Stuff You Should Know - How Blood Pattern Analysis Works

Episode Date: February 15, 2011

Numerous television shows feature blood pattern analysis -- but how do these fictional portrayals measure up to the real thing? Tune in as Chuck and Josh break down the science behind blood pattern analysis. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid work. Be sure to listen to the War on Drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast and Happy Valentine's Day. I'm Josh. That was Charles W. Chuck Bryant. I'm Josh Clark. This is Stuff You Should Know, the podcast, the Love Edition. Yeah, let's talk about Valentine's Day and Love.

Do you want to hear a possibly true Valentine's Day fact? Sure. So you know where we get the concept of sending Valentine's Day cards? Hallmark? No, it was even earlier than that. A little guy by the name of St. Valentine. Okay. Again, this is uncorroborated, but I'm pretty sure it's true. Back in the day, St. Valentine used to hang out with the Pagan, I believe Greeks, maybe? Yeah. Romans, one of the two, and who had a custom of hooking up, picking a partner, and that was who you were going to be with for the rest of the year. Not married, but all the benefits, you know what I mean? Sure. To consummate that choice, they would go off and hook up like that day, February 14th. St. Valentine comes along and goes,

this is an importance to my God and soon to be your God. So let's figure something else out. How about you guys keep picking people that you want to be friendly with. Okay. Stop the fornication. Okay. And instead, just send notes of affection to one another. Wow. Those became, as far as I know, the Valentine's Day card. I'm sure that sounds good to me. Does it? Yeah. All right. One of the great symbols of Valentine's Day, Chuck, is the heart, which is almost invariably colored red. Yes. It's a very cute iconography, but if you really think about it, what you're seeing is the organ colored by our lifeblood. Yes. What happens when something happens to that organ or that lifeblood? And it goes from

inside that cute little heart to being sprayed all over the wall at a high speed velocity. Yeah. A bunch of things happen. Sure. A lot of telltale symbols are left behind after the person falls forward, killed or backwards by the love of their life on Valentine's Day, no less. Yeah. Yeah. But bud spatter? Bud spatter. Yeah, we should say probably right now, it's not splatter. Yes, spatter. It's blood spatter, which strangely enough is an appropriate interchangeable term or phrase for blood pattern analysis. It can also be called blood spatter analysis. Did you see that? Yes. It's interchangeable. Or it can be called that stuff Dexter does. It could. You like Dexter, don't you? Yes, I do. Okay, so I know that I have a lot of bad karma

coming against me, because let me explain why. Okay. That wasn't just a blanket statement. Sorry. Because of the three times now that I've ruined six feet under for people who haven't seen the whole thing, but I've not seen season five. So if you're going to talk about Dexter, don't give me any clues as to what goes on season five, aside from the off-camera breakup of the marriage between Michael Hall and Jennifer Carpenter. Yeah, that was very sad. But Julia Stiles has nothing to do with it. She even released a statement, she said. Really? Yeah. Felt like she needed to. Yeah, interesting. But just not her style usually. No, she's pretty lucky. So Chuck, do you want to talk about Dex? Yeah, well, I mean, you know what I couldn't find out is he's on the show, he is a

crime scene photographer slash spatter analyst. Yeah. And I couldn't find if that's really a thing. So Mike, I'm guessing I'm positing that maybe in some smaller municipalities, they may do double duty like that. Yeah. But I bet in Miami, they probably have a dedicated photographer, dedicated analyst. Yeah, actually, from this article, I believe it says that a lot of people, a lot of people who become blood pattern analysts, start out as cops or detectives or whatever and kind of find that they have a pension for reading blood and they start taking courses and workshops and become certified. So I imagine, yeah, it's possible, especially in smaller areas, that the people are pulling double or triple duty like that. Yeah, you're probably not going to

end in some tiny county. You're not going to have a full-time crime scene photographer. Or maybe it's some local that's not on the, but, you know, we'll get to all that because this is a two-parter. Well, one reason, Chuck, that it's not just an across the board filled position or even available position at every police department is because as it's put in the article, it's as much art as science right now. It takes a lot of interpretation and you can't just, you know, hand the stuff over to the prosecutor and they're just like, bam, case closed. There's the blood pattern analysis. Yeah, look at all that blood on the wall. He did it. But it is used to corroborate other evidence because as we said, it does tell a story when the person who you love shoots you

