Pic Of The Moment: The Case Of The Amazing Disappearing Evidence

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132. Scientific protocol in evidence collection would say that is an untruth

If clothing is (improperly) removed from the suspect at a crime scene it has to be bagged and recorded then it goes to the station to confirm the chain of custody and to allow it to be used in an initial questioning. The suspect should be in a suppled overall and only then should the clothing be sent on to the crime lab. Reasons for allowing GZ to change his clothes would be either stupidity or incompetence or fraud because of the following:

1) The suspect should have the clothing removed in a secure and forensically clean area with a specialist evidence collection officer present. Such rooms can be set up at a crime scene but that takes time it is more usually done at the station.
2) Neither the unsecured crime scene nor the suspects home counts as secure and forensically clean. Cross contamination is possible and inconvenient items can be "lost".
3) If the police allowed him to go home and get changed the clothing is useless for evidential purposes - something of which both the DA and the Police Chief will have been fully aware.

The clothes of the victim should not have been removed at the crime scene, once death is confirmed and the names of attending medical staff who may have worked on the deceased have been taken, the body and all clothing should be bagged and moved to the autopsy room where evidence professionals should be used to collect and only then separately bag the items. Under NO circumstances should the clothes of the suspect be moved to the lab in the same consignment as those of the victim, there are huge dangers of cross contamination and such a procedure would probably render any forensic evidence from those items unreliable.

Essentially your hypothesis would condemn the entire police department as either fools or corrupt.