Pages: 4

Defining homicide can present its own challenges when it comes to understanding and responding to this crime since what is considered to be an acceptable killing is socially, historically and culturally constructed, as the people have noted elsewhere. This chapter commences with a chapter that provides an insight into the investigation of homicide in England and Wales but which also documents some of the opportunities and challenges faced when conducting research in this field, offering a methodological perspective for others interested in advancing knowledge of homicide investigation. It also explores some of the techniques and expertise drawn on in homicide investigations including digital forensics, the commercialisation of forensic science, forensic entomology, social network analysis, the use of the media, the role of psychologists, investigative interviewing, statement analysis and geographical profiling. Consideration of the victim in criminology is a relatively recent consideration, and there has historically been a more concentrated focus on the offender.

Pages: 55

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 13

Adopting a starting point of the 1980s, my doctoral research explored the recent history of homicide investigations in England and Wales, the ways in which they have changed and what the subsequent consequences of change have been (Pike, 2018, 2022). In this chapter an insight into my experiences of conducting this research is provided. Three methods of data collection were adopted: qualitative interviews with former and serving homicide detectives, examination of case files and observations of investigations and detective training. Each approach is discussed in turn here, beginning with the interviews, before the examination of case files and then observations are considered. However, the reader should note that the process was not linear and such is the nature of qualitative research; it was not the case that each stage of data collection was completed before the next began. Ultimately, it is hoped that this chapter will represent another step towards addressing what might be considered a gap in the existing literature around the experiences of conducting qualitative research on homicide investigation in England and Wales.

Pages: 15

The chapter describes how the Norwegian Police Service handle homicide investigations in a socially stable but sparsely populated country. In one of the safest and least crime-ridden countries of the world are more than 70 per cent of all murders committed in the victim’s home. Domestic violence and mental disorders lie behind most of these homicides. One-third of the homicides happen in the capital of Oslo; hence, the regional police force is struggling to maintain a satisfactory level of expertise and professionalism both inside and outside the police force. There have been several high-profile cases of miscarriages of justice over the past 20 years – most of them homicide cases. This has led to a climate for change and development in how the police handle rising expectations and investigative complexity. To move more safely and quickly in challenging situations the police service has moved towards new standards, such as a new model for investigative decision-making and investigative interviewing rising from systematic learning and evidence-based policing.

Pages: 13

Australian clearance rates are some of the best in the world, with 13% of homicides unresolved. This chapter discusses homicide in Australia and offers information about what issues can positively or negatively affect solvability, the challenges faced by police investigators during these investigations and investigative opportunities open to detectives. It also provides case studies related to the three main homicide typologies in order to discuss tools and techniques available.

Pages: 12

Homicide investigation in the United States is a task carried out largely by local law enforcement agencies, including municipal police departments with appointed police chiefs responsible to elected officials and sheriffs’ offices where the elected sheriff is the ultimate policymaker. Contemporary investigative practices are like those in many Western democratic societies, but the US law enforcement function is embedded in a particular societal context. This context includes several conditions and challenges that, when combined, are unique. The US system of governance is federalism, assigning various powers to the central government and reserving the remaining, including police matters, to the states. Most American police agencies are small and have limited resources. Assistance in some homicide investigations is sought from larger local agencies, state agencies, and support services from some federal agencies in special circumstances. In 2020, the US experienced an unprecedented near-30% increase in homicide over 2019. Researchers are working to understand the many factors involved, but it is important to note the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic and the killing of George Floyd, an African American, by an officer who was subsequently convicted of murder in the case, drawing worldwide attention, sparking protests, and further deteriorating the relations between law enforcement agencies and the public they serve. US law enforcement agencies police a country that has easy accessibility to firearms and has more guns than it has people living in it. Increased accountability demanded by citizens shines a light on police practices, including investigations of homicide, but police are facing significant challenges to recruit and retain officers.

Pages: 178

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 13

This chapter focuses on changes in policing concerning the development of detectives and specialisation in a homicide investigation. The chapter describes critical developments in history, legislative changes, the professionalisation of detective work, and the Detective Degree Holder Pathway. Key debates focus on the changing employment and recruitment of detectives, the operational environment in which they operate, and the measures to increase the number of detectives and the pool from which homicide detectives are selected.

