Free Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist by Ann Rule

children, but it gave all three of them a sense of discipline and responsibility they’ve never lost.
The Tortilla Solution
    By the end of our first year of farming, we had acquired six head of cattle, slaved over them during countless hours at the drafty barn . . . and made a grand total of $19. My plan was hardly shaping up to be the moneymaker I had hoped for.
    The problem was the exorbitant cost of feed. I racked my brain for an answer. Should I give up? Try something else? Not yet, I decided. If police work teaches you anything, it’s tenacity. Then I remembered a strategy Phil Weston,* a Los Angeles County deputy sheriff I had known back in Downey, used with his livestock: scrap tortillas. I grabbed the Yellow Pages and started calling every tortilla factory listed within driving distance.
    “I’ve got a question for you,” I began. “What do you do with broken tortillas?”
    After I had convinced them I wasn’t a prank caller, I struck a deal with Reser’s Fine Foods: They would give me all their misshapen tortillas and leftover dough from the ton they cranked out daily if my kids and I would pick it up every weekend and haul it all away. In exchange, we promised to keep the factory owners stocked with as much steak and hamburger as they wanted. It worked perfectly. We supplemented the tortillas with alfalfa for roughage, and we madesure the factory owners’ freezers never went empty. The kids used to joke that our cows mooed in Spanish from eating all those tortillas, but the cattle couldn’t have found more nutritious feed—almost pure corn—and it was restaurant quality. Sometimes I would catch my kids surreptitiously snaking a hand into the barrels and sneaking a tortilla to munch.
    As time went on, I expanded my cattle operation to seventy-five head and three hundred regular customers. My children and I spent weekends delivering meat, getting the cattle vaccinated, and scooping manure out of the barn with a front-end loader on a tractor to spread across the pastures as fertilizer. It was backbreaking work, but the proceeds helped to put them through college.
Blood at the Barn
    Why am I telling you so much about my cattle business? Because, as farmwork often does, the operation generated a lot of blood—blood that ultimately proved invaluable to my developing career in crime scene analysis.
    When the bulls arrived, we castrated them to help them gain weight and to keep them from bothering the heifers. Then we forced them into a squeeze chute, where we cut off their horns with a tool resembling a pipe cutter. That kept them from gouging one another while they vied for space at the feeding trough. The cuts usually created an arterial spurt, and the steer would swing their heads around wildly when their horns came off. Sometimes the blood sprayed over the walls before you could manage to get medicated coagulant on the wound. At other times the steer rubbed their wounds along the sides of the chute, leaving long horizontal red smears and streaks on the walls.
    I soon discovered that the patterns bore a striking resemblance to the blood patterns I saw at crime scenes. Since cattle blood has the same properties as human blood, I started studying them more closely, noting the differences between what happened when a steer stood still, shook his head, dragged it along the wall, and so on. Castrations gave me ample opportunity to examine blood-into-blood patterns because cutting through multiple tissue layers as we did meant the steer dripped blood continuously as we worked. That taught me a lot about coagulation, too. Blood starts to get gooey and jellylike as it dries, and the plasma begins to separate, forming a yellow-tinged rim at the edges of the red part. Understanding this process—and knowing how long it takes to occur at different temperatures and in different weather conditions—gave me an effective way to estimate time of death at murder scenes.
    But that wasn’t what generated the most useful