ABSTRACT
Blood is a frequent finding at the scenes of violent crimes. Its arrangement and distribution at crime scenes and on exhibits provide information about the mechanisms leading to its deposition. Such considerations might employ aspects of fluid dynamics, mathematics and specialist image capture, and they are reliant on the accurate recording of observations based on a consistent classification system and terminology. This Chapter provides an overview of blood pattern analysis from its early and somewhat gruesome scientific beginnings, to the use of modern digital reconstruction techniques, via a variety of landmark experiments and cases. Discussion of the effect of changing conditions on the behavior of single blood drops provides a useful background from which to consider the variety of airborne and other blood distributions that might be formed as a result of forces acting on wet blood during a variety of scenarios most commonly encountered in violent crimes against the person.
