ABSTRACT
To understand how a killer sexually degrades a victim’s body, one must be able to interpret the dierences among the natural disposition of a victim’s remains, staging a scene, and posing a body. In most murders, the killer leaves the victim’s body where it drops or in a position aer the death-producing injuries have been inicted. e victim is le, typically, at the body recovery site, in a natural position for a dead person. e killer does not do anything to or with the body, above and beyond what is involved in killing or disposing of the victim. In a very few cases, the body disposition is unusual. Clearly, the killer has done something to the victim-ante-or postmortem-that has produced the unusual victim disposition. ere are two subtypes of unusual body disposition, each of which is even more unusual and rare-“posing” and “staging” (Geberth, 1996; 2003; Keppel & Weis, 2004).