through the heart and spatters your blood all over the wall on Valentine's Day, killing you dead. Yes. Yeah. Yes, you can tell a lot of things. For instance, this list that I'm about to read, the type and velocity of the weapon you always hear about, you know, this is a blunt force thing or knife stab wound, stab wound, gunshot, the number of blows that this person could withstand before dying and even after death. Yeah. I mean, think about a passion killing. Sure. Rage killing. The handedness of the assailant because everyone knows, you know, if I was going to punch you in the face, I'd do with my right hand, hit you on your left cheek. That's how it works. Yeah. Position of the victim and like whether or not they were moved or they flailed around on the floor for

a little while trying to try to live, pull themselves to safety perhaps. The wound that was inflicted first, like this was the kill wound and all this other stuff happened because it was just a sicko type of injury, how long ago the body's been there and whether it was an immediate death or whether they bled out over the course of hours or whether they, yeah, if it was an immediate death and the blood just kind of pulled where they fell or if there's smears from them crawling or something like that, which would indicate that death was delayed or being dragged. Maybe there's nobody. Yeah, I think that I took from this. It wasn't explicitly said, but there's you can, especially with an old crime scene, learn a lot about something where there's no other

evidence just from the blood, like skeletonized blood. Yeah, blood can actually, where there was once a blood droplet, it can skeletonize and flick away and there will be no drop, but there will be an outline, a ring around where the drop was. Right. You can also tell from the amount of clotting that's taken place. Apparently, once clotting starts, you know that it's been at least 15 minutes, which probably isn't that helpful, but it's been at least 15 minutes since the blood exited the body. So like we did come up on the person who's just killed. He died more than 15 minutes ago, we can say that. Thanks a lot, Dexter. And then, but if some stuff's more clotted than others, you can tell that the attack took place over a period of time. Sure. And we

talked about in crime scene cleanup, obviously, how it can harden, brain can harden on walls. So it's not just blood. They're looking at all sorts of bone fragments and pieces of whatever that's in you that is no longer in you. But as we'll see, just the presence of, say, brain and skull fragments. Indicates a head wound. It does. That's a good one. You're all on your way to being certified. And it also usually indicates, you know, probably what type of weapon is we'll see later, right? Yeah. The cool thing about blood, though, Josh, is that it's very predictable. It's very cohesive. It has a lot of surface tension. So the molecules, like, bind really tight. So it's always a little round sphere until it hits something.

And when it hits something, it's really predictable what happens. Like, you can read it and pretty much be able to tell things that will get into, like, angle and velocity and stuff like that. Yeah. With some certainty. Yeah. So much that they've used in court. Yes, they do. To put people in the pokey. Sometimes unfairly. We will see that too. Should we talk about the types of spatter? This is my favorite part. The three types of spatter. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on

the table. Without any drugs. Of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm the prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. Cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil asset. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Nikki Lynette, the host of about a girl here to tell you about our new season. Every episode of about a girl digs deep to explore the real stories of women who were there,

playing an important role in the creation of classic, beloved music. For every story you might think you know, there's always another side. Claudia Lanier sang with Ike and Tina Turner, George Harrison and Bob Dylan. But she also inspired songs by David Bowie, The Rolling Stones and Leon Russell. Sharon Osborn is a household name today, but she toiled for years under the sway of her violent criminal father before a turbulent marriage to Ozzie very nearly killed her. Shirley and Willie Nelson, Shantae Brody and Snoot, even Beyonce. I'm excited to tell you all about them on about a girl season four. Listen to about a girl on the iHeart radio app, apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Hit it then. Okay, well, there's low velocity,

medium velocity and high velocity, right? And that sounds pretty stupid, but there's different characteristics of each type of velocity group, right? Yeah. So, you know, when blood moves, like you said, it follows like predictable patterns, gravity, force, surface tension keeps it together. And for example, say how high up a blood drop drips from is going to determine how spread out that drop is sure because it has more time to accelerate in a greater force when it hits the ground than if it's, you know, an inch or two off of the ground. So that's a pretty good example of a low spatter velocity of blood drip, right? Yeah, like I've been stabbed and I'm laying on my couch with my arm dangling off and it's just dripping off my fingertip,

