, if you pick up the poison pills in the Butler's office then Diana cheekily asks if 47 is thinking of framing him. With all the evidence in the room, 47 can use this in the murder mystery Mission Story to make his target believe this really is the case! | |
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In The Neighborhood, Dave, Malcolm, and Marty track down the author of a book whose last page was missing. After the three hork up $200, the author reveals that it was the butler, which dissatisfies them. They try writing up their own ending, but Calvin pieces together that it was the butler all along. | |
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In Spongebob Square Pants' "The Great Patty Caper", Spongebob, searching for the key that was stolen, says, "We know you did it! The butler always commits the crime!" to the fish who works on the train that is not a butler. | |
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In Hellsing, if Sir Islands' suspicions are anything to go by, Walter Dornez - the Hellsing family's butler - had been working for Millennium way before he officially turned, and was responsible for the security breaches that enabled the Valentine brothers to get into the mansion and massacre most of Hellsing's staff; in fact, he may even have been complicit in what happened to Integra's father long ago. It's also just a tad convenient that he gives Alucard a gun which is later destroyed by the Doktor via remote control. | |
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Not a murder, but at one point in Memoria, one of the protagonists is in a tavern trying to find the last remaining unaccounted-for member of a mob from the previous night. He's told that everyone currently in the room was also there last night (and is therefore a potential candidate). After he interrogates the three suspicious men in the bar, it turns out that the fifth member of the mob was the barmaid. | |
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In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Dumbledore shows Harry a Pensieve Flashback of a meeting between Tom Riddle (the boy who would be Voldemort) and a witch named Hepzibah Smith, in which Riddle is clearly covetous of Hepzibah's magical artefacts. Two days later, Hepzibah was found dead, and her house-elf Hokey (the wizarding equivalent of a butler) confessed to accidentally spiking her cocoa with a poison that resembled sugar. Harry and Dumbledore, however, know the truth: Riddle killed Hepzibah, stole the artefacts, and altered Hokey's memories to make her think that she did it. | |
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In The Hound of the Baskervilles, suspicion initially settles on the butler John Barrymore and his wife Elisa, but both are later shown to be innocent. What they are guilty of, however, is giving shelter and supplies to a fugitive — who turns out to be Elisa's younger brother Selden, a local Serial Killer. | |
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It Was Your Blood, Part Spoof. Data is called on to solve a mystery in his Sherlock Holmes persona, and starts with the usual suspects. On asking if the butler did it, he's informed that the transporter chief has an alibi. | |
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