Confounding factors of fly artefacts in bloodstain pattern analysis

Abstract

Few studies have explored the relationship between bloodstain patterns and fly artefacts. The documents reviewed in this paper focus on entomological activity at bloodletting scenes and methods describing how this can be interpreted. The methods used by various authors are discussed and categorized into visual, contextual and chemical analyses. Visual analyses focuses on the individual stains, contextual refers to the stains in the context of the scene and chemical analyses are those conducted on the stains to indicate source. Suggestions are made for future research needs in these categories, and current methods to employ are recommended.