- Draft -

Please note this set of fact files is still in draft form.

For serology follow this link

Shedding of blood is the dramatic accompaniment to murder committed by violent means. Blood accounts for about 9 per cent of a healthy person's body-weight and as many murderers have discovered to their cost, when it is spilled a little goes a long way.  Once blood is shed in any quantity, and especially when it starts to clot, it becomes very difficult to deal with. Murderers' attempts to clean up after their violent handiwork often fail because of blood-traces which adhere tenaciously to their clothing or to the murder weapon. Blood found at the scene of the crime has trapped many killers who thought they removed all incriminating traces. A sensational demonstration of this was provided by the French detective Gustave Mace in 1869, when he was interrogating a murder suspect in the room which he believed had been the scene of a ghastly crime involving the dismemberment of the victim. Convinced that a great deal of blood must have been shed, Mace looked about the room but could see no obvious traces.  Then he noticed a marked hollow in the tiled floor. With the suspect looking on in astonishment, the detective took a jug of water and tipped the contents on the floor - the water collected in the hollow area, and when the tiles were lifted their under-surfaces were found to be caked with dried blood. This discovery led to a murder confession by Pierre Voirbo and to a triumph of detection for Mace.

Blood is important forensically, and can yield a great deal of information to the investigator. The first task in examining suspicious stains is to determine whether they are blood, and if so, are they human? Once this is established stains are examined for age, sex and blood group. The shape and pattern of liquid blood-splashes can help in reconstructing the murder; bloody fingerprints and palm-prints tell their own story; dried blood on a suspect's clothing can be related to the victim, the crime scene and the murder weapon; blood and tissue forced under the fingernails of the victim during a violent struggle can be linked to the assailant.

Thus a single blood-trace can provide a wealth of information, and analytical techniques are improving all the time. Blood dynamics is important not only for narrowing suspicion on the guilty but also in showing a suspect's innocence. As in many other aspects of forensic investigation, bloodstains are taken into account with a variety of other evidence to build up a pattern of crime.

The investigation of blood at a crime scene can be broadly divided into a biological approach (serology) and a physics approach (blood splatter or bloodstain pattern analysis). This fact file will concentrate on the dynamics of blood evidence. Another fact file will cover the serological approach to blood evidence.

1. Peel Regional Police Forensic Identification Services - (Canada)
2. Crime Library - It's in the Blood