Also Twine, to follow up -
I think I understand now what you mean by tails, essentially the "end" of the initial rope.
Not exactly, but pretty close. The "tail end" is the unused end that sticks out from a knot, its opposite is usually the "standing part" which is generally the part of a rope that is attached to something already before you start tying the knot, the standing part could be attached to a ship or a tree, for instance.
Usually there are four "parts" going into a knot. In an ordinary loop knot the four parts are the standing part, the tail and both the "legs" of the loop. In a "bend" which means a knot used to tie two ropes together, you have two tails, and two standing parts.
The big knot in your picture seems to have SIX parts coming out of it, and that means it is somehow special, it could be more of a "rope mechanism" than a simple, common knot with a name.
Interestingly enough, there appeared to be only one "original" end of the string. I could tell because it had a normal knot at the end of it, like most hoodie strings do. That tail, would have been one of the two "free ends" labeled on the left hand side of the reference view. I believe the other "tail" was removed/cutoff by the perpetrator in order to be able to pull the string thru the Hoodie and out "free". Without cutting off the other tail, it would have likely been impossible, to pull the string thru and out of the Hoodie in the first place, i.e. out, i.e. free, in order to use the entire rope "at will".
Hope that makes sense
thank you
spatiio
That makes perfect sense to me. They may well have cut off the knotted end to be able to pull the drawstring out of the Hoodie.
Apart from that, I think it would help if we could see the entire string in a single picture, the knots, the ends, all of it in the same photo. Perhaps you could also tape the ends that were cut (by police or coroner, I assume) together as well, to make the entire rope mechanism visible. The relative lengths of the free ends may be telling.
Something else: As someone else already noticed, the small knot may actually be an overhand knot tied around a piece of the same string. I didn't notice that at first. It looked a bit like a reef knot or maybe a granny to me. But if it is an overhand knot, it is important to note whether it is tied around the standing part or around the end that forms the tail, since such a knot has opposite properties in these configurations. In one of these configurations, the loop constricts when there is a pull on the standing part, in the other, it allows the loop to widen when the standing part is pulled. I couldn't determine from your pictures which one it was. It looks like that knot has been tied with considerable force. Maybe whoever tied the knot made a mistake and tied a slip knot instead of a noose and then tried to fix it by tying the overhand so hard that it would stop the loop from slipping open through force of friction instead of through the correct geometry. Or maybe it was tied as a noose and drawn tight by pulling on the standing part, but that would probably have killed the victim all by itself, and also embedded that loop in the neck tissue, which apparently didn't happen, so that's not so likely.
More pictures are needed, pictures that show the ends of the rope, where they go and how long they are, at the same time as they show the knots.
Showing a knot without showing the rope ends can lead to the wrong conclusions. The shape of a knot when you can't see how the parts going into the knot are connected is almost meaningless. I wish I had some pictures to illustrate that. But you can look up pictures of the bowline and the sheet bend and compare them. If you don't look at the parts and how they are connected, the knots are identical, but in reality, when you take the the parts into consideration, they have totally different functions, they work in different ways and are tied with different methods.
