ABSTRACT
Hans Gross (1924) was the rst to address crime scene staging and the responsibilities investigators have to learn how oenders manipulate physical evidence toward simulating something separate and apart from what actually happened. Gross (1924) argued:
Staging is the overarching behavioral pattern exhibited by an oender to misdirect an investigation toward self-preservation and avoiding apprehension that can include lying, giving false alibis. Descriptive analysis has revealed that most intimicide oenders are male, that most intimicide victims are female, and that most intimicides are underpinned by a pervasive history of intimate partner violence (United States Department of Justice, 2014). Further, descriptive research on crime scene staging specically has revealed that most oenders are male, that most victims are female, and that intimate partner homicides are staged more oen than murders where the victim and the oender were associated in another way (i.e., neighbor, employee, etc.) (Eke, 2007; Ferguson, 2011; Pettler, 2011). Empirical research has also shown that oenders point their staging eorts toward overall deception, disconnecting association to the victim, misdirecting the investigation, and self-preservation toward avoiding apprehension. Additionally, empirical research on crime scene staging has identied a myriad of staging behaviors exhibited by oenders, and Ferguson (2011) found that staging behaviors appear to be related to the type of scene chosen to simulate by an oender.
