Ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (C10H16N2O8), more commonly known as EDTA, is used in forensic science as an anticoagulant for blood samples collected from crime scenes. Consequently, differentiating between whole blood and a doped amount of EDTA in blood is crucial to the efficacy of the judicial system. In the O.J. Simpson murder trial, defense lawyers claimed that police planted the blood found at the murder scene in order to incriminate Simpson. The lawyers claimed that the blood must have been planted due to the excessively high levels of EDTA. This, along with several other factors, eventually gave the jury enough reasonable doubt to dismiss the murder charges. This situation has become a more common occurrence in violent crimes today. Through experimentation, correlation values for DRIFTS and ATR spectra were calculated using Spectrum 10 Spectroscopy software. The correlation values were typically high when doped blood samples were compared to a doped blood reference and low when doped blood samples were compared to a whole blood reference. Nevertheless, there were some contradictory samples where whole blood gave a ‘false positive’ or a ‘false negative’. PLS Toolbox was then used in order to look at the minute differences in the spectra. More specifically PCA and LDA were utilized to analyze both DRIFTS and ATR spectra of whole and doped blood. Finally, the use of LC-MS was used to quantify the relative traceable amount of EDTA in doped and whole blood samples.

Forensic discrimination and quantification of EDTA in dried bloodstains using diffuse reflectance infrared fourier transform spectroscopy, attenuated total reflectance, and liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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