Trace evidence expert Douglas Deedrick again took the stand today, and was again hammered at by defense attorney David Schertler. Deedrick earlier testified to examining and performing experiments on various objects taken from the 2006 murder scene of Ivy League-educated attorney Robert Wone.

Deedrick discovered blood spots on the knife found next to Wone’s body that could have been made by a towel, he said. Prosecutors believe that Wone was stabbed with a different knife than the one recovered at the scene. They say Wone’s blood was transferred to the fake murder weapon via a towel that had his blood on it.

Prosecutors have accused housemates Joe Price, Dylan Ward and Victor Zaborsky of conspiring to cover up Wone’s murder. The three are currently on trial.

In order to establish whether the blood was dabbed or wiped on the knife with a towel, Deedrick recreated what might have happened by soaking a towel in horse blood and then wiping it on a knife. The patterns that showed up were similar to the patterns found on the recovered knife. In another experiment, he stabbed a pork loin with a t-shirt draped over it in order to examine the sort of fibers left on the blade. The t-shirted loin was meant to stand-in for Wone on the night of the murder.  The fibers recovered from the test knife were different from those left on the supposed murder weapon.

Schertler didn’t like the idea of the pork loin or the equine blood. “Are you familiar with the difference between human blood and horse blood?” Shertler asked. Deedrick admitted he wasn’t. Schertler didn’t explain what the difference was.

Schertler also didn’t like the fact that Deedrick had performed his horse blood experiment only once. That’s not the way scientific experiments work, he contended. “You do it over and over and over again in order to get the same result, right?” Deedrick replied that he hadn’t seen the need to perform the experiment more than “one time.”

As to the pork loin experiment, Schertler wanted to know why Deedrick had picked pork loin to represent Wone’s body. Deedrick pointed to various sources that backed up the practice of using pork meat as a stand-in for human flesh. Challenging whether the loin was comparable to a human body filled with blood, Schertler asked if the loin Deedrick used was juicy. “You get what you get when you go to Safeway,” replied Deedrick.