ABSTRACT
Crime scene staging is a deliberate, purposeful act by an oender to manipulate elements of the crime and its scene to misdirect the investigation with criminal intent in reection of what the oender thinks, feels, and believes will be the most believable to investigators, family members, friends, and so on, based arguably on the crime scene oender’s personality, cognition, behavior, emotionality, and envirosocioculturalism. Hans Gross (1924) argued that practitioners should study personality characteristics of murderers. Douglas, Burgess, Burgess, and Ressler (2006) argued that the crime scene is a reection of the personality of the oender. ough some have dened crime scene staging limited in scope to physical evidence only, the act of staging at any level in and of itself is a behavior observable oen in the form of both physical and verbal evidence. Physical evidence does not stage itself. It does not position itself, clean itself, destroy itself, and so forth. Rather, the physical behaviors of the oender are the acts that stage physical evidence on purpose. e answer to every question one could ask about the why and how of an oender’s actions are twofold: (1) e answer to the “why” is always the same, which is, “Because it met the needs of the oender.” (2) e answer to the “how” part is always specic to the case itself, namely, the oender, victim, specic type of conict if present, and a myriad of other factors. Take, for example, the homicide staged as a suicide in a rearm-related death. Firearms do not put themselves into the hands of murdered victims. Oenders put them there. Human beings do not have to think about breathing in order to breathe nor do they have to think about blinking in order to blink, but human beings have to think consciously or unconsciously about most other acts in order for the body to physically move. For the purpose of this discussion, the point is that it is important to recognize that generally speaking thinking precedes behavior. An oender thinks something then does it, and in the aforementioned example, the oender thinks the rearm has to be in the hand of the victim in order for it to look like a suicide, so then the oender physically places the rearm into the hand of the victim to make that happen. Most oenders have no idea what real suicides look like, and Douglas and Munn (1992) argued that it is for this very reason that many oenders make mistakes in this area.
