Online Killers by Christopher Barry-Dee;Steven Morris

would have been found, but they were not.
    Fragments of a shattered wine glass lay on and around Darlie’s bloody footprints. A vacuum cleaner lay on its side. Blood found underneath these items indicated to crime-scene consultant
James Cron that they were dropped after—not before or during—the violence and the spilling of blood.
    Sergeant Nabors repeated the Luminol process on the leatherette couch close to where the boys had been stabbed. Here he found a small child’s handprint glowing iridescent blue on the edge of the couch. Like the blood in the kitchen sink, someone had wiped the blood away. The police had not wiped the couch clean, so who had? Surely not the alleged intruder?
    The only two people who could have wiped it were Darlie and her husband, and they denied doing so.
    In summary, the sink had been cleaned, the blood-smeared worktop wiped over, a bloodstain on the couch had been wiped too, and all before the police arrived at the premises. Despite all this, the Routiers denied cleaning anything.
    To evaluate the veracity of Darlie’s statements to the police, a forensics expert tried to replicate the intruder′s series of moves that fateful night, based on Darlie’s recollection.
    He began by dropping a bloody knife from waist height on to the floor of the utility room while making his way toward the garage door. The blood that spattered across the floor during the test produced a pattern entirely different from the little pools found in the utility room on the night of the murders. The test conducted by the forensics expert showed a random pattern of drops and directional splashes, while the crime photos showed “carefully dropped drips of blood.”
    When another blood expert found tiny drops of the boys’ blood on the back of the nightshirt that Darlie had worn that evening, he remarked that a likely way the blood could have got there was when it dripped off the bread knife and onto Darlie’s back, and this would be consistent with her raising her arm above her while stabbing the boys.

    After the murders, Darlie gave two conflicting accounts of exactly what the intruder had done to her. One officer said that she told him that she had struggled with her assailant on the couch, while another officer said she told him the struggle was at the work surface of the utility room.
    To retrace the alleged attacker′s movements as observed by Darlie Routier, James Cron then followed the trail of blood. It indeed led from the room where the children had been slain, through to a utility room, past the sink, then onto the concrete floor of the garage, where it trailed off below a window screen. Cron then went out into the yard and began looking for blood traces that might have been left behind by the alleged slayer in flight after he exited the garage window. Surely his savagery would have produced vast amounts of blood and his clothing would have been dripping with it—yet there was no blood on the window, its frame or sill, or on the outer wall.
    There was no blood in the dewy, wet mulch below the window… or on the yard’s manicured lawn… or along or on top of the six-foot-high fence that surrounded the garden, or on the gate, or in the nearby alley.
    The blood was contained within the house, and nowhere else!
     
    Darlie Routier had told the police that she had seen the killer leave the premises by passing through the utility room and into the garage before disappearing. The blood trail led to the window screen and not to the garage doors, which, as Darin claimed in court, were in any case locked.
    The screen had been slashed with a knife, but on examination it showed no signs of having been forcibly pushed in or out to facilitate an adult’s ingress or egress. Even more telling was the fact that the screen’s frame was easily removable. Perhaps,
the investigators figured, the woman, in her panicked condition, may have been wrong—perhaps the intruder had found another means of entry and exit. So