Tragic Hero / Cold Case

What makes the Cold Case stories so visceral is that many victims, even ones who are less than perfect, try to do the right thing or make a difference in their circumstances, only for their determination, ethics, and/or bad luck to get them killed.

Season 1

• Officer Joe Washington from "The Runner" wanted to get his beloved surrogate family out of the ghetto and makes protecting them through off-the-books means his driving goal, but he is killed while trying to save the girl he regards as a little sister from a rape. Without him, they languish in poverty for 20 years, with his sister-figure becoming estranged from her grandmother and spiraling further into drug abuse out of guilt and hopelessness. His wife had a miscarriage and also thought that he was cheating on her. His murderer is the one who got out of the ghetto.
• Julia and Gerard from "Volunteers" helped unwed mothers get safe abortions, but they are murdered by their friend who was an FBI informant.

Season 2

• "The Badlands": Tom and Della Lincoln are community leaders who provide hope, camaraderie, jobs, and protection for their gang-ridden neighborhood. Their desire to reach out and never back down makes them offer to take in one of their busboys due to feeling that his addict brother is a bad guardian. This turn of events leads to the angry brother trying to rob the restaurant and then killing all three of them in a panic after being caught. To add insult to injury, the neighborhood in general and their restaurant staff and regulars in particular go on a brutal downward slide without Tom and Della around. This situation is only reversed when their daughter reopens the restaurant at the possible cost of giving up her status as The One Who Made It Out.
• "The House": Hank Dempsey is a mostly harmless guy who is sent to prison after he is caught impulsively stealing a present for his girlfriend. His poor impulse control remains with him in prison and is exacerbated by his contempt for the sinister warden and guards, causing Hank to pull pranks that make him enemies and get time added to his sentence for repeated escape attempts he makes to see his girlfriend again. While he survives his apparent death, he is also forced to kill one of his closest friends in self-defense.
• Rita Baxter from "The Sleepover" was a sweet little girl whose kindness was repaid with rejection and death. She was invited by the most popular girls at school to a sleepover only to be bullied further. She witnesses one of the girls, Brandi, being physically abused by her mentally disturbed brother Neal on the direction of their parents. Rita tried to get them to go to the police but Brandi kicked her and another girl, who happened to be Rita's former friend and the one who originally invited her, Ariel, out of the friend group. When Rita tried to comfort and assure Ariel that they can still be friends and don't need popularity, Ariel refused and murdered her in a fit of rage. Ariel confessed this to Brandi, who used it as blackmail against her for years. Neal was so traumatized by Rita's murder that he re-enacted her death by drowning another girl when he grew up. This case got Rita's death re-investigated. Had she never died, that other girl would never have been murdered. Such a perfect circle of tragedy.
• After finding out that his boyfriend was dying from AIDS, Jeff Kern from "It's Raining Men" tried to get the most influential (and closeted) gay men in the city to use their influence to find a cure not just for his boyfriend but for every homosexual in danger. He is killed instead by his own brother who wanted to keep his gay past a secret from their family.
• Poor Elliott Garvey from "Red Glare" was a teacher who began to attend civil rights meetings because he tried to desegregate his class, but was instead accused of being a Communist. He lost his job, he and his family become pariahs in the community which drives them apart, and he is called to testify against alleged Communists which he refused to do because he does not know them and they might be innocent. Why was he murdered? Because of a Love Triangle that he wanted no part of. Worse, his family became estranged from one another and even tried Unpersoning him for decades after his death.
• Greg Vizcaino from "Discretion" was an ADA who found out that the suspect he's prosecuting in a rape and murder was innocent, and decides to prove this despite the blow it could deal to his political ambitions. He is killed after finding out that the investigating officer scapegoated an innocent Latino kid because it was more convenient than arresting the actual perpetrators (who were rich and white) and, due to Greg's hesitance to confide in anyone else, the Dirty Cop gets away with both the murder and the frame job for four more years.
• "Yo, Adrian": Jerry Stone's desire to prove himself as a boxer rather than the loser his community thinks of him as leads to him insisting on staying in a boxing match longer than he can take, getting him beaten to death.
• Zeke Williams from "Strange Fruit" refuses to back down a single inch in his confrontations with the local racists no matter what risks he faces. He saves a black maid from being raped by her white employer and even tries to help her report it, which eventually gets him beaten and lynched.
• "Kensington": Joe Young is an intelligent, hardworking mill employee and family man who tends to believe that people will live up to what they say, which can set him up for big falls like the loss of his job. His sense of betrayal at being lied to (combined with his desperation to provide for his family) can make him do stupid things, such as embarking on a robbery attempt that the would-be thieves abandon, only for them to get into a fight afterward, with Joe being killed by mistake while trying to get between his friends.