Pages: 14

The role of the senior investigating officer (SIO) in UK homicide investigations is a central role within all UK Police Forces. In simple terms the job of the SIO is to establish the cause of a death and the manner of death to a legal burden of proof and to establish in the case of unlawful killing who caused the death, with the burden of proof ‘beyond all reasonable doubt’. The SIO in homicide enquiries is a privileged position that attracts a significant amount of professional attention from senior ranks within the police service and across wider society. An SIO has to be prepared to operate within a high-risk environment. In conclusion, alongside the technical skills that all effective SIO’s must possess, the most important element of being a SIO is demonstrable moral and ethical leadership standards and values.

Pages: 13

The senior investigating officer in a homicide investigation occupies a pivotal position. They are the principal decision-maker, charged with the duty of bringing focus and direction to the investigation, deciding how far lines of inquiry should be explored and when to call a halt to police activity. Consequently, their decision-making underpins all significant investigative activity. Yet, when their decision-making is flawed, it can lead to case failures, which in terms of high-profile murder investigations are likely to be significant. Experience in the role, environmental factors and cognitive inhibitors impact their decision-making ability. This chapter examines how senior detectives make investigative decisions, how they make sense of hard-to-solve homicides, and how their reasoning is vulnerable to cognitive heuristics and biases. Having established this, the chapter identifies strategies to enhance investigative decision-making and manage such biases in thinking.

Pages: 15

Digital evidence occupies an increasingly prominent role in homicide inquiries. Despite the investigative opportunities it provides, its effective and ethical use are far from straightforward. Drawing upon data gathered from two distinct ethnographic studies of major crime investigation, we explore how police forces in England and Wales accommodate the demand for digital examinations. We focus on the opportunities and challenges that arise in the extraction and analysis of digital data from mobile devices. The findings contribute to emerging debates about optimising the value of digital traces in police investigations.

Pages: 14

This chapter will discuss the commercialisation of the forensic science market in England and Wales. The current mixed economy provision of forensic science to police forces will be discussed and the potential impact that this has upon criminal investigation – in particular, homicide. An overview on how the forensic sciences support homicide investigations and the historical and contemporary changes to these provisions are discussed in light of the potential benefits and risks to justice.

Pages: 18

This chapter describes the current role of forensic entomology in homicide investigations. Insects and arthropods provide critical evidence in the investigation of homicide and neglect. They provide information that helps establish the time, manner and circumstances surrounding death. While forensic entomology is founded on a robust body of empirical studies, the complex variables at crime scenes create uncertainties in evidence interpretation. This chapter describes the principal uses of forensic entomology, highlighting areas of uncertainty as well as strengths. It first addresses methods to establish mPMI estimates. Next, entomotoxicology is shown to provide valuable insight into the circumstances of death. The use of DNA profiling on entomological samples is then shown to enable victim identification. Throughout, the case is made for future studies to improve our understanding of entomological evidence in geographically specific case-based scenarios.

Pages: 11

It is widely acknowledged that crime is a social endeavour and offenders, victims and crime exist within a context of complex social interactions and relationships. This includes the act of homicide. Analysis of these interpersonal relationships and their embeddedness in both criminogenic and non-criminal contexts and ‘networks’ provides insight into the patterns of behaviour and structural processes which lead to homicide perpetration and victimisation. This chapter, recognising a lack of research on UK gangs and the proliferation of fatal violence, explores the use of social network analysis in understanding, investigating and preventing homicide committed in the context of groups and networks. It begins with an explanation of the nature of group-related homicide, and then it discusses social network analysis and its use in understanding criminal networks. While it doesn’t advocate the use of any particular social network analysis software, it explores some of the common features of networks and how these may be used to investigate and disrupt group-related homicide and how it may be used in the context of prevention and intervention in order to reduce the harm caused by homicide to individuals and communities.

