Welcome to The Murder Accountability Project!

[Bohemian]

The Serial-Killer Detector: How an algorithm is discovering new links between unsolved murders
The New Yorker
Alec Wilkinson
November 20, 2017 5:00 AM

‘Thomas Hargrove is a homicide archivist. For the past seven years, he has been collecting municipal records of murders, and he now has the largest catalogue of killings in the country—751,785 murders carried out since 1976, which is roughly twenty-seven thousand more than appear in F.B.I. files. States are supposed to report murders to the Department of Justice, but some report inaccurately, or fail to report altogether, and Hargrove has sued some of these states to obtain their records. Using computer code he wrote, he searches his archive for statistical anomalies among the more ordinary murders resulting from lovers’ triangles, gang fights, robberies, or brawls. Each year, about five thousand people kill someone and don’t get caught, and a percentage of these men and women have undoubtedly killed more than once. Hargrove intends to find them with his code, which he sometimes calls a serial-killer detector.’

Read more at:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/27/the-serial-killer-detector/amp

 

[dotr]

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/27/the-serial-killer-detector

Deborah Smith, who lives in New Orleans, is a hobby MAP searcher and a forum moderator on Websleuths, an online watering hole for amateur detectives. “I keep spreadsheets of murdered and missing women around the country, with statistics, and I highlight murders that I think might be related,” she told me. “I have them for nearly every state, and that comes from MAP. If I have a killer, like, say, Israel Keys, who was in Seattle about fifteen years ago, I’ll look up murders in Seattle and parts of Alaska, because he lived there, too, and see if there were any the police might have overlooked.” She added, “MAP is just extremely, extremely useful for that. There isn’t really anything else like it.”

 

[Preplexed&astounded]

Imagine if law enforcement agencies used the resource of VICAP and this database, crimes could be potentially be solved or at least identified and classified correctly.

 

[guardian1234]

YES I wondered why this episode was not followed up . It seems this community has a serial killer

 

[Chaos4574]

I use a touchpad instead of a computer and I was wondering why the site doesn't work with it and if I have options on my touchpad?

 

[Momof2inTN]

Thomas or Bessie. I believe I have discovered a pattern for a serial killer that bludgeons his victims and there is 1-3 per year since 1994 in different states until 2016. Maybe more. How do I determine the name and other info from your site on each case for further research?

Any help is appreciated

 

[dgrace51]

Hi Everyone,

Do we have a site for you! The Murder Accountability Project.

The message below is from Tom Hargrove. Mr. Hargrove is the Director of the Murder Accountability Project.

The Murder Accountability Project is a nonprofit group based in Alexandria, Virginia, and operated by a Board of Directors that includes veteran homicide investigators, investigative journalists and homicide scholars. The project is intended to be a resource for police, journalists and families of murder victims who want to know more about unsolved murders in their communities. The project is provided free-of-charge and can be accessed at www.murderdata.org


This website gives the public easy-to-use access to two datasets maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation: the Uniform Crime Report from 1965 to the present and — more useful for police investigators — the Supplemental Homicide Report from 1976 to the present. These are voluntary reporting systems, meaning local police are not required to provide any information to the FBI.

The Murder Accountability Project, using the Freedom of Information Act, has obtained data on more than 22,000 homicides that were not reported to the Justice Department. This means the information at www.murderdata.org is the most complete data on U.S. homicides available anywhere.

To download the four-page briefing document we give to homicide investigators, click on this link:https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/59764882/HowToForMAP2016.pdf

In the coming weeks, we will be working with Mr. Hargrove and his incredible group of people to show you how you can use the information the group offerers for your local community

.So much to tell you but for now please get familiar with the site. Feel free to post questions.

Thank you,

Tricia Griffith
Owner/Websleuths.com

Link is dead. For the four-page briefing document they give to homicide investigators, use the links below. Thx!
Found via here: http://www.murderdata.org/p/data-docs.html
Direct link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/uxg5wouyaaq68sx/HowToForMAP2016.pdf?dl=0

 

[Hoover8583]

Wonderful! Thank you!

