http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OrgyOfEvidence

Are we really supposed to accept that all of this came from a 120 lb woman?

Danny Witwer: I worked homicide before I went federal. This is what we call an orgy of evidence. You know how many orgies I had as a homicide cop?

Officer Fletcher: How many?

Danny Witwer: None. This was all arranged. Minority Report I worked homicide before I went federal. This is what we call an orgy of evidence. You know how many orgies I had as a homicide cop?How many?None. This was all arranged.

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A common tactic for fictional criminals (especially murderers) is to plant false clues at the scene of their crime: either to deliberately frame someone else or merely to throw suspicion away from themselves. Sometimes, however, they take things too far and the sheer amount of clues they plant has the opposite effect. No detective will believe that any criminal could be so careless as to leave that much incriminating evidence behind. He may also be suspicious because his investigation seems to be turning up all this evidence far more quickly and easily than is usual for this kind of case. Alternately, the quantity of evidence isn't the problem; the problem is the plausibility of the existence of the evidence, or the ability of the investigator to find the purported evidence (the latter usually leads to either a Detective Mole or a The Bad Guys Are Cops situation, although that can be avoided in the case of evidence that shows up after a thorough search in a place already searched).

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In Real Life, of course, this is unlikely to work as it does in fictionnote i.e. in Real Life, the police will likely fall for it. Any defense made in court that "I wouldn't be that stupid" is completely hopeless. Even if you prove to the court that you have an IQ of 200, so many other criminals have done stupid things that you would not be believed. The reason in fiction that the detective doesn't believe the evidence is generally that the detective is very experienced; the amount of evidence they find is so disproportional to the norm that it not only strikes them as unusual but implausible. That's why they start to suspect that it was planted deliberately. A Signature Item Clue may be what is used in these.

Compare and contrast Suspiciously Clean Criminal Record, which looks suspicious because it's overwhelmingly exonerating.

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See also Never the Obvious Suspect. If you're looking for that kind of orgy, then Get Your Mind Out of the Gutter.

Examples:

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Comic Books

In Daredevil: Born Again, this phenomenon is what finally convinces Matt Murdock that the recent misfortunes he has suffered are being caused by The Kingpin rather than simply a string of bad luck. Most of his difficulties were subtly engineered problems concerning his taxes, his career and his friends — his entire apartment building blowing up is a little more suspicious. Murdock: It was a nice piece of work, Kingpin. You shouldn't have signed it.

In Fables, this is part of what makes Bigby Wolf suspect that Rose Red's murder was staged, the gratuitous amount of blood belonging to the allegedly dead Red. He admits later he assumed she was dead because of all that blood there...until he realizes there was too much blood for a woman Rose's size .

. In IR$, the Big Bad decide to sacrifice his Dragon, hanging him so it looks like a suicide, with evidence of traffic... Not as bad as the main conspiracy, but maybe enough to commit suicide instead of the shame of the trial. The hero declares that in IRS, you learn never to trust any document presented before you asked for it.

In The Maze Agency story "The Mile High Corpse", evidence is found on the body of the victim that seems to implicate all of the possible suspects.

In X-Men Noir, Tommy Halloway/the Angel investigates the murder of Jean Grey, which was clearly done with Wolverine Claws. When he finds the missing X-Man, Anne-Marie Rankin, he's suspicious because she pointed him in the direction of Captain Logan almost immediately after they met. Halloway manages to figure out it couldn't be Logan very quickly, leading to the obvious conclusion that Rankin's trying to frame him - and since Logan's nekode aren't too hard to come by if you know where to look, she likely killed Jean herself.

