Issues That Would Confront a Homicide Investigator
Case 1
A farmer has found a greatly decomposed body in one of his fields. While plowing the fields for the first time in two years, he ran over the body, and the plow brought the body to the surface.
The first thing the farmer would do is to call the local police department that will send a homicide investigator to the scene. On arrival, the first thing that the investigator would do is to secure the scene so that he can collect as much evidence as needed before they are tampered. However, collecting evidences to such the case will not be an easy task for the investigator. First, the investigator would need to identify the identity of the decomposed body, which is not an easy thing, and he would have to take this to the forensic department. Another thing that the investigator will need to solve is the cause and manner of the murder. A decomposed body buried somewhere in the fields or thrown in the forest is often the first sign of murder for investigators. Suicidal people often tend to take away their lives at a closed surround mostly indoors, so the suicide opinion is taken off the table.
One of the important things in a homicide investigation is to identity witnesses (“Richmond police chief shares challenges of solving homicides – East Bay Times”, 2013). Getting a witness for the murder case would prove to be difficult for investigators. It has always been hard to solve a murder case with no key witness to give out important information that would lead to the investigation being successful. The first witness is the farmer, but other than providing information on how he found the body, the question of how the body ended in his farm would not be answered. So the investigator would have to wait for the identity report from the forensic and interview the closely related family members and friends. This is because, in most cases of murder, the victim and the offender were related.
References
Richmond police chief shares challenges of solving homicides – East Bay Times. Eastbaytimes.com. (2013). Retrieved 26 February 2020, from https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2013/04/24/richmond-police-chief-shares-challenges-of-solving-homicides/.