Thomas Hargrove

Thomas K. Hargrove (born c. 1956 in New York, New York) is a retired news reporter and the director of the "Murder Accountability Project", a non-profit organization which uses a nationwide database of criminal homicides to search for patterns that would aid in investigations.

Hargrove's father was a technical writer. His family moved from Manhattan to Westchester County when he was five. He studied "computational journalism" at the University of Missouri and joined the staff of the Birmingham Post-Herald after graduating in 1977. Although initially hired to conduct public opinion polls, he was soon assigned to work as a crime reporter. He covered the 1979 police shooting of Bonita Carter. He also covered voting irregularities in a story that spurred passage of the Alabama Voting Reform Act of 1989. Beginning in 1984 Hargrove also worked part-time as a stringer for the New York Times and the Reuters news service.

In 1990 Hargrove left the Post-Herald to become a national correspondent for Scripps Howard News Service, specializing in the analysis of large government-created databases. He co-founded the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University and co-edited the 2-volume statistical study, The 21st Century Voter: Who Votes, How They Vote and Why They Vote.

Hargrove's investigative efforts uncovered material for feature stories on people erroneously declared dead, on the misappropriation of federal grants intended for inner-city schools, and on local variations in the enforcement of prostitution. The latter project sparked his interest in analyzing FBI homicide data to potentially detect serial murders. The reception of another study Hargrove performed showing discrepancies in the diagnosis of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome earned him the leeway to pursue his serial killer detection concept.

In 2015, after Scripps Howard spun off its newspaper holdings, Hargrove retired to Alexandria, Virginia and founded the Murder Accountability Project to continue compiling and studying data on homicides and to refine his detection algorithms. He has also begun gathering data on arsons.

References

• Kolker, Robert (February 8, 2017) "Serial Killers Should Fear This Algorithm." Bloomberg Businessweek
• Wilkinson, Alec (November 27, 2017) "The Serial-Killer Detector: A former journalist, equipped with an algorithm and the largest collection of murder records in the country, finds patterns in crime." The New Yorker

External links

• Murder Accountability Project website