Thomas Hargrove (Murder Accountability Project)

Episode #209- We welcome Thomas Hargrove of the Murder Accountability Project. This project collects data on murders in the United States.  Thomas was recently featured on Discovery Plus's docs-series "The Hunt for the Chicago Strangler."  Lots of jaw dropping information revealed in this episode.  There may be several serial killers on the loose in Chicago and many unsolved murders in your town!

00:00 - Intro
00:50 - Welcome Thomas & His Background 
04:04 - Existing Crime Data in the U.S. 
07:25 - Epidemic with Native American Women 
09:33 - Recognizing Patterns  of Serial Killers 
16:45 - Trouble Solving Murders 
20:50 - Serial Killer in Cleveland?
24:22 - Killer in Gary & Lack of Police Resources 
28:04 - Chicago Strangler 
32:17 - Lack of DNA 
35:32 - Multiple Serial Killers 
37:40 - Intelligence of Serial Killers & Green River Killer
42:15 - Serial Killer Samuel Little 
44:20 - Gap in Chicago Strangler Killings 
45:25 - Multiple Killers in Chicago & Arthur Hilliard
49:45 - How Murders are Handled in Denmark 
52:38 - Improving Murder Clearance Rate 
55:30 - Outro 

Murder Accountability Project website:
http://www.murderdata.org

Chuck Shute website:
https://chuckshute.com

Transcript

Chuck Shute: 0:00

Hey guys, stick around. We have a great interview coming up with Thomas Hargrove of the murder Accountability Project. And we're going to talk about murders in the US. And I think a lot of these statistics are going to shock you. And we're going to discuss serial killers, some ones from the past, but as well as some people that may be out there right now that are still killing. And this is a fascinating interview. You won't want to miss it. Quick note though, there are some technical difficulties. My camera shuts off about 40 minutes in. The good news is, is we don't lose audio. So if you're just listening, you won't even notice this. And I don't think it affects the interview very much. It's a very fascinating topic enjoy. Please welcome Thomas Hargrove to the Czech shoe podcast. How are you doing today?

Thomas Hargrove: 0:54

I'm good. Chuck, how are you?

Chuck Shute: 0:55

I'm great. Yeah, I'm really excited to talk to you. I appreciate you taking the time to do this. So yeah, let's just dive right in your you are a retired Washington, DC investigative journalist and former White House correspondent so before we get to your the map, the murder Accountability Project, tell me a little bit about what that was like just being investigative journalists in DC. That must have been interesting.

Thomas Hargrove: 1:18

Oh, yeah. It's a wonderful, wonderful job. Everyone who's not a lifetime reporter should be jealous because you get to experience so much of life. I I've the things I've done, I've flown on to an aircraft carrier and done a catapult takeoff. I've been in the the death chamber for next, a botched execution. I've I've talked to just about every kind of elected official. I've been just in the aftermath of a tornado and helped pull debris off someone who sat up straight and looked at me and said, you know, it really does sound like a freight train. Wow. It's amazing how much of life you experience as a as a journalist, and it was a wonderful way to spend a lifetime.

Chuck Shute: 2:12

Yeah. So then you retire from that. And then was it 2010, you kind of started this project, explain how the murder Accountability Project because it was found in 2015. But didn't it start with something back in 2010 that you did.

Thomas Hargrove: 2:25

While I was still a reporter. I did a year long project. Looking at unsolved homicides in the United States, it was called murder mysteries. And it was a wonderful project and won a bunch of awards. But it alerted me to what's broken in how we handle homicide in America, in fact, how we handle crime investigation, we do it differently than the rest of the world, most of the world and we don't do it better. To be honest. There are so many things that homicide detectives do not have, starting with a master list of murder. If you were in London, and asked the home office to give you a printout of every unsolved homicide in England, they could do that. We cannot do that here in the United States. It's a very decentralized system. And there is no master list. And so the first thing we did when I retired in 2015, I formed a nonprofit organization. And among the things that we tried to do is to create without debate or dispute, the most complete accounting of homicide. If you go to our website at murder data.org You can look up if you know someone who was murdered, you probably will find that record in our data. Mm hmm. So, um, detectives use that website to test theories. Okay. Appear before homicide detective gatherings to demonstrate how to use the website.

