Detection Avoidance in Homicide

Debates, Explanations and Responses

Claire Ferguson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000405910
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Jura
• Subtopic: Forensik

Detection Avoidance in Homicides: Debates, Explanations and Responses presents theory and research on how offenders avoid detection and the challenges and opportunities these efforts pose to investigators.

From a scholarly perspective, the book presents a continuing history of research on detection avoidance by offenders, discusses the features of complex death investigations involving detection avoidance, and critiques the current frameworks used for conceptualizing these behaviors. Dr. Ferguson focuses on the key debates in the literature, argues for collaborations between researchers and practitioners to remedy siloing, and explores the reality of detection avoidance in homicides as complex and multifaceted. While detection avoidance behaviors have the potential to negatively impact sudden death investigations and frustrate criminal investigations specifically, their use also creates broader problems. These include many problematic effects on family members of the deceased, police officers, police agencies and the communities they serve. Offenders choosing to use detection avoidance behaviors challenges the efficient use of public resources, puts at risk the successful adjudication of homicides, and creates a public safety issue. The book explains detection avoidance using learning, situational, individual and gender-based theories, including proposing whether it may be a form of coercive control used by intimate partner abusers. Finally, how detection avoidance by offenders is recognized and responded to in sudden death investigations is addressed, with specific reference to useful examples of policy reform implemented by various police agencies internationally.

Providing research and theory to explain detection avoidance and best practice for responding to it, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of criminology, forensic science and psychology. It will also be useful to professionals working with homicide offenders.

1 A continuing history of research into detection avoidance

This chapter begins by introducing detection avoidance (DA) in homicide cases as a behavior seen and discussed throughout history in fictional, criminal justice practitioner-focused and academic literature. Definitions of the key terms are introduced and notable debates in the literature are outlined. Early treatment of the subject of DA and crime scene staging (CSS) by notable historical voices are explored, including recommendations for how to investigate these death scenes properly and thoroughly. Finally, more recent discussions by both practitioner and academic authors are summarized, with specific reference to the scarcity of the literature available on DA in homicide in general. Given the challenges posed with discriminating between offender behaviors when little theoretical work exists, literature on CSS is introduced to fill the gap.

Lying and manipulating evidence has been used by motivated offenders to escape suspicion of criminal behavior for centuries. In William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Macbeth (1892), written in the early 1600s, Macbeth and his wife murder King Duncan, clean their hands and smear his blood on the watchmen to give the illusion that they themselves were not the guilty parties. Shakespeare provides the following description (1892, ACT II, SCENE II):

• LADY MACBETH
• Go get some water,
• And wash this filthy witness from your hand. Why did you bring these daggers from the place? They must lie there: go carry them; and smear The sleepy grooms with blood.
• MACBETH
• I’ll go no more:
  • I am afraid to think what I have done; Look on’t again I dare not.

Along with motivated offenders, investigators responsible for investigating sudden, suspicious or complex deaths have been aware of the potential for countermeasures to be used by offenders for centuries as well. Investigators have tried to combat these offender efforts with various investigative philosophies, forensic techniques, policy, training and the like. The earliest description of the challenge DA behaviors pose in criminal investigations was provided by Dr. Hans Gross (1936). Gross referred to the clues which give away attempts at DA as ‘defects’. He writes (p. 433):

The “defects of the situation” are just those contradictions, those improbabilities, which occur when one desires to represent the situation as something quite different from what it really is, and this with the very best intentions and the purest belief that one has worked with all the forethought, craft and consideration imaginable.

These defects, which have also been called incongruities, inconsistencies, deceits, improbabilities and paradoxes, and how they may be recognized have received little attention in the academic literature. Sudden death investigators, be they a law enforcement officer, a forensic scientist, a pathologist or an accident reconstructionist, have therefore mostly used idiosyncratic methods and gut instincts to identify and explain DA behaviors. This book centers around filling this gap by describing and theorizing, in a scholarly manner, the use of DA by offenders. It examines and critiques how these types of behaviors have been researched, identifies key challenges posed by the use of DA and opportunities to overcome these, as well as examines how training may reduce the impact these offender behaviors have on sudden, suspicious or complex death investigations.

Definitions

DA by offenders has also been referred to as using countermeasures, forensic awareness behaviors, evidence manipulation, precautionary acts and adaptive behaviors in the forensic psychology and criminology literature (Neimeyer, Pepper, & Salfati, 2008; Turvey, 2008). Here it will mostly be called DA, but other terms are also used where appropriate. DA behaviors are those which an offender employs to hide, destroy or manipulate evidence in order to avoid detection or apprehension by police (Beauregard & Bouchard, 2010; Beauregard & Martineau, 2012, 2014; Canter, 1989; Davies, 1992; Salfati & Haratsis, 2001).

