Modern forensic and criminal science uses all kinds of methods to track down those responsible for crimes, from good old-fashioned fingerprint dusting to cutting-edge DNA profiling. It wasn’t all that long ago, though, that crime-solving relied on some far older, far less reliable, and far more spurious techniques for identifying potential culprits—and perhaps among the most spurious of all was the belief that a murder victim’s body could, long after death, still respond to and effectively accuse its murderer. The blood then slowly clots and coagulates across the entire body, leaving no fresh flowing blood behind. But if scientific fact says there would be no blood left to bleed after death, what exactly were these medieval crime-solvers seeing? Far from seeing fresh blood exiting the victim’s body, ultimately, these early investigators might simply have been witnessing one of the earliest (and decidedly ickiest) stages of natural decomposition, and were simply (and wrongly) interpreting it as a sign of guilt.