Pages: 12

Police use of the media during a homicide investigation is complex. On one hand, the media allows police services to engage with a wide range of people that are vital to solving a case. On the other hand, the media can at times be detrimental to what people think about homicide and the police response. The chapter delves further into these issues and conveys the role and function of the media today during police investigations. Existing literature relating to police media workings and homicide investigations are examined in relation to four key stages. These include (1) in the immediate aftermath of a homicide; (2) police communication using the media; (3) the media reporting of homicide; and (4) citizen cooperation via the media and police assessments of new information. Taken together, these stages illustrate that the police need to carefully manage their engagement with several audiences when using the media.

Pages: 12

The aim of this chapter is to show why murder squads should have ‘seconded’ or permanent psychologists attached to their team. Not only can registered psychologists contribute to homicide investigations, but they can also support the general administration and, more specifically, investigators in both their personal and professional roles. This can be achieved by providing input into selecting, training and supporting detectives in coping with stress and mental health issues and advising on interviewing techniques, post-arrest, court appearances, conviction and discharge, including challenging release proposals and incorporating risk management. Based on my personal insights as a UK consultant clinical forensic psychologist, this chapter will cover an introduction to psychologists; how psychological input into training and supporting detectives can be useful; stress and mental health issues; offender profiling; how research by psychologists can help investigators, interviewing witnesses and suspects; and media input before finally discussing how psychologists can help in court.

Pages: 15

This chapter considers the investigative interview and explores how these interviews take place on homicide investigations. Whilst interviewing within England and Wales will be the focus of the chapter, international practice will also be explored. Predominantly, the chapter will address the interviewing of suspects by the police, although the principles of investigative interviewing have wider application to interviews with victims and witnesses. Investigative interviewing is influenced by principles of fairness and is underpinned, in England and Wales, by the PEACE framework (Shawyer et al., 2009. Although it has been recognised that the PEACE framework has improved the skill of interviewers, some aspects of this framework have been more successfully incorporated into interviewing practice than others (Clarke and Milne, 2001; Clarke et al., 2011. While it has been suggested that the investigation of homicide be undertaken to the ‘gold standard’ (Brookman and Innes, 2013), there is a dearth of research into interviewing on homicide investigations. This chapter explores some of the research in this area, focusing on the use of tactics, question types and interviewing style. It concludes by highlighting areas that require further research, in particular the interviewing of vulnerable suspects and the role of third parties during the interview.

Pages: 12

Unlike most portrayals on television, physical and biological evidence may be absent from a crime scene. Thus, particularly at the early stages of a criminal investigation, the police may have to rely on eyewitness testimony. In this chapter, we will first address the importance of eyewitness testimony during a homicide (and other criminal) investigations. Then, we will address how reliable eyewitness memory is and what factors can affect its reliability. We will then address some of the techniques and interview strategies that trained police forces can use to enhance eyewitness memory and obtain accurate and detailed accounts from eyewitnesses, namely the Cognitive Interview and the PEACE model. Lastly, we will briefly address some of the new developments in this field and how these might shape future policy and best practice. In sum, this chapter focuses on the key role that eyewitness testimony can have in homicide investigations and the science-based methodologies that have been developed and used to collect informative and accurate accounts from eyewitnesses.

Pages: 12

Homicides are complex, dynamic crimes spanning periods of time. To fully understand homicides, investigators must understand not only what occurred but also when behaviours and events occurred. Understanding the sequence of homicides offers new insights into profiling and victimology. The current chapter outlines a new method for temporal analyses, Behaviour Sequence Analysis (BSA), which has already been applied to several homicide types (including murder, serial homicide, and terrorism). Drawing from the author’s extensive work with police departments around the world as well as several recent publications from authors in the field, readers will gain an understanding of how to run their own BSA for research and investigative purposes. This is an exciting new area of research, and readers are encouraged to take the methods outlined in this chapter and begin applying them to their own case files and research projects. Additional methods based on the BSA approach are also outlined. Waypoint sequencing (Keatley and Clarke, 2021) provides a streamlined approach to sequence analysis, which was designed for live, real-time cases in which faster results are preferable. Behavioural fingerprinting is a new method for crime linkage, an important area of investigations and criminology, offering a new approach to linking crimes based on their sequential fingerprint.

