An investigation into the correlation of knife damage in clothing and the lengths of skin wounds

In determining the possibility that a specific weapon was responsible for a specific injury it is often valuable to examine the damage marks left on any clothing worn by a victim. Correlating this damage both to the skin and clothing with the dimensions of the suspect weapon (if available) may help in determining these possibilities. In this work four different types of knives were used to produce damage marks on various different fabrics both stretched and loose over skin. Statistically significant differences were found between the length of wound on the skin and the corresponding damage to the fabrics when the fabric was stretched over the skin while no statistically significant differences were observed when the fabric was loose over the skin. This was true for all of the knives examined.