ABSTRACT
Any deliberate eort made by an oender before police arrive to manipulate the pristine condition of a crime scene to purposely misdirect and thwart the investigation and with the criminal intention to frustrate the overall criminal justice process is the essence of crime scene staging. Empirical research has shown that crime scene staging is on the rise, which could be due to public fascination with crime scene-related media, enhanced awareness of forensic science application, and/or oenders’ belief in their understanding of how crime scenes should look (Ferguson, 2011, 2014; Schlesinger, Gardenier, Jarvis, & Sheehan-Cook, 2012). is book has explored what is empirically known about crime scene staging and has introduced an empirically derived how-to (i.e., victim-centered death investigation methodology [VCDIM]) for eld use toward the early identication and detection, crime analysis, synthesis, and evaluation of potentially staged crime scenes. Further, VCDIM integrates the precise measurement and critical documentation techniques used to create a permanent record of the physical evidence in a crime scene, such as bloodstain pattern evidence and/or rearms-related incident evidence for the purpose of a systematic, scientic, comprehensive, multidisciplinary reconstructive process toward supporting or refuting claims made by an oender in relation to all other aspects of the evidence in totality.
