Crime Reporting Case Study:
Online Investigations
“Murder Mysteries: Investigating America’s Unsolved Homicides”
Scripps Howard News Service
May-November 2010
A project of the John Jay College Center on Media, Crime & Justice
and Criminal Justice Journalists
by Ted Gest
Criminal Justice Journalists
April 2011
INTRODUCTION
With crime rates in the United States much lower in 2011 than they were 20 years ago, there is a
tendency among many in the general public―and some in the news media―to minimize violent crime
as a significant policy issue. In fact, crime remains a major problem in many pockets of the nation, and
the most serious offense—homicide—happens so often (more than 15,000 reported in 2009) that most
homicides are not even mentioned in news reports.
Depending on the size of the jurisdiction and public interest as it is interpreted by the local media,
murders that are deemed not very significant, for example one drug dealer killing another, may be
ignored by newspapers or broadcast outlets, or given only the most cursory of mentions.
This kind of coverage may give the public the false impression that murder is an uncommon crime. And
because many of the major cases that do get heavy media play are solved, the average citizen probably
believes that most homicide investigations are brought to a successful conclusion.
Scripps Howard News Service (SHNS), based in Washington, D.C., which serves 14 daily newspapers and
nine television stations owned by its media chain, decided to take a fresh look at murder in America,
particularly the growing percentage of killings that go unsolved and the possibility that law enforcement
authorities are overlooking serial killers. The result was a powerful series of stories that appeared
between May 23 and November 26, 2010.
Led by reporter Thomas Hargrove, Scripps Howard built a database of 525,000 homicides around the U.S.
over the 29 years between 1980 and 2008. This number dwarfs, by comparison, the toll of about 60,000
Americans who died during the Vietnam War and the 3,000 who were killed during the September 11,
2001, terror attacks. The magnitude of the murder toll rarely gets much attention these days in a nation
that is accustomed to seeing and hearing news reports of people killed by criminals—and watching
television programs and movies that treat murder as a commonplace event.
Like any good reporter, Hargrove decided to go back to the basics, trying to learn how many reported
murders had taken place since 1980, and how many of those that law enforcement officials say they
have solved.
This is not so easy as it may appear.
There are more than 17,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States—no one seems to know the
exact number—and there is no federal law requiring that they report murders or any crime to a central
source. The Federal Bureau of Investigation issues an annual compilation called “Crime in the United
States” (see http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/ucr ) that includes estimated crime totals reported by
a vast majority of police departments, but many crimes do not show up in the statistics.
It is believed that most murders are reflected in the total, but not all of them are included. In many
cases, the cause of death is not firmly established and police departments may have a bias against
classifying marginal cases as homicides, to keep their numbers as low as possible.
Even if most murders are known to authorities, the proportion that are solved has been declining
nationally. The most common explanation is that in decades past ―when 90 percent of murders were
declared solved―most cases involved people who knew each other. Even if some of the cases didn’t
produce evidence that would sustain a conviction in court, detectives often could identify the assailant
with near certainty and declare the case closed.
In recent years, police have said that more cases involve witnesses who have refused to tell investigators
what they know, for fear of retaliation, because they distrust the police, or for some other reason. In
some areas, critics who charge that police departments are biased against minorities advocate a “stop
snitching” culture that actively discourages talking to law enforcement.
After taking a close look at how few cases are officially solved, Scripps Howard concluded that about
6,000 people get away with murder every year in the nation, bringing the average solution rate
nationwide to below 65 percent.
“The majority of homicides now go unsolved at dozens of big-city police departments,” Scripps Howard
declared in its 2010 series.
HOW THEY DID IT
The project evolved over several years because SHNS editors didn’t give the go-ahead until long after
Hargrove conceptualized it. Hargrove already was somewhat familiar with crime data, having worked as a
police reporter for the Birmingham (AL) Post-Herald in the 1970s before eventually moving to the news
service’s Washington DC headquarters.
Beginning work on the murder project in the 2000s, he didn’t realize at first that some basic crime data
either isn’t available to the public or isn’t complete.
The U.S. Department of Justice estimates there were 565,637 homicides in the 29-year period being
studied. Working with the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University, Hargrove obtained in 2004
the FBI’s “Supplementary Homicide Report” for 2002. The report includes data that police department
around the nation are asked to provide with details on every homicide in their jurisdiction―numbers
that the FBI compiles and issues separately from “Crime in the United States.”
Many agencies don’t submit the reports. In the year Hargrove started looking, the FBI had data on
510,420 murders, about 90 percent of the total. The state of Florida had stopped sending its police
departments’ records on homicides to the FBI in 1994, and most also were missing from the District of
Columbia. Hargrove invoked freedom of information laws in both places to get the information. He also
was in touch with about two dozen states or large cities seeking records that were missing for specific
years.
