This Algorithm Helps Find Serial Killers But Australia Won't Use it

The founder of the 'Murder Accountability Project​' explains the cases he's cracked in the US, and why police laws prevent similar outcomes here.

Serial killers very rarely target people at random. Usually their victims are of a similar age, gender, and ethnicity, and are murdered in comparable ways. And while these correlations might seem obvious in retrospect, detectives are usually looking at crimes one at a time over periods of years. Which is how parallels can go unseen and serial killers can slip beneath the radar.

Computers, however, are immune to the obfuscation of time and bureaucracy. A former journalist by the name of Thomas Hargrove realised this in the early 2000s, and set about creating an algorithm that could comb FBI records for patterns in unsolved homicide cases. In 2010 he ran his algorithm over a series of US state records, predicting that Gary, Indiana, was the likely home of a serial killer. Police later caught and prosecuted a local man named Darren Vann, affirming Hargrove’s calculations.

Today, Thomas Hargrove is the founder and chairman of a non-profit called the Murder Accountability Project, which tracks unsolved homicides using his method of crunching police records. On behalf of VICE, I got in touch with him to hear how the algorithm works, and to learn why Australia’s opaque system of police data retention prevents us from using his algorithm here.

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