12 inches to the carpet. Sure, that's great. The force that's acting on this low velocity blood spatter is gravity. Yeah, nothing else, right? They usually come from stab wounds, like you said. And then some of the properties of a low velocity blood spatter, the force of impact is less than five feet per second, not much. Yeah, it's not much. That's like a blood drop, right? Yeah, between usually between four and eight millimeters. That's about the size you're going to get with a low velocity. And like you said, it's you've been stabbed and you're laying there. So most of the low velocity blood spatters come about after an attack, after the injury's been sustained, right? Yeah, it's not sprayed all over the wall. Right. So stabbing is a pretty good,

usually it's stabbing is low velocity or vice versa. And one type of low velocity blood spatter from stabbing is called a passive spatter. That's after you've been stabbed and you're walking around and you're basically leaving a dripping blood trail. Yeah, should we at this point say that this might be a little gruesome? Is it too late? I think it's a little late. All right. I guess we could go to the trouble of going back and inserting it, but I predict, hold on, I predict we will not. We will not. So let's just say that now. You can turn it off at this point if you have already, if you're a little creeped out by blood, which I am. Are you really? Yeah, I mean not. You picked these. Yeah, but I mean, it doesn't mean we shouldn't cover it. Okay. I'm not like, I don't have a

true phobia, but I mean, who likes seeing large amounts of blood in that bright, bright red on white surfaces. It's yeesh. Have you ever passed out at the site of blood? No, no, it's not that bad. I had a roommate in college named John Johnson, real name, who was shucking oysters down in Florida when we were down at the beach once and he shucked the meat of the palm of his hand and looked at it and none of us knew that he was afraid of his own blood and just fell right over and he was a big boy. So he made quite a clamor. He came to and, you know, was okay after that, but he fainted dead away at the site of his own blood. Well, I mean, I've never seen something really, really, really gruesome. Have you never seen pictures? Yeah, I don't like that stuff.

I don't either, but yeah, I'm not into it. But people are and we'll get to that too. A medium velocity is next and that has a force from five to 100 feet per second. Diameter no more than four millimeters, usually. And that can be caused by a blunt object or, I love this line, like a baseball bat or an intense beating with a fist. You gotta be a tough guy. Dude, if you're, if you can have the same impact as a baseball bat with your fist, then you're either doing something right or wrong. Or you are using brass knuckles. Yeah, that's true. So that could also be from a stabbing, actually. And in this case, if you damage an artery, something can happen called projected blood. And

that means you're laying there and as long as your heart's beating, it's really pumping that blood out and it can project in a very distinctive pattern, evidently. Yeah. I mean, like if you, if you ever see somebody who's carotid artery's been punctured and they have their hand there, it's just like spewing from between their fingers. It's projected blood. That's medium velocity, which can be compared to like a good squirt gum. What are those ones called? Super suckers? Yeah, like that kind of spray. And it's not just the heart that's projecting it. And that's a, that's a good example of medium velocity, the heart pumping the blood and projecting it out of the body, right? Another medium velocity blood spatter is let's say you're beating somebody with a

lead pipe. Yeah. When you're drawing back again to the conservatory. Exactly. That's what I thought of too. I thought about that. When you're drawing back for another blow, oh yeah, sure. You're whipping the blood off of the lead pipe. Yeah. After that first blow. So that's medium, medium velocity, which you said is about five to 100 feet per second. Yeah. Okay. So then you have high velocity, which is pretty much a gunshot wound. And that's more than 100 feet per second. That's when blood is really hauling. You got tiny little sprays on the wall or wherever. And that's the one where you're going to find like tissue and bone usually along with the blood. Chances are are less than one millimeter in diameter. And you can either have, you can have front spatters,

back spatters or both. If the bullet goes through you, you're going to have both. Yeah. Intriguing exit one. Yeah. Think about it. Like anytime you see somebody get shot, like the blood almost doesn't spatter, like it'll just start soaking the shirt or something like that in the front. Yeah, but don't look behind him. Yeah. You look behind and all of a sudden there's a huge hole because of cavitation. Yeah. Full metal jacket comes to mind. Mm hmm. Gross. So you have seen gruesome things. Well, yeah. What is your major mouth function? And my favorite thing in this, on this page was the, the bit about internal muzzle staining and stippling. Sick stuff, but pretty awesome too. Yeah. If basically in, I guess it could happen

in any kind of gunshot that's close, but it's going to be real close. I think of an execution style murder. Sure. Like when the mobster says we need to whack Jimmy two feet. I guess two feet would be normal, but yeah, he's got two feet. He's the most nondescript gangster of all time. Exactly. Which one again? So they would put the gun like up to his head and in that case, the skin, if there's still a body can have burns from the gunpowder and the inside of the muzzle because of the cooling of the explosive gas used can actually suck blood back inside of the gun. Yeah. The spray that I missed. So if you're lucky enough to get a hold of that gun, they can swab the inside and be like, this is Jimmy two feet blood on the inside of your muzzle here, buddy.

