Chapter 5

the staged crime scene.

This chapter discusses when an offender intentionally alters the scene by adding, removing, or rearranging evidence and provides false information to the police.

An attempt to deflect attention away from themselves or onto some other person.

Referred to as staging.

The perpetrator changes elements of the scene to make a death appear to be a suicide or accidental in order to cover up a murder.

Staging is a conscious criminal action on the part of an offender to thwart an investigation.

Three examples of crime scene staging:

1. making a death scene appeared to be a suicide

2. attempting to redirect the investigation by making the scene appeared to be a sex related homicide.

3. Arson: offender sets fire to the scene to destroy evidence and make it appear as an accidental death.

Crime classification manual:

someone purposely alters the crime scene prior to the arrival of police. There are two reasons that someone employed staging: to redirect the investigation away from the most logical suspect or to protect the victim or victims family.

Two categories of staging:

primary staging

secondary staging

tertiary scene alteration: someone other than the offender alters the crime scene but is not done to misdirect the police investigation.

In primary staged scene

an intentional and purposeful, altering or changing physical evidence or other aspects of the crime scene, and/or providing false information for specific criminal intent to misdirect or divert a police investigation away from the true facts and circumstances of the crime.

Two parts

perpetrator driven activity

providing false information to the police. This is apparent in almost all staged crime scenes.

Offender sets the stage for a false reality.

Verbal staging: false statements to misdirect the investigation.

Coincidence: two unrelated events seem to take place at the same time. Example husband murdered his wife and attempts to stage the scene to resemble other events.

In addition to primary and secondary crime scenes, stage scenes have two subcategories ad hoc or premeditated.

Ad hoc: undertaken without forethought and preplanning. Takes place after the fact.

Clear lack of premeditation or prior planning and appears impulsive.

Typically reflect missing evidence or altered scenes.

Examples offender cleans the residence, removes other children, they do this, read dresses, or repositions the victim in bed. Drug abuse deaths might be cleaned up and illegal substances removed.

Case study 5.1

mother had no intention of murder the child but after the child had died she had no idea how to explain the death.

Inconsistencies are usually easy for investigators to recognize and uncover.

Pay attention to the description of their events, the evidence left behind, and what the investigators find at the scene.

Offenders typically present themselves as positive and responsible people.

Case study 5.2

as an example of an ad hoc plan thrown together on the run with intent to deflect blame and divert attention away from the relevance. Demonstrates how far victims will go to stage a scene.

Premeditated primary staged scenes

meticulously planned out ahead of time.

Fraudulent burglary, theft reports, false rape, even homicide.

Level planning and life experience will determine the amount and type of physical evidence that is portrayed.

Ad hoc scenes and point away from an actual act while premeditated staging has evidence that focuses on to the actual act.

The offender wants the police to have a clear understanding as to what happened.

Case study 5.3

case study 5.4

premeditation was evident because of the consensual sex right before the fake rape accusation.

Many offenders tend to exaggerate: they leave too much evidence and conflicting evidence.

Example: staging a suicide after shooting victim and had placing done in victim’s hand.

Often the gun is not in the victim’s hand

Susan Smith drove her vehicle into a lake with the children inside then claimed that she was carjacked by a black man.

Most stories are not designed to last through a long-term investigation. They want to get through the initial investigation without arousing any suspicions.

Motive

it is important to identify the motive behind the crime because motive can narrow down the list of possible suspects.

Examine the scene for evidence that it may have been staged. In the JonBenet Ramsey case she was initially reported as being abducted because there was a three page ransom note. However, later she was found dead in the basement and had suffered a skull fracture and strangled.

Hazelwood in Napier discuss the importance of motive: “in staged scenes investigator is confronted with the necessity to determine the motive for two different behaviors. One. The original act that necessitated the staging and two. The staging itself

it is important to recognize when a crime scene was staged. Next it is important to determine the motive.

What are the verbal physical and sexual behaviors displayed by the offender before during and after the crime. This can give clues to the offender’s intelligence variances criminal sophistication and experience.

Proprietary interest: is an inconsistent offender behavior. An example would be a murder where the wife is killed and her possessions are thrown around ransacked or damaged while the husband’s personal property is left untouched.

Secondary staging

the intentional alteration or manipulation of the crime scene or the victim by an offender that is unrelated to misdirecting or diverting the police investigation.

Personalization: investing intimate meaning into the crime scene.

This could be placing something over the victim’s head posing the victim into sexually provocative or embarrassing positions to shock people or humiliate or degrade the victim: some other ritualistic symbolic reason known only to the offender

Crime scene signature: something the offender does at the scene or to the body that is above and beyond what is necessary to commit the crime and is related towards the offender own site logical and emotional needs

the basic examples of secondary staging are depersonalization, undoing, body posing, and symbolic/ritualistic.

Depersonalization: “the actions taken by a murder to obscure the personal identity of the victim. The face may be beaten beyond recognition with the face of the victim may be covered.” Covering a victim and in particular covering their faces deep personalizes them.

It may be that they are covering them to turn someone they knew into some thing. However and anger retaliatory type of offender might play something over the victim or reposition the body into a submissive position including turning the body on its side away from the door or placing the body face down or in a closet. This is done to demonstrate the victim’s ultimate submission and is one last insult to the victim. Other more extreme examples of depersonalization include postmortem mutilation of the victim’s body typically involving the face but could involve a woman’s breasts or genitals being removed which is referred to as the feminization.

Undoing: an unconscious defense mechanism by which one symbolically acts out in reverse of some earlier unacceptable behavior. It’s a way for the offender to psychologically try to undo what they’ve done. After teenager argued with his mother and stabbed her to death, he cleaned her up change her clothing and layer on the later on the couch with her head on a pillow to make it look like she was sleeping.

Body posing: the well documented and well known, body posing is actually very rare. Body posing usually happens at a sexual homicide and is where there is evidence of sexual activity observed in the crime scene or upon the body of the victim. It usually involves posing the victim into a provocative sexual position, presenting the victim in a bondage scenario, or inserting foreign objects into the bodies orifices.

The prominent and public display of the victim’s body is also an example of secondary staging. The hillside strangler kidnapped, raped, sadistically tortured, and then murdered women in the Los Angeles area of California. After they were dead they were transported to residential neighborhoods where they were left naked in public areas. This is also an example of an offenders crime scene signature.

Symbolic/ritualistic

the body is posed in a manner that is important to the offender. John list killed his mother, his wife, and each child. He placed them all on sleeping bags in the same room (with the exception of his mother who he left on the third floor) turned on soft music turn the heat down, left a written confession and fled.

Tertiary scene alterations

alterations that are carried out by family members or others that initially find the body in an embarrassing or degrading situation or where people actually change the scene for reasons other than to mislead the police investigation. For example, a family member finds a loved one has been murdered and covers them out of respect for the victim. As long as it was unintentional and noncriminal this would not be considered staging. It could potentially be criminal if the suicide scene is altered to resemble a homicide or accident so the insurance will pay the family.

Artifact: something altered or added to the scene after the after the fact but has no real evidentiary or behavioral value.

Case studies 5.5, 5.6

MO related scene alteration

sometimes an offenders attempts to alter or change is seen do not mount staging because the alteration is related to the offender’s modus operandi and is referred to as MO behavior. MO behavior refers to those efforts intended to help the offender commit the crime and then escape detection rather than some other purpose.

Case study 5.7 and 5.8

summary crime scene staging takes place in all types of crimes but is most prevalent in instances of interfamilial and other interpersonal types of homicides.