Season 3

• Amy Lind from "Start-Up" built a company around a medical search engine to help people. She is instead murdered by her own partner Scott and their company went bust soon after due to machinations by another person she wrongly trusted.
• Trevor Dawson from "Detention" was a moody teen boy who was depressed and made a suicide pact with his friends, Raquel and Boris. While calling a teen hotline, he ended up growing close to one of his classmates, Dawn, and found out that she was being sexually abused by her stepfather. He and Dawn fell in love and and along with Raquel and Boris, plan to kill her stepfather. Trevor and Boris assaulted the man but refused to kill him because Trevor realized how precious life is, reneging on his previous suicide pact. He is instead killed accidentally by Boris, who he tried to stop from jumping to his death.

Season 4

• Marlene Bradford from "A Dollar, A Dream" was a widowed mother doing the best she can for her girls after they lose their home but has a hard time planning ahead and finding ways to change things. She is killed by a Crazy Homeless Person who had previously befriended her and whom she tried to help as thanks.
• "Torn": Frances Stone is a passionate suffragette who is nonetheless fed fears and conflicting emotions by her parents, who point out that women getting the vote could get Prohibition passed and ruin the family brewery. Ultimately, she accidentally falls to her death during a struggle with her mother as they argue about how Frances has decided to side with the suffragettes.
• Mike Chulaski from "Cargo" was a longshoreman who tried to save a teenage girl he came to see as a daughter from prostitution. He is killed by another prostitute who was desperate to get out of the life.

Season 5

• Carrie Swett from "That Woman" has a habit of speaking important but uncomfortable truths, exposed an inappropriate sexual relationship between one of her classmates and a teacher. The lovesick student then stonewalled other students into helping her murder Carrie.
• "Bad Reputation": Pete Doyle is a former alcoholic stick-up man who sobers up in prison and vows to go straight to make amends and be a better role model to his son, all while being hounded by his arresting officer and his former partner-in-crime. However, he is too focused on lambasting his past actions to look for a middle ground while forming a connection with the boy who respected the old Pete. When his son gets involved in a crime himself, Pete tries to stop the robbery and Shoo the Dog but still ends up being murdered by an opportunist after the loot.