That's why you just throw it in the East River. Yeah. Or use the old pillow method. Don't, don't be cheap. Right. Wow. I just gave advice to murderers. Yeah. That's weird. I guess we did. I've never done that before. The other thing, I'm sure you haven't. The other thing that they can look for is a, you gotta use brass knuckles is a void and a void is where let's say I were to kill somebody and the blood is spraying on me and the wall behind me. There will be a, you're going to leave a handsome silhouette. Yeah. Not an outline of a body like a cartoon, but there will be a void there where they said, you know, something or somebody got in the way of the blood spatter. Go find me that shirt, which is now in a trash can somewhere. Go find me that

last chance garage hat covered in blood. That'd be bad news. I love that hat. So Chuck, you've seen Dexter. We talked about this, right? Seen them all. Yeah. I have too. Except for season five, right? Oh, Dexter, I thought you meant like all crime. Oh, no, no, no. I've seen each episode. Got you. Sorry. Well, surely you've seen them. At least I know for a fact in at least one episode. He's messing with like these red strings in the room. That's when the art department really gets involved. Yeah. So this, you can, you can imagine Chuck, this is a very painstaking process. Yeah. Each of these lines, not just for the art department, but this happens in real life. It's a method of figuring out the angle of the path of blood. Yeah, I thought this might be outdated,

but they still use it sometimes. They do. Well, there's something that the article I thought left out and it was the importance of determining the angle. It just went into how we figure out angles. Oh, yeah, sure. But there's a lot of import in figuring out what angle this blood spray traveled, right? Yeah, because it'll tell you a lot of times, you know, that the person who fired the weapon was probably taller than six feet because the gun was at a certain level at a certain angle. So was it a man? Was it likely a man? Was it likely a woman based on the height? Right? Yeah. If it's a downward angle, then that might corroborate the idea that this person was killed execution style, which juries like to hear about if that's going on. Because that's like,

get on your knees type of thing usually. Yeah, that's pretty cold-blooded. If somebody's pleading self-defense and said they were on the floor, an upward angle would corroborate that and might, you know, get them off in their self-defense plea. There's a lot of reasons why figuring out that angle is very important, right? Agreed. And it's also probably the most scientific of blood pattern analysis. Math heavy. Trigonometry heavy. Yeah, we should say we tried to find a math heavy and I made the mistake of emailing our editorial department to get someone to describe it and I thought, we're all none of us like math. That was a half-hearted attempt. That's why we're writers. Yeah, so we don't have to do math, especially not trigonometry. Yeah, we do now,

though. I think I have this licked, but it's really not that hard actually once I re-read it. Let's talk about the strings first. Okay. So it is, you do, they do use these strings. Elastic. Elastic strings. Each one represents a drop of blood. So if you have a lot of drops of blood, you can have a lot of strings. It's going to take a while, right? But you create a, you find a level, right? Like you create a level point. Yes. You start running strings through the level point from the blood to, you know, somewhere else in space. The wall or a ceiling. And then all of a sudden, after you start doing a few of these strings, you're going to find that they all come together at a certain point. And that point is the area of convergence, aka what was originally

a person's head. Exactly. Right? Yeah. And that's where all the blood came from. So you're going to find where they on the ground, where they up high. Basically, you're creating in real life a three-dimensional model of the path this blood took. Yes. Right? And where the person was standing, where they were in relation to the wall, all that stuff. You're probably going to figure out how the person was attached from what side, that kind of thing. Yeah. So it's very important. And that's the old school really methodical way to do it, right? Yeah. You're going to explain the trigonomic. This is for college boy blood pattern analysts. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Why are you going to explain it? Do you want me to go for it? Yeah. Because I'll explain the way I would do

it afterwards. Okay. Okay. Which I think is actually how this article describes it. We'll see. What? How Chuck would do it? Yeah. Okay. So when blood hits, when blood hits a surface, whether it's drywall or the floor or the ceiling or something like that, if it falls or travels straight up and down, that's a 90-degree angle. Yeah. You're going to get a little round drop. You get a round drop. But the stronger the angle, the more severe the angle, the drop starts to elongate. It hits. Like, you know, when you skip a stone, it's kind of like that. Or when you spill any liquid. That's another way to put it. Yeah. So as it elongates, it gets longer and thinner. And what you can actually do is take the measurements of each