Films — Live-Action

Fan Works

On the Coreline short story Coreline: A Tale Of Two Maris, this is the particular issue that occurs with a murder investigation on Indianapolis, the (apparent) work of a version of Mari Illustrious Makinami (with the powers of Captain America, who has been trained by Captain America, and with extensive knowledge of Supernatural Martial Arts) that has gone rogue. The police suspect that it is Mari because all of the murders have been done with moves which are unique to her, while the members of The Champions (a Corporate-Sponsored Superhero team) that have taken up the assignment to investigate believe that it's not her because they assume that someone who has been trained as extensively in covert operations as Mari has would have access to other methods of assassination that would not lead back to her, and thus she's being set up. The Champions end up being right — the one doing the set-up being an evil version of Mari with the powers of the Taskmaster , who can easily copy anything the other Mari does, especially martial arts moves.

Literature

Live-Action TV

The third season of Absentia has the FBI tracking a mole with evidence coming to a man who is found dead seemingly of suicide. But the supervisor openly notes that whatever else, the man was far too smart and experienced to allow so much evidence (literally caught on tape) just lying around which makes him suspect he was the patsy for the real mole.

On American Gods Shadow and Wednesday are arrested for a robbery they committed in a previous episode. The police detective has them dead to rights but is worried because the evidence is primarily satellite photos of the crime in progress. The technology used is state-of-the-art and is what governments use to track terrorist masterminds. She wants to know why someone with access to top secret surveillance satellites would use it to track two small time crooks. She is right to be worried since the source of the evidence was Mr. World who had Wednesday arrested so he could offer him a deal that would prevent the coming war between the Old Gods and the New Gods. All the cops are massacred by Mr. Wood so there are no witnesses to the meeting.

Andromeda has a variation on this, where Tyr is in a locked room alone with a planetary president he blames for killing tens of thousands of Tyr's people, when two shots are fired from Tyr's weapon, killing the man instantly. Tyr's defense is essentially that if he had actually planned to assassinate the president, he wouldn't have gotten caught. "And I have... some small experience in these matters." He then starts listing off virtually untraceable means of assassination with discussion of their pros and cons until Dylan stops him. Later on, Andromeda reconstructs the events and realizes that Tyr's gun fired at the floor. The only reason the victim was killed was because all guns here use miniature guided missiles instead of regular bullets. Still, someone as experienced as Tyr would've fired at the target.

An episode of The Avengers (1960s), "The Curious Case of the Countless Clues", has John Steed go up against a killer who plants clues over each of his hits, and then poses as a detective attempting to "solve" each of the murders he himself committed.

Burke's Law: In "Who Killed Marty Kelso?", the murderer plants a cufflink at the scene to implicate an innocent man. After the police fail to find it, she plants its mate. When Burke finds both of them, he figures that one cufflink is a clue and two is an obvious frameup.

In La casa de papel, The Professor allows the police to discover the gangs staging area because he filled it with irrelevant information and false leads. The police would spend days trying to chase down every lead only to discover that they had nothing of value. It is then subverted when the police forensic expert concludes that the evidence is useless and correctly identifies the one place in the house where real evidence might be found .

. Can go both ways on Columbo. Often, the killer will go out of their way to leave behind evidence to throw off the scent or frame an innocent suspect. Other times, they'll do their best to erase evidence. But in either case, Columbo will find it odd that so much "evidence" is piling up so easily and that leads him to figure out the truth. In "Publish or Perish", Miles Greenleaf arranges for his hitman to plant an orgy of evidence against himself while he carefully stages an alibi, to try to convince the police that someone is trying to frame him. Unfortunately, he plants too much evidence and some of it doesn't fit (literally).

CSI: In "The List", the team investigates the murder of an ex-cop who was in prison for murdering his wife. Over the course of the investigation, it becomes apparent that the original case against him was based on an orgy of evidence.

CSI: NY: In "Prey," the CSI team investigate a murder with a large amount of strange evidence, all of it designed to simulate evidence encountered at early crime scenes.

In a series 3 episode of Death in Paradise, the Victim of the Week has been poisoned, and nobody has been able to find the poison or work out how it has been administered. The killer then plants the poison at the scene of the crime to try and frame somebody else, but this inadvertently gives the police the information they need to solve the case.

