Abbreviation | MAP |
---|---|
Formation | May 31, 2015 |
Type | Nonprofit organization |
Purpose | To improve the accounting of unsolved homicides, assist law enforcement in clearing the nation's cold-case backlog and educate the public about the growing problem of unsolved murder. |
Headquarters | Alexandria, Virginia |
Chairman | Thomas K. Hargrove |
Vice Chair | William Hagmaier |
Treasurer | Holly Lang |
Secretary | Enzo Yaksic |
Michael Arntfield, Elizabeth Goeckel, Bruce E. Harry, David Icove and Isaac Wolf | |
Key people | Thomas R. Burke, JD |
Staff | All volunteer |
Website | www |
Murder Accountability Project (MAP) is a nonprofit organization which disseminates information about homicides, especially unsolved killings and serial murders committed in the United States. MAP was established in 2015 by a group of retired detectives, investigative journalists, homicide scholars, and a forensic psychiatrist. [1]
MAP has assembled records on most criminal fatalities, including case-level details on many thousands of homicides that local police failed to report to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's voluntary Uniform Crime Report program. [2] At its website, the group also provides access to an interactive computer algorithm that has identified homicides committed by known serial killers and suspicious clusters of murders that might contain serial killings. [3]
MAP is an outgrowth of a 2010 national reporting project led by Scripps Howard News Service reporter Thomas Hargrove, who wanted to know if FBI computer files could be used to detect previously unrecognized serial killings. The project took first place in the 2011 Philip Meyer Journalism Award offered by the National Institute of Computer Assisted Reporting for outstanding journalism using social science techniques. [4]
Hargrove developed an algorithm that organizes homicide reports into groups based on the victims' gender, geographic location, and means of death. The algorithm searches for murder clusters with extremely low clearance rates. The algorithm's identification of 15 unsolved strangulations in Gary, Indiana, was validated with the October 18, 2014, arrest of Darren Deon Vann by the Hammond Police Department. Vann confessed to multiple homicides and took police to abandoned properties in Gary, where the bodies of six previously unknown female victims were recovered. [5] [6]
MAP personnel warned police and local journalists about larger clusters of suspicious female homicides committed in Cleveland and Chicago. The Cleveland Police Department assembled a small task force to review the area's unsolved homicides following release of the group's analysis. [7] [8] Chicago Police Department officials told reporters it had found no evidence of serial murders in a wave of unsolved female strangulations committed since 2001. [9]
MAP filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Illinois State Police on December 3, 2015, to compel the state to release homicide data it "no longer reports to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report and Supplementary Homicide Report." The case was settled when Illinois agreed to release data on hundreds of cases it had not provided to the federal government. [10] After determining Illinois State Police were not counting how often Illinois police solve homicides through arrest, MAP sent Freedom of Information Act data requests to 102 Illinois law enforcement agencies and determined the state suffered the lowest clearance rate in the nation in 2015. [11]
The MAP Board of Directors includes: William Hagmaier, a retired FBI special agent and former chief of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, Enzo Yaksic, director of the Northeastern University Atypical Homicide Research Group, and Michael Arntfield, a professor at the University of Western Ontario, where he runs a cold-case society. [1]
Elizabeth Short, known as the Black Dahlia, was an American woman found murdered in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, on January 15, 1947. Her case became highly publicized owing to the gruesome nature of the crime, which included the mutilation of her corpse, which was bisected at the waist.
The Atlanta murders of 1979–1981, sometimes called the Atlanta child murders, are a series of murders committed in Atlanta, Georgia, between July 1979 and May 1981. Over the two-year period, at least 28 children, adolescents, and adults were killed. Wayne Williams, an Atlanta native who was 23 years old at the time of the last murder, was arrested, tried, and convicted of two of the adult murders and sentenced to two consecutive life terms.
A cold case is a crime, or a suspected crime, that has not yet been fully resolved and is not the subject of a current criminal investigation, but for which new information could emerge from new witness testimony, re-examined archives, new or retained material evidence, or fresh activities of a suspect. New technological methods developed after the crime was committed can be used on the surviving evidence for analysis often with conclusive results.
Robert Kenneth Ressler was an American FBI agent and author. He played a significant role in the psychological profiling of violent offenders in the 1970s and is often credited with coining the term "serial killer", though the term is a direct translation of the German term Serienmörder coined in 1930 by Berlin investigator Ernst Gennat. After retiring from the FBI, he authored a number of books on serial murders, and often gave lectures on criminology.