SHNS was told by many states and cities that it was impractical or impossible to obtain missing homicidecase records dating from 10 years or more in the past. In the end, Hargrove ended up with 15,322
records that had not been in the FBI files. That brought the news service’s database to 525,742 records,
or 93 percent of the estimated national murder total.
Gathering the raw data was just one step.
One of Hargrove’s basic goals for his series was to find out whether law enforcement agencies were
missing serial killers. Since police department jurisdictions are so splintered around the U.S. and many
killers tend to be mobile, Hargrove’s theory was that a murderer could operate in widely separated
places and not even be suspected. Given the fairly low solution rate of homicides generally, it was a
reasonable assumption.
Another major piece of the analysis was mass murders—single incidents with two or more victims. (This
is different from serial murders, which are individual crimes committed over a period of time by one
person). Mass murders in the U.S. increased five percent between 2008 and 2009 to 1,428 incidents
while the overall murder total dropped nearly 7 percent.
The serial murder phase of the investigation produced perhaps the most creative reporting. Hargrove
learned from an FBI unit known as the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP) that 70 percent
of known serial murder victims were women.
Hargrove, assisted by University of Missouri journalism graduate student Elizabeth Lucas, narrowed
down the characteristics of these cases, such as the age and location of victims, and the method of
killing. They identified 161 clusters of killings in which 1,247 women of similar age were killed with
similar means. At least three-fourths of the killings in the group were unsolved at the time they were
reported to the FBI.
The analysis showed that places with the highest number of suspicious clusters included Los Angeles,
where a man known as the “Grim Sleeper” was suspected in at least 10 murders; Phoenix, which has
denied that it has evidence of a serial killer; and Seattle, where “Green River Killer” Gary Leon Ridgway
was implicated in 48 deaths. Scripps Howard reported that authorities in seven cities confirmed that the
news service’s analysis had correctly detected known or strongly suspected serial homicides in their
areas.
Scripps published its findings in 2010 in a “special report” that was made available to all of its member
newspapers and television stations. All of them ran the first wave of stories in May, on unsolved murders,
and the serial killer part of the project had been run by 13 newspapers and 4 televisions stations as of
March 2011. At least 10 non-Scripps newspapers and three non-Scripps television stations also picked up
some of the stories.
The series contained not only the basic numbers but also maps and tables clearly showing trends and a
state-by-state listing of the numbers of unsolved killings.
The first story, “Unsolved Murders,” laid out the basic facts about the decline in homicide solution rates,
including interviews with victims’ relatives and experts like University of Maryland criminologist Charles
Wellford, who had done a major study of the subject. Wellford volunteered to be a consultant on the
Scripps Howard project.
Scripps Howard did not stop its reporting at describing the general problem and pointing out gaps both
in law enforcement databases and in the police pursuit of killers.
A separate story outlined “best practices” that police departments could use to improve their records.
Much of the problem is a matter of priority and manpower. When Santa Ana, California, saw its murder
clearance rate drop to 42 percent in the 1990s, it got federal aid for extra detectives in a “cold-case”
project. The solution rates have jumped to an average of 69 percent since 2000.
The news service looked for agencies whose statistics showed that were doing better at solving crimes
and interviewed local officials to explain what they were doing.
The clearest example in homicide clearances Hargrove found was Durham, N.C., where the solution rate
rose from 39 percent in the 1990s to 78 percent since 2000. Durham Police Chief Jose Lopez said it was a
deliberate effort.
“We will canvass door-to-door to see what information we can get,” Lopez told Scripps Howard. “If
necessary we’ll get up to 100 officers knocking on doors…so we can get more witnesses.”
On the federal level, Scripps Howard wrote a story about how the FBI is overhauling its Violent Criminal
Apprehension Program (ViCAP), whose database already includes 1,398 known serial murders, 187 cases
of attempted murder by serial killers, and 737 serial sexual assaults.
Scripps Howard devoted yet another story to the many problems it encountered in gathering data, citing
“sloppy accounting” and “significant flaws in the FBI’s Uniform Crime report system” for irregularities in
the way unsolved cases are reported. Sometimes the problems are not as bad as the statistics make
them seem. Redding CA., for example, made four arrests in cold murder cases but didn’t report them to
state or federal authorities.
To help establish that the problems it was writing about were not just abstract issues involving obscure
cases, Scripps Howard commissioned a survey of 1,001 adults that found that at least one American
adult in nine personally knows the victim of an unsolved homicide. The odds of knowing a victim were
greater among racial and ethnic minority groups, among men, and less-educated people.
The series found that children are common victims of unsolved cases. The killing of six-year-old JonBenét
Ramsey in Colorado got saturation news coverage. But overall, killings of children are a daily event in the
U.S., Hargrove found. Police don’t know who committed more than 10,700 child killings from 1980
through 2008. Journalists may not have focused on these cases in their local coverage areas.
