‘The Perfect Murder’: An Exploratory Study of Staged Murder Scenes and Concealed Femicide

Abstract

Presenting cases of criminologically unidentifiable circumstances, authors point to concealment susceptibility of some femicide cases, overlooked by both the criminal system and by scholars, rendering them ‘concealed femicides’. The paper presents descriptive and criminological analyses of Israeli cases whereby the woman’s murder was followed by scene staging. It extrapolates the common characteristics of femicide victims and perpetrators, offers a typology of homicide scene staging behaviour that facilitates domesticity-related femicide concealment and, eventually, introduces tools to enhance exposure of femicide.