Staging and Personation
The commission of a violent crime involves all the same dynamics of normal human behavior. The same forces that influence normal everyday conduct also influences the offender's actions during an offense. The crime scene usually reflects these behavior patterns or gestures.
Learning to recognize the crime scene manifestations of this behavior enables an investigator to discover much about the offender.
Due to the personalized nature of this behavior the investigator also has a means to distinguish between different offenders committing the same offense.
There are three manifestations of offender behavior at a crime scene Modus Operandi (MO) personation(signature) and staging.
The Assessment Phase of Crime Analysis
The assessment phase of crime analysis should attempt to answer several questions. What was the sequence of events? Was the victim sexually assaulted before or after death? was mutilation before or after death? Observations like this can offer important insights into an offender's personality. How did the encounter between the offender and the victim occur? Did the offender blitz attack the victim or did he use verbal means to capture her? Did the offender use ligatures to control the victim? Lastly any items added or taken from the crime scene require careful analysis.
Personation
Most violent crime careers have a quiet isolated beginning with in the offender's imagination. The subject day dreams about raping, torturing, killing, building bombs, setting fires or any combination of these violent acts. When the offender translates these day dreams into actions, his needs compel him to exhibit unusual behavior during the crime.
unusual behavior by an offender, beyond that necessary to commit the crime is called personation. The offender invests intimate meaning into the crime scene, only the offender knows the meaning of these acts, when a serial offender demonstrates repetitive ritualistic behavior from crime to crime it is called the signature. The signature aspect of a crime is simply repetitive personation.
Undoing represents a form of personation with more obvious meaning. Undoing frequently occurs at the crime scene when there is close association between the offender and the victim or when the victim represents someone of significance to the offender.
Staging is when someone purposely alters the crime scene prior to the arrival of police. there are two reasons why someone employs staging, to redirect the investigation away from the most logical suspect or to protect the victim's or victim's family. The second reason for staging is to protect the victim's family and is employed most frequently with rape-murder crimes or auerotic fatalities. The offender of a sexual homicide frequently leaves the victim in a degrading position.
This type of staging is also prevalent with autoerotic fatalities. The victim may be removed from the apparatus that caused death.
Finally, the investigator should discern whether a crime scene is truly disorganized or whether the offender staged it to appear careless and haphazard. This determination not only helps direct the analysis to the underlying motive but also helps to shape the offender profile. However, the recognition of staging especially with a shrewd offender can be difficult. The investigator must scrutinize all factors of the crime if there is reason to believe it has been staged. Forensics, Victimology and minute crime scene details become critical to the detection of staging.
Staging Red Flags
An offender who stages a crime scene usually makes mistakes because he stages it to look the way he thinks a crime scene should look. While doing this, the offender experiences a great deal of stress and don’t not have time to fit all the pieces together logically. Inconsistencies will begin appearing at the crime scene with forensics and with the overall picture of the offense. These contradictions will often serve as the red flags of staging and prevent misguidance of the investigation.
The crime scene often will contain these ref flags in the form of crime scene inconsistencies.
Another red flag apparent with many staged domestic murders is the fatal assault of the wife and/or children by an intruder while the husband escapes without injury or with a nonfatal injury. If the offender does not first target or if that person suffers the least amount of injury, the police investigator should especially examine all other crime scene indicators. In addition, the investigator should scrutinize forensics and Victimology with particular attention.
Forensic results that do not fit the crime should cause the investigator to think about staging. The presence of a personal type assault utilizing a weapon of opportunity when the initial motive for the offense appears to be fo r material gain should raise suspicion. This type of assault also includes manual or ligature strangulation, facial beating and excessive trauma beyond that necessary to cause death (over kill) sexual and domestic homicides will demonstrate forensic findings of this type:
a close range, personalized assault
The victim is the primary focus of the offender.
This type of offender often will attempt to stage a sexual or domestic homicide to appear motivated by criminal enterprise.
This does not imply that personal-type assaults never happen during the commission of a property crime, but usually the criminal enterprise offender prefers a quick clean kill that reduces his time at the scene. Any forensic red flags after careful analysis should be placed in context with Victimology and crime scene information.
Investigators often will find forensic discrepancies when a subject stages a rape/murder. The offender frequently positions the victim to infer sexual assault has occurred. an offender who has a close relationship with the victim will often only partially remove the victim’s clothing. He rarely leaves the victim nude. Autopsy demonstrates a lack of sexual assault. With a staged sexual assault, there is usually no evidence of any sexual activity and an absence of seminal fluids in the body orifices.
source information--Crime Classification Manual By John E Douglas, Ann W. Burgess, Allen G. Burgess and Robert K Ressler Lexington Books 1992
