Attinger freely admitted that his years of work have had little impact on practices of blood-spatter experts at crime scenes. “I would say there’s been no change,” he said. But he saw no reason for law enforcement to hit pause until techniques improve.
“I have trust in the US justice system,” he said. The technique’s limitations, he said, “are known by both the prosecution, the defense and, hopefully, the judge.”
Attinger now appears to be a part of the very industry he was hired to scrutinize.
In 2015, he co-taught an advanced bloodstain-pattern analysis course to members of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. His partner was Craig Moore, the retired officer who coauthored his first blood-spatter article. Attinger taught an introduction to ballistics and the fluid dynamics of bloodstain-pattern analysis, while Moore taught the practical application of the discipline. “An advanced class is designed for a person who will be testifying in court,” Moore said. Attinger said he had “no opinion” as to whether the students were qualified to act as expert witnesses after completing the course.
He is also a dues-paying member of IABPA. In June, Attinger spoke at the first South American IABPA conference. “A whole continent is eager to do #forensics with bloodstain patterns,” he tweeted afterward. “Go for it!”
One month later, Attinger settled a lawsuit with Iowa State University, whom he had sued after student complaints about verbally abusive conduct led to an internal investigation and sanctions against him. He claimed the process violated school policy and his constitutional rights. Attinger denied the allegations, saying he is “very articulate and honest in the feedback” he provides to students. “Some people do not like to receive honest feedback and not everyone is called to be a researcher.”
The settlement allowed Attinger to remain at Iowa State and work full-time on research and related activities, but only until 2021, when a current grant expires.
Today, Attinger talks a lot about his new idea: he’d like to develop a computerized, handheld device that analysts could use to read bloodstains at crime scenes—even if they didn’t understand the complex science behind them.
Ristenbatt said the justice system would be better served by more educated investigators who could grasp the limitations of different forensic techniques. Ristenbatt also used to teach introductory blood-spatter courses, but said he stopped when he realized his students were holding themselves out as experts. “The easiest way to control it is not to do it anymore,” he said.
In 2016, the Texas Forensic Science Commission—a state panel consisting of seven scientists, one prosecutor, and one defense attorney—opened an inquiry into two cases that turned on bloodstain-pattern analysis. At the center of one is Joe Bryan, a beloved high school principal who has been in prison for 31 years over the killing of his wife. The bloodstain-pattern analyst in that case, a local police officer who took a 40-hour class with one of MacDonell’s former students, recently acknowledged that his conclusions were wrong.
Ristenbatt gave an impassioned speech to the commission, calling for mandatory educational requirements for analysts, including a four-year degree in natural or forensic science. In February, the commission announced it would require accreditation for all bloodstain-pattern analysts testifying in court starting in May 2019. Commission decisions only affect Texas courts, but have influence across the country.
In the meantime, experts in the old methods—the ones that got their start all those years ago in Corning—keep testifying.
“I think if you were to do a study,” Ristenbatt said in an email, “of all the people who call themselves bloodstain-pattern experts and you looked at the genealogy, if you will, of how they’ve obtained their training, it’ll all likely come back to Herb MacDonell through some means.”
[ “I AM VERY SATISFIED.” ]
MacDonell still lives in the big red house in Corning. He is 90 and uses a stair lift to descend to his laboratory. It takes, he said with characteristic precision, exactly 31 seconds to reach the last step.
The stairs lead to a long hallway lined, floor to ceiling, with fading photographs of MacDonell’s students, their changing hairstyles and glasses a vivid timeline of his decades of teaching.
The laboratory now has the fluorescent-lit feel of a high school chemistry classroom. The rows of bottles, still there, are covered in layers of dust. The whole room has a yellowed tint to it, like stepping into one of the old photographs on the wall.
Behind the lab, in a large office, MacDonell carefully catalogs his legacy. A thick book details every student who attended a Bloodstain Evidence Institute. A glass display case showcases mementos from police departments across the country. Stacks of VHS tapes chronicle courtroom triumphs and TV appearances.
Today, MacDonell’s demeanor is much the same as it was in his earliest videos. He is confident, sometimes curt. Little gets under his skin as much as people who refer to his field as “blood splatter” instead of “blood spatter,” a phrase he said he coined (“Splatter is splash. Spatter is not splash,” he said). He is keenly aware of his impact.
“Overall,” MacDonell said, “I am very satisfied with my life’s accomplishments and have few regrets.”
When asked to pinpoint the proudest moment of his long career, MacDonell’s answer comes easily: Susie Mowbray’s exoneration. Mowbray was imprisoned for nine years over the killing of her husband. At her retrial, MacDonell used blood spatters to reconstruct the crime, testifying her husband’s death was a suicide and discrediting the expert who testified for the prosecution at her first trial. The expert was MacDonell’s former student.
MacDonell has testified against his own students numerous times. Asked recently whether he ever considered changing his course structure, or certification process, after seeing students give faulty testimony, MacDonell answered in the negative. “You can’t control someone else’s thinking,” he said. “The only thing you can do is go in and testify to the contrary.”
Leave it to the lawyers to cross-examine, to the trial judges to exclude, to the appellate judges to overturn.
According to MacDonell, this June marked 50 years since he first testified about blood-spatter analysis. To honor the occasion, he planned to pour himself a glass of single-malt scotch and toast Shaff, the client whose case unleashed modern American bloodstain-pattern analysis on the world. Sitting in a home maintained as a shrine to his accomplishments, MacDonell could rest assured his legacy would be protected in the courts for years to come.
Herbert MacDonell died on April 11, 2019, five months after this story was originally published by ProPublica in December 2018.
“I Am a Girl Now,” Sage Smith Wrote. Then She Went Missing.
By Emma Copley Eisenberg
On the late afternoon of November 20, 2012, just a few weeks shy of her 20th birthday, Sage Smith stepped out of the neon pink–walled apartment in Charlottesville, Virginia, she shared with two friends. After a tough and tumbling childhood, things finally seemed to be falling into place: She had moved out of her grandmother’s house, was taking classes, had just reconciled with her dad. And she had just started openly identifying as a transgender woman.
At night and on the weekends, Sage and her roommates gussied up and went out to dance at Charlottesville’s only queer club or to the strip of bars near the University of Virginia. Her friend Shakira had started taking estrogen injections, and Sage wanted to start, too. Sage changed her gender on Facebook to “female.” “I am a girl now #Respect it,” she wrote to a friend on Facebook on November 9, 2012, and to a family member on November 18: “Look I am transitioning and I am your niece.”