one of these drops, right? And you take, let me see if I got this, Chuck. You take the width, right? It's so obvious that we were riders. Anytime this comes up. You take the width and you divide it by the length. And that gives you a number. Yes. This is trigonometry, by the way. And you take that number and you use a calculator. Yeah. And you use the arc sign function. Yeah, don't ask us to really explain how to come up with the arc sign. Well, even in the article, I couldn't find it. Yeah, they said get a calculator. Arc sign is the converse of sine or cosine, one of those. And basically what you're finding is the angle of a right triangle by taking the opposite side and dividing it by the hypotenuse.

And that will give you, once you figure out the arc sign of that number, the angle. And that's the college boy way of figuring out the angle that blood traveled from the area of convergence. Exactly. So a quick example, if you have a two millimeter wide blood stain that's four millimeters long, you divide that and you get 0.5 and the arc sign of that is 30. And we figured out the arc sign of five is 30. 0.5 is 30 by using that calculator. Yeah. And 30 would be your angle. That means a 30 degree angle is what you're looking at. Right. So this is how Chuck would do it. Chuck would get a computer program called no more strings. I guess they couldn't use no strings attached. That's what I would have called it. Maybe you could make a competing program. Yeah,

maybe so. No more strings is a program that actually creates a three-dimensional model and you plug in all your numbers and it does it for you with computer animation. And that's, I want to say modern. It is modern, but they do still use a string method. And a lot of times they say that'll be more convincing to a jury if they can look at animation than hear some nerd explain it in front of them while they're falling asleep. Exactly. No, I mean, I think that's very much the case. That's probably why that software is, probably more use than either of the other two methods these days. Yeah, I would call it the jury swayer program. That's what I would call it. I would call it the widow maker.

The war on drugs impacts everyone. Whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy, number one, is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2,200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs, of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm a prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like

what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Nikki Lynette, the host of About a Girl here to tell you about our new season. Every episode of About a Girl digs deep to explore the real stories of women who were there, playing an important role in the creation of classic, beloved music. For every story you might think you know, there's always another side. Claudia Lanier sang with Ike and Tina Turner, George Harrison and Bob Dylan. But she also inspired songs by David Bowie, The Rolling Stones and

Leon Russell. Sharon Osborn is a household name today, but she toiled for years under the sway of her violent criminal father before a turbulent marriage to Ozzie very nearly killed her. Shirley and Willie Nelson, Shantae Brodis and Snoop, even Beyonce. I'm excited to tell you all about them on About a Girl season four. Listen to About a Girl on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, a little history? Yeah, we usually cover that first, but we didn't. I think this, this is a fine article. I like the way it was paced and then laid out. Yeah, very detailed. Yeah. It's been around actually since the 1890s. They've been, you know, analyzing blood stains and spatter, but they didn't really

start using it until much later. The first guy, I love the name of this book, the first guy from the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Poland, his name was Dr. Edouard Piotrowski, wrote a book called Concerning the Origin, Shape, Direction and Distribution of the Bloodstains Following Headwounds Caused by Blows. And I imagine that was also his, how he got the ladies. He wrote that, shown his book to the ladies. And it would be, I think, probably about 50 years later that they actually started using these interpretations in court. Yeah, that guy laid the groundwork for how to do it, at least for a beating. Yeah, for Paul Kirk. Yeah, and Paul Kirk was a physician in Ohio, right? Yeah. There was a 1955 case of Samuel Shepard being prosecuted

for murder. And Dr. Kirk figured out, from blood spatter analysis, where Samuel Shepard was when he attacked the victim, allegedly, well, he was prosecuted, so, or convicted, so that's the fact. And then it also showed that Sam Shepard, or that the victim, was attacked by a left-handed person. Yeah. I'm assuming Sam Shepard was, won the case, bam, blood spatter analysis is on the map. I wonder what the jury thought about that first. Because it means, now it's so all over the place, you know all about this stuff, but the first time someone, like, recreated a scene and said he was this tall and left-handed, were they, like, wow, that's amazing? Or what are you talking about? I wonder. Probably while it's amazing, just like once today. Yeah. Have you heard of the CSI effect?

