When a murderer stages a crime scene, they are doing it for one of two reasons:
1) They may simply be trying to throw off the police from the evidence trail, such as stripping the victim's clothes to suggest a sexual component of the crime when no such act occurred
2) They are setting the police a puzzle to solve, over and above the identity of who killed the victim.
There is a further possible scenario, that the killer's psychological predilections are strong enough to demand the scene is arranged to fit with their fantasy that likely to drove them to murder in the first place, such a posing the deceased in a humiliating manner, as an expression of the killer's sense of superiority, or wish to mark the victim as 'deserving' of degradation beyond taking their life.
A dead body is processed for clues as to the cause of death. Corporeality speaking to materiality, as science brings its analytical tools to bear. Evidence at the scene can be anything from bullet fragments, blood spatter, discarded cigarettes through to DNA traces and transferred fibres or plant material. All derive from the world of the material. However, in a staged scene, the realm of the symbolic is also engaged. The symbolic is not analysable by the same hard and fast facts as material evidence yielded by science. Rather, they are very much accessed through interpretation.
In my latest novel, "The Death Of The Author (In Triplicate)", there is a staged murder scene which is littered with deliberate symbols set up by the killer. To solve his or her identity, the detectives must first unravel the meaning of the field of symbols. Within the four elements of the material world, as constituted by the ancients all the way through to alchemists, that is fire (ashes), earth (garden soil), water (a jacuzzi) and air (a greenhouse), are discovered statues of gods and idols from every human mythology. Each divine is interred in their appropriate element. Gods of thunder, wind and cyclones are found in the greenhouse. Fertility and harvest gods in the potting shed's mound of soil.
The latest scientific forensic techniques are being asked to go up hard against ancient belief and the precursor of science in the form of alchemy. Of course alchemy's primary search for the philosopher's stone, which would supposedly turn base metal into gold, was a fool's errand and yet many of the processes and equipment employed, such as boiling admixtures in glass retorts, led the way to many discoveries that helped usher in the modern world and modern chemistry. Many of the statues uncovered no longer have adherents and believers, rather humbly now just existing as exhibits in a museum. What is the murderer trying to say with this symbology? They believe themself much smarter than the forces of law and order, hence the setting out of the challenge of a puzzle. And yet they also want that cleverness, that self-perceived genius, to be acknowledged.
In many ways, all fiction is a form of detective fiction. What is a novel if not a series of clues? A code to be cracked. The author carefully layers their work with whatever it is they want the reader to uncover and take away from their book. If it is made too obvious, the book is likely to be a poor read. If too oblique and difficult to discover, then the author's intentions go largely unfulfilled. In this way, the author shares a facet with the murderer above; they want their cleverness acknowledged. For the murderer it might be a boast or a public taunting of the police that brings about their downfall, as it gives away who they are and how to find them. For the author, it is talking about their book in interviews, struggling between the poles of revealing their art. as against not giving too much away.
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