Herbert MacDonell

Herbert Leon MacDonell was an American forensic scientist, known as the father of bloodstain pattern analysis, who earned a master's degree in science from the University of Rhode Island in 1956 and worked for the Rhode Island Attorney General's office before directing his own Laboratory of Forensic Science in Corning, New York. His 1971 manual Flight Characteristics of Human Blood and Stain Patterns is regarded as the first authoritative training text in the field, and in 1983 he helped found the International Association of Bloodstain Pattern Analysts following the first Advanced Bloodstain Institute training session. Over a career spanning six decades, MacDonell testified as an expert witness in bloodstain pattern analysis in more than thirty states and in high-profile cases including the O.J. Simpson murder trial and reviews of the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., training generations of crime scene analysts through courses he developed himself.