This is a comprehensive course on how to investigate homicides and other suspicious deaths. Through the use of classroom lectures, video segments, photographs, case study exercises, and hands-on practical exercises, attendees will be provided with a thorough education in the specific techniques involved in these types of investigations. Taught by instructors with extensive backgrounds in death investigations, this course will cover such topics as initial response and securing the scene, crime scene search methods, obtaining search warrants, identifying and preserving forensic evidence, witness interviews, suspect interrogations, report writing, and testifying. The course will also discuss suicides, death investigations involving children, and the capabilities of forensic evidence analysis.

Throughout this course an emphasis is placed on protecting constitutional rights, seeking the truth, avoiding false confessions, and respecting the victim’s family. This course is intentionally designed for law enforcement officers from all sizes of agencies that might be tasked with a death investigation.

This class is highly interactive and calls on the attendee to use the knowledge used in the class to interpret crime scenes and organize an investigative plan. The attendee will be presented with actual scenarios from real investigations.  

Course Objectives:

• Identify when a death investigation is no longer a murder investigation
• Crime Scene Management
  • Understanding the most perishable item at a crime scene
  • Primary duties of the first officers at a crime scene
  • Stages of handling a crime scene
  • Crime scene report narratives / documentation
  • Possible reasons for staging and altering a crime scene
  • What to look for in hanging deaths
  • Identify the manner of death in an autoerotic strangulation / asphyxiation death

• Search Warrants
  • Requirements of a search warrant
  • Documents needed for the application for and execution of a search warrant
  • Situations that constitute “exigent circumstances’
  • Significant elements in a “plain view doctrine” seizure
  • Identify when Miranda is required

• Physical Evidence
  • Principles of transfer and persistence of physical evidence
  • Methods of locating, documenting, preserving and collecting physical evidence
  • Associative vs. reconstruction evidence
  • Understand laboratory capabilities and craft an effective analysis request
  • Databases for DNA, fingerprints and ballistics
  • Understand emerging technologies and finding expertise beyond your laboratory

• Interview & Interrogations
  • The two methods of lying—active deception & passive deception
  • The three questions the detective will need to answer during any interview or interrogation
  • The ratio of input between the subject and the detective during an interview vs during an interrogation
  • Why there are physical responses to emotions such as stress, anger, fear or sorrow
  • Defining and addressing “proxemics”
  • Identifying the types of false confessions

• Child Death Investigations
  • What investigators are most likely to see
  • Common mechanisms and outliers
  • Importance of notification
  • Commonalities
  • Typical vs atypical child death crime scenes
  • Behavioral analysis of Maternal Filicide
  • Reconstructions
  • Case Study