Yeah, we've talked about it. Did we? Yeah. Oh, it was a long time ago. Yeah. It was between episode zero and 100. Gotcha. But explain it, because we have new listeners. Oh, well, welcome. New listeners. Hey, new listeners, listen up. The CSI effect is basically juries watching things like CSI, Dexter, all this televisionized blood spatter analysis or forensic science, and expecting that. So if a prosecutor fails to deliver, that means that the case isn't all that great. Or, conversely, if the prosecutor of the defense can deliver some whiz bang, no more strings, 3D graphics of somebody getting shot or not getting shot, the jury is swayed because, you know, that's how you win a case. So there's an expectation that a case has to have that

kind of thing. It's the CSI effect. Yeah, it's either someone going, that's not how they do it on TV. Yeah, exactly. Or, hey, that's exactly how they do it on TV. Right. Probably has the reverse effect too. You could also just as easily call it the Dancing with the Stars effect, the American Idol effect, like... Well, those are different effects. But they have the same effect. Bleeding? Deadly. Dumbing down. There was a third gentleman, Josh, in the history of blood spatter analysis, Dr. Herbert McDonald. And he came around in the early... He wasn't born in the early 70s because that'd be pretty young to be studying this kind of thing. It's the Doogie Houser blood spatter. He had my brother worked on that. He came into prominence with Blood Spatter in 1971 and wrote

a book about it, probably a more updated version than the Polish gentleman. And he started training officers in that and got together at a convention in 1983 and said to his fellow guys, you know, we should start a group. We should start an organization. Imagine you get pretty loaded at a blood spatter convention. And so they did. They started the International Association of Blood Stain Pattern Analysis. Analyst. That was great, Chuck. I hope I don't get in trouble for that. I don't think you will. No, he was a great guy. He didn't drink. I gave advice to murderers earlier. Chamberlain case. Should we go ahead and hit this one? Yeah. You're a fan of Seinfeld. So you're familiar with the... Maybe a ding-o-way child baby. Yeah, yeah. Wow. That was Elaine

doing her best. Meryl Streep, who actually said, the ding-o-way my baby, who was doing her best, Lindy Chamberlain, who in real life said a ding-o-way my baby. I think took my baby is what the original line was. And I think Elaine changed it to eight. That's much more severe. Either way. Either way, in 1980 in Australia, the Chamberlain family, Richard and Lindy and their two kids, Zarya and Reagan, were camping at Ayers Rock. Another kid. They had a third there, too, actually. Oh, they did. And it never gets any press. Oh, okay. It's like, I want to stay out of this. Yeah. Well, they were camping with their three kids at Ayers Rock. And apparently, Lindy, the mom, noticed a ding-o near her kid's tent and went over and saw the ding-o,

I guess it was nighttime, running off with something. She said she couldn't see what. Yeah. But when she looked at the inside of the tent, she saw that the four-week old or 10-week old Zarya was missing and that there was blood. So there was a huge search of this park and they found a ding-o layer, found the baby's clothes, now bloody, and basically didn't buy the mom's story or the parent's story that it was a ding-o. They think that they thought pretty quickly off the bat that there was something fishy, something hinky, as you would say. Yeah. And they started investigating her and kind of under the assumption that they framed a ding-o. They'd actually murdered their baby. Yeah. Well, a couple of the things that happened was they found, when they found the

little jumper, it was not torn that much. It was bloody, but the snaps were closed and it looked as if it had been pulled off of a body. The key thing that happened was, as the mom said, Lindy said, you know, there was a jacket she had a jacket on and they didn't find any jacket at all. Right. And the other thing that happened was there was a witness, not a witness, but someone nearby camping that obviously when all the brouhaha started, she came over there and she saw the cops pick up the jumper and just fold it and take it away. Right. And even she, I think at the time, thought, you probably shouldn't be handling evidence like that. Yeah. It's not the way to do it. And they didn't photo-document the scene, right? No. Big mistake.

They basically mishandled all the evidence in the thing. They were hip cops from Central Australia handling like a huge murder case or a huge death case. Yeah. So they muddled the whole thing to the point where there was just basically a lot of speculation. They had one expert testify that from the blood stain on the jumper, it looked like a throat was cut. Yeah. And that's pretty much what sealed her fate to be convicted. Well, what also sealed her fate is that she remained very cool and unemotional throughout this trial. That really? And the jury hated her. They did not like her. They didn't understand why a woman could remain collected when her baby was dead, let alone when she's being tried for it, you know, if she hadn't really killed the baby.

