[tiggerella]

My sister-in-law died in 2001. The police gave us the ring she was wearing: a piece of costume jewelry that looks like little diamond chips. We have never found out whether the single shot to the head that killed her was self-inflicted or murder, but obviously, her blood spattered to the ring she had on her finger.

My husband insisted he wanted to keep the ring. I insisted I wasn't putting it into the safe with my grandfather's wedding band with his sister's blood on it, so he let me clean it. It was clean and shiny when I put it away.

A few years later, we were adding some odd coins to the safe when I opened the box the rings are kept in to show my daughter some of the other heirlooms I've been keeping. The ring was blood stained again...

I cleaned it again. I put it back away. The next time I opened the safe, I pulled it out and looked at it. The blood stains were back again.

This time, I didn't clean it. I just tucked it back into the box, put the box back into the safe, and said a little prayer for my sister-in-law.

I recently went back into the safe because the diamond that belonged to my husband's grandmother needs work, but we can't afford it right now. Since the prongs holding the diamonds into the ring are part of the problem, I opted to put the ring away rather than wear it and lose the diamonds. While looking for the box that the diamond my husband bought me was in to swap it with Nana's ring, I opened the box holding my sis-in-law's ring and my grandfather's wedding band.

The ring is clean. Every little fake diamond chip glistens without a single rust colored stain to mar the finish. Putting it under a strong light with a magnifying glass, you would never know that the ring was ever blood stained.

Thus my question. Do blood stains disappear? Or did I maybe imagine the stains (which, by the way, horrified my daughter when she saw them)?

The only witness to my sister-in-law's death passed away in 2004, and I hadn't looked at the ring since then. Might the disappearance of the stains have something to do with the possible person who may have killed her and lied about it dying the same way she did?

Thoughts?

[ma0641]

Take it to a jeweler, most will ultrasonically clean them at little or no cost.

[tiggerella]

But why would I take it to a jeweler, ma0641? It's clean now...