By Dean H. Garrison, Jr.
This article originally appeared in the MAFS newsletter April 1996.
“I tend not to try to determine why people do things at crime scenes.”
-Criminalist Charles Morton
California v Menedez II, Trial transcript 12-5-95
Crime scene reconstruction may answer the question of where a victim was standing when an axe hit him or who stepped in the pool of blood by the door or what caused the revolver’s hammer to fall or when the third shot hit the car window or how the knife ended up out on the patio, but the crime scene reconstructionist cannot answer the ultimate question, the final question that tugs at everyone’s mind, the all-encompassing, all-seeing, all-knowing question of WHY did the crime happen? This may account for the fact that attorneys (for either side) very seldom ask “Why?” questions.
What happened and How it happened cover almost all of reconstruction work. The “Why?” question is an ultimate issue, something to be contemplated by ministers, psychologists, widows, and jurors. How a shot struck a victim is not the same as Why it struck the victim. Some very excellent works [Bevel, Rynearson, Chisum] on the subject of crime scene reconstruction mention Why as one of the questions answerable by the reconstructionist. These authors are more accurately addressing the questions of How, rather than Why.
The true answers to the Why question of crime are often:
He always hated his mother
or
He just ran out of luck
or
She was as crazy as a couple of dancing mice that night
or
The guy owed him money, so he shot him
or
It was a lovers’ quarrel
or
Yes, he knew the gun was loaded, but he didn’t mean to shoot the store clerk
or
The voice from the toaster told him to do it
or
The police officer took his eyes off the suspect for just a moment
or
“I killed them to prevent any more earthquakes”
or
He hit her once too often
or
The victim said something stupid like, “You can’t do it. Go ahead and shoot!”
or
She hit him with his own car just to scare him
or
His fifth grade teacher always thought he was strange when he talked about assassinating famous people
or
“Gee, I dunno…I guess I was pretty upset.”
or
The victim/suspect was simply one evil SOB.
These after all, are the real answers to the “Why?” question. No amount of careful crime scene measurement, meticulous photography painstaking evidence collection or Sherlock Holmesian deduction, induction, or reduction can answer the “Why?” question. No reconstruction has yet answered the Why of Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, or John Wayne Gacy, but numerous individuals and agencies have addressed the “What happened?”, and “How did it happen?” questions that surround these cases. (It was perhaps the downfall of those who have tried to reconstruct the Kennedy assassinations that they could never quite divorce the what-happened from the why-did-it-happen.) You can understand the How without knowing the Why. And this is not all bad, because the true reason why a crime occurred is neither very interesting nor very enlightening.
Sixty stab wounds and a shoeprint on the victim’s face may indicate why the killer thought it was necessary to commit the act. The word “PIG” written on the wall in the victims blood may indicate why the killer felt it was time for a murder. The use of meat fork and boning knife and roofing hammer or fifteen groin shots may hint at the true reasons why the crime was committed. These, however conspicuous, are only indicators of why…indicators to be interpreted by attorneys in their closing arguments, juries in their deliberations, and psychological profilers in their analyses.
As a crime scene reconstructionist, your job is not to answer Why the crime occurred. It’s not your problem. Your are employed to examine the evidence and circumstances and, with some knowledgeable and scientific analysis, figure out How the crime transpired. The “Why?” is not your specialty, nor your responsibility. There is an old cop maxim which says that there are two kinds of murder cases: who-done-its? and who-cares? In either type of case, the question of why who done it did it is not something that can be answered by a crime scene reconstruction.
Suggested Readings
- Bevel, T., “Crime Scene Reconstruction,” Journal of Forensic Identification, Vol. 41, No. 4, 1991, pp. 248-54.
- Osterberg, J. and Ward, R., Criminal Investigation: A Method For Reconstructing The Past, Anderson: Cincinati, 1992.
- Rynearson, J. M. and Chisum, W. J., Evidence and Crime Scene Reconstruction, 3rd ed., National Crime Investigation & Training: P.O. Box 492005, Redding, CA 96049, 1993.