That happens on the internet a lot, by the way.

Yes, it does.

Which is why I wanted to get scientists and experts to weigh in on it because I myself am getting very taken by the pattern.

And again, I keep looking at the cloud shoe and the, you know, the treads.

I think, “Oh god, it sure looks like that.

” Not to say that other sneakers don’t have that tread.

I do want to ask you about the size of it.

Um, again, you’re right.

We don’t have aspect.

We don’t have the lovely little, you know, forensic ruler sitting beside, which I’m sure I hope the CSI analysts do have from the homicide investigators, but we do have his foot um on the tile in some of the other video stills that we grabbed, and it kind of shows that his foot is a is not quite the length of a tile, but it is about a little more than threequarters of the length of a tile.

So with that kind of aspect ratio, are you able to look at that uh blood stain and say that is way smaller than a potential shoe tread or a sneaker tread or it is actually the right size for a a sneaker tread or none of the above.

So the that’s that circled area of the image uh which captures his foot relative to one of the tiles is instructive in the sense that it it shows you that it’s within the realm of possibility that that area could be a portion of a footwear impression.

One thing that your audience should understand is that whether or not it is or it isn’t is really dependent on how the footwear made contact with blood before it transferred.

What was that volume of blood and where was it located? Now, what we haven’t seen is another source of blood, another location where the transfer could have occurred, meaning a drop big enough to stamp your foot into it so as to make a stamp that big.

Right now, this does not need to be a one for one like a like a like a stamp pad.

I don’t need the same exact size blood pattern in order to make the transfer because you can imagine blood is going to move laterally along the surface as you put pressure on it.

Yeah.

So, it doesn’t need to be that exact, but we do need to have some sense of is there enough volume somewhere already on the surface that could spread along the bottom of a footwear, you know, of a sneaker, whatever it happens to be, a boot, so that it would then be available to then transfer onto the tile in the way that we’re looking at it.

Well, I’ll tell you what, we don’t have a picture that shows that.

Um, we do know from one of my sources that the blood pattern continues inside, but nothing different.

So, there’s not one big pool of blood somewhere.

We also don’t know because of the darkness of the welcome mat if there’s a whole bunch of blood on the welcome mat.

We we just we can’t see that from the naked eye and the and the the journalist’s pictures.

But if you had to render a guess uh based on you know the crude uh materials work materials that we’ve been able to provide for you which is just a journalist’s pictures and the and the video um your best guess would be So my best guess is that what we’re looking at is a drip pattern and what I think is complicating the interpretation a little bit is that there’s what’s called a void pattern in there.

Right? So there’s this like little uh wedge shaped area where there isn’t any blood and that makes the pattern a little harder to make sense of.

Had that area been filled in I think a lot of people would be easily understand like oh that’s simply a few droplets of blood that fell in the same place or at least you’d understand why some of us would initially consider that.

Now why does that happen? Why do we get void patterns? A lot of times, you know, these are what we often see with spatter, right? When blood is traveling through the air.

But in other situations, and this might be one of them, it could be an an artifact of the tile itself, you know, was there some kind of treatment on the tile, right? To make it water bead on it, right? You know, we call it, you know, is it hydrophobic, right? Does it repel water? And so in that one area, the blood really couldn’t stay there because of some treatment on the tile.

And so as a result, it kind of moved left and right of that one area.

So you got this distortion to what otherwise would have been a regular pattern.

So you have a void.

And so now that complicates things because now it looks like the aspect of a footwear impression or something like that.

So before we get to the idea that it has to be footwear, we have to make sure that we’re not over interterpreting something that is more easily explained by some characteristic of the surface itself.

Dr.

Valentin, thank you.

I so appreciate your wisdom on this and all those years that you studied it.

Thank you, Ashley.

Good to see you again.

You, too.

My great thanks to Peter Valentin.

Uh Dr.

Valentin’s a favorite of mine.

He’s talked to us before in previous episodes about the blood stains outside of NY’s house.

