http://www.scrippsnews.com/content/amateur-sleuth-finds-serial-murders-old-case-files
ROCHESTER, N.Y. - A computer analyst turned amateur detective used old FBI crime files to identify a cluster of unsolved murders of young women in upstate New York that police agree was the work of a little-known serial killer active in the early 1990s.
Kevin Fallon, 37, an information technology analyst from Buffalo, N.Y., has proven it's possible to spot serial murders by carefully studying FBI records of America's 190,000 unsolved homicides committed since 1980. About a third of all homicides go unsolved each year in the United States.
Fallon, who has taken graduate classes in computer forensics, used the federal crime database -- called the Supplementary Homicide Report -- that Scripps Howard News Service posted online more than a year ago in an ongoing national reporting project examining unsolved murders. Fallon contacted wire service reporters about his discovery.
"I was just playing around," Fallon said. "I was searching for unsolved murders involving knives, strangulations and cases in which the cause of death was undetermined."
Fallon found an unusual bulge of unsolved strangulations in the Rochester area.
"If that wasn't a pattern, well, then I don't know what a pattern looks like," he said. "It was just so obvious."
New York authorities, asked about Fallon's discovery, are talking for the first time about the extraordinary efforts they made to solve a string of killings of women in the Rochester area that occurred in the shadow of the much-heralded arrest of "Genesee River Killer" Arthur Shawcross. He died in prison in 2008 after confessing to 11 murders.....Continue reading the rest of the article at the link above
ROCHESTER, N.Y. - A computer analyst turned amateur detective used old FBI crime files to identify a cluster of unsolved murders of young women in upstate New York that police agree was the work of a little-known serial killer active in the early 1990s.
Kevin Fallon, 37, an information technology analyst from Buffalo, N.Y., has proven it's possible to spot serial murders by carefully studying FBI records of America's 190,000 unsolved homicides committed since 1980. About a third of all homicides go unsolved each year in the United States.
Fallon, who has taken graduate classes in computer forensics, used the federal crime database -- called the Supplementary Homicide Report -- that Scripps Howard News Service posted online more than a year ago in an ongoing national reporting project examining unsolved murders. Fallon contacted wire service reporters about his discovery.
"I was just playing around," Fallon said. "I was searching for unsolved murders involving knives, strangulations and cases in which the cause of death was undetermined."
Fallon found an unusual bulge of unsolved strangulations in the Rochester area.
"If that wasn't a pattern, well, then I don't know what a pattern looks like," he said. "It was just so obvious."
New York authorities, asked about Fallon's discovery, are talking for the first time about the extraordinary efforts they made to solve a string of killings of women in the Rochester area that occurred in the shadow of the much-heralded arrest of "Genesee River Killer" Arthur Shawcross. He died in prison in 2008 after confessing to 11 murders.....Continue reading the rest of the article at the link above
