Blood and crime scene question

basics:

Use an ultraviolet light to look for scattered proteins. This is fairly indiscriminate, & you'll find fingerprints, blood, semen, urine, saliva, etc., often quite old. (Turn on a UV light in any hotel room & you'll think about bringing your own sheets.)

When you've got an area that you suspect of having been a site for blood etc. before getting wiped down, spray with Luminol. If it encounters heme, it'll glow softly. Then you've got to collect samples & test, first to see if it's human.

Having determined you've (probably) got blood, you evaluate its placement. Do you have spray, spatter, castoff? How forceful? Can you determine point of origin? How round are the gravity drops? Are they primary or secondary?

My feeling is you should either read up on procedures then write the story, or write your story then shoehorn procedures into it. There are dozens of good books on it.

It depends on the surface and the biological agent.

Strongbadia said:

I have been reading some. My story involves beating the system though. How can one get rid of proteins and blood etc once it is there?

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A damn good fire would do the trick.

Thorough scrubbing with bleach or an enzymatic compund.

Then the police grill you for 11 hours as to why you've bleached the crap out of something, so perhaps not a great idea.

Statistics say that fewer than 16% of murders will result in prison time, which suggests that five out of six are already managing to beat the system....

There was a great story in the papers a couple of months back about dumb criminals. This one guy decided to kill his wife and thought he new how to beat the system and get away with it by wearing latex gloves at the crime scene and scrubbing everything with a protien eating bacteria agent that effectivly cleaned any bodily fluid mess. In addition he neatly chopped her up and put her in a suitcase drove her a few hundred miles away and dumped the suitcase off a bridge into a lake. It would have been the perfect crime had he just remembered to take the I.d tag off the suitcase before he launched it into the lake..

Anthony Ravenscroft said:

Thorough scrubbing with bleach or an enzymatic compund.

Then the police grill you for 11 hours as to why you've bleached the crap out of something, so perhaps not a great idea.

Statistics say that fewer than 16% of murders will result in prison time, which suggests that five out of six are already managing to beat the system....

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In my state, at least, 80% of all murders are solved, and prison time is served.

Strongbadia said:

I have been reading some. My story involves beating the system though. How can one get rid of proteins and blood etc once it is there?

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By having the ME lose the evidence.

By having the criminal steal the evidence.

Burn down the whole building, destroying the evidence.

Jamesaritchie said:

In my state, at least, 80% of all murders are solved, and prison time is served.

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That may be true of all indictments that reach a court of law -- few prosecutors will take on a murder case they don't feel can be won, so it's a stacked deck.

But the number also leaves out disappearances not identified as due to death, all deaths not identified as murder, & probably murders without a clear murderer.

Anthony Ravenscroft said:

That may be true of all indictments that reach a court of law -- few prosecutors will take on a murder case they don't feel can be won, so it's a stacked deck.

But the number also leaves out disappearances not identified as due to death, all deaths not identified as murder, & probably murders without a clear murderer.

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Yes, surely the best murders are the ones that nobody thinks are murders.

The better thing is not the kill them in your own living room.