Diagnosis: Murder has Dr. Sloan realize that the suspect was being framed because there is "a mountain of evidence" left behind, which he finds suspicious. This leads him to the killer who is arrested by the police, even though Sloan has no real evidence to tie him to the crime and the mountain of evidence hasn't been proven fake.

In Elementary Sherlock believes that Detective Bell is being framed because the suspect is an experienced police officer who would know better than to make so many basic mistakes. He might get sloppy on one or two things but would not do something as stupid as hide the murder weapon in his own home in a place where the police were bound to search.

is being framed because the suspect is an experienced police officer who would know better than to make so many basic mistakes. He might get sloppy on one or two things but would not do something as stupid as The CBS legal series Family Law had a few cases where the attorneys realize there's just too much evidence to make something look shady. More than once, a client seemingly has an airtight alibi...but the team realize that there's just so much going for them from testimony to how they can account for every minute as no one can actually be able to account for everything on a given day. A man is accused of trying to kill a dealer selling drugs to his daughter with the kid identifying a car matching his. Rex brings up how he was once shot at by a client and he, an intelligent, fast-on-his-feet lawyer, was so shaken that "if you'd asked ten minutes later who I was, I don't know if I could have answered." Yet, somehow, a stoned teenager, with a bullet in his leg had the presence of mind to note (on a dark night), the make, model, and license plate of the car driving off. Lynn quickly realizes that someone (such as the guy's daughter) must have been feeding him that info.

Father Brown: During The Summation in "The Brewer's Daughter", Father Brown points out that the sheer amount evidence uncovered was unlikely unless the murderer was attempting a frame-up. The killer was attempting to invoke this trope by framing herself, and relying on Father Brown to then uncover the more subtle evidence she had left implicating a second suspect.

Glee, or specifically Sue Sylvester, does this with her leaking of the New Directions set list to the opposing glee clubs. Principal Figgins: Sue, the directors, both from the Jane Addams Academy and Haverbrook School for the Deaf, have informed me that you gave them the New Directions' set list.

Sue: You have no proof.

Figgins: The set lists were on Cheerios' letterhead.

Sue: I didn't do it.

Figgins: They say, "From the desk of Sue Sylvester."

Sue: Circumstantial evidence.

Figgins: They're written in your handwriting!

Sue: Forgeries.

Figgins: Sue, there is an orgy of evidence stacked against you!

Sue: Well, you've clearly made up your mind not to be impartial in this case. Sue, the directors, both from the Jane Addams Academy and Haverbrook School for the Deaf, have informed me that you gave them the New Directions' set list.You have no proof.The set lists were on Cheerios' letterhead.They say, "From the desk of Sue Sylvester."Circumstantial evidence.They're written in your handwriting!Forgeries.Sue, there is an orgy of evidence stacked against you!Well, you've clearly made up your mind not to be impartial in this case.

Parodied in The Goodies episode "Daylight Robbery on the Orient Express", where the clues they find include a Union Jack waistcoat, a pair of glasses, and a beard...

Hannibal: In the first season finale, Will Graham is able to deduce that he is being framed because while he might believe he was capable of murdering Abigail Hobbs , he couldn't possibly accept that he also murdered the victims of the copycat killer (a.k.a Hannibal Lecter). Will Graham actually uses the trope name in the second season premiere when admitting to Jack Crawford that avoided a glut of incriminating evidence in favor of just enough to convince Crawford. Hannibal Lecter's frame-up was successful because ita glut of incriminating evidence in favor of just enough to convince Crawford. Comes up later when Will predicts that evidence in the barn where Miriam Lass was found will exonerate Lecter. Lecter, however, anticipated this and left evidence that could implicate himself...but could also be interpreted as implicating Chilton.

