No book review this time, instead I spent this past week attending the 1999 Annual International Association of Bloodstain Pattern Analysis Training Conference.
Few authors discuss blood spatter in their books; Kathy Reichs is one I can think of right off who has used it. I met a guy at the conference who works in the lab with her. François was a very animated man with a heavy French accent and an excellent sense of humor. My only regret was not having more time to talk with him. (By the way, he told me that her third book was released in Montreal last week!)
I also met the authors of a textbook called Bloodstain Pattern Analysis. I picked up this book so that I wouldn't be completely lost at the conference. While it is very technical, it was perfect for a crash course in the field. Ross Gardner and Tom Bevel were both extraordinarily nice men and I was thrilled to talk to both of them at length.
Blood spatter interpretation is an area of forensics that I didn't even know existed until earlier this year when I met Deputy Rinehart in Houston who specializes in it. I think as the different areas of forensics expand - DNA, ballistics, profiling, toolmark identification, etc. - we will start seeing even more movement towards specialization in each area. There were some very sharp experts in this particular discipline at the conference and they were all accessible and down-to-earth.
So while I am now by no means trained well enough to go to a crime scene and say what happened by the stains on the walls, I do understand the nature of a spatter (not splatter, mind you), a drip, and a swipe.
And if you're thinking, "Oh, gross!" consider the presentation Joe Slemko gave concerning an insurance fraud case involving paint spatter in a living room. He proved that the black paint spilled all over the claimants' carpet and furniture could not have possibly gotten there the way that they said it did. And he used the principles of bloodstain pattern analysis to do it.
Interested in learning more about this subject?
International Association of Bloodstain Pattern Analysts
Association for Crime Scene Reconstruction
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