 

[margarita25]

Post from WS member @Amstorrs:

“Hey guys. I saw this article on a facebook page and wanted to share it here and on Websleuths’s but I’m not sure what forum to share it on:


Help solve a murder: Public website has searchable data on cold cases “

—-

Thanks Amstorrs, I have posted this in the MAP forum.

—-

From the above link / in progress

Help solve a murder: Public website has searchable data on cold cases
FEBRUARY 9, 2017

“Can you help solve a murder or spot an undetected serial killer?

Open-source website Murder Accountability Project gives the public free access to data about homicide cases from federal, state and local governments, and the FBI.

And there are a lot of them.

More than 211,000 Americans have died in unsolved homicides since 1980, according to The Economist in 2015.

The Murder Accountability Project “is the most complete data on U.S. homicides available anywhere,” the website said.

The database includes two major FBI datasets: The Uniform Crime Report from 1965 to the present and the Supplementary Homicide Report from 1976 to the present.

It also includes data on more than 22,000 homicides that were not reported to the Justice Department that researchers obtained using the Freedom of Information Act.”

 

[margarita25]

Anyone can use the site to search for cases based on location, weapon, time frame, and the victim’s sex, age and race, and look for connections or patterns.

“This site is especially useful in cases in which an offender is suspected of killing more than one victim,” the website said. “Possible additional victims may be identified by checking all available reports.”“

-much more at link:
Help solve a murder: Public website has searchable data on cold cases

Murder Accountability Project

 

[NJEverCurious]

Has anyone seen anything on the MAP for the victims on Long Island? I just looked and didn't see any cluster for LI.

 

[Amstorrs]

Chicago Police Call For Witnesses To Come Forward In Search For Possible Serial Killer

“Chicago police are now calling for DNA testing and witnesses to come forward after more than 50 Chicago women were strangled and killed.
.....

“There’s simply nothing there right now that suggests that we have serial killers in the City of Chicago,” Johnson said.

But the head of the Murder Accountability Project, Thomas Hargrove, says research might show otherwise.

“It’s highly unlikely these 50 women were murdered by 50 separate men,” Hargrove said.”

 

[book-thinker]

Chicago Police Call For Witnesses To Come Forward In Search For Possible Serial Killer

“Chicago police are now calling for DNA testing and witnesses to come forward after more than 50 Chicago women were strangled and killed.
.....

“There’s simply nothing there right now that suggests that we have serial killers in the City of Chicago,” Johnson said.

But the head of the Murder Accountability Project, Thomas Hargrove, says research might show otherwise.

“It’s highly unlikely these 50 women were murdered by 50 separate men,” Hargrove said.”

This is creepy!

 

[iulia]

Computer algorithm helps reopen dozens of Chicago cold cases

The Murder Accountability Project, which analyzes homicides across the U.S., fed information about thousands of Chicago homicide victims and the way they died into a computer, which ultimately spit out 51 strikingly similar cases involving women whose bodies were found in some of the poorest pockets of the city.

“When you put the narratives together ... it just screams serial killer,” said Thomas Hargrove, the founder of the project who presented his findings to police in 2017.

Hargrove’s group has made similar efforts elsewhere. In 2010, it analyzed a pattern of 15 unsolved strangulations of women in Indiana. Four years later, a man in Gary confessed to killing seven of them. In Cleveland, the group’s data led police to create a task force to examine whether a serial killer or killers were responsible for the deaths of as many as 60 women.

Detectives in Chicago started the investigation under pressure from activists. They are now reassessing the reports and evidence in each of the deaths, looking for links that went unnoticed in the original probes as well as any new clues. At the same time, Rep. Bobby Rush, in whose district many of the killings occurred, has asked the FBI to join the investigation and plans a community meeting to warn about the risk of a serial killer.

