Serial Killer Detection Algorithm

Law enforcement agencies have their own databases and can crosscheck information with other agencies. But what if you could do a similar thing, without the need of a complicated software or a complicated algorithm? What if you could have visual access to a serial killer detection algorithm? That’s right, a potential free tool that will help you visualize unsolved murder clusters?

This is going to be like a field trip for all you serial killer “hunters”, I promise you. Just wait and see.

While researching publicly available information and data, I stumbled upon something very interesting and informative at the same time. Something I am sure it is worth checking out. So I decided to write a post about it for all of you interested in finding out more about serial killers and/or potential serial killers in different areas and states.

As you probably already know, discovering a potential serial killer is a nightmare for law enforcement. But even worse than that is not being always able to connect the dots; though compared to previous decades, we can certainly say that law enforcement agencies compare information much faster.

If you look back in time, with all the information we have at our disposal right now, we can clearly see clusters of unsolved murders in certain areas. You might have heard of some of those murders; and you probably heard of and some were later attributed to serial killers. Now that we have the information it looks so obvious that those victims, even if unrelated to each other, seemed to have something in common: no suspect and similar killing method. But back then, it wasn’t so easy for law enforcement to connect all the murders.

The Murder Accountability Project

What is The Murder Accountability Project you ask? According the their own website here is what they say: “is a nonprofit group organized in 2015 and dedicated to educate Americans on the importance of accurately accounting for unsolved homicides within the United States. We seek to obtain information from federal, state and local governments about unsolved homicides and to publish this information. This Project’s Board of Directors is composed of retired law enforcement investigators, investigative journalists, criminologists and other experts on various aspects of homicide. ”

Every year thousands of killers in U.S. get away with murder and as a direct consequence of this, only in the last 3 decades, over 200.000 people have vanished in unsolved murders. That is a lot; and the sad part of this is that the official national statistics on murder are actually estimates based upon incomplete reports by police departments that voluntarily choose or refuse to participate in federal crime reporting programs.

Here is where the Murder Accountability Project comes is. You can visit them at this website.

How to navigate the project

Once you go on their website you need to know that the project has access to two data sets maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation: the Uniform Crime Report from 1965 to the present and — more useful for investigators — the Supplementary Homicide Report from 1976 to the present.

In other words, this mean that this project has the most complete set of information about crimes reported in the U.S. The project has an entire page about how to navigate it and you can read all about it on their “Hot To Use” tab on the menu.

Here is the interesting part: “It is possible to search cases sorted by geography, type of victim, method of killing and timeframe of killing. This site is especially useful in cases in which an offender is suspected of killing more than one victim; and possible additional victims may be identified by checking all available reports made to the FBI or obtained independently by the Murder Accountability Project.

For example, you can go on the “Clearance rate” tab and choose whatever state you wish and time frame to see the murder curve for all homicides and the difference between the cleared ones and unsolved ones. It is an interactive chart so you can play with it and compare data from different states from one time frame to another. You can even download the data if you wish.

MurderData Clearance Rates

Search Cases

Let’s say you checked out your area and state and you see a high number of unsolved homicides. You can now go to the “Search cases” tab and see more information about the homicides including includes the age, race, sex, ethnicity of victims as well as the weapon used and the circumstances surrounding the killing.

For the purpose of this example I selected the following homicide characteristics: Time frame 200-2016, State California, Victim female, Weapon knife or other cutting instrument, Circumstances unknown. And voila!

Look at this data. Over 50% of homicides between 2000 and 2016, where victims were women of all ages and races and died in unknown circumstances by a knife or other cutting instrument have gone unsolved at the time of this report.

If you hoover over the chart a little box will appear where you can carefully keep only or exclude certain data sets and visualize the data in a separate window and export it as text.

Once exported it will look like this. I exported a small sample of the data just for the sake of this example.

