Herb MacDonell’s work is blood. Bloody people, bloody ceilings, bloody floors, cars and sweaters. The distance it travels, the angles it makes, the patterns the little scarlet droplets form when they hit a surface.

MacDonell has spent 60 years as a forensic scientist, specializing in blood spatter. He’s testified as an expert witness in more than 33 states, as well as internationally, and he knows O.J. is innocent – at least of the 1995 murder case.

He spoke to a jury of students, faculty and community members at Syracuse University Tuesday night in the Life Sciences Building. His lecture, ‘Sixty Years of Forensic Investigations’ covered six decades in the field and highlighted 10 of the most interesting cases he’s worked on over the course of his career.

MacDonell is currently the director of the Laboratory of Forensic Science in Corning, N.Y. He appeared at O.J. Simpson’s double murder trial in Los Angeles, and the assassination trials of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. He has written four books on blood spatter analysis and is known in his field as the ‘father’ of blood spatter analysis.

James Spencer, chemistry professor and one of the organizers of the event, said MacDonell’s lecture is the first in what will be a series of forensic science speakers.

‘We’re trying to bring in some really distinguished forensic science guys,’ Spencer said. ‘Dr. MacDonell has been around since the earth was still warm, so he’s a great place to start.’

MacDonell’s frequent jokes, quick delivery and nonchalant attitude kept students and guests laughing in between slides of bloody corpses and crime scenes.

He traced the decades along with his receding hairline, from 1949 to the present, beginning with his father’s alleged suicide.

After a chairman of the Republican Party in MacDonell’s hometown started a rumor that his father had hung himself, the 21-year-old started collecting affidavits and traced the rumor back to its original source.

MacDonell said his testimony often proves or disproves the side he’s working for. Regardless, he said he’s just there to analyze what he sees.

‘Physical evidence doesn’t lie,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t get excited like people do.’

In fact, MacDonell said physical evidence, and his analysis of it, has helped convict and acquit a great many people over the years.

His fingerprint analysis on a light bulb put a man in jail for murder and rape. His examination of blood spatter on a car door convicted a man of second degree murder, and his knowledge of explosives kept an innocent man at the Democratic National Convention out of prison.

‘I thought it was really interesting,’ said Iris Park, freshman broadcast journalism major. ‘Especially how he would just say very simple things, like this is impossible because this man’s hand couldn’t have been here or to make this kind of print your hand has to be at this orientation. He made it sound so simple.’

In his first defense case in 1965, MacDonell determined a hunter’s death an accident by analyzing the path the bullet traveled through the corpse’s body. He found the bullet fired had ricocheted off of a tree.

MacDonell still has the part of the tree with the bullet hole. It’s one of a number of artifacts he keeps at his home.

‘I have a whole collection of firearms, handguns and shotguns that have killed at least one person, sometimes up to two or three people,’ he said.

MacDonell keeps the artifacts largely for teaching purposes. As the current director of the Laboratory of Forensic Science, he holds a number of training sessions through the years, and having access to a large collection of firearms, he said, is an important teaching tool.

‘If someone has to photograph a model holding the gun to the head, it should be the right caliber, it should be the right gun,’ he said.

In the 1970s, MacDonell testified for a young man arrested at the Democratic National Convention on firebomb possession. He analyzed the ‘bomb,’ which turned out to be a homemade generator no more dangerous than a citronella candle, and the man was found not guilty.

‘I was once known as the mad bomber of Balever,’ MacDonell joked, referencing his childhood growing up in Balever, N.Y., where his AC Gilbert Chemistry set kept him experimenting.

MacDonell also discussed a murder case involving two burglars, a senior citizen who hacked his wife to death with 54 chops (photograph included) and a 2001 Detroit murder case in which his determination of where the victim was shot corroborated the prosecution’s testimony.

He didn’t go into some of his more famous cases, most namely the O.J. Simpson trials and the assassination trials of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.

MacDonell is a man who describes blood on ceilings as ‘beautiful,’ who says when it comes to forensic science ‘never’ and ‘always’ are two words not in his vocabulary, and who put his skill and personality best himself.

‘I’m humble, but I’m damn good, too.’

jmterrus@syr.edu

Published on March 24, 2009 at 12:00 pm