Doing Away with the Missus: Murder and Crime Scene Staging by Police Officers

• In Event: Police Homicides

Abstract

There is some controversy in the criminology literature about the extent to which police officers stage crime scenes after committing a homicide. Turvey (2000) found that 20 percent of offenders in his sample of crime scene stagers were law enforcement officers, whereas Ferguson (2011) found only 4 percent to have a background in law enforcement. This study examined solved cases where murders were staged, by police officers, to appear as something else. Five solved cases from a larger sample of staged homicides were examined. Those involving police as offenders were most likely to be staged as burglaries or home invasions, and often involved staging behaviours like ‘discovering’ the body, leaving victims where they fell, establishing an alibi, and removal or disruption of valuables or personal items in the scene. Victims and offenders were commonly known to one another, often through intimate relationships. These cases differ from staged cases more generally as the sophistication of staging efforts may be more advanced, and the murders did not often take place during an argument or confrontation.

Author

• Claire Ferguson, Queensland University of Technology