Season 6

• Mike Mcshane from "Glory Days" was a dedicated, promising college football player who was murdered for threatening to expose his team's use of anabolic steroids.
• Laura McKinney from "True Calling" was an optimistic young teacher who took a job at an inner city high school. She was murdered by another teacher after she found out that he was using one of her students as a drug mule.
• Miriam Forrester from "Wednesday's Women" was an undercover civil rights activist. Her cover was blown to the Ku Klux Klan but she fooled them by playing up her cover as a tupperware sales lady. The man who exposed her murdered her anyway for humiliating him.
• Jimmy Tully from "Shore Leave" was a Marine from the 1950s who was murdered by his own staff sergeant over the matter of a stolen gun and pinning it on an innocent recruit. He never got to be a father to the son he conceived with the woman he fell in love with. His best friend and fellow Marine who stole the gun as a prank has to live what's left of his life knowing he inadvertently caused Jimmy's death.
• Danny Finch from "One Small Step" was a little boy who drowned in the river on the day of the moon landing. He had befriended a group of boys and he proved his courage by saving their leader. That Ungrateful Bastard then bashed him in the head and drowned him for daring to show him up.
• "Street Money": Dexter Collins was raised in a bad neighborhood by a hardworking single father. After getting a law degree and being The One Who Made It Out, he comes back to run for city council in order to try to stop the urban blight of his neighborhood and get some of his old acquaintances away from drugs. He is constantly sabotaged by his rival. He reluctantly fires his old girlfriend and campaign manager over her willingness to accept donations that he refused (despite the implications they may still love each other). His best friend starts using drugs again. He is threatened with disgrace over the one time he fell into crime as a kid. Finally, he ends up murdered by one of his own supporters after the guy's nerves were frayed from how much he put into the campaign, and he mistakenly thought Dexter was selling out to his opponent. Worse, Dexter's past is exposed after his questionable death, causing him to be wrongfully smeared as "Crackhead Councilman" for years.
• Ally Thurston from "Wings" was a stewardess in the 1960s who demanded equal working rights at the airline and got a pilot who was sexually harassing the stewardesses fired. She is killed by her boss, the pilot's delusional lover.
• Jane Everett from "Breaking News" was a newscaster from the 1980s who discovered that the plastics company which was her station's biggest sponsor had been covering up the deaths of their employees from asbestos exposure. She is killed before breaking the story by her own producer and mentor because he's secretly in the company's pocket.
• Roy from "The Brush Man" was a brush salesman who has a case of Samaritan Syndrome but is plagued by worries that it does more harm than good after serving a prison sentence for killing a Domestic Abuser who Roy had considered a friend. When he discovers that the husband of one of his customers has been beating her and their son, his attempt to resolve the issue with minimal violence gets him killed and leaves the wife and son to suffer further.
• "Libertyville": Julian Bellowes is a war veteran and innovator of affordable suburban housing in the 1950s who also has a lot of insecurities and self-loathing about being a light-skinned black man hiding his heritage, and not having the courage to publicly welcome his black family or admit the truth to his white wife and in-laws. When he tries to find some middle ground in his deception by integrating the housing development, his efforts fail to hold up against systemic racism, and the old friend he tried to help move into the development kills him in a fit of rage.
• "November 22nd:" Patrick "The Rifle" Lennox strives hard to become the greatest pool hustler but only succeeds at the cost of ruining his closest personal relationships. When he realizes this and aspires to change, it gets him killed.

Season 7

• "Soul": Billy Sanders is a repressed Preacher's Kid who recently lost his brother and brings a sense of vision to the music world that he visits with the ambition to do new and great things, only to be exploited by his boss, learn his father is an adulterer, and be killed in A Tragedy of Impulsiveness by his childhood friend. He never gets public credit for his soul music genius in life or in death, and is wrongly viewed as a deadbeat by his girlfriend and the mother of his child for the rest of her life.
• Vivian Lynn from "WASP" made enemies of both the sexist male pilots and her fellow WASPs due to her pride and streak of justice. She wanted to get the pilot who got one of her friends killed arrested but is murdered by her own superior officer to protect the WASP program from getting shut down due to the scandal.
• "Read Between the Lines": Donalyn Sullivan is the eldest daughter of a dead addict whom she deeply loved, is molested in foster care (leaving her rightly defensive and mistrustful around certain people), and works hard to develop a career as a rapper and care for her younger sister. On the verge of her potential big break, she is killed by her foster mother in a Crime of Passion during an argument about the welfare of her sister when the whole situation could have been resolved peacefully with just a little more trust, effort, or patience on the part of either party.
• Just like Mike, Jack Chao Lu from "Chinatown" tried to go up against the criminal element in his neighborhood, but had a Hair-Trigger Temper about it. He was killed after he found out that his own brother Ling was helping the local gang transport drugs.
• Luke Cronin from "Forensics" is a poor boy who got into a prestigious boarding school on a debating scholarship. He used debate to speak out against the classism in the school. After realizing it wasn't working and that he was pushing himself too hard, he tried to quit to take care of his ailing father but his coach Darren thought that debate was Serious Business and that he is throwing away his future for a worthless old man. When he calls Darren ridiculous for taking debate so seriously (in a way that resembles his debating) Darren kills him. It was not all in vain. One of Luke's uptight classmates did give up on debate and found satisfaction doing volunteer work overseas.
• "The Good Soldier": Mike Donley is a war veteran and Army recruiter who cares about improving the lives of his recruits and supporting them through hard times. However, the death of one recruit and the maiming of another on the battlefield make Mike burdened by It's All My Fault feelings. He decides to go back to the front himself, only to be killed by one of the people who cares most about him but feels betrayed and abandoned by his plans to leave.
• "Bombers": Carlos Espinosa is a homeless graffiti artist who wants people to see and respect his work, and gets his best friend to join him in painting murals on highly visible skyscrapers. This leads to his friend falling to his death while running from a graffiti cleanup official and Carlos being murdered when he tries to expose the person who ratted them out.