Chuck Shute: 3:55

Yeah. So before you started that, though, there was a couple things that didn't exist. There was the Uniform Crime Report, which was supposed to be a national report on major crime and whether they're solved or not. And then in 1989, they made it a law. But you said the FBI is not using it. They're not reporting. And that's what it was designed for. Correct?

Thomas Hargrove: 4:15

Yeah. Oh, that's a that's a real interesting story. About three years ago, a friend of mine who happened to be an employee of the Interior Department, came up to me and asked what what do we know about Native American homicides? And I told them well, one thing we know is they're often not reported. And he said what? And the next thing I know I'm face to face with the the Deputy Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs, and Tara Sweeney is her name was her name. She's gone now. And we talked about that we gave her a report showing where all of the reported Indian murder murder occurred. And the next day her secretary called me and said, Would you put that report online? And we're nothing if not a tool of the Interior Department, we saw no reason not to do that. So we posted it. And a few weeks later, journalists out west started contacting us to say that, yeah, they can see very prominent homicides of Indians that were not in the data. And every time that happened, I would ask the journalist, well, who was the agency that investigated? And every time the answer was the FBI. And that's when it all came together. The FBI, up until a year ago, has never reported a homicide to itself. The FBI runs the Uniform Crime Report, but it had never documented any of the cases that it investigates. And it turns out, this is in violation of a law that Congress passed, Congress became aware of this in 1988. And they passed the Uniform Federal crime reporting act of 1988. It took effect on January 1 of the next year, we're requiring all federal law enforcement, including the FBI, including the Department of Defense, to report data to the official accounting of crime, and nobody obeyed that law, it was completely ignored. And so lawsuit against the basically the federal government, it's still pending, it's

Chuck Shute: 6:25

pending. Okay. And then because then there's this other thing, the FBI supplemental homicide report that was created later, that was supposed to have more information with age, race, sex circumstances, weapons used? And did is how's that going? Are they using that one?

Thomas Hargrove: 6:41

Well, they've never the FBI has never reported cases, it's handled to that, although they did just a few months ago, for the first time ever. And because we advise them that they're breaking the law, they started to report the reported three cases, to the SH er and to the UCR. Okay, three is not the right number. We went through their press releases and found at least 16 cases that they put out press releases about Indian homicides that are not in the data. So we can document that they're under reporting, but at least they've started to report something. So yeah.

Chuck Shute: 7:18

Explain to me or explain to my audience what's going on. And I don't even know if I really know exactly what it is. But I know that there's some sort of basically epidemic with Native American women, there's a lot of these murders that these women are just going missing, and it's not being reported or even was it half of these women that would go missing, the murders are not solved?

Thomas Hargrove: 7:38

We don't know. You know, to quote, The Great Bob Woodward. We don't know what we don't know. And since these cases are not reported, we don't know. So we're trying we're trying to retro, that we're trying to get those cases. And the first thing we're going to do is see if there is an unusual pattern of unsolved Native American murders of women. That is the narrative and it is there are now seven state Commission's and one federal commission that have been appointed to look into this. And they've all acknowledged that the data are terrible. That's

Chuck Shute: 8:16

yeah. It's really scary. Now who typically if somebody because I know they have different laws, so if somebody dies, a Native American woman on a reservation dies, who would typically be in charge of trying to solve that murder? Would it be the FBI? Or would it be the Native American police or?

Thomas Hargrove: 8:34

The answer's yes. So it varies from reservation to reservation. In many places, the FBI has been designated as the lead investigative agency. Also, the Bureau of Indian Affairs has a legal investigative arm and they too, can be involved is the lead agency. It can be the local sheriff's office, it can be the tribal police, the Navajo Nations, has a very famous and pretty good police department. They've started to report pretty effectively, just recently, they're starting to report in the last five or six years. You can see those cases in our at our website and decide for yourself. It varies is the short answer. There are over 500 federally recognized tribes, and it's a mich mismatch of who is legally responsible for investigating major crimes.

Chuck Shute: 9:34

So your project, you started with this algorithm and it was it was a data originally mined from serial killer Gary Ridgway, who's that's an I knew that name very well, because I'm from Seattle, grew up in Seattle, and he was a Green River Killer. So you use the data from that one to kind of figure out an algorithm. Is that how you did it?

