How can a faked suicide reliably be distinguished from a true suicide?

At no time during the Hutton Inquiry was the question considered of how to distinguish a faked suicide from a true suicide.

The scene at Harrowdown Hill "looked like" suicide. But why was that the case? Did Dr. David Kelly kill himself? Or was he killed and the scene was set to seem to be suicide? In other words the seeming suicide was a faked suicide.

In the circumstances at Harrowdown Hill and, more broadly, in the context of David Kelly's long-term involvement with intelligence matters distinguishing a true suicide from a faked suicide is particularly difficult.

Not only was the question not considered at the Hutton Inquiry, the Attorney Genera, Dominic Grieve, failed to consider this fundamental question in his "investigation" leading up to his oral and written statements to the House of Commons on 9th June 2011.

Let me illustrate some of the difficulty in arriving at a definitive list of factors that will allow reliable differentiation  of true suicide from faked suicide.

The following assumes that you start with a completely open mind.

•  Fingerprints / no fingerprints on the knife. There were no fingerprints on the knife found at Harrowdown Hill. Thus there is no evidence that Dr. Kelly had ever held the knife. However, the absence of fingerprints may simply be due to the presence of blood on the knife handle.
• The supposed lack of evidence of third party (or parties) being at Harrowdown Hill. If the evidence was properly tested (which it wasn't) the alleged absence of third party presence may indicate that no third parties were present. Equally, it may indicate that such third parties as were present were very careful and might have left no forensic evidence of their presence, for example,  because they might have been wearing forensic suits.

These two points server to illustrate the difficulty.

In any case Lord Hutton didn't ask this fundamental question.

Nor has Thames Valley Police propertly addressed it.

Nor did Attorney General Dominic Grieve.

If David Kelly eventually gets an inquest, an honest and diligent Coroner will require to give this issue very careful thought indeed.