Confounding factors of fly artefacts in bloodstain pattern analysis

Crime scene and body alterations caused by arthropods: implications in death investigation

“…Morphological alterations of bloodstain pattern due to insect activity are described in several entomological textbooks [ 7 – 9 ], but, until now, few real cases have been reported in the forensic literature [ 22 , 37 , 47 , 53 , 54 ]. This discrepancy could be due to a lack of consciousness regarding the ability of insects to alter the death scene, producing artefacts that could be misinterpreted as bloodstains produced during the crime.…”

“…The differentiation between FAs and bloodstains and the confounding factors affecting their shapes and characteristics have been widely discussed in forensic literature [ 47 ]. Benecke et al [ 22 , 56 ] reported three cases in which differential diagnoses between bloodstain patterns and FAs were crucial in determining the manner of death.…”

“…Among these, 7 were case reports [13][14][15][16][17][18][19], 3 case series [6,20,21], 19 original articles [22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40], 4 were technical notes [41][42][43][44] and 8 were reviews [1,10,[45][46][47][48][49][50].…”

Distinction of Fly Artifacts from Human Blood using Immunodetection

“…This is true for any insect species that has been tested, including P. terraenovae used in the present study. The only recourse is to attempt to identify fly artifacts based on unique morphologies coupled with contextual analysis (i.e., location of stains in relation to the crime scene) . There are a number of reasons why this approach to fly artifact identification is not sufficient:…”

“…This is true for any insect species that has been tested, including P. terraenovae used in the present study. The only recourse is to attempt to identify fly artifacts based on unique morphologies coupled with contextual analysis (i.e., location of stains in relation to the crime scene) (5,11). There are a number of reasons why this approach to fly artifact identification is not sufficient: 1) As demonstrated in this study with P. terraenovae, following blood feeding, four types of artifacts (regurgitate, defecatory, translocation, and transfer patterns) are produced that met the definition of insect stain, yet none can be distinguished morphologically from human bloodstains in a consistent or reliable manner (10).…”