Thomas Hargrove: 9:53

Yeah. So as a reporter, my very first job was as a police reporter, a cop shop Reporter we would call it back in Birmingham, Alabama back in the in the 70s, late 70s. And at that time, I was very aware next door in Atlanta of the child, the Atlanta Child Murders. And the Atlanta police department was roundly criticized for not recognizing the patterns sooner. I started going to university discussions about what happened in Atlanta, and learned that this is a well known phenomenon called linkage blindness, that it's common not to recognize a pattern like this. So I kept that in the back of my mind. And then later on, when I was doing a study of how police and forced prostitution laws, I got, when I purchased purchased my very first copy of the Uniform Crime Report, I got an extra bonus at no extra charge, somebody tossed in a copy of the supplementary homicide report, I'd never heard of it or seen it before. And it was row after row of individual murders that had been reported to the FBI. And it did include things like the weapon that was used the age, race, sex ethnicity of the victim, similar information of the offender if an arrest had been made, who investigated the case, the circumstances of the case, which was the police theory as to why it happened. And I don't know where these thoughts come from. But the first thought I had when I saw the SAR was I wonder if we could teach a computer to spot serial crimes, that problem of linkage blindness. And I asked my editors for several years. And finally, when my stock was high enough in the newsroom, Peter Copeland, my bureau chief said, Okay, we'll give you a year. And who gets that anymore? Yeah, I was given a year to do that project. And in the summer of 2010, I and an assistant, we went through at least 100 methods that don't work. Our guide was Gary Ridgway, who at that time was the worst known serial killer on record. He was convicted convicted of murdering 48 girls and women in the greater Seattle area. And he was our benchmark our teacher, we knew we would have success or some sort of success. If we came up with a computer program, an algorithm a series of mathematical steps, that would tell us that something God awful happened in Seattle, in the 1980s. And as I say, we found 100, things that don't work. What finally did work was a kind of cluster analysis, where we take the data and we group them, we group them according to the gender of the victim, the county where the victim was murdered, the method of killing the weapon that was used. And at the time, we later took it out at the time, we would group them by age. But we stopped doing that because it turned out not to be necessary. But we would, we would then, once the groups had been assembled, we took over at the time, we had about half a million murders, we now have records of more than 800,000 murders, but back then it was about half a million. And we turned them into about 10,000 groups. And then we had the computer do one more thing to calculate what was the clearance rate of each route group. And then we would have the computer sort and tell us what were the large clusters of apparently similar murders that had an extremely low clearance rate. And when we did that the Green River killings popped right up to the top. The very top there actually were larger clusters and Los Angeles and Phoenix, Gary, Gary Ridgway scored third in that list. So we started investigating why in the case of Los Angeles, it was interesting. It's like they had a convention. There were five separate serial killers, working the south base in Los Angeles County, killing women with handguns. And they were completely unrelated. When I called the LAPD and talked to the press office and said, ask them I sent them a list of the of the individual cases that the algorithm had spotlighted. And an hour or two later I called back and said, Well, could these be cereal? And he said, What are you kidding? And he used the line. It's like we had a convention here. We had five separate killers. Wow. They were they were quite independent. They didn't know about each other. They weren't acting as a group. But they were killing women through the same basic technique. handguns are very, very common in LA. So

Chuck Shute: 14:59

are those ones saw

Thomas Hargrove: 15:00

Yes, okay, it has been solved. What about

Chuck Shute: 15:03

the Phoenix one? I live in Phoenix now and he got me worried.

Thomas Hargrove: 15:06

Yeah, there were a bunch of murders in the desert. And the first time we talked to the Phoenix Police Department, they looked at it. The problem was Phoenix has multiple jurisdictions. It's a real patchwork and what the algorithm identified were murders of bodies recovered mostly in the desert. And the Phoenix Police Department at the first time we tried, said, We don't have any indication that these are connected cases. In subsequent years, we've had other conversations with Phoenix authorities and they are still looking. You know, there. It is common to find bodies in the desert. And it is a common murder technique to dispose of bodies. Often it's difficult to know the cause of death. Because the body has been exposed to, to weather. Mm hmm. So yeah, anyway, we are looking at okay, so there's some first time they said no, and now they're, they're poking back. They have more than 2000 unsolved murders in the area. And that's scary. probably quite a bit tucked in that pile of data, probably several serial killers in Phoenix. Yeah, they very well may not be active. Okay. Data that goes back over nearly 50 years.

