Learn English – the correct term for ‘misleading’ investigations

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I am looking for the more common and correct term used when someone tries to misdirect investigations on a crime that has been committed .

For example,

a murderer who tries to create false evidence so that possibly someone else is suspected of the crime they committed.

I think that "mislead or misdirect " investigations can be used, but is there a more precise term used in these specific cases?

N.B. I am not referring to "alibi".

Best Answer

Consider, draw/drag a red herring across the trail/path/track

red herring

Something intended to mislead or divert attention from something else; from the old practice of dragging a herring across a track to confuse tracking dogs. Dictionary of Unfamiliar Words

The purpose of her trip to Wentworth was to hide there the dead lady's golf clubs – left-handed clubs, the attaché-case being a red herring to put the police off the trail. Murder in the Mews

set up someone [to be the fall guy]

informal Make an innocent person appear guilty of something: suppose Lorton had set him up for Newley’s murder? ODO

More than seventy years after Bruno Richard Hauptmann was executed for the kidnapping and murder of the two-year-old son of aviation hero Charles A. Lindbergh, some students of what was known as "the crime of the century," which the famed muckraking journalist H. L. Mencken termed the greatest story since the Resurrection of Christ, believe that Hauptmann was in fact the victim of a conspiracy involving faked evidence to set him up to be the fall guy. History's Greatest Conspiracies

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