Blood stain in my apartment?

Factual Questions
1

Background
I moved into my current apartment last September. There was two weird stains on the floor, it looked like someone was murdered in my livingroom. Mrs. Bloodytoe put a carpet over it. Recently we recieved a free container of Oxy-stuff. The stain is now gone. The Oxy-stuff only works on organic stains.
Questions

  1. How can I figure out if it was blood?
  2. How can I get info on crimes that have happened in my apartment?

Rev Bloodytoe

2

You win the Very Appropriate Username award.:wink:

3

If it’s an apartment, talk to the manager. Most states have laws that you have to disclose certain things about a home before you buy it (like if a murder took place there). When my mother sold real estate a few years ago, she had to disclose that not one, not two, but three suicides had all occured in the same house over a ten or fifteen year period. I imagine that there is something similar to do with renters. After all, if there is a currently unsolved murder that took place in your apartment, you should know about it.

You could also contact the local police and inqure about it, or check the police blotter in the paper for the time period of a few months before. If you live in a small town, a murder in your apartment would likely be big news.

As for testing the stain, I would think it would be hard at this point without contacting a lab and cutting up the carpet. Even a really clean looking carpet is likely to have bits of the material in it, enough for a forensic lab to get out. And you’re likely to find that it was a bad BBQ sauce spill after all that…

4

Well, now that you have eradicated the stain, I think that #1 is moot.

5

BBQ sauce? They were cannabils too!?

6

Hydrogen Peroxide bubbles in the presence of blood. Of course, it does with other things too.

Plus I agree with “Well, now that you have eradicated the stain, I think that #1 is moot.”

7

You can purchase a small quantity of Luminol here. Luminol is a reagent that is highly sensitive to blood proteins, and is used by forensic investigators to determine the presence of blood even after a surface has been washed.

8

Thanks Q.E.D and everyone else.
-Rev Bloodytoe

9

I was going to suggest that… Make sure you turn off the lights and make the room as dark as possible. It does glow, but not quite like you would see on CSI. Plus, it’s not specific to blood, other proteins such as those found in semen would show up too, so you might find out a little too much information about previous occupants if you spray it in your bedroom :wink:

Also, in our lab, serologists need to prepare it fresh fairly frequently. If the solution is old, you might be disappointed with the results.