Don’t worry this isn’t anything alarming. I’m in the process of writing a whodunit and I just want to know if there are any signs that occur/do not occur in a stab wound that is made after death? Any answers would be a great deal of help. Thanks!
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If you stab someone when they’re alive, there will be some blood loss around the stab site. Much more so if the knife is removed as there is no more pressure of the blade on the internal blood vessels. After than, the body tries to stop the bleeding, so you’d see inflammation of the surrounding tissue. If the wound was not fatal, you might see some blood clotting around the wound where the body tried to stop the bleeding, whilst fatal wounds tend to bleed so much the body doesn’t get to try and close it. A person that died on the site of the stabbing will usually be surrounded by a pool of blood, or if they were able to walk about, leave a trail behind.
Post mortem wounds don’t bleed as there is no blood pressure anymore. You’ll see clean cuts, no inflammation of the surrounding tissue. You may however see some superficial coagulation as the blood inside the tissue is exposed to air and dries, but only if the wound was made soon after death. There is no large blood pool to be found.
It also depends how long after death the stab wound occurs, if it’s just minutes you may still see some bleeding as the blood hasn’t fully coagulated yet. The longer you wait, the more the blood pools towards the lower body parts due to gravity and coagulates, to the point where unless you cut through large vessels, you can make a fully blood free stab wound, kind of like when you stab a chicken carcass before you cook it.
Inflammation status is usually determined by a pathologist using a microscope and tissue samples collected from the stab site, not by the detectives on site.
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