Sometimes, when I’m watching true crime, they will say something like “the victim was struck 33 times with a hammer,” or “41 times with an axe,” etc. If it’s all in the same place, how do they maintain an accurate count? Wouldn’t it all be mush? How can they be exact?
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Unless the victim was unconscious at the time of the attack, stabbing, shooting, or beating them in the exact same place over and over again is quite difficult.
This is because most people will resist physical attacks by running away or holding up their arms to defend themselves and they’ll probably also wiggle around a lot in pain.
So, in most cases, when crime shows talk about, say, a victim being stabbed multiple times, they’re talking about multiple wounds.
It’s actually very difficult to land multiple blows in the exact same place, especially on a victim who doesn’t want to be hit multiple times, so there will be different marks which can be discerned, depending on the weapon.
If it’s a stabbing, for example, it’s simply a matter of counting the stab wounds. With a blunt weapon, they might be looking at the cracks in the skull or other bones; if one crack is interrupted by another running in a different direction, then there must be at least two blows.
“Sometimes, when I’m watching true crime”
Remember you are watching fiction, most stories do not follow normal logic.
Tissue damage is different after the heart quits. Quite literally, you can count the staps to a point of death and how many times the body was penetrated after.
Often they aren’t as exact as these shows portrait it. Often they can only say “lots of blunt violence”. Sometimes they can deduce a number of hits by cutting marks since not every hit will be in the exact same angle (so each individual carve in a bone means at least one hit). That is often not a guarantee though, more the examiners best guess based on what he saw.
The exact number of hits doesn’t matter, but it’s a big difference if it’s 3 or 30 hits since you can deduce how much time the murderer had, and that he was serious about making it deadly.
Sometimes, when I’m watching true crime, they will say something like “the victim was struck 33 times with a hammer,” or “41 times with an axe,” etc. If it’s all in the same place, how do they maintain an accurate count? Wouldn’t it all be mush? How can they be exact?
In: 0
Unless the victim was unconscious at the time of the attack, stabbing, shooting, or beating them in the exact same place over and over again is quite difficult.
This is because most people will resist physical attacks by running away or holding up their arms to defend themselves and they’ll probably also wiggle around a lot in pain.
So, in most cases, when crime shows talk about, say, a victim being stabbed multiple times, they’re talking about multiple wounds.
It’s actually very difficult to land multiple blows in the exact same place, especially on a victim who doesn’t want to be hit multiple times, so there will be different marks which can be discerned, depending on the weapon.
If it’s a stabbing, for example, it’s simply a matter of counting the stab wounds. With a blunt weapon, they might be looking at the cracks in the skull or other bones; if one crack is interrupted by another running in a different direction, then there must be at least two blows.
“Sometimes, when I’m watching true crime”
Remember you are watching fiction, most stories do not follow normal logic.
Tissue damage is different after the heart quits. Quite literally, you can count the staps to a point of death and how many times the body was penetrated after.
Often they aren’t as exact as these shows portrait it. Often they can only say “lots of blunt violence”. Sometimes they can deduce a number of hits by cutting marks since not every hit will be in the exact same angle (so each individual carve in a bone means at least one hit). That is often not a guarantee though, more the examiners best guess based on what he saw.
The exact number of hits doesn’t matter, but it’s a big difference if it’s 3 or 30 hits since you can deduce how much time the murderer had, and that he was serious about making it deadly.
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