Dr. Thomas Coyne

So you'll see pinkish or purple discoloration of the body on the bottom where it's lying.

And so they probably would have encountered that upon seeing the two victims.

The blood also, yeah, would have started to coagulate.

If it sits for quite a long period of time, you can also see separation of the cellular component from the liquid component.

So we call it serum.

So you may see a little separation of that as well.

But if it's soaked into the bed sheets, it would have just looked all red.

That stiff and you can't bend it.

You know, it's almost immobile.

And so for the child who's going up to their parents hoping to feel a warm body, it would probably feel horrible.

I mean, just cold and very stiff, non-responsive.

You know, some people say it's got a metallic smell to it, almost like iron.

It's biological, so there are a number of different biological compounds that we produce that may be present in blood at any given time.

from ammonia-type chemicals to the mineral component of the blood as well.

But there is a definite unique smell to blood.

It doesn't vaporize, let's say, like human tissue.

As our fatty tissue begins to break down, it aromatizes this sort of putrid chemical smell that is quite unique, human death compared to animal death.

But blood does have a pretty unique smell that I think most of us can recognize.

Well, I mean, so if you are performing a surgery on someone, obviously, especially a vascular surgery where you are instrumenting or entering into or repairing a blood vessel, oftentimes that you may insert a catheter to maintain the patency or keep that vessel open while you're operating on it.

I don't know how in this particular case this occurred, but it's possible that a shard of that catheter was dislodged during surgery, was accidentally cut off and left in, or just simply left in accidentally, rather than being removed when the surgery was complete.