Investigating Staged Crime Scenes: Responding to the Leahy/Arnold Inquest Findings

In March this year the sensational Coroner's Court Inquest ruling in the Julie-Anne Leahy and Vicki Arnold deaths in Queensland was highly critical of several QPS investigators, and their ability to investigate 'complex' homicides. The most recent finding has also been critical of several other reviews, inquests, reports and investigations carried out by various agencies, making note of 'contorting' and 'ignoring' facts to fit the original flawed theory of the event. The case involved what is now thought to be a double murder, staged to appear as a murder-suicide perpetrated by Vicki Arnold. Although we await a criminal court finding on whether this case was indeed a staged double homicide, the third Coroner's Inquest has highlighted the potential deficiencies that exist in police knowledge of staged crime scenes, where the offender attempts to have the scene appeal as something different to what it is in reality. This type of behaviour may involve manipulation of the physical evidence, including a change of position of weapons or bodies, falsifying injuries, cleaning up, planting additional evidence, as has been proposed in the Leahy/Arnold case. Staging a crime scene also may involve actively deceiving investigators by lying during interviews, creating false alibis, filing false reports, or by circulating other falsities about the victim or the interviewees own involvement in the case the likes of which is thought to have been perpetrated here.