Death by Talons by Tiddy Smith

Author:Tiddy Smith [Smith, Tiddy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: WildBlue Press
Published: 2023-02-22T06:00:00+00:00

The Front Door

At least three arriving officers independently noticed, to their bewilderment, that there was blood smeared on the inside of the front door. This watered the seeds of doubt from the very outset. A woman was dead at the bottom of the stairs, yet her blood was on the front door. And since the first responders were the first people to see the blood, it had to be deposited there before they arrived. Therefore, its source had to be either Michael or Kathleen.

According to the murder theory, Michael left these bloody marks on his way out the door. With bloody hands, he pushed open the door, leaving tremendous blood smears all over its interior surface.

Is this explanation plausible? There are two reasons to think not:

1. If Michael was concerned with cleaning up the scene (over the course of several hours), he would hardly forget to clean up the large bloody wipes he left all over the back of the door. And he would certainly not forget to close the door behind him.

2. The smears themselves are too profuse and clumsy to be explained by the simple operation of opening or closing a familiar front door. It is as though something large and moving has fallen against the door.

So, the bloodstains on the back of the open front door are not well explained by the simple mechanics of opening a door, and the stains are very unlikely to have been overlooked by Michael in the course of his clean-up and staging of the scene. Both of these facts indicate that it was most probably Kathleen, not Michael, who left the stains there. So how did Kathleen leave these stains?

To answer this question, we should look at the door itself. The transfer and drip stains are all contained in an area approximately twelve inches high and six inches wide. The blood within this zone appears wiped and smudged. Importantly, there were no handprints or fingerprints. Instead, it is as if some blood-soaked object was wiped across the door diagonally, in a broad curve that extends down towards the lock. So, something soaking with blood was pressed against the door as it arched along a curve, leaving red smears on its interior surface.

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