A person recieves a knock at the door
and is confronted by somebody brandishing a weapon.
Assaulted in the doorway.
Two different types of bloodstains.
An altercation takes place in the kitchen.
That altercation will lead to
a number of bloodstains that are being deposited.
They'll leave bloody shoeprints behind.
In a real crime scene
it can be quite confronting.
It's the bloodstains on the walls.
It's the real person that lay deceased within the scene.
A forensic investigator will spend many many hours
exposed to that sight and that scene.
It’s the morning after a series of violent, bloody murders.
Forensic investigators are on the scene.
I think those two on the door are separate.
The bodies are barely cold.
Do you want to get the back of his head?
This is the crime scene house at the Canberra Institute of Technology.
I’m Charlotte Weldon and I’m a second year student.
I study forensic science,.
Today we’re analysing the blood stains that are in the scene.
We’re looking for specific patterns.
My name is Erin Bourke, I’m a second year CIT student.
I'm studying crime scene examination.
The process is breaking it down so it’s not so overwhelming.
Start with the floor, work your way around the walls.
We do a lot of measuring and calculations
to get areas of origin and stuff like that.
A little bit scared.
I looked at it, I had no idea where to begin,
what to even think,
I was just scrambled.
You just kind of freeze for a second.
And how far through are you at the moment?
It looks like you've cleared the floor.
My name is Shawn Harkins
and I'm a forensic teacher and lecturer
at the Canberra institute of Technology.
The students will come in.
They'll need to examine that
over the course of the entire day
and collect data.
It'll be that data that they'll take on board,
and go away for the next month and think about,
and then write a report.
It can be quite a confronting sight for quite a number of people.
It’s nothing like the sterilized version of the world that we see on these crime shows.
Monsters, aliens, phantoms - none of them are real.
The thought than an actual person could do this is too awful
so our imaginations create a way to
make it easier to take.
Shows like CSI and Dexter
inspired some of the students to try their hand at forensics.
My favourite is probably CSI - the Las Vegas one.
That's what initially started off this whole liking of the job,
and that's what I want to be when I grow up
sort of thing.
But as they're finding out,
TV doesn't always get it right.
There's no blood trail.
He was killed right here.
Keys, briefcase - he just got home from work.
Hang on a second, this is a crime scene.
I would say definitely the whole contamination issue.
You don't see them wearing all of this on TV.
Walking around with a $2000 Armani suit
is certainly not going to be the most effective way to examine the crime scene.
We need to be in a lot of protective gear,
it's sometimes hot,
it's uncomfortable,
and we're there for many many hours
processing the crime scene.
It's my expectation that they're able to
reconstruct the scene.
Reconstruct who was in the scene,
and reconstruct how it was that the crime took place.
So how did these innocent mannequins
meet their fate?
Well, the previous evening,
Shawn was wearing a very different hat.
He was playing the part
of both perpetrator and victim
in creating these bloody scenes.
My assumption is it started on this wall
and worked it's way around.
He does look like he's fallen down
as it gets lower into the room.
You can see from those larger bloodstains on the wall,
this simulates the pumping of the heart,
pumping blood out on to the wall.
As the person gets around,
and close to the corner where I’m now laying,
there’s been a further assault with a blunt weapon.
Yeah, I guess the pattern on the wall
behind me is indicative of an arterial bleed.
So some artery close to the surface of the skin.
The narratives aren't based necessarily
on real life,
but they're based off the type of bloodstains
that we see in real life.
They have to be.
I need to prepare these trainee crime scenes
as best as I can.
And by coming up with scenarios that
mimic the type of blood stains that are seen,
that better prepares them to analyse
some of those more confronting scenes
that they may see,
and set aside any of the human aspect
and concentrate on putting the puzzle back together.
You do think of the impact that this job
has on you,
at the same time I think
it would be quite a rewarding task
to be able to give answers.