02/16/08 (WA)
Blood Spatter Training For Police Experts
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In a small room in Edmonds a pool of blood on the floor and red smears on a table appear to weave a violent tale. Crimson droplets stain a wall and a trail leads out the door.
No one is in the chair facing a table laden with booze bottles, playing cards and money. No one is there to tell detectives what happened.
Bothell police officer Dan Christman, a blood pattern expert, asks investigators to take a closer look.
If they know how to read it, the blood can tell them a story.
"We think it was a really bad bloody nose," said Susan Truley, an evidence technician with the Kent Police Department.
Truley, along with investigators from Edmonds, Everett, the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office, Lynnwood and Oregon recently spent a week with Christman to learn what they can deduce from blood at crime scenes.
The shape, size and color of blood patterns hold a wealth of information, Christman said. With the help of some trigonometry, investigators can determine a victim's position when he began to bleed. Darker blood comes from an organ or veins and arterial blood is bright red. The pattern can help determine what kind of weapon was used to inflict the injury and sequence of events.
Detectives can use what they learn from the blood pattern to corroborate or refute statements given by suspects or witnesses about what happened. Christman has seen a murderer confess once confronted with evidence from the blood stains, he said.
Blood pattern analysis is "one pillar in the porch to support a case," Christman said. "This isn't always the magic bullet. Sometimes it is."
Snohomish County deputy prosecutor Mark Roe has tried murder cases in which the blood patterns found inside a room were critical evidence.
"The relative position of the victim and everyone else in the room, can help determine if it was self-defense, cold-blooded murder or anything in between," Roe said.
In the last decade blood pattern analysis has become an increasingly popular investigative tool and field of study. As people have been drawn in by television shows such as "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" and "Law and Order," police and prosecutors have learned that jurors want to see sophisticated forensic evidence in court.
That's not always possible.
The "CSI effect" has placed some unrealistic expectations on investigators and prosecutors, Christman and Roe said.
"We can't turn a case in 60 minutes and some of what they see on television isn't realistic. It just doesn't exist," Christman said.
Christman spent a decade as a death investigator with the Snohomish County Medical Examiner's Office and another five years in King County and Idaho. He became a police officer in 1997. He's investigated 3,500 death scenes.
Christman has become an expert witness and assists other police agencies in the United States and Canada with blood pattern analysis. He worked with the FBI to analyze blood found inside the Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, home where Joseph Duncan III murdered three people and kidnapped Shasta and Dylan Groene in 2005.
Christman also teaches at the state police academy in Burien and offers more extensive blood pattern analysis training about five times a year.
"Detectives are using blood pattern analysis to solve crimes in their jurisdictions," he said. "There's so much value in it."
In Edmonds, he lectured about physics and math and the value of reading blood. On the last day Christman used cow's blood to create mock crime scenes to test his students. The four scenarios are taken from real-life cases.
Students measure the blood stains and apply trigonometry to determine where the victim was positioned in the room. They learned that a fine mist of blood on a wall likely was caused by a gun. The cast-off stain was the work of a kitchen knife.
"It gives you a fuller idea of what's going on," Everett police detective John Zeka said. "I'll have a better idea of what to look for out there."
Truley said learning to read blood helped her figure out what happened at the mock poker game, something the crime scene technician likely wouldn't have been able to do without the week-long training, she said.
She and a few other investigators measured and analyzed the blood stains. They noticed the bottles weren't overturned and the money was still on the table.
The room was a bloody mess, but not a crime scene.
The original case was investigated as a crime, but police eventually found the man, who had been taken to a medical clinic to be treated. He had gotten a bloody nose and sneezed or coughed, spraying blood droplets across the table and wall. He grabbed his nose, bloodying his hands and smearing them on the table. He eventually walked out, still dripping blood.
Christman would like to see more police departments train their detectives in blood pattern analysis to help solve crimes.
"It's grim work," he said. "Someone has died. Behind them is whole family seeking justice. It's up to us to figure out the truth and maybe through that we can help families heal."
With thanks, The Herald, ©
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