I am so thankful that he gave me his expertise.

Now, I want to switch gears to a third expert.

And you may know Dr.

Ken Kinsey.

Um, well, you may know him from his prior work or you may know him from his street cred, but here’s his street cred.

He’s a forensic crime scene analyst and forensics expert.

Uh, his company is Kenny Kinsey and Associates Crime Scene Consultants, uh, Crime Scene and Violent Crime Consultants.

or you may know him from a very famous trial, the trial of one, Alex Murdoch.

He was the crime scene expert, uh, the blood expert who was up on the stand talking about Paul Murdoch’s blood.

And so you may know him from there, but Dr.

Kinsey has testified in roughly a hundred trials, whether it’s um blood pattern analysis, blood stain pattern analysis, or crime scene uh crime scene reconstruction.

He has done a few things with regard to this kind of CSI.

So, I asked Dr.

Kinsey what he thought of that particular blood stain.

Here’s our conversation.

Dr.

Kinsey, I’ve been asking the experts um and I’d love to hear your opinion.

Do you think that pattern that everyone’s talking about is in fact a footwear impression or something else completely? Miss Ashley, it very well could be a footwear impression.

I I don’t like to to assume uh because you may have an imperfection.

It does appear to have characteristics at least some outsole design as with a footwear impression, but it we’ve got to remember it’s two-dimensional.

So, uh without a one to one, it’d be kind of hard to interpret that.

but it appears to be characteristic of a partial footwear impression.

And I’m interested to hear you say that.

Um, and again, I understand that these are sort of crude tools that we’ve given you.

Uh, just the journalist’s pictures um are not the same as the investigator’s pictures.

But I like when we’re looking at the scale, you know, we can see the relativity of the size of the perpetrator’s foot as compared to the tiles.

And so then you can see that his foot takes up almost a whole tile, a little more than twothirds of a tile.

So when you think of that and the size of that particular blood pattern, does it make sense that it could be actually the size of a of a tread pattern in a typical sneaker or say the sneaker that I’m holding up, which we’ve talked about a lot.

It’s a it’s one of those cloud sneakers.

Absolutely.

It it certainly could.

And we use scaling in this line of work.

uh my colleagues and I we use scaling a lot.

The only problem with the scaling it’s going to give you a general size and the first thing you learn in footwear comp comparison when I when you’re actually matching a known to an unknown is that several manufacturers and depending on their uh their manufacturing process, you can’t just look at the size of the impression and determine the size of the shoe.

And what I mean is some manufacturers may use utilize a 9 and a half, a 10, and a 10 and a half for with the same outsole.

They may produce it with the same outsole design and the same size.

So, it’s going to give you a general area of what you’re looking for as far as shape, size, and outsole design, but it’s not going to lock you in definitively unless you’ve got a known to compare to that unknown.

But it will get you brand uh many times.

It will get you uh characteristics of a certain brand and it’ll it’ll get you a little bit closer to where you have to go.

Well, I’m fascinated to hear that you think there is a possibility of it being um a footwear impression, but then there’s the wild card.

Um, when the police showed up at Nancy Guthri’s home, they were responding to what sounded like a missing person, not necessarily uh a blood bath or a murder or anything like that.

So, my thoughts are the officers walked up to the front door and may not necessarily have seen that blood.

And what we’re looking at might even be the imprint of one of the police officers shoes as they stood there waiting for someone to answer that door.

Absolutely.

And great uh great crime scene preservation starts with a crime scene log.

And most of these logs are going to contain not just the identity of all first responders, but it’s going to go down to the brand and size of their footwear.

And that way if you’re uh if the person is examining those unknown footwear impressions if they’re drawing a blank and many times it’s the same way with DNA especially with the advent or the discovery of touch DNA.

You can do the same thing with footwear when you when all else fails you can go back because you’re going to have to eliminate those first responders.

And it is highly likely that it could be a partial footwear impression from a first responder.