Why would so much effort be paid to trying to solve a Ramsey case but so little to others? Some say it is
an issue of class.
Lawanda Hawkins of San Pedro, Calif., who founded the group Justice for Murdered Children after her
son, Reginald, was killed in 1995, claimed, “If a killing happened in Beverly Hills, I can guarantee that
(police) will get to the bottom of it. But if the killing happens in South Central (Los Angeles), they won’t.”
IMPACT OF SCRIPPS HOWARD’S REPORTING
Crime journalism often affects police activity, whether it is a matter of bringing information to law
enforcement’s attention or more of a defensive reaction—police wanting to assure the public that they
are responsive to concerns the news media have identified.
In the case of the Scripps Howard News Service study that found clusters of unsolved homicides of
women, authorities in the Gary, Ind., area, and Youngstown, Ohio, broadened their look at possible serial
killings after Scripps Howard brought data to their attention.
The Lake County, IN, Coroner’s Office in Gary added three suspicious homicides to a list of 14 identified
by Scripps Howard that date to the 1990s. Youngstown police began a new review of the evidence on
possibly related homicides there.
Also thanks to the data identified by the series, Las Vegas Nevada police for the first time said they
suspected a serial killer who was preying on prostitutes. Local news media had published and broadcast
stories in 2008 speculating on the possibility, but police never had acknowledged it until Scripps Howard
inquired.
Hargrove explained in his story that law enforcement often is reluctant to talk about possible serial killer
cases, partly not to alarm the public. He calls it “pattern blindness –the reluctance by police to recognize
and acknowledge they are chasing a serial killer.”
After Scripps Howard identified six clusters of mostly unsolved killings of 74 women in the Dallas area, a
Dallas police officer admitted, “I’m sure there are serial killers [ …] but I’m trying to figure out a way to
find them.”
“I still have every hope that this effort, which is still less than six months old [as of early 2011] will lead to
the identification and capture of serial killers,” Hargrove said later in an interview. “Police could hardly
be expected to start rounding up bad guys immediately.”
Meanwhile, he will keep up his own work amid other projects, updating the news service’s databases
with 2009 murder data that the FBI provided in March 2011.
“The key in this kind of journalism, just like good police work, is patience,” he says.
LESSONS FOR JOURNALISTS
Any journalist could do a local version of the Scripps Howard series by making use of the news service’s
data, which are posted online at the sites listed below. The complete dataset, including the 15,000
records obtained under Freedom of Information laws, is available to all at no cost, in the “About this
App” tab on the web version of the series, for download in two formats, SPSS and Tab Delimited text.
Scripps’ two websites on murder (see Sources, below) were created by Jason Bartz, the news service’s
director of digital development, over two months.
For further research, reporters can ask local law enforcement authorities about their record in clearing
homicides (or any other category of cases), both currently and historically. Because comparative data
are readily available, reporters can compare the jurisdictions in their area with others, either nearby or
across the United States. Of course, they should take into account differing crime patterns and the
amount of manpower available to address them.
Journalists also can check on Scripps Howard’s identified clusters of possible serial killers to see if any
turned up in their areas. Reporters should not assume that law enforcement authorities have gone
public with suspicions that cases are related. In many areas, police have kept quiet on the subject.
Hargrove is willing to answer questions about the Scripps Howard work. Most recently, he was
interviewed by KSHB-TV, “NBC Action News” in Kansas City, Mo., for a story that identified several serial
killing clusters among 62 strangulations of women in the area between 1980 and 2004—43 of them still
unsolved.
“Statistically, Hargrove’s research showed Kansas City had too many unsolved strangulations to be
explained without more deaths being related to a serial killer or possibly multiple serial killers,” wrote
reporter Russ Ptacek.
The CMCJ would like to thank the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation for its support of this case study.
Sources
Scripps Howard News Service
http://www.scrippsnews.com/projects/murdermysteries
This site provides for searches of more than 540,000 homicide records across the U.S., using
drop-down boxes to narrow the results by state and county. The results can be filltered by factors that
include age, race, ethnicity, circumstance, and weapon.
http://www.scrippsnews.com/projecrts/serial-killers
At this site, users may access Scripps Howard’s database by entering the name of a
jurisdiction—city, state, or county—and finding out about the number of unsolved murders.
FBI Supplementary Homicide Reports
http://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/ezashr
International Homicide Investigators Association, 10711 Spotsylvania Ave., Fredricksburg, VA
22408; 1-877-843-4442 (toll free);
http://www.ihia.org/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1
Prof. Charles Wellford, University of Maryland Criminology Department, 301-405-4699.
cwellford@crim.umd.edu
Example of recent local story using Scripps Howard data, from KSHB-TV, NBC Action News, Kansas City,
March 2, 2011
http://www.nbcactionnews.com/dpp/news/local_news/investigations/computer-program-identifiessuspected-serial-killer-clusters-among-62-kansas-city-strangulations