Mystery Tropes: It's Always...

"It's always the husband. It's always the husband. It's always the husband," Lieutenant Provenza proclaims in The Closer and Major Crimes.

"If you say it with every case, of course you'll turn out to be right at least once," Raydor tells him in exasperation. 

Provenza often turns out to be right. As Forensic Files makes clear, aside from naive young people encountering thugs and psychopaths while wandering about at midnight...[and other cruel tragedies that I won't address here]...

Most murders are committed by people the victim knows--intimately: boyfriends, exes, wives, husbands, so much so, there's an entire subculture of "I used to date but now I watch Forensic Files" memes online.

Forensic Files episodes are very cleverly edited. The tale does not follow the investigation. It presents a story--so that information that may have come out later is often presented upfront and information that resulted in an arrest is saved for that point in the narrative. 

In the case of "Internal Affair," for instance, the wife's affair is revealed before the husband's affairs are mentioned. It is more likely, however, that during the actual investigation, investigators were suspicious of the husband from the start and ruled out other possibilities as they went along. 

In fact, the officers in this particular case keep stating how dumb the husband was. Oh, yes, what he did was morally wrong--but really, he was so stupid! He left Internet searches for "kill spouse" on his computer. He killed his wife in the bedroom and was naturally unable to clean up the resulting blood...

However, again, the editors of the show are quite adept. And the people they interview usually either play along or are interviewed in such a manner that their suspicions regarding the culprit are easily cut and pasted into the show when such suspicions become relevant to the narrative.

One place where the editing approach doesn't work is the episode about the husband and wife who pretended the husband had died--right before he was supposed to go to jail for another offense--by burning a corpse they dug up from a graveyard. The corpse was buried as the husband's. The wife pretended to mourn.

During the entire show, the friends and family are so disgusted by the two, they make zero attempt to disguise it. 

Apparently, the couple came up with the idea from watching shows like CSI.

Says the mother of the wife, "I said [to my daughter], 'Don't you watch the ends of those shows? They always catch the bad guy.'"