But it’s still better to have it than to discount it and not collect it.

Well, the only thing that I’m curious about is if that is a a footwear impression, where are the um additional impressions that would have happened after that one? Because that doesn’t seem to appear anywhere uh in the vicinity of the front entrance, at least from the images we can see.

Well, they may or may not be there.

And with blood, many many times you’re going to blood’s really really thick.

It’s it’s very viscous.

So the majority of that blood could have been transferred or maybe not.

But with chemicals and reagents, you can bring out additional and you may be able to enhance this and get more uh detail of that outsole design also with chemicals.

I’ve started with just the smallest piece of a partial footwear and sometimes you can develop the entire footwear depending on the chemicals you choose.

Wow.

I never thought of that.

I did think that you could maybe use a reagent and see additional prints that aren’t easy to see with the naked eye, but I didn’t think about filling in the gap of what we’re seeing.

Yeah, I actually worked one in in the corrections department here in South Carolina and we tracked the offender back to his cell and there were no visible footwear and we we physically sprayed each foot, you know, we sprayed the entire area and followed the footprints and went right back to his cell.

And none of those prints once probably two foot from the uh victim sale there were no prints visible and we were able to follow it all the way to the offender sale.

That’s amazing.

You know, I think back to the Idaho case and Brian Coberger murdering four innocent kids at 11:22 King Road and they said that there was a partial shoe print in blood outside of Dylan Mortonson’s bedroom.

And we never heard much more than that.

We sure never heard, you know, in the settlement conferences in the, you know, um, when he stood up in court and pled, we never heard that it was his shoe print.

I assume because as a criminology student, he got rid of everything he was wearing.

So, while it’s fascinating to see a partial shoe print, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to find the shoe that goes with it.

Correct.

And it depends on the motivation and the intelligence of the offender.

Uh, a lot of times in street crimes, you know, these shoes are very, very expensive.

A lot of times just in your normal street crimes, they will not get rid of the shoes.

They’ll try to clean them.

But someone with uh his educational background, I know I I wouldn’t keep anything.

I I would I would get rid of everything.

Probably even burn my car down.

But, uh, he probably did dispose of those if he was responsible.

Well, and he we can’t tell.

Well, he looks like a bumbling idiot when he comes up to the front, you know, trying to, you know, figure out where the camera is at first and then go and maggyver a way to pry it off or smash it off or cover it.

Some people think he’s covering it and leaves.

I don’t.

I think he’s using the vine to get between the bracket and the camera and yank it.

In any case, Savannah Guthrie did use the word yank.

U, so I’m curious about that.

But the other issue is is without being able to extrapolate the size, right? Because you can’t take the the like you mentioned, you can’t take this small impression if it is one and extrapolate out to what size it is because the manufacturers don’t necessarily have a relativity to their sizing.

They might just use the whole pattern and cut it smaller or bigger.

Right.

Right.

And with a very big case that I was involved in, it was something similar.

It was a tire and we actually had to cut it down and that manufacturer made three different tires.

So that’s why we couldn’t give a definitive match.

We were able to say it’s the same uh shape, size, and design, but we couldn’t say this tire above all others made this impression.

And you’ve kind of got the same thing with footwear.

Maybe even more with footwear because there are so many brands, sizes, and styles out there.

What is it about this pattern that would lead you away from thinking that it’s a footprint? It it has the characteristics of a partial footwear.

I I would if I saw it in my regular everyday life, that’s what I would take it to be a partial footwear impression.

If you had the actual and again these are journalists pictures 60 hours or so after the fact, but if you had the actual CSI pictures vertically taken with the measurements, etc.

Is there something that could dissuade you? Well, I would want to see it enhanced.

I would document it here and then I would use a chemical or a reagent and try to enhance it.

So, I may not conduct my comparison on this partial, but if it’s all I had, uh, if I could come up with a a suspect shoe, you would do an overlay and hopefully you would be able to find some unique random characteristic in this.