Agency	Circumstance	Cntyfips	MSA	Off Race	Off Sex	Solved	Source	State	Vic Race	Vic Sex	Weapon	Year	Number of Records	Vic Age
Santa Ana	Circumstances undetermined	Orange, CA	Los Angeles-Long Beach, CA	Unknown	Unknown	No	FBI	California	White	Female	Knife or cutting instrument	2004	1	73
Los Angeles	Circumstances undetermined	Los Angeles, CA	Los Angeles-Long Beach, CA	Unknown	Unknown	No	FBI	California	White	Female	Knife or cutting instrument	2005	1	32
Palmdale	Circumstances undetermined	Los Angeles, CA	Los Angeles-Long Beach, CA	Unknown	Unknown	No	FBI	California	White	Female	Knife or cutting instrument	2005	1	21
Pomona	Circumstances undetermined	Los Angeles, CA	Los Angeles-Long Beach, CA	Unknown	Unknown	No	FBI	California	White	Female	Knife or cutting instrument	2005	1	37
Los Angeles	Circumstances undetermined	Los Angeles, CA	Los Angeles-Long Beach, CA	Unknown	Unknown	No	FBI	California	White	Female	Knife or cutting instrument	2005	1	55
Los Angeles	Circumstances undetermined	Los Angeles, CA	Los Angeles-Long Beach, CA	Unknown	Unknown	No	FBI	California	White	Female	Knife or cutting instrument	2005	1	33
Los Angeles	Circumstances undetermined	Los Angeles, CA	Los Angeles-Long Beach, CA	Unknown	Unknown	No	FBI	California	White	Female	Knife or cutting instrument	2005	1	49
Inglewood	Circumstances undetermined	Los Angeles, CA	Los Angeles-Long Beach, CA	Unknown	Unknown	No	FBI	California	White	Female	Knife or cutting instrument	2004	1	37
Los Angeles	Circumstances undetermined	Los Angeles, CA	Los Angeles-Long Beach, CA	Unknown	Unknown	No	FBI	California	White	Female	Knife or cutting instrument	2004	1	59
Fresno	Circumstances undetermined	Fresno, CA	Fresno, CA	Unknown	Unknown	No	FBI	California	White	Female	Knife or cutting instrument	2004	1	67
San Bernardino County	Circumstances undetermined	San Bernardino, CA	Riverside-San Bernardino, CA	Unknown	Unknown	No	FBI	California	White	Female	Knife or cutting instrument	2005	1	28
Kern County	Circumstances undetermined	Kern, CA	Bakersfield, CA	Unknown	Unknown	No	FBI	California	White	Female	Knife or cutting instrument	2005	1	25
San Bernardino County	Circumstances undetermined	San Bernardino, CA	Riverside-San Bernardino, CA	Unknown	Unknown	No	FBI	California	Black	Female	Knife or cutting instrument	2005	1	27
San Bernardino County	Circumstances undetermined	San Bernardino, CA	Riverside-San Bernardino, CA	Unknown	Unknown	No	FBI	California	Black	Female	Knife or cutting instrument	2005	1	48
Los Angeles County	Circumstances undetermined	Los Angeles, CA	Los Angeles-Long Beach, CA	Unknown	Unknown	No	FBI	California	Black	Female	Knife or cutting instrument	2004	1	43
Napa	Circumstances undetermined	Napa, CA	Napa, CA	Unknown	Unknown	No	FBI	California	White	Female	Knife or cutting instrument	2004	1	26
Napa	Circumstances undetermined	Napa, CA	Napa, CA	Unknown	Unknown	No	FBI	California	White	Female	Knife or cutting instrument	2004	1	26
Los Angeles County	Circumstances undetermined	Los Angeles, CA	Los Angeles-Long Beach, CA	Unknown	Unknown	No	FBI	California	Unknown	Female	Knife or cutting instrument	2005	1	48
San Diego County	Circumstances undetermined	San Diego, CA	San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos, CA	Unknown	Unknown	No	FBI	California	Unknown	Female	Knife or cutting instrument	2004	1	21
Long Beach	Circumstances undetermined	Los Angeles, CA	Los Angeles-Long Beach, CA	Unknown	Unknown	No	FBI	California	Black	Female	Knife or cutting instrument	2004	1	34
Los Angeles County	Circumstances undetermined	Los Angeles, CA	Los Angeles-Long Beach, CA	White	Male	Yes	FBI	California	White	Female	Knife or cutting instrument	2005	1	23
San Diego	Circumstances undetermined	San Diego, CA	San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos, CA	Black	Female	Yes	FBI	California	Black	Female	Knife or cutting instrument	2005	1	43
West Sacramento	Circumstances undetermined	Yolo, CA	Sacramento-Roseville, CA	White	Male	Yes	FBI	California	White	Female	Knife or cutting instrument	2005	1	18

Let’s say for example that you look up a murder with specific characteristics. Sex, age, weapon, circumstances. Now you can widen your search to other states using the same variables and find out how many similar other crimes happened during a certain period of time.

Murder Clusters

If you want to see a map visualization of the homicides you can do that by going to the Murder Cluster tab. Once you get there, you can see the number of homicides concentrated in a specific area. That conglomerate of multiple murders in a location is called a murder cluster, which shows us that something is unusual there. This could potentially signal that either there is a high level of unrelated homicides there, or even worse: a serial killer is present.

For the sake of exemplification, look how the map looks if we select as time frame 1980-2000, victims female and a “Solved rate” of around 27% and voila!

Do you see that green circle in the Seattle area? Those were unsolved homicides having female victims, killed in unknown circumstances and using unknown weapons attributed to no other than Gary Ridgway aka The Green River Killer

Say it isn’t interesting. Now go on and do your own searches and see if you notice anything interesting or peculiar in your area or even other states. Maybe you’ll even discover a possible serial killer.

Oh, and..don’t forget to share your findings.

Source: Murder Accountability Project