ARE THERE 2,000 SERIAL KILLERS ROAMING THE STREETS OF THE U.S.?

Criminologist makes terrifying estimate based on chilling new research into mass murderers

By Valerie Edwards

Daily Mail
November 22, 2017

A researcher has estimated that there are nearly 2,000 serial killers at large in the United States.

Archivist and researcher Thomas Hargrove has developed his own algorithm that he uses to track the habits and status of serial killers.

He told The New Yorker that according to the FBI, 1,400 murders remain unsolved but are linked to other killings through DNA.

Hargrove, who is a part of the Murder Accountability Project (MAP), said his estimate of 2,000 serial killers at large is the number he came to after analyzing data available.

Hargrove collected records of murders for the last seven years, and he has a catalogue with 751,785 murders carried out since 1976, according to the New Yorker.

That number is roughly 27,000 more than appear in the FBI's files.

In order to obtain this figure, Hargrove needed records from each state. In some cases he had to sue states that either reported inaccurately or failed to report the murders altogether.

Using his computer code, which he sometimes calls the serial killer detector, Hargrove searches for anomalies among the most common murders that result from gang fights, robberies or love triangles.

He told the New Yorker that about five thousand people kill someone each year and don't get caught.

Hargrove, who created his algorithm in 2010, says that a percentage of those men and women have more than likely killed more than once.

The code uses data aggregation to gather killings that are related by method, place, and time, and by the victim's sex.

It also considers whether the rate of unsolved murders in a city is notable.

Hargrove told the New Yorker that he noticed a pattern of murders in Lake County, Indiana in 2010.

Between 1980 and 2008, fifteen women had been strangled and many of their bodies had been found in vacant houses.

Hargrove said he contacted local police in the area and asked them if they could possibly have a serial killer in their town.

Police paid him little attention until Darren Vann was arrested for killing Afrikka Hardy at a Motel 6 in 2014.

'Over several days, he takes police to abandoned buildings where they recover the bodies of six women, all of them strangled, just like the pattern we were seeing in the algorithm,' Hargrove told the New Yorker.