ABSTRACT
Crime scene staging is not mindless and random work on the part of the oender. As mentioned earlier, scenes can be simplistically or elaborately staged, but the mind of the oender is what drives the process from beginning to end. Staging behaviors are purposeful and deliberate, specically enacted by the oender in an attempt to misguide investigators’ eorts toward apprehension. Sometimes in cases where oenders are asked why they did it (why they staged the scene), replies range from I don’t know to I just panicked and didn’t know what to do… and then run the gamut from there. Staged crime scenes are perplexing. ey are illusions. ey are reections of the impressions an oender has of what some type of accident, suicide, other type of murder, or some other legitimate death scene is supposed to look like. What is so interesting about that idea is that once investigators study the victim and the suspect and they learn everything they can about them, it becomes very clear as to why the oender thought the crime scene should look a certain way toward simulating something else.