The Colonial Parkway murders were the serial murders of at least eight people in the U.S. state of Virginia between 1986 and 1989. The killings were associated with the Colonial Parkway, a 22-mile long thoroughfare that cuts through the Colonial National Historical Park and connects Jamestown, Williamsburg and Yorktown. Long stretches of the road are devoid of any streetlights and are extremely isolated, making it a popular lovers' lane location frequented by young adults.
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David J. Icove is a former Federal Bureau of Investigation Criminal Profiler and FBI Academy Instructor in the elite Behavioral Analysis Unit. He was one of the FBI's first criminal profilers to specialize in the apprehension of serial arsonists and bombers. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Forensic Engineers and co-author, along with Gerald A. Haynes, of Kirk's Fire Investigation, the leading textbook in the field of fire investigation.
The New Bedford Highway Killer is an unidentified serial killer responsible for the deaths of at least nine women and the disappearances of two additional women in New Bedford, Massachusetts, between March 1988 and April 1989. The killer is also suspected to have assaulted numerous other women. All the killer's victims were known sex workers or had struggles with addiction. While the victims were taken from New Bedford, they were all found in different surrounding towns, including Dartmouth, Freetown and Westport, along Massachusetts Route 140.
According to the Louisiana Uniform Crime reporting program, there were 177,710 crimes reported in the U.S. state of Louisiana in 2018. 2018 had the least amount of non-violent criminal offenses since at least 2008. Violent crime decreased from 2017 to 2018, but 2012 still remains the lowest with its record of 22,868. Rape went up 12.7% from 2017 while murder/non-negligent manslaughter declined 7.8%. Additionally, robbery dropped 15% and aggravated assault dropped 1.5%. Handguns remain the leading murder weapon with a rate of 44.7% with firearm following close behind at 35.7%. Together, these two contribute for 80.4% of the murders. Similarly, robberies were committed mostly with firearms in 2018. Firearms were leading with 52% and strongarm listed with a percentage of 35%.
Darren Deon Vann is an American serial killer. He was arrested on October 18, 2014, for the murder of 19-year-old Afrikka Hardy at a Motel 6 in Hammond, Indiana and has confessed to the murders of six other female victims in Indiana. He led police to those women's bodies, all of which were found in five abandoned structures in Gary, Indiana.
On the evening of November 18, 1987, police went to the mobile home of Russell Keith Dardeen, 29, and his family outside Ina, Illinois, United States, after he had failed to show up for work that day. There, they found the bodies of his wife and son, both brutally beaten. Ruby Elaine Dardeen, 30, who had been pregnant with the couple's daughter, had been beaten so badly she had gone into labor, and the killer or killers had also beaten the newborn to death.
Samuel Little was an American serial killer of women who confessed to committing 93 murders between 1970 and 2005. The Federal Bureau of Investigation's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program has confirmed his involvement in at least 60 murders, the largest number of confirmed victims for any serial killer in American history. Little provided sketches for twenty-six of his victims although not all have been linked to known murders.
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The murder of Susanne Lindholm took place in the early morning hours of August 8, 1976, when Susanne Lindholm, a 25-year-old clerk at Helsinki Airport, was raped and strangled in the cellar of her apartment building at Sofianlehdonkatu 9 B, Käpylä, Helsinki, Finland. The crime received considerable publicity. Despite a large volume of clues and a few arrests by the police, the case remains unsolved. New investigations started in 2004 also led to an arrest, but there was insufficient evidence of the suspect's guilt.
Dr. No is the nickname given to a suspected American serial killer thought to be responsible for the murders of at least nine women and girls in Ohio, between 1981 and 1990. As victims, Dr. No primarily chose prostitutes working in parking lots and truck stops located alongside Interstate 71. There are suspicions that he committed three similar killings in New York, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, between 1986 and 1988.
Ronald Lee Moore was an American fugitive, murderer, rapist and suspected serial killer who murdered at least two women between 1996 and 1999. He was not connected to either murder until over a decade later. In November 2007, while incarcerated in Baltimore for burglary, Moore was accidentally released due to a clerical error. He was captured on December 24, 2007, but committed suicide by hanging in January 2008 at the Nelson Coleman Correctional Center in Louisiana. After his suicide, DNA testing linked him to other crimes and he was mentioned in the podcast Serial (2014) as a possible suspect in the killing of Hae Min Lee.
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