Chuck Shute: 16:40

Yeah. So this is because this is an interesting statistic is that you said that police used to solve murders about 90% of the time. And now it's only 65%. That blew my mind because that seems so backward, backwards with the DNA advancements, whatever I I just think I guess I'm naive, because I thought murders just don't happen very often are definitely not most people killing multiple people. Because once they get the DNA, the people get locked up. But 65% clearance rate of murder solved is what your reporting, right?

Thomas Hargrove: 17:09

I'm sorry to report. But we had a hard year last year, we set a new record last in 2020. We only cleared 54% of our homicides, the worst we've ever done. And that pattern continues. We may be the only western democracy where most murders go unsolved. But right now the level is down to 54%. The problem is that police are overwhelmed. There aren't enough resources applied to the problem. The nature of murder has changed increasingly, and involves racial minorities and inner cities. Increasingly, it is drug related or gang related. And those can be tougher to solve unless a police department has figured out how to retool, there are plenty of police departments that know how to deal with gangs and drugs. And plenty that don't. And looking at the murder clearance rate is a pretty good indicator of that. Yeah, well, I

Chuck Shute: 18:11

think you said homicide detectives cannot clear more than five murders in a year. So if 10 murders come across their desk, they're only going to solve half of them.

Thomas Hargrove: 18:21

Now, they'd be lucky to solve half of them. That the guidance from the Justice Department and others is that it is not a good idea to ask a homicide detective to handle more than five cases a year even five is pushing it as murder is a very labor intensive investigation. It's knocking on doors. It's talking to people just forever and talking to them again. And again. A good investigation will re interview the wisdom witnesses multiple times because often they forget stuff. And when they tell their their recollection, multiple times. Things that they forgot to say the first time pop up. I mean, this is just the way life is. But you don't see that on television on television. It's yeah, burgers investigated and solved in 60 minutes by beautiful people sitting in front of gigantic computer monitors. Isn't that way? Yeah. And increasingly, we don't have the resources to do that kind of work.

Chuck Shute: 19:23

Is the DNA how often is DNA an issue in solving a murder? Because I would think I mean, there's got to be DNA on most murders, right? I mean, it's just all you're looking at. You find one little hair and that's something.

Thomas Hargrove: 19:36

Yeah, I don't think it's that common. But yes, DNA has helped. It's also hurt. What happens is, state laboratories are overwhelmed like everything else involving law enforcement is overwhelmed. And it can take many months or in some cases years to get DNA back from a state lab. that can cause a DNA pause and investigation stops until they get lab results back. And that can be critical. Because the if the early days of an investigation are very important, and it would help the detective to know DNA is not going to help. If he knew that, then he would knock on yet more doors and do it the old fashioned way. Sometimes the expectation for magic doesn't, doesn't pan out. Gotcha. DNA is not the magic bullet, we thought. I mean, look at the look at the clearance rate over time. Despite the miracle of new forensic techniques, we have ever declining rates of clearing homicides. And that's eloquent proof that DNA is not a magic bullet.

Chuck Shute: 20:48

Right. So Cleveland, I think, is also one of the ones the cities where you said had the biggest cluster of murders. And you think there may be a serial killer there, but you can't prove it.

Thomas Hargrove: 21:00

Yeah. And to their credit, in fact, there there were nice to work with the Cleveland Police Department. Oops. Is that them? That was me. Okay. Someone called anyway, the Cleveland Police Department did start a a special investigation re reviewing the cases that the algorithm spotlighted and during that time, it was it was a horrible thing. There was a murder of a 14 year old girl aliannah to freeze. The algorithm show that there was an unusual cluster along 93rd Street in in Cleveland. And aliannah was last seen boarding a school bus well, actually a regular city bus on our way to school, along 93rd Street. A few days later, her body was recovered in an empty house about half a block from 93rd Street, horribly, horribly mutilated, I mean, something out of the Middle Ages. Aliana was 14, but she looked much, much younger. She had learning disabilities and other issues. Who would do that to to a young girl like that. I mean, she did nothing to deserve that. And the police called me back. And we were still in this discussion about these cases. And they said, Would you please check hard, we want to see if they're anything like this. They made an arrest. They solve that one. He left his DNA at the scene. And they had him and every every every instinct in their cop bodies was there's no way this guy hasn't killed before. This wasn't his first rodeo. He was 44 years old when he was arrested. And who starts killing at 44 Killing like that. But we couldn't we couldn't find anything that was a direct match. There were plenty of unsolved murders of African American girls and women but not with that particular violence. So we're glad they caught him. But we don't know. They they were able to the task force was able to clear another murder because of the review. So we count that one and say victory. We don't have proof that they are serial, although they and we believe Aliana DeFries was probably a serial victim. But we just can't prove it.

