It took one journalist, a story on prostitution, a passion for open source software, and an old, yet powerful database, to create the Murder Accountability Project (MAP, www.murderdata.org). The MAP involves finding serial killers, preventing murders and connecting the statistical dots. It’s also a project that has a fascinating back story.
Thomas Hargrove, the founder of MAP, had purchased a uniform crime report from the University of Missouri while doing research on a story about prostitution in 2004. The university threw in the Supplemental Homicide Report at no extra cost, as you do, and this free, data-heavy document changed the course of Thomas’s life.
“The document contained row after row of information about individual murders that covered everything from the month, the year the murder happened, and the jurisdiction,” says…