Hill Street Blues: A variant comes up during a long story arc about a particularly nasty robbery and homicide. Soon after making a public appeal for eyewitnesses and offering a significant reward, it seems like they've caught a big break: A cab driver claims to have been in the vicinity and gives a nearly perfect description of the suspects, including details that had been deliberately left out of the press release to help filter out anyone trying to pull a fast one... But Captain Furillo starts to get a bit suspicious after a while, because the guy's testimony is too perfect, going into such detail that the man would have to be Sherlock Holmes to pick it all up from a fleeting glimpse of two men running down a poorly-lit alleyway in the small hours. When he confronts his supposed star witness with these facts the man cracks and admits he was lying, and got all his information from his girlfriend who works for the Police Department as a clerk.

Legend of the Seeker: The plot of the episode "Confession", after Kahlan finds a man she had confessed to killing resistance members somehow was not really guilty. Richard, along with another woman, also suffer this before it's over. It doesn't help that the real murderer has a magical artifact that allows him to transfer some of his memories (such as those of the murders) to another person.

Midsomer Murders: In "Fit for Murder", Barnaby and Jones find a large amount of incriminating evidence when they search the house and vehicle of a pair of suspects. Barnaby points out the murders were methodical and carefully premeditated, and scarcely the work of someone who leave incriminating evidence (that they had no reason to keep) where any search would reveal it.

Monk has used this trope several times: In "Mr. Monk and the Rapper", only Natalie, not the police or even Monk, realizes that someone is trying too hard to make Murderuss take the fall for the car bombing that killed Extra Large, which include: the use of a white gold pocket watch as the timer (a signature trademark of Murderuss's), lyrics from a suggestive song by Murderuss called "Car Bomb", a blasting cap stolen from a construction site near Murderuss's house, and footprints of a shoe brand that he wears at the scene of the limo driver's murder, after he's killed by the real attacker to keep from talking to the police. Natalie deduces this as she reasons that if Murderuss were responsible, he wouldn't be dropping so many obvious clues behind that pointed to himself (he would have probably used a generic pocket watch instead of his trademark type; stolen the blasting cap from somewhere away from his house; not worn his trademark shoe brand when he killed the driver; nor written the song "Car Bomb"). In "Mr. Monk Meets Dale the Whale," this trope is invoked almost on purpose. Dale "the Whale" Biederbeck has his physician Dr. Christiaan Vezza kill judge Catherine Lavinio and stage the scene to make it look like Dale himself did it... because bedridden Dale, who is so morbidly obese he hasn't left his bed in nine years, is the only suspect who could not have possibly done it. Dr. Vezza does it by wearing large boots to leave big footprints behind. He kills the judge with a baseball bat with the engraved initials "DB". He also deliberately sets off a smoke alarm and dons his own empathy suit (a giant fat suit) so that a passing neighborhood girl sees a "very, VERY fat man" disabling the alarm. Lastly, he fakes a 911 call, impersonating the judge's voice to deliver the ace in the hole. In "Mr. Monk Goes to a Fashion Show," Monk is convinced that Pablo Ortiz is innocent in spite of the fact there's an orgy of forensic evidence against him. This turns out to be because the orgy of forensic evidence is actually against Julian Hodge, the real killer, but a forensics tech was bribed into relabeling the blood samples so they appeared to be Ortiz's. The tie-in novel Mr. Monk and the Two Assistants has a Mystery Writer Detective accusing Sharona and Natalie of working together on a murder. Monk cites the slews of evidence as the first clue to the duo's innocence. After all, if anyone is going to be smart about not leaving behind clues, it'll be two people who worked for a detective obsessed with details.

Murder, She Wrote: In "Night Fears", the killer floods the police with a bunch of false clues pointing towards a psychopath, hoping that this will drown out the one legitimate clue pointing towards him.

Once Upon a Time: In "The Cricket Game", there's so much reason to believe that Regina killed Archie that Emma, quite possibly the person in Storybrooke most familiar with this world's law enforcement and crime, finds it difficult to believe that Regina's actually guilty.

