HemoSpat News

Association for Crime Scene Reconstruction

An Introduction to Building 3D Crime Scene Models Using SketchUp, an article which I co-authored with Elissa St. Clair (Naval Criminal Investigative Service) and Albert Schade (Berks County District Attorney’s Office, Forensic Services Unit), was published in the Fall 2012 Journal of the Association for Crime Scene Reconstruction.

The purpose of the article is to try to encourage those doing crime scene reconstruction work to consider SketchUp as a tool due to its ease-of-use, affordability (free!), and the wealth of models available in the 3D Warehouse. With SketchUp, it is possible to get a reasonable 3D model from a 2D crime scene sketch without being a professional modeller or spending months learning the tools.

ACSR - St. Clair, Maloney, Schade - SketchUp Crime Scene - No Perspective

A Crime Scene In SketchUp (No Perspective)
ACSR - St. Clair, Maloney, Schade - SketchUp Crime Scene - With Perspective

A Crime Scene In SketchUp (With Perspective)

In the article we give an example from a real crime scene and show step-by-step how we constructed the 3D model from the 2D sketch. At the end we show the resulting 3D model side-by-side with the crime scene photos.

The abstract of the paper is on our Bloodstain Research page, and the article and supplemental material are also available for download.

If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to contact us.

IABPA Conference 2012 Edinburgh, Scotland

Last week I attended the IABPA conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. The conference organizers Amanda Pirie and Chris Gannicliffe [Scottish Police Services Authority (SPSA)] and their team did a fantastic job. It was held in a great, historical venue – The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh – and the schedule and talks were quite good. They also planned a couple of amazing evenings. The first was a reception with the Lord Advocate in The Great Hall at Edinburgh Castle. The second event was dinner and a céilidh at the Ghillie Dhu. Very impressed that everyone who stayed until the wee hours of the morning still made it to the conference on Wednesday morning!

Some of the presentation and workshop highlights for me were:

Special thanks to Craig Severin and Iain Harkness [SPSA] for keeping the céilidh evening flowing…

This conference set the bar pretty high for future conferences!

It has yet to be decided where the next European conference is going to be held, but there was talk of… Rome, Italy…

Andy Maloney

Lead Developer, HemoSpat

IABPA Conference 2012 Tucson, AZ, USA

I attended the 2012 IABPA conference in Tucson, AZ, USA last week. I was fortunate enough to have been invited to present my work on cast-off visualization as well as a workshop on HemoSpat. Thanks to Norm Reeves [BPA Consulting] for all his work organizing the conference and for inviting me to present.

This conference had a great mix of research, case, and other presentations. It’s encouraging to see so many others presenting their work. I was particularly glad to see Céline Nicloux [Institute De Recherche Criminelle De La Gendarmerie Nationale] and Elisabeth Williams [Environmental Science & Research] present research on cast-off that fit so well with what I’m doing with it.

There was a more international flavour at the conference this year which was refreshing. People came from Korea, Japan, South Africa, The Philippines, France, The Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, UK, and of course the USA and Canada.

The standout talks for me this time were: The Characteristics of Blood On “Wicking” Fabrics presented by Rich Tewes [Pioneer Forensics], Paulette Sutton’s [private consultant] Proving a Priest Killed a Nun (“Can I get a Holy Crap?!“), Bloodstain Pattern Documentation: A new Approach presented by Michael Perkins [Las Vegas Metro Police Department] (his recommendations are exactly the direction HemoSpat is headed) and André Hendrix’s [Politie Zeeland] presentation about the shooting of Prince William of Orange titled A 400 Year Old Royal Crime Scene.

Even the general meeting was interesting this time…

Thanks to André Hendrix, Klaas Vervolet, and Jos Albers for participating in the Adopt-a-Canadian program. We had fun running around the Tucson area after the conference.

Next stop: Edinburgh.

Andy Maloney

Lead Developer, HemoSpat

HemoSpat Icon
FORident Software is pleased to announce the release of HemoSpat v1.6 for Mac OS X 10.5-10.7 [64-bit Intel], Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7.

The larger changes include a new interactive 2D viewer, a new tutorial on working with SketchUp, Mac OS X 10.7 support, and improvements to the COLLADA (.dae) exporter.

There are many other changes and fixes as well. For download links and a more complete list of changes, please see the release notes.

New 2D Viewer

New 2D Viewer

We look forward to hearing any feedback from you!

Association for Crime Scene Reconstruction

When an investigator encounters a cast-off pattern at a crime scene, they can usually get a sense of the general location and orientation of the swing which created the pattern. This is very difficult to document and almost impossible to demonstrate to others who have not attended the scene.

This research is about trying to find a way to capture that piece of the scene in a way that will let investigators communicate it to others. The article, titled Visualization of Cast-off Patterns Using 3D Modelling Software, was published in the Fall 2011 issue of the Journal of the Association for Crime Scene Reconstruction.

Cast-off Pattern Planes of Motion

Cast-off Pattern Planes of Motion

The abstract of the paper is on our Bloodstain Research page, and the article and supplemental material are also available for download.

If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to contact us.