A brutal and terrifying murder in Big Sky, Montana, last month was initially reported as a grizzly attack. A man was found dead in his campsite, apparently beaten to death. The horrifying scene that happened led a pair of witnesses to report it as a bear attack.

But it wasn’t.

Darren Christopher Abbey confessed earlier this month to kill the caravan with a screwdriver and an axe. Dustin Kjersem had been camping in the Custer Gallatin National Forest in mid-October when his deceased body was found in his tent.

Given the multiple bloody wounds on his body, the friends who discovered him thought it was the work of a grizzly bear, although investigators later found the cause was from “multiple wounds” caused by a screwdriver and an axe.

In Tennessee, Nicholas Wayne Hamlett, 45, was arrested on Nov. 10 for murder after allegedly killing a man and stealing his identitywhile staging death as a bear attack.

Hamlett called 911 pretending to be a stressed-out hiker named Brandon Andrade, who he claimed had been attacked by a bear and fell off a cliff in the Tennessee mountains, according to a report from the US Marshals Service.

It was later determined that Andrade died of head trauma.

The phenomenon of blaming one of nature’s top predators for homicidal intent isn’t a new excuse, but it’s a putative motive forensics and wildlife experts say they have little trouble disproving.

Despite several recent grizzly bear-inspired murders and killings in other states, Wyoming law enforcement officials say they are not fooled by man’s attempt to frame innocent bruises.

Grizzly Impersonation Failed

Taking grizzly-inspired murders a step further, four Los Angeles residents were arrested Wednesday on suspicion of insurance fraud and conspiracy over $141,000 for allegedly dressing up in a bear suit and destroying luxury vehicles to collect the insurance money, according to a statement from the California Department of Insurance.

After viewing surveillance video of alleged bear attacks on vehicles the culprits turned into their insurance companies, a biologist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife said it was clearly a man in bear suit

Hard to fake

A bear’s teeth and claw marks are distinctive and hard to imitate, said Dave Wolfskill, a deputy and retired Laramie and Crook County farmer who lives in the Hulett area. He personally saw the scars on the face of a man in his area who survived a grizzly bear attack and said they were nothing like cut wounds.

“Teeth punctures and claw marks are nothing like being hit with an axe,” he said.

Short of a hay hook used on square bales, no instrument can be thought of that could reproduce a bear attack, although it he said the teeth would be incredibly hard to imitate.

Mike Frolander, a longtime Crook County EMT and coroner who has held the position for more than three decades, agreed. He has never personally responded to bear attacks or any staged murder scenes, but said it would be easy to tell based on DNA evidence alone.

“Any time there’s contact between two things, there’s a transfer of evidence,” Frolander said. “Sometimes it’s obviously hard to see. I would like to think that there should be evidence of an animal there, not unlike a human.”

DNA testing would probably show that, Frolander said.

Hard to remove

Lt. Russ Ruschill of the Jackson Police Department also said that trying to stage a grizzly attack would be “statistically difficult to pull off” in the age of DNA and advanced homicide investigation tools.

He’s never heard of anyone trying to do this, and noted that grizzlies don’t exactly roam downtown Jackson, though he once saw famous and recently deceased grizzly 399 and her four cubs walking through the police parking lot one night.

He does not recall any staged murder scenes in his experience, although staged versions of events are common when it comes to questioning criminal suspects.

“Many people fabricate, minimize, obfuscate and embellish their version of events to favor themselves,” he said. “That happens in almost every criminal investigation.”

The Grizzlies are not on the list

When it comes to staged crime scenes, burglaries and home invasions are generally the most common, according to an analysis that looked at 141 staged crime scenes in the US, Canada, UK and Australia.

Burglaries and home invasions accounted for 43 percent of crime scenes, followed by suicides at 13 percent, car crashes at 12 percent and accidental deaths at 11 percent, according to figures published by Claire Ferguson in her 2011 thesis for Australia’s Bond University. “Defects of the Situation: A Typology of Staged Crime Scenes”.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, grizzly bears were not on Ferguson’s list of staged crime scenes.

In fact, a person’s chance of being attacked by a bear is about 1 in 2.1 million, according to the National Park Service.

Bigger story

In Big Horn County, where one might expect to see a framed bear, no such cases have occurred, according to Big Horn County Sheriff Ken Blackburn.

Although many people have tried to forensically manipulate crime scenes throughout his career, he has never had a grizzly imitation. Usually, it involves arson or burning of vehicles or other similar crime scenes that are easily determined by crime scene investigations.

In his mind, the bigger story, aside from staged grizzly attacks, is cash-strapped departments like his, which often have to pay thousands to third-party crime labs because of understaffing and backlogs at the Department of Criminal Investigation’s crime lab. Wyoming.

To that end, his department just paid nearly $10,000, he said, to check a paint chip in a recent ATM break-in case because of lab backlogs in light of a pending court date.

“It’s natural for criminals to try to cover up a crime and it’s really important that we have the proper tools to be able to investigate crimes,” he said, “and even more importantly to support forensic efforts to bring these people to justice and bring closure for the victims’ families.”

As for mimicking grizzly attacks, Blackburn said he felt such attempts would be easily thwarted based on the evidence.

“I came to believe that wound mechanics would be so blessed,” he said.

Contact Jen Kocher at [email protected]

Jen Kocher can be contacted at [email protected].