I need to know when the actor I enter battle with dies. What's the easiest way to do this?

I've come up with the following, either seems fine, but is there another way that is better?
1. Force the enemy in to an alias with a OnDeath event - (but then I would need to get that back to the player)
2. When entering combat, save the enemy reference, when combat is done, check if the enemy is dead.
a. OnCombatStateChanged
b. IsDead()

#2 - seems cleanest to me as it's all in one code base.

This is not for a stage or quest, this is to track kills. So it could be any enemy, not a scripted enemy.

Thanks!

If the purpose is to track kills, could you not use the OnStoryKillActor event and check whether you are the killer (or one of your followers is, if you want)?

I'd say the best approach for this depending on what your goals are is to use either a http://www.creationkit.com/Kill_Actor_Event, which will allow the Story Manager to feed your quest a bunch of data regarding the actor that died (and if you want to give that data to your scripts, an http://www.creationkit.com/OnStoryKillActor_-_Quest Event), or if you just want a very simple method so you can fire off a new quest stage when your actor dies use an http://www.creationkit.com/OnDying_-_Actor Event in Papyrus. Don't use OnDeath, it can fail.

Thanks Ingenue & Thomas Kaira! I have never used the "Story" functionality so I'll have to look in to what that's about.

This is not in any way quest related though, so I don't have stages to trigger or anything. It's for a statistic, so I'll look at the OnStoryKillActor event.