Pages: 15

Stranger murders are difficult to solve because of the lack of a connection between the offender and the victim. If the homicide is part of a series, however, inter-crime relationships may be analyzed to help focus the police investigation. Every crime in the pattern can be considered a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. The more pieces, the more information; the more information, the more detailed the overall picture; the more detailed the overall picture, the better the chances the case can be solved. The application of scientific studies of criminal behavior has led to the development of several serial crime investigative techniques, including linkage analysis systems, behavioral (psychological) profiling, geographic profiling, and crime-specific statistical databases. Geographic profiling is a criminal investigative methodology that analyzes the locations of a connected series of crime to determine the most probable area of offender residence. Under the appropriate circumstances, it can be a useful tool for suspect prioritization and information management in a murder investigation. This chapter discusses the nature of the criminal investigative process, the importance of linkage analysis, and the theoretical basis and operational considerations of geographic profiling. It concludes with an outline of relevant police investigative strategies.

Pages: 69

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 13

Re-examining cases of domestic homicide on a multi-agency, no-blame basis is a relatively new concept which first emerged from the United States of America in the 1990s, in the form of Domestic Violence Fatality Reviews (DVFRs). Approximately eighteen years later, England and Wales adapted this process to create Domestic Homicide Reviews (or DHRs), which were first piloted in 2008. It must be acknowledged that the DHR process operates independently of the official police homicide investigation, but both processes must take one another into consideration. By drawing on existing research that has focused on the policing of domestic abuse and homicide and DHR-specific research that has incorporated a policing perspective to investigating domestic abuse and homicide, this chapter demonstrates that from an academic research point of view, very little is known about the relationship between the DHR process and police homicide investigations in England and Wales. Furthermore, this chapter will also demonstrate that it is difficult to ascertain whether DHRs and their outcomes have had any impact on organisational policy and practice, including those that dictate how cases of domestic homicide are policed in England and Wales.

Pages: 11

This chapter explores the intersection between femicide and honour-based violence (HBV). It examines how relevant sociocultural norms support and facilitate different types of violence – for instance, the belief that men have a right to control and/or discipline women makes women vulnerable to violence from intimate partners, demonstrating how patriarchal values increase the risk of gender-based violence. The sociocultural differences between the dominant cultures of European countries and between those who inhabit them mean that prioritising ‘expert’ voices from the hegemonic culture over less visible minority groups manifests in a country’s practices, norms, values and beliefs being treated as monolithic and in diversity being largely ignored. Gendered violence encompasses HBV, ‘crimes of honour’, ‘crimes related to honour conflict’, ‘crimes of tradition’ and ‘culture-based violence’. During the trial, Shafilea’s parents insisted that they had not been involved in their daughter’s disappearance or murder; they also denied claims that they had repeatedly beaten her over a prolonged period.

Pages: 13

The Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act introduced a brand-new UK homicide offence. An organisation, such as a company, will be guilty of an offence if it causes a person’s death and this amounts to a gross breach of a relevant duty of care. The organisation’s senior management need to have also played a substantial role in the breach. Should an organisation be found guilty, the main sanction is a (potentially unlimited) fine. The offence operates in a complex investigatory and enforcement environment. There is significant overlap between corporate manslaughter and the wider health and safety regulatory regime. Only the police can investigate corporate manslaughter, and only the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) can decide whether a case will proceed. Yet the police and the CPS are reliant on enforcement bodies, such as the Health and Safety Executive, to advise in relation to whether breaches of health and safety law have occurred. Many investigations do not result in a corporate manslaughter indictment. A health and safety charge may be the only charge in circumstances where there is organisational culpability but insufficient evidence to meet the high threshold for corporate manslaughter. Twenty-nine companies have been convicted of corporate manslaughter to date.