Chuck Shute: 23:42

So do you think that there's other murders that they just don't have the DNA or the evidence or do you think that they haven't even found all these maybe other other bodies are hidden better? Something they haven't found them yet?

Thomas Hargrove: 23:54

Yes. The answer is yes to both. Yeah. Oh. It is it is common in urban environments for serial killers to be adept at hiding their their victims. One of the one of the clusters that the algorithm identified was a series of strangulation murders in Gary, Indiana. And we tried to tell the Gary This is back when I was still a reporter before the murder Accountability Project existed. I tried to have conversations with Gary police department that please look at these 15 unsolved strangulations. We have a mathematical technique that's indicating that these could be connected. And if you call up the narratives, they sure look connected. And Gary refused to acknowledge the possibility that was in 2010 and 2014 next door to Gary. police recovered in Hammond, Indiana to Motel Six The body of 19 year old Africa hearty she was strangled and left in a bathtub. They quickly made an arrest a guy named Darren Dion Vaughn. And he said, Well, I've been at this for a while, I've been killing lots of people in lots of places. I'm willing to show you some of my work here. And Gary. So the Hammond police detectives called Gary and said, We're coming in and Mr. Vaughn took police to six other body recovery sites that no, nobody knew a thing about six other women that Vaughn had killed in a six month period, and hidden in abandoned properties, it can be very easy to hide your work, and Vaughn was pretty good at it.

Chuck Shute: 25:49

What typically happens with those abandoned properties? That sounds like a very common dumping site.

Thomas Hargrove: 25:55

It is. And it's one of the reasons why civic improvement efforts try to get federal funding to plow them under, you know, to turn them into empty lots. I mean, that's a good idea. And that is happening in urban renewal projects. In many cities. They're trying to do it in Gary, it's a problem. And, you know, one of the problems facing law enforcement is that this is a dirty little secret. But many cities in America are broke, they cannot afford their pension plans, their their property tax base is eroding. Gary, Indiana has a pretty bad case of that, but so do other major cities. And that failure of available income feeds back into not adequate resources being available to investigate major crimes. We simply can't afford the manpower to to properly investigate these cases, because the cities themselves are under resourced.

Chuck Shute: 27:02

Yeah. And I mean, that's what's so frustrating when you see this movement for defund the police, which and I'm all for accountability of police. I think that'd be a great thing. But it seems like they need more resources and not less.

Thomas Hargrove: 27:15

Amen. Yeah. I mean, the the killing of George Floyd was a stimulant for all kinds of civil disorder. It was a murder. And it was done in real time, filmed by people who were begging the police officer to stop that Mr. Floyd was dying. He said he couldn't breathe. That kicked off around have intense dispute and demonstrations against local police by local people. And that was one of the big factors for the huge erosion and homicide clearance and 2020. It was in response to the George Floyd murder.

Chuck Shute: 28:00

Yeah, it's just really sad. So well, let's get into the big one. The Chicago strangler, which this one some of those murders may have been Vaughn from the Gary, Indiana, he may have some of those. But there were 75 murders, and only about a quarter are solved. So these women were strangled smothered a fixated south and west sides of Chicago, the women had a history of sex work or drug use, and the overwhelming majority black women, some white, some Hispanic, but what was it three quarters black women? Yeah, about that. Okay. And so and then the other thing we know is that this is interesting, the body dump locations 94% Out door, which is you say that's very unusual. And yeah, and the majority women were found nude and many were raped. And it's just really disgusting when you think about the abandoned buildings is one spot, but also trash cans and alleyways. And I want this party to understand when they light the body on fire you did you say that that was maybe to bring attention? Or is it to destroy evidence or both?

