May 26, 2020
Since 1980, more than a quarter of a million unsolved homicides have occurred in the United States - which is more than all U.S. military deaths since the end of WWII. And here's the maddening truth about those unsolved cases - there is no centralized agency in the United States dedicated to keeping track of cold or inadequately investigated murders. Unbelievably, the statistics we read about murders in America are only estimates. Projections. This is because local police and sheriff's departments only provide data that they want to provide - there is no federal standard for such reporting, and no single place to hold the data even if such a standard existed. Enter Thomas Hargrove, the retired reporter-turned-justice warrior,who in 2015 founded the Murder Accountability Project ("MAP"), a nonprofit organization dedicated to tracking and accounting for unsolved U.S. homicides. Gathering data provided by multiple federal, state and local governments, MAP publishes it all, enabling anyone - even YOU - to investigate patterns in unsolved murders, figure out how often your local law enforcement agencies clear homicides - and look at individual cases reported to the FBI or obtained by MAP through Freedom of Information Acts. Listen in as Melissa tells Hargrove's story, describes the frustration he has experienced when law enforcement pays no attention to his research - including one serial killer he identified after seven women were killed in Indiana - and police didn't pay attention until the murderer was caught after taking seven additional victims. But mostly, take note of how YOU can use the data MAP collects to do your own research and perhaps find patterns in your own community that could lead law enforcement to seek out the bad guys.