Read Online Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist by Ann Rule - Free Book Online

minutes.
    I also knew that the more habitually you shot up, the harder you had to work to find an uncollapsed vein. Smack users were prone to hit an artery now and then in their urgent quest to find an inroad for the drug, and when they did, blood could spurt anywhere. Sometimes you found long, arching lines of it streaked across a mirror over a bathroom sink, and you knew an addict had been gazing in it while searching his neck for a vein to tap. He had pierced an artery by mistake and sent his blood spurting onto the glass. At other times, you spotted a dark red blob beside the body—the telltale sign that a user had found a workable vein, then carelessly squirted his blood onto the floor in order to empty the syringe before refilling it with a liquid he considered more precious to put in his body.
    But none of that explained this blood.
    Still baffled, I watched them carry out John’s body. Later, I read the medical examiner’s report and it all fell into place. The ME discovered a large gash on the back of John’s head. In the first momentsafter fixing, as the heroin was flooding his system and doing its irreparable damage, John tried to take a few steps, but he fell down and lacerated his head on the sharp edge of a table. He lost consciousness, but his heart continued beating for several minutes—pumping blood out of the wound in the back of his scalp and onto the floor all around him, leaving him lying in a sticky red pool. The death was ruled an accident. Odds were John didn’t feel a thing. He slipped blissfully into a coma, never realizing he was simultaneously overdosing and bleeding to death.
Blood Puzzles
    Why am I telling you about this particular case, about this long-dead and forgotten junkie? Because when I recall that day, I am struck by how much police work has changed.
    Blood pattern analysis was in its infancy in the United States in the mid-1960s. Looking back, John could have been bumped off by a rival dealer, a reckless junkie who coveted his stash, a thief who knew where he hid his drug money—anyone. The guy had his share of enemies. Frankly, we would never have known if a clever killer had whacked him on the back of the head, shot him up with enough pure heroin to make sure he never woke up again, and vanished, taking the murder weapon with him.
    Nowadays, dozens of crime photos would be taken of a scene like that. You would get every angle of the body and the blood on camera. You’d collect samples. You’d photograph the trail of droplets. You’d measure each one and study its shape. You’d do a bloodstain map. In this particular case, you would focus intense attention around the victim’s head as the source of the blood. You would conduct a microscopic examination of the table where he hit his head. You wouldexamine John’s clothing for touch DNA—places where someone might have grabbed, twisted, or yanked on his clothes and inadvertently stripped off some of their own DNA.
    But back then, there wasn’t one cop looking for those clues. Everyone just tromped through the blood evidence at crime scenes. Blood was something to be cleaned up. There were no schools studying blood pattern analysis in this country, no textbooks defining terms like “spatter” and “blowback.” Even though practitioners in Poland had begun, in 1895, doing research by beating rabbits and studying the bloodstains the blows created, the field wouldn’t emerge in the United States for decades.
    Blood fascinated me, although I didn’t know the first thing about it. As a patrolman, I ran into the stuff almost daily. Fights. Beatings. Dead bodies. They all came with blood. Whenever I was called to a bloody scene, my instincts told me, There’s got to be something to this. How did this blood get here? What does it mean?
    But I had no answers. I remember shootings where I noticed blood specks on witnesses’ clothes. I had no idea that in the years to come, those patterns would prove enough to convict a suspect