Criminal Drama And Bloodless Mattresses: Why It's Believable
Crime dramas on TV fascinate people because everyone wants to know how police investigate and solve murders. This is a very complex topic, given that so many murders each year go unsolved, while almost as many are solved. Perhaps what is most fascinating are the crime drama cases where the crime scene has been "sanitized" or cleaned up to avoid detection. If it involves a mattress, you are probably thinking that that is not possible. Here is why a "bloodless" mattress is not only possible, but also very believable.
Blood in a Mattress
Like any bodily fluid, blood quickly soaks down into the fibers and padding of a mattress. On TV, you see a clean mattress sprayed with luminol, and you wonder why the police do not simply cut a small hole in the top of the mattress to see the blood-soaked fibers underneath. The biggest reason for that is that cutting the hole is vandalizing property, especially when there is no legitimate legal cause for it. The luminol's revelation is the second biggest reason why.
However, you may argue that the "cleaned" mattress would still hold some viscous blood residue, given the fact that blood gets stickier and thicker as it dries and more fluid when it is doused with water and chemicals. For that reason, a properly cleaned mattress after a bloody mess is usually handled by a mattress sanitizing company. Unless the visible blood on the mattress is in excess of what one might see when a woman has her period and has a nighttime accident, the mattress sanitizing company would not think anything of it.
Calling in a Mattress Sanitizing Company vs. Purifying the Mattress Yourself
Most murderers, both real and TV-fictitious, make the common mistake of using bleach to remove blood. While this does remove all visible traces of blood and the smell that decomposing blood leaves behind, it does not fully clean and sanitize a mattress. It also contributes to the criminal's guilt, as he/she clearly knew that he/she did something wrong or stumbled onto something bad.
If the TV crime dramas instead wrote a mattress sanitizing company like Hy Gieni Tech into the script, both the fictitious investigators and the viewers would think nothing of cleaning the mattress this way. The mattress cleaners would not think anything either, since they would be paid to clean and sanitize the mattress. The chemicals that the mattress cleaners use also eliminate the detection of blood when using luminol because these cleaning chemicals remove virtually all of the blood. Ergo, a bloodless mattress at a crime scene is TV fact at its best and completely believable.