So in addition to just botched handling a blood pattern analysis or no real blood pattern analysis, it was her demeanor that helped convict her as well. I want to see that movie. I haven't seen it. I haven't either. I just know about it for some reason. Yeah. Well, she got an Academy Award nomination, but all she has to do is show up and she gets an Academy Award nomination. Not necessarily true. Let's get real. No? You about to point out a stinker of Meryl Streeps? I'm just saying she's played the same character a few times. Oh, please. Okay. We won't go down that road. What happened to the Chamberlain's? Well, she was convicted of murder and he was convicted, right? To as well of being an accessory or some say accessory to murder, right? Yes. And

she was in jail, sent to prison for a life. And then three years later, a guy was hiking in a similar area, fell to his death. Oh my God. And when they went and found his body, he was near a dingo layer, several dingo layers, and they found the missing jacket just by chance. Well, this guy had fallen to his death. I did not know that. And I don't, as far as I know, Richard Chamberlain did not push him to his death so they could find the planted jacket. So they actually said, no, this clears you guys. We found the jacket years later, covered with blood near dingo layers, torn. Sorry. You got, here's 1.3 million. Sorry about your baby. She got 1.3 million Australian pounds. Australian dollars. Australian units of money. No, Australian dollars.

And apparently that was only about a third of their legal fees. So it's not the happiest ending, although she did end up out of jail and exonerated. She got to meet Meryl Streep. I imagine so. Maybe. I wonder if she met Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Probably not. Probably not. So that's blood pattern analysis. There's a lot of really cool graphics and illustrations. Did you see those? Yeah. And by graphics, we don't mean awful, awful pictures. There's some pictures of blood. And if you read the captions, you're like, yeah. But no, it's not like anything that the average person couldn't handle. But no, there's some cool illustrations of how you figure out areas of convergence, that kind of stuff. Yeah. Really

puts the punch into trigonometry. That's what HowStuffWorks does. Absolutely. Type in blood. Just blood. It'll bring up a bunch of cool stuff. But if you really want to do a good search-to-blood pattern in the search bar, the bloody bleeding gushing search bar at HowStuffWorks.com. And since I said bloody bleeding blood, what did I say? Bloody bleeding search bar. Since I said that, it means it's time for the listener mail. Josh, I'm going to call this Malingling Monkousers. Jerry either laughed at that or she blew snot because she's sick. Maybe the boat. This is from Brooks. And Brooks says, hi guys. And Jerry, I've been loving your podcast for the last few weeks. New listener. If loving our podcast is wrong, Brooke doesn't want to be

right. While he's been driving 45 minutes to a different hospital for his ER rotation. Sorry, Brooks. He's a fourth year med student. During the Monkousen podcast, you mentioned Malingering, which made me think of one of the patients we saw in the ER last week. And he says that this doesn't violate any HIPAA oath because he doesn't have any details at man. I don't know if I believe him. I don't. But we'll see. A young guy came in complaining of sudden onset flank pain classic for kidney stones. We asked him for a urine sample to check for microscopic blood. Our first clue that something was up should have been when he asked if we needed to watch him supply the sample. That's only routine procedure and drug testing, not medical testing. When we got the

sample from him, it was totally bloody and we knew it was contaminated. So we asked him for a catheterized specimen and I was totally shocked when he said, okay, not many people dig the catheter. I think he was shocked. Yeah, I think he was shocked by the size of the tube used to get the sample. He nearly jumped off the table during the process. But during his moving, an empty blood bile shook out of his pocket. What we concluded was that he had stolen a bile of his own blood from a lab earlier in the day, brought it to the ER with a goal of convincing us he had a kidney stone. His secondary gain, aside from malingering, painkillers. Yeah, drug seeking, med seeking. My boss was not amused, though I was. Just thought you'd enjoy hearing about a good solid case of

malingering. From JD of Scrubs. Yeah, from Brooks of Shawshank Redemption. That's a good one, Brooks. We appreciate you. Thanks for sending that in. That's awesome. Good luck, med student. Fourth year. Fourth year. Good luck in the real world. We're pulling for you. Keep sending us cool stories. My mom was an ER nurse for decades, and she always had the best stories ever. Yeah. If you have a good story about probably not too many blood spatter stories up, a good Valentine's Day story, we want to hear it. Wrap it up. Send it in an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our

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