Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist

Author: Rod Englert
Publisher: Macmillan
Price: $34.99 (paperback)

I’ve lost track of how many CSI spin-offs are clogging the television airwaves these days; it seems that if I dare touch my remote control after 8.30 pm on a weeknight, I end up surfing through at least one scene featuring a group of impossibly glamorous forensics experts exchanging wooden dialogue and suspiciously improbable science over a mangled corpse. Horatio Caine and his ridiculous sunglasses have a lot to answer for, but they’ve also ignited unprecedented interest in what is, undeniably, a fascinating and vital area of detective work: crime scene analysis.

Unsurprisingly, the work of those slick primetime CSI teams is rather different to what actually takes place in a police station or forensics lab. Retired Chief Deputy Rod Englert’s fascinating non-fiction book Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist reveals how detectives and forensics experts piece together clues from the blood spatter patterns left at crime scenes. It’s part memoir, part true crime, and that’s what makes it work so well. Englert’s decision to weave anecdotes from his long and varied career with details about how blood spatter contributed to solving various murder cases give this book a compelling human dimension, although that may make it less appealing to those who are keen for some hardcore scientific nitty gritty.

Englert is one of the world’s foremost blood spatter analysis experts, and it’s partly due to his research that blood patterns have become such a reliable element of crime scene reconstruction. Perhaps surprisingly, blood spatter analysis is a recent science: when Englert first joined the police force in Los Angeles in the 1960s, the idea of using blood patterns to help solve a case was absolutely in its infancy. Englert’s curiosity began to change that.

Clearly, he’s extremely interested in blood—in the 1970s, he and his family ran a cattle business on the side, and he admits to spending hours studying blood patterns on the cattle barn floor and walls after a slaughter, even refrigerating bottles of steer’s blood to ‘re-create details from cases’ in a disarmingly thorough manner:

I dribbled blood from my fingertips, from the point of knives, and from holes in plastic garbage bags dragged across the barn floor. I tried the same tests on cement, gravel, dirt, sand, grass, wood, and carpet to find out how the trails of blood differed. Then I did experiments on ice and snow and watched what happened when it began to melt.

Despite this slightly unusual hobby, Englert manages to come across as a thoroughly likeable, All-American Good Cop kind of guy. His emphasis is not on science, but on stories: he explains the evolution of blood spatter analysis by recounting his career and the cases that shaped him as an investigator and contributed to the increasingly important field of forensic investigation. He has a relaxed, affable style, although there are times when he veers slightly in the direction of the mawkish: recounting a tragic incident in which a young policeman was shot dead at point blank range in an unprovoked attack, Englert laments, ‘this could have been me on countless occasions. This could have been my blood spattered all over a parking lot, all over my notebook, all over a photograph of my children’. His sentiment adds little to the story.

But Englert’s career is a fascinating one, and some of the cases he describes in Blood Secrets illuminate not only how important blood spatter is when it comes to solving crimes, but what a peculiar sort of life the homicide detective leads: it’s at once so compelling and gruesome, but so draining and frustrating, that it’s no wonder we’re all so intrigued by it. Englert has worked on a huge number of cases, some high profile—he analysed blood evidence during the OJ Simpson trial, concluding that it ‘provided incontrovertible proof’ that Simpson was guilty of murder. Details from cases that didn’t make world headlines are no less compelling: Englert was able to help solve a two-year-old homicide in the early 1980s by reconstructing the death scene—and contradicting the murderer’s version of events—from the strange triangle of blood found next to the victim’s body.

It’s clear that the efforts of Englert and other forensics experts have had a dramatic impact on crime solving. In her foreword to this book, Ann Rule points out that although ‘there is such a thing as the perfect murder; thousands of them’, the fact that juries can now rely on detailed physical evidence as well as eyewitness reports makes their job that much easier.

It may be routinely glamourised on primetime, but the work of the real crime scene reconstructionist or homicide detective is undeniably not glamorous, with all its blood and gore and stories of human misery; but, as Blood Secrets demonstrates, that doesn’t make it any less a strangely mesmerising profession.