 

[imstilla.grandma]

The nonprofit Murder Accountability Project (MAP) has filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Bureau of Indian Affairs and other federal law enforcement agencies for failing to obey a 31-year-old Congressional mandate that homicides and other major crimes must be reported to the Uniform Crime Report (UCR), the nation's official accounting of major crimes.

That federal law enforcement agencies have ignored the Uniform Federal Crime Reporting Act of 1988 became apparent when MAP determined earlier this year that half of Native American homicides committed from 1999 through 2017 were not reported to the UCR or to its related Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR). At least 2,400 Indian murders were not reported, MAP determined.

The FBI and the Bureau of Indian Affairs have jurisdiction to lead criminal investigations on many Indian reservations but failed to report either the occurrence of these crimes or whether they were cleared through the arrest of the offenders. The Army, Navy, Air Force and Department of Defense have also failed to report to the Justice Department many thousands of homicides and other major crimes for which they had jurisdiction.

The 1988 law requires all federal law enforcement agencies, including those within the Department of Defense, to report crime data including homicides to the Justice Department. The Act further requires that the Justice Department “shall report” these data to all “institutions participating in the Uniform Crime Reports program.” MAP relies upon the UCR and SHR to monitor homicides and makes these data available at this website.

"The American people have the right to know how they are being murdered and whether those murders are being solved," said MAP Chairman Thomas K. Hargrove. "We reluctantly are suing federal law enforcement agencies under the Freedom of Information Act to compel them to obey a Congressional reporting mandate."

To download a copy of MAP's 71-page federal complaint, click here.
Murder Accountability Project

 

[margarita25]

Post from this thread:
IL - IL - 75 Women in Chicago Strangled / Who is the Chicago Strangler, Serial Killer?

Computer algorithm helps reopen dozens of Chicago cold cases

The Murder Accountability Project, which analyzes homicides across the U.S., fed information about thousands of Chicago homicide victims and the way they died into a computer, which ultimately spit out 51 strikingly similar cases involving women whose bodies were found in some of the poorest pockets of the city.

“When you put the narratives together ... it just screams serial killer,” said Thomas Hargrove, the founder of the project who presented his findings to police in 2017.

Hargrove’s group has made similar efforts elsewhere. In 2010, it analyzed a pattern of 15 unsolved strangulations of women in Indiana. Four years later, a man in Gary confessed to killing seven of them. In Cleveland, the group’s data led police to create a task force to examine whether a serial killer or killers were responsible for the deaths of as many as 60 women.

Detectives in Chicago started the investigation under pressure from activists. They are now reassessing the reports and evidence in each of the deaths, looking for links that went unnoticed in the original probes as well as any new clues. At the same time, Rep. Bobby Rush, in whose district many of the killings occurred, has asked the FBI to join the investigation and plans a community meeting to warn about the risk of a serial killer.

 

[imstilla.grandma]

The brutal murder of Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind, 22, a pregnant Native American in North Dakota in 2017, started a conversation around the crimes that Native American women are vulnerable to. However, it appears that there may have been many more like LaFontaine-Greywind who went unreported.

A non-profit organization has now sued a number of government bodies for failing to "report" native American homicides. The Murder Accountability Project (MAP) has filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and other federal law enforcement agencies for failing to obey a 31-year-old Congressional mandate that homicides and other major crimes must be reported to the Uniform Crime Report (UCR), the nation's official accounting of major crimes.

US non-profit sues FBI for not reporting native American homicides, cites brutal murder of Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind

 

[burblestein]

When will Mendocino County, California be added to the data base?

 

[slippednfell]

Link is dead. For the four-page briefing document they give to homicide investigators, use the links below. Thx!
Found via here: Murder Accountability Project: Data & Docs
Direct link: Dropbox - Link not found

Neither the original nor the updated drop box links work. Can someone please give me an updated link?

Thank you!

 

[Manwel]

Forgive me for this question if it has been answered before (I am new) but I am curious what it means if you search for a specific murder that you know occurred but it is not accounted for in the results? Specifically, I cannot find the data result for Douglass Watts, 2018, White male, age 73, Chicago area.