For JULY 2000 issue

SCIENCE IN CRIME DETECTION

SOME TRICKS WE USE IN SOLVING GUNSHOT CASES

-Dr. Anil Aggrawal

In this issue, I am going to tell you about some interesting “tricks” that we use in solving gunshot death cases. I shall describe six different situations and each one will be illustrated with an interesting picture.

The usual belief in gunshot cases is that only the area of the wounds can tell us important things. But in several cases non wounding areas can tell us many things.

Blood spatters on the hands

Many times we find that the hands of the victims are spattered with blood as seen in figure 1 here. Blood (and sometimes tissue) gets splattered on the hands. This condition is most often found in suicide victims.

(Editor: Please reproduce figure 001.jpg here. Caption: Blood splatters on hand. The hand of a suicide victim. Obviously, the hand steadied the barrel of the handgun and was close to the near-contact wound of the head.)

Obviously if we get a dead body like this from the police and the police wants to know from us, if the victim committed suicide or if he was murdered, we have no hesitation in saying that it was a case of suicide. The reasoning is like this. In a murder case, the gun is NOT in the hands of the victim. It is in the hands of the assailant. So there is no way, the hands of the victim will get spattered with blood. But if the gun was in the hands of the victim himself, the moment he fires the gun, the blood will spurt from the wound and would spatter the hands of the victim.

Blood (and tissue) splatters on the hand that held the firearm in contact with the head or on the hand that was used to steady the barrel. Brain tissue is the most frequently encountered substance in addition to blood. This usually happens when the victim puts his gun to his head, and then pulls the trigger. The hand of an assailant in a homicide can also be found to be covered with blood and tissue, but since contact homicidal wounds are rare, few assailants find it necessary to rid their hands of such reminders after committing a murder.

This is situation number one, or let us say, trick number one by which we can say whether the person was murdered or he committed suicide.

Now let us come to he second situation.

The position of the blood stains on the feet of the victim can also tell us many things about the crime. Blood may drip down onto the feet or other parts of a victim’s body, indicating the more or less upright position of the victim at and after the wounding. See the figure 2, and you will find some interesting things here. If you see carefully, you can see two different types of blood stains here. This person actually first killed his wife with his gun and then killed himself. One of these types of the stains were caused when this person killed his wife. The second type of blood stains were caused when this person shot himself. When he shot himself, the blood simply dropped down from his head, and flowed downwards. These types of blood stains can easily be seen here.

(Editor: Please reproduce figure 002.jpg here. Caption: Blood droplets on foot. The foot of a man who dispatched his wife with one bullet and then shot himself in the head. Blood droplets appear to be originating from two different directions: directly above the foot and from in front of and above the foot. The back-splash from the homicidally inflicted near contact wound of the head caused one pattern; dripping of blood from the head of the man caused the other.)

Observation and documentation of this phenomenon can be of help in understanding the circumstances of the shooting.

A little bit about firearm residues before we go further. When a gun is fired, lot of smoke and other material such as unburnt particles of gunpowder come out from it. These so-called “residues” deposit on the hands of the person who fired the firearm, and tell us a lot about the crime.

Firearm residues are generally found around the firearm entry wounds, and here they tell us about the distance the firearm was shot at. But these residues at other areas can also be of great help to us. Firearm residue on the body in areas other than the actual wound site can indicate the position of the body at the time of shooting. The “flare,” or powder gas that escapes from the cylinder gap of a revolver, can indicate the relative position of the body and the weapon.

See the accompanying figure.

(Editor: Please reproduce figure 003.jpg here. Caption: Revolver flare indicating barrel length. The very short-range wound in the center of the upper back was inflicted with the revolver held nearly parallel to the skin. The exit wound is near the upper right hand corner of the figure. The flare caused by leakage of lead powder particles and gas is situated approximately 3 inches from the inshoot wound, thus indicating the barrel length.)

This is a very unusual type of wound – a type which we don’t get to see very often. You will see three different dark areas here, and a scale is spanning all the three dark areas. The middle of these dark areas is actually the entry wound of a bullet from a revolver. This revolver was held almost parallel to the body. Its exit wound can be seen easily on the extreme right side of the photograph. Now look at the extreme left hand side of the photograph. You will see some stippling. This is the flare, which was caused by the leakage of lead powder particles and gas. This leakage occurs from the back of the gun. Now the situation is this. The entry wound in the middle is telling us about the position of the muzzle of the revolver, and the position of the stippling is telling us about the position of the breech end of the revolver. Naturally the difference between the two would give the length of the revolver. And in this clever way we can find the length of the revolver, which in this case was about 3 inches.

The same is true of powder tattooing or lead fragment stippling which arises from the leakage of powder grains from the cylinder gap.

(Editor: Please reproduce figure 004.jpg here. Caption: Revolver flare indicating position of head. This suicide victim must have had her head tipped down to the right at the moment of discharging the firearm as indicated by the flare on the right side of the neck.)

In the accompanying case, the police wanted to know whether the lady killed herself, or whether somebody killed her. This problem was solved in a very clever way. Look at the flare on her right side of the neck. This kind of flare can not come if she was shot by someone else. If she was shot by someone else, the flare would come on the hands of the assailant, and not on the neck of the victim. But here the flare is on her neck. What does this indicate? Clearly that the back of the gun was in proximity of the neck. The entry point shows that the muzzle was in proximity there. Now if we join the two lines, we find that the revolver must be parallel to the victim as shown, and this clearly is the position seen in suicide only.

We can also reconstruct the scene of crime from fragments of lead sheared off the bullet as it jumps the cylinder gap and strikes the rear of the barrel to enter the bore.

(Editor: Please reproduce figure 005.jpg here. Caption: Stippling from metal fragments. The man pictured was shot many times with a .22 caliber revolver. Fragments of the soft metal bullets were shaved off when the bullet passed from the cylinder to the barrel, impacting the face and causing the stippling pattern. No bullet impacted the body in the facial area)

The impingement of powder gas and soot deposit that is found upon the palm of the hand when the same hand has been wrapped about the cylinder of the revolver when the shot is fired is a hallmark of a firearms suicide victim.

(Editor: Please reproduce figure 006.jpg here. Caption: Soot deposit on hand. Two examples are shown. In that on the left, the hand was wrapped about the cylinder gap at the moment of firing. In that on the right, the forefinger was close to the cylinder gap of the revolver. Both subjects committed suicide.)

Look at these two figures now. Here you can see lot of blackening on the hands. This blackening is nothing but the soot which ejected from the barrel of the gun when the victim committed suicide. This type of blackening is not seen in the hands, if someone else has killed him. In this case, the police wanted to know if the person had committed suicide or if he was murdered, and clearly the forensic man could say that he had committed suicide.

These are some of the “tricks” we use in solving cases of deaths due to gunshot wounds.

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(Dr. Anil Aggrawal is a professor of Forensic Medicine at the Maulana Azad Medical College, New Delhi-110002. His E-mail is dr_anil@hotmail.com and his Website address is: http://members.tripod.com/~Prof_Anil_Aggrawal/index.html

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Note to the Editor: Please make all correspondence at S-299 Greater Kailash-1, New Delhi-110048. Phones (R): 6465460, 6291942, 6413101; (O) 3239271-4

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