Thomas Hargrove: 29:02

Probably Probably speculation, but probably to destroy evidence. Does that work? Yeah, yeah. If you can burn the crime scene, you improve the chance that you didn't leave something behind that is detectable. But that having been said, I mean, Chicago is a bit of a mystery. It has an unusually high number of females, strangulations, that was Red flag number one. And then when you put names and narratives to the FBI data, and you look at those cases, it just screams serial, that, that these were women who were found outdoors, suggesting that their killers were strangers, not an intimate not a member of the family or a friend who came knocking on your door. This was someone you ran across out of doors. Stranger on stranger murders of most of many Women with histories of sex work or have drug use, or both. Those are all red flags for serial murder. Serial killers have a hard time getting access to women who will allow themselves to be alone with men. They don't know. But you know, a sex worker, that's what she does. And there was a Dallas, homicide investigator who put it to me this way, once you have, in a way you have to pity the poor, serial killer, what other woman would get into your panel van alone? So they have they have limited choices of victims. And they often target sex workers for that reason.

Chuck Shute: 30:48

And is that how they? What's up?

Thomas Hargrove: 30:51

The signs of serial murder in Chicago were everywhere. I mean, it was really very obvious to us, that, that these women, these 51 onsolve strangulations of women were not handled by 51 separate men, that just did not happen.

Chuck Shute: 31:12

Well, and you mentioned that so the locations, so that's another thing, because these are like scary places where most people don't want to go. So you think that they are luring them in in their cars and then driving them to these locations where they end up? Or are they dumping them in the locations after they've murdered them? Or?

Thomas Hargrove: 31:29

I don't know, I'm not sure I don't have access to the police reports. Hmm. It could be that most of these recovery sites are near or at where the woman was killed. It does vary in in some of the murders in Washington Park, the woman was recovered near her home. And so that does suggest or at her home on our property. So that suggests that she was killed where she was left. But it may vary. i We there are some things we don't know. We can be pretty confident that these are connected cases, we think there are two or three serial killers involved.

Chuck Shute: 32:15

Okay, so the part I don't understand. So there's very little DNA can collected. And none of the there's 21 DNA samples, is that correct? And none of them match. How is that possible then?

Thomas Hargrove: 32:27

Well, because we think that we're dealing with serial killers that don't leave their DNA at the site. The fact that there was so little there were 21 DNA samples recovered from 18 victims 18 out of 51. Okay, that alone is pretty unusual. This is strangulation murder, a very hands on kind of killing, involving sex workers predominantly. There should be lots of DNA, and that there is so little is one of the mysteries of this case. In fact, I've had conversations with Brendon Dena Han, the chief of detectives, who's gone back to check on this question, Why was there so little DNA? They're not sure. The the rate of which in which DNA is recovered from crime scenes has been growing over time in Chicago. But the opposite is true. Among these 51. Overtime, the rate at which DNA was recovered from the crime scene has declined. So much so that the last time police pulled any DNA from a murder scene among these strangulation victims, was 2011. Angela prophet. Wow, that's very, very unusual and quite quite a mystery. We don't have an answer for it. I mean, it could be that the killers are getting more adept. They're, they're learning how to kill without leaving traces. It's possible that the killer's DNA is part of those 21 cases but they don't cross match. Now, not that's not exactly accurate. So in one case, there was a woman who was murdered and DNA was recovered, and that DNA sample cross matched to a sexual assault where the victims survived. Was that Angela Ford was that I'm not gonna say who it was. Yeah. But police contacted her sister, who had been involved in sex work with her and asked the surviving victim describes a white male with a moustache, apparently pretending to have an Hispanic accent. Does that ring any bells? And the sisters said, No. I didn't meet anyone like that, huh? But there may be other cases of crossmatch The problem is they don't know who the Killer is, and we've been encouraging the police to consider familial DNA work, where you look for families of those 21 samples trying to identify the offender that way, it has been very successful. It's what caught the Golden Gate killer. In California, it can work, it's a lot of work. And again, it's not a magic bullet. And they keep saying they're going to try to do this. But we're waiting to hear the results.

Chuck Shute: 35:31

So you think it's two or three separate people that and they just all happen to have similar ways of killing and disposing of the bodies?