More than one Perry Mason case hinged upon Perry finding the clinching piece of evidence against his client (or pointing to a Red Herring) after a thorough search had been conducted by Lt. Tragg.

Rizzoli & Isles: In "Burden of Proof", Jane initially is convinced of the prosecutor's guilt. However, the sheer amount of evidence that turns up against him eventually convinces her that he is the victim of a very thorough frame-up. note Indeed. As stated, the man is a prosecutor who knows exactly what the police would look for. It's highly unlikely that he'd be so stupid as to leave so much evidence behind.

Subverted on Scream Queens (2015) as Dean Munsch plants slews of evidence to make it look like her ex-husband's mistress killed him. To her shock, the detectives are too lazy and incompetent to notice any of it and Munsch is nearly arrested herself.

Shooter: Swagger tries to use this as evidence he didn't commit the assassination, as he'd never have left that much evidence lying around.

Video Games

Assassin's Creed: Unity: A murder mystery involves a warden, who was apparently killed by a local crime gang over his debts, despite the gang's leader swearing they didn't do it. It was actually his deputy, who gives himself away by mentioning a vital clue no-one could've known about.

Double Subversion in Knights of the Old Republic: in the Sunry case, his medal was quite obviously planted at the scene, put into the hands of the victim. However, that was the Sith's counterattack to the Republic's coverup of what really happened.

Visual Novels

Most Ace Attorney cases stack the deck against you and your client this way. The fourth case of the second game gives a clever twist on it, however: the victim is found with your defendant's knife in his chest and a torn, bloodied button from his costume lodged in the defendant's trousers. Even the non-too-bright local detective suspects a frame job. As it turns out, someone did try to frame him, but your defendant really is guilty , albeit by hiring an assassin rather than committing the murder directly.

Danganronpa's framejobs almost always turn out like this. Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc: The third case in the first game looks so damning that one character starts calling it a setup before the trial has begun. A whole story is spun where the frame target wears a ridiculous and out-of-character cardboard costume, attacks people with progressively lethal weapons, runs into a dead end and vanishes, and swiftly relocates a corpse when it is left alone for only a minute. And this is all while completely escaping detection from the entire cast, only to wind up trapped inside a locker later on. Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair: The second case in the second game, meanwhile, ends up making the patsy an impossibility as far as suspects go because of all the inconsistencies in her characterization with the evidence left behind. The blood soaked corpse was moved to block a door (forcing the scapegoat to leave behind footprints through sand), and yet the scapegoat didn't have any blood on their clothing or body. Also, the culprit tried to leave behind the scapegoat's Trademark Favorite Food at the scene of the crime, but they got the details wrong and chose a variant that the scapegoat doesn't eat.



Webcomics

Schlock Mercenary: In the CSI parody arc , the lab tech promises his boss an orgy of evidence, and lays out how Schlock's body chemistry provides clear evidence of many, many crimes. Except not the crime that they know of and are trying to prosecute him for. Ozvegan Griz: What you've got here is more like a blind date.

Ozvegan Gerg: But she's really hot, right?

Web Videos

This trope is name-dropped repeatedly on various CinemaSins reviews, although in the context of the video it is used to describe the film-makers' ham-fisted attempts at driving the audience into assuming a specific mindset, e.g. using an over-abundance of typically boyish toys and/or furnishings to establish that a room belongs to a boy. As with other uses of the trope, the film-makers plant too much evidence, making the set-up less convincing.

In one Puffin Forest video Ben describes a campaign where his players were attempting to identify the person who committed a crime. He had sufficient clues to guide them to the culprit but they insisted on looking for more evidence to be sure. Ben kept giving more clues, all pointing to the culprit, but they still refused to accept the conclusion. Finally he gave them a journal written by the culprit laying out all the details and motive for the crime... at which point the players felt there was too much evidence for it to not be a frame job.

Western Animation