And like you said, it’s kind of a crude photograph, but there are most likely random details in this that could be used to match back to a to a shoot.

Does anything concern you about the the drop the perfect round droplets on either side of this um you know what looks like a shoe print? Uh do those dissuade you or could they have been dropped at a different time? You can’t age it uh to be honest, but when you look at the totality of it, I would think it was from this incident.

And the skeletonized, it’s it’s a very slow drip.

Uh this person is vertical uh 90° moving very very slow or stopped when this blood letting uh took place.

I don’t mean a different date.

I mean it could have been a second later.

Meaning the shoe print goes down um imprints that blood pattern.

There’s movement and then two additional drops fall afterwards.

That’s what I’m sort of wondering about the different time the shoe print goes first.

Thereby, it’s not stepping in the drops.

Well, this doesn’t appear to be a shoe print in a drop to me.

This appears to be a transfer from a shoe.

So, there was some blood a quantity of blood somewhere else that this person stepped in before they uh transferred this.

And uh it may be out of screen or we may not have the benefit of looking at it, but that does not look like a distorted drip or drop to me.

It it looks like a uh it looks like what we call a swipe if there wasn’t a shoe involved.

It it’s blood on a surface that transfers.

And I’ll tell you something, uh Dr.

Kinsey, we have not been able to see a a larger source anywhere.

Uh not in the pictures that the journalists are able to to to capture.

or Michael Ruiz from Fox Digital and Brian Enton from NewsNation.

uh they were able to just use their iPhones and take their pictures or their smartphones, take their video up at the front entrance and then you know head back out and they didn’t see what was inside the house uh either because I’ve got reporting that says that this blood pattern is replicated inside the front door as well but exactly the same and that there’s no um scuffle marks or uh scene of a struggle in that pattern.

So, does that change your opinion at all if there’s no source that you can actually see where the shoe could have picked up that blood or could that have happened on the welcome map? Either, but it it doesn’t change my opinion.

There is a source somewhere.

And this to me appears to be a an absol and and most of that blood like I mentioned and we use a quantity.

And you wouldn’t believe how fast that blood stops transferring.

So inside that doorway may be a more complete footwear.

If that is indeed what this is, and I believe it to be, uh it it’s it has too much characteristics to uh to just be a tra a drop or a drip pattern.

This is going to be a footwear.

I’m fairly certain, but I wouldn’t hang my hat on that unless I had a little bit better photograph.

Well, I hope at some point uh we have a suspect that he is arrested that this evidence is entered into a court of law as exhibits and then you and I can have this conversation once again where you’re able to see the more specific CSI versions of the photographs and that they hang him uh into this crime.

I mean, I just hope that they’re able to get some resolution for the family and for those who are just their hearts go out to to to Mrs.

Guthrie and her and her family in this mystery.

Um, Dr.

Kinsey, thank you so much.

I really appreciate this.

Thank you.

So, there you have it.

Or not.

I came into this thinking, I’ll bet I’ll have a definitive answer on what we’re looking at in those pictures and the internet will be settled for good.

And here we are.

Totally different opinions among uh Dr.

Peter Valentin, Dr.

Laura Petler, and Dr.

Ken Kinsey.

But that’s why I wanted to talk to all of them because everybody has different expertise.

Everybody has a different set of eyes.

Whether the crime scene analysts who are actually working the Nancy Guthrie case and the FBI and the Pima County Sheriff’s Department are seeing the same things or different things than these three experts did.

I don’t know.

But at least you can take these interviews to the bank because they’ve got more degrees than a circle.

And I’m so thankful that they joined me.

And thank you so much for being here.

Um, thank you to uh my subscribers.

I appreciate you if you haven’t already.

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Um, and thank you to the members.

I appreciate you guys.

And I hope you’ve liked some of that um exclusive content that I’ve sent out just your way.

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Um, and by the way, I appreciate you thinking your way through this video and having an open mind.

And remember, the truth isn’t just serious, it’s drop deadad serious.

 

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