I’m not looking for a book I’ve read or movie I’ve seen, but curious to know if there is a book or movie with the following plot:
The protagonist steals the identity of their victim at random due mainly to some opportunity too good to pass up presenting itself, and begins to pass him/herself off as the victim (not just stolen credit cards, but really claiming to be person X). To his/her horror, they soon discover that the identity they’ve stolen is that of a serial killer. Before long their world turns nightmarish as the police track them down…and so does the killer.
I know there was a Law and Order episode that sort of touched briefly on the general plot, but it wasn’t very detailed and definitely was not from the thief’s point of view.
Well, Antonioni’s wonderful The Passenger has Jack Nicholson as a reporter who finds a dead body and decides to exchange identities with the corpse, only to discover that the dead guy was a gun runner who was involved in some nefarious deals. Great flick.
Along vaguely similar lines, there was the Seinfeld episode where Jerry and George ‘steal’ someone’s cab at the airport, only to learn that they have thereby unwittingly assumed the identity of a Nazi supremacist, and they reap the hatred. Hilarity ensues.
Don’t know of any movies or books with the OP’s plot. Could be interesting, though, if done right.
From time to time I’ve handled criminal cases in which someone stopped by police for, say, a minor traffic offense, fraudulently uses the name of someone he knows at booking. The prisoner is then horrified to learn that the person whose name he used is in far more trouble than he would’ve been in the first place, with arrest warrants and serious felony charges pending. “O what a tangled web we weave…!”
Well it would be interesting if done right, but I’m trying to imagine how it would work. So the serial killer leaves what behind? DNA? Fingerprints? How would taking someone’s credit cards mean he’s at all linked up by that evidence?
Was he spotted on camera? OK, so the two could look the same but then how would the arrest be any different from any of the other of hundreds of false arrests in this country?
Did the serial killer leave a business card behind? Well that’s just silly of him, but I guess it’s the only way to link them up.
Basically, the only way for this to work is to have the police know the killer’s identity somehow and yet, well, I guess, sit and wait through half the novel while the theif realizes it himself.
I’m picturing the protagonist stealing the wallet of a suspected killer (the suspicion based on something less than concrete like a witness rather than DNA evidence) who after being released after being brought in for questioning on a case they couldn’t pin on him/her has been keeping a low profile to evade capture - I guess something would have to convince the police that they weren’t innocent even though they’d been forced to let him/her go for this to work.
Idiot protagonist doesn’t know this, and merrily constructs a paper trail by using their ID to get credit cards. Maybe the killer looks like the thief, which is why the theft struck the protagonist as ideal.
The twist at the end of the first season of “Nip/Tuck” had the protagonists (who were still largely likeable or sympathetic characters at the time) give a facelift to the drug dealer who had been exhtorting them. They gave him the face of someone on the FBI’s most wanted list.
Enderw24: The moron is similar enough to the real killer the bite marks the killer left on some victims ‘match’ the moron’s bite well enough the prosecutor can snow the jury with the CSI effect. Similar-sized fingers can give you partial fingerprint matches* and, since juries are partial to CSI crap, that gives the prosecutor as close to a walkover as he’s going to get.
*(I did not specify how partial. I also did not specify how impartial the jury was.)