Pages: 18

Murders of missing people are relatively rare yet are among the most complex of homicide investigations. A missing person may never be reported to the police or may be reported weeks, months or years after they were last seen. As such, the tools and techniques that the police routinely draw upon are not readily available in many of these kinds of homicide investigations, adding to their complexity. Very little research has examined cases concerning people who go missing and who are later murdered. This chapter seeks to advance our understanding of these homicides, illustrating how certain victim and event characteristics may hinder the police investigation.

Pages: 12

This chapter explores the organisation and conduct of the minority of police murder enquiries that are required to engage with the challenges of investigating ‘hard to solve’ criminal homicides. It is suggested that police detectives engaged in such efforts structure their thinking around three core questions. The ‘Whodunit?’ question is focused upon the fundamental task of suspect identification and location, as typically in such cases, the identity of a prime suspect and evidence for their involvement in the fatal violence are difficult to establish. Rather different challenges are posed by the ‘Howdunit?’ question, where the investigative tasks centre providing a ‘high resolution’ account of precisely how the violence was performed. Issues of motive and ‘Whydunit?’ are also important, especially in being able to construct a compelling and persuasive narrative to support prosecution. In the chapter, the significance of each of these questions in shaping and guiding the work of homicide investigators is illustrated by real-life empirical case studies.

Pages: 58

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 11

This chapter will explore the often-forgotten survivors of homicide who are having to endure a criminal investigation whilst managing the ‘traumatic grief’ that follows such a devastating event and what is often intense media coverage. We will explore how, despite having the same end goal as the survivor, those investigating homicide have many different priorities and approaches in trying to reach that goal. It will be shown that the actions of investigators have a direct role to play in influencing the grief processes of those closest to the victim. We will see that how they are notified about the homicide, how the victim’s lifestyle is examined and how, in England and Wales, the family liaison officer works with the family all have a significant impact on the victim’s grief and their perceptions of homicide investigators.

Pages: 12

This chapter considers how restorative justice (RJ) can be used to help secondary victims of homicide in dealing with their loss. It begins by discussing the impact of homicide on secondary victims. It then considers some of the principles of RJ and how it can help secondary victims in terms of having questions answered and receiving an apology from the offender. It also considers the impact of forgiveness by secondary victims in cases of homicide – the impact on the forgiver and on the forgiven – before concluding with a brief case study of Ray and Vi Donovan, who are RJ campaigners in the UK.

Pages: 19

The emotional impact of homicide investigation is a very under-researched area. Yet, homicide investigators deal with death every day and are exposed to traumatic scenes and interactions with witnesses and victims’ families on an ongoing basis. This chapter explores the social, cultural, and organisational factors that shape emotions in homicide investigation and the coping strategies detectives employ to minimise the impact of the work. Although emotions are often viewed negatively there are vitally important positive emotions associated with homicide investigation that are linked with the nature of the work and its moral content, and these contribute to ‘emotional energy’ (Collins, 2005) and a sense of pride and satisfaction with the work. Furthermore, despite arguing that homicide investigation has little impact on them, homicide detectives are affected by the powerful ‘primary’ emotions (Turner, 2007) murder evokes while their contacts with victims’ families generate sadness and a desire to get some justice on their behalf. It is argued that rather than denying emotions as is so common in policing, acknowledging their importance and impact is crucial.

Pages: 14

This chapter examines how police investigations fail, resulting in wrongful arrests or the charging of innocent individuals or the failure to detect an offender. Both outcomes are a failure to achieve ‘justice’, albeit ‘miscarriages of justice’ incorporate far wider considerations. This chapter focuses upon the misattribution of criminal liability in a criminal investigation or the failure to identify those responsible for criminal offences. The variables involved in criminal investigation are many, often disparate and frequently emanating from beyond the police organisation, but this chapter concentrates upon (in)action and behaviours directly attributable to policing staff. There is now a bedrock of research that, in examining previous wrongful convictions, claims to have identified the most common ‘root causes’ of failure in criminal investigations. Of course, each investigation has their own peculiarities and idiosyncrasies, but patterns may be discerned, with common features across failed investigations. These can manifest in a specific fashion in each case but have, at their heart, identifiable commonalities, which will be outlined in the context, primarily, of homicide investigations in England and Wales.