That number now stands at more than 211,000. Then-Washington Bureau Chief Peter Copeland gave me a year starting in early 2010 to lead a national reporting project we called “ Murder Mysteries.” We started by studying the mountain of unsolved murders, which at that time numbered 185,000 committed since 1980. I lobbied my bosses for three years that it might be possible to teach a computer how to spot likely victims of serial killers using this publicly available database. (I just recently retired as a national correspondent for its successor, the Scripps Washington Bureau.) I happened to see a copy of the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Report for 2007 and was intrigued to see demographic information for every murder victim in America. How did you get started studying murder data, and what has that entailed?įor many years, I was an investigative reporter for the now-defunct Scripps Howard News Service. After 37 years as an investigative reporter, Hargrove recently retired from journalism, to “spend my remaining time and energy to improve the accountability of unsolved murders.” The Marshall Project asked Thomas Hargrove, the founder of the Murder Accountability Project and, to talk about what he’s learned in a career of studying data on homicide investigations across the country. Earlier this week, NPR reported that more than one-third of homicides in America go unsolved and examined why police investigators don’t close more murder cases.