Forensic psychologists and criminologists have long recognized the use of DA and the challenges they pose to investigations. Referring to these behaviors as forensic awareness, the first contemporary treatment of the issue appeared in 1989 when psychologist David Canter discussed the importance of identifying, through crime scene behaviors, whether police had previously questioned offenders. Canter discussed the concept from an investigative psychology standpoint, indicating that those crime scenes evidencing DA are likely to involve experienced offenders, especially in sexual assault cases. Also studying sexual assault, Davies (1992) went on to define forensic awareness as an offender changing their modus operandi to prevent evidence being deposited or destroying it after the fact, in an effort to thwart investigative efforts. Davies (1992) noted that there are several possible expressions of forensic awareness in an offender’s modus operandi, including avoiding interruptions, protecting their identity, avoiding reporting and ensuring a safe getaway.

It is not uncommon in many homicide cases for the offender to engage in DA (Turvey, 2008). Turvey terms these behaviors ‘precautionary acts’ (Turvey, 2008, p. 212) and describes them as “behaviors that offenders commit before, during or after an offense that are consciously intended to confuse, hamper, or defeat investigative or forensic efforts for the purposes of concealing their identity, their connection to the crime, or the crime itself”. A few examples include using a mask, clothing or disguise to conceal physical features of the offender; choosing a secluded or less travelled location for the offense; using gloves to prevent the transfer of fingerprints or biological fluids; staging the crime scene; and so on (Turvey, 2008).

CSS is one of many forms of DA offenders may carry out in order to distance themselves from a homicide, and this form of DA has received the most attention in the academic literature. CSS is also not uncommon in death investigations, although perhaps less so than DA more broadly (Geberth, 2006; Hazelwood & Napier, 2004; Schlesinger Gardenier, Jarvis, & Sheehan-Cook, 2012; Turvey, 2008). CSS is defined as the deliberate alteration of physical evidence in an effort to simulate events or offenses that did not occur, for the purpose of misleading authorities. For example, after killing a person an offender may relocate the deceased’s body into a car, position it as if the victim was driving and send the car into a body of water to give the impression the victim died in an automobile accident. In such a case, the act of relocating the body, positioning it in the car and driving into the water would be considered acts of CSS, or just staging. Homicides involving staging have also been referred to in the literature as concealed homicides, where a murder is made to look like a noncriminal death (e.g., a suicide or accident). This terminology is especially popular in the literature on intimate partner homicide (IPH) and intimate partner femicide (IPF); however, the behavior being referred to is better known as CSS in the broader literature on death and homicide investigation.

The easiest way to conceptualize the difference between DA more broadly and CSS is to note that, where DA generally involves taking something away or preventing something from being left at the scene, staging involves an attempt to prevent offender identification by adding something to the scene to give the impression that something else has occurred. Important in both definitions is noting the motivation behind the countermeasures – where they are carried out for the purpose of thwarting investigators or investigations rather than for some other reason.

Early works

Despite DA being somewhat common (Geberth, 1996; Gross, 1936; Hazelwood & Napier, 2004; Turvey, 2000), the forensic criminology, psychology and science communities know very little about it. The following section outlines what has been discovered to date in the study of DA in death investigations.

Dr. Hans Gross, arguably the most influential early scholar in criminal investigation, is one of the few who has confronted the issue of DA and CSS directly. Regardless of his works being nearly a century old, Gross maintains some of the most detailed and relevant discussions of the use of DA by offenders. In his seminal text on criminal investigation, Gross (1936) mostly provides practical advice to investigators responsible for making decisions about possible suspicious deaths. He notes that death investigators need to be constantly aware of the fact that offenders commonly use countermeasures to evade detection, and therefore investigators should examine each case through a lens of relative skepticism. He advises that by doing so, the investigating officer can determine the contradictions, paradoxes and the defects that lead the officer to discover the “grand blunder” which, he explains, “the most experienced and crafty criminal rarely fails to commit” (p. 433). To uncover this, he advises investigators to consider what each circumstance of the case would signify if the crime actually occurred the way it presents as well as what it would signify if the crime were a false report or something else, such as a concealed homicide.

In O’Connell and Soderman’s (1936) manual on investigating deaths, there is some reference to what these authors refer to as simulated crime scenes in their discussion of distinguishing homicides from suicides. Their simulated scenes are akin to CSS and the discussion of them provides a useful starting point for thinking about this type of DA in particular. O’Connell and Soderman’s (1936) work stresses the need to identify inconsistencies in injuries and wound patterns to the victim, which do not correspond with the alleged narrative or facts of the case. Similar to other books on the issue from around this time, O’Connell and Soderman (1936) do not provide reference to any scholarly research, and practical recommendations for how to do death investigations dominate. These authors offer detailed and specific procedures for investigating scenes of fatal shootings, hangings, strangulations, slit or stab wounds, chop wounds, traffic accidents, falls, drownings and poisoning. The specific recommendations given for examining each of these types of deaths need not be summarized in this introduction (see Ferguson, 2011, for a more detailed summary). However, their discussion of Goddefroy’s method warrants noting as it is one of the only specific techniques ever proposed which may address whether evidence has been staged based on fixed indicators. O’Connell and Soderman (1936) propose that Goddefroy’s method can be utilized to determine whether a dead person has been hung up by someone else in the case of an equivocal hanging (e.g., one where it is difficult to determine between homicide, suicide and accident). O’Connell and Soderman (1936) also note the challenge posed by injuries of this type when attempting to determi...