She had tried to speak with the police, but they had refused her. “I sent registered letters to the chief of police and the mayor.” Eventually, he heard from a deputy coroner, who had also started to suspect that there was a serial killer in Gary. (The Department of Justice advises police departments to tell citizens when a serial killer is at large, but some places keep the information secret.) Hargrove was indignant. The police department rebuffed him a lieutenant replied that there were no unsolved serial killings in Gary. “Could these cases reflect the activity of one or more serial killers in your area?” he asked. Hargrove wrote to the Gary police, describing the murders and including a spreadsheet of their circumstances. Many of the bodies had been found in vacant houses. Between 19, fifteen women had been strangled. In August of 2010, Hargrove noticed a pattern of murders in Lake County, Indiana, which includes the city of Gary. Statistically, a town with a serial killer in its midst looks lawless.
It also considers whether the rate of unsolved murders in a city is notable, since an uncaught serial killer upends a police department’s percentages. By a process of data aggregating, the algorithm gathers killings that are related by method, place, and time, and by the victim’s sex. The algorithm forms the basis of the Murder Accountability Project ( MAP), a nonprofit that consists of Hargrove-who is retired-a database, a Web site, and a board of nine members, who include former detectives, homicide scholars, and a forensic psychiatrist.
Hargrove created the code, which operates as a simple algorithm, in 2010, when he was a reporter for the now defunct Scripps Howard news service. Hargrove intends to find them with his code, which he sometimes calls a serial-killer detector. 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. 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. 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. 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. To hear more feature stories, download the Audm app for your iPhone.
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