American journalist, archivist and researcher Thomas Hargrove has developed a computer program whose algorithm examines and compares the characteristics and circumstances of crimes and finds in them the "handwriting" of serial killers. For seven years, Hargrove has used her to investigate the facts of 751,785 murders since 1976, and according to him, this is 27 thousand more than those records of murders that can be found in the FBI archives.
In an interview with The New Yorker, Hargrove revealed that around 1,400 unsolved murders in the United States are linked to earlier (also unsolved) murders through DNA matches. And this is just the bottom line. This means, the researcher concludes, that somewhere around 2 thousand people are walking freely, who were killed several times, but no one caught them.
Hargrove calls his program a "serial killer detector." She looks for anomalies and coincidences among the many cases of so-called "simple" murders. These are those considered accidents in fights, robberies, or lovers' revenge.
The program compares the crime scene, time, method of murder, sex of the victim. With her help, Hargrove was able to track down the serial killer who strangled women in Gary, Indiana, between 1980 and 2008. Over the years, 14 women were found strangled there. Some were killed in their homes, the bodies of some were hidden after death in empty houses.
Hargrove contacted the local police, wrote about the relationship found between the strangulation of different women and asked if they knew that a serial killer was operating in their city. It was in 2010 and almost no one paid attention to his message. But in 2014, police found the new body of a strangled girl in a hotel room. Her name was Africanka Hardy. After examining the records of her telephone conversations, the police detained a local resident - 43-year-old Darren Vann.
The detainee during interrogation confessed to serial murders and took the police to empty houses, where the remains of six more women were found, whom he strangled in the four years that the police did not pay attention to Hargrove's request. Vann also admitted to killing women in the early 90s. This is how Hargrove's program worked!
“At least seven women have died after I tried to convince Gary's police that there was a serial killer on the loose in their town, and a pretty brutal one,” Hargrove says. “I think there are a lot of uncaught serial killers. I believe most cities have at least a few,”he continues.
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Officially, according to the FBI, less than 1 percent of crimes are committed by serial killers every year among the many murders in the United States. Hargrove believes that these figures are grossly underestimated.
According to him, several years ago he asked people he knew who worked in the FBI to tell him the number of unsolved murders in the United States for the year, in which the murderer's DNA would appear among the collected evidence and this DNA would be associated with other unsolved murders. He was told about 1400 such cases.
“And these are only cases when they had DNA. But murderers do not always leave traces of their DNA at the crime scene; rather, on the contrary, finding DNA at the crime scene is like a gift, says Hargrove. And these 1,400 cases are already 2%, not 1%. Moreover, these 2% is a floor, not a ceiling, the real number will be much higher, about 2 thousand."