Thomas Hargrove: 35:39

Yes, well, so if you're a serial killer in Chicago, that's probably the way you're most likely going to practice your craft, killing out of doors, killing strangers leaving their bodies in disposal sites that are easily obtainable. So, yeah, a serial killer would naturally fall into that pattern, which was one of the reasons why the narratives of these murders was so indicative of these being connected homicides,

Chuck Shute: 36:10

but but they're all using the same method with the strangulation or fixation. There's no, none of them are stabbed, none of them are shot, none of them are hit over the head with a blunt object. So why that's a more personal way with the strangulation Is that Is that pretty common those as well with sex workers and such?

Thomas Hargrove: 36:28

It is it is common for a serial killer to stick to a method. That having been said, there's not a reason in the world to think of what you just said, is being completely true. That serial killers do mix up a little bit their methods, they may primarily stab or strangle, it may, there may be a contingency that causes them to vary, we are only able to identify these 51 because of a particular method,

Chuck Shute: 36:58

right? But I'm saying like if they're if there's two or three, isn't it interesting that they're all using the same method? Like not one of them? is using a different method? Or I mean, that seems kind of interesting to me, like, is that the most common method for serial killers?

Thomas Hargrove: 37:12

It's a common one, certainly. Because you do get the hands on contact with the victim. But again, it's possible that when they solve when they catch one of these guys, they'll find other homicides that didn't quite have this particular signature. Okay? Okay. There's no reason to think that 51 is the right number, or that it had to be strangulation in every case, no reason whatsoever.

Chuck Shute: 37:41

How smart Do you think this guy is? Like, I mean, and he must be good to not be leaving DNA? Or if it's, again, if it's two or three, I mean, maybe they're all really smart. Or I mean, they just getting lucky.

Thomas Hargrove: 37:53

Hannibal Lecter is a Hollywood fiction, that serial killers are probably, at best average intelligence, and many of them are sub average intelligence. I mean, if you had any brains at all, you wouldn't get into serial killing as a source of your amusement. I mean, that's stupid. And eventually, we hope there'll be caught. But no, these are not. These are not evil geniuses who are evading capture through their intellect. Now they're they're evading capture, because there are so many murders. There are more than 5000 unsolved murders in Chicago since 2000, approaching 6000 Now, and that's just a ton of work facing the police. They're doing the best they can. But like so many other police departments, they're overwhelmed. Mm hmm.

Chuck Shute: 38:48

So maybe average intelligence, but do you think that maybe they have techniques of law enforcement? Like is it possibly an inside job somebody with a law enforcement background like the Golden State killer, or is it just someone that maybe has watched some Forensic Files episodes, or they must know a little bit about destroying evidence?

Thomas Hargrove: 39:04

Yeah, I'm sure they watch TV and learn something from that. And as they get practice, they get better serial killer kills over and over again. And each time he knows a little bit more than the time before. So with practice comes greater abilities, I guess. It's not uncommon for a killer to evade capture for many, many years that you were growing up the Green River Killer had smaller task force, and this is one of the finest law enforcement investigations ever launched a series of multi agency, good cops who worked tirelessly for years, and they only caught him when DNA came along. And they only had two samples of all of those victims. They only had two DNA samples that cross matched that proved who it was

Chuck Shute: 40:10

really? Oh, that I didn't know. Yeah. Oh, that's

Thomas Hargrove: 40:15

also what's interesting. He was a Ridgeway was a, a suspect early on. Yeah, that's what I thought he, he passed a polygraph. They gave him a lie detector test he passed. And so he was taken off the list. How did

Chuck Shute: 40:33

he do that? And this guy, it was not like he was definitely average intelligence, right. I mean, he was like a factory worker or something. He wasn't.

Thomas Hargrove: 40:40

No, no, trust me. Ridgeway is no evil genius. Yeah. But he passed his polygraph. It's one of the reasons why courts correctly will not accept polygraph evidence as evidence because it's not reliable. And Ridgeway proved it. Yeah, he was an early suspect, because he was known to be trolling areas where sex workers plied their trade and just sort of fit the profile. But they had to take him off the list when he scored is telling the truth.

Chuck Shute: 41:13

So 48 for Ridgeway, and you said only two had evidence and also there could have been more than 48 that they just never found the bodies, right.

Thomas Hargrove: 41:23

Yeah, he says he killed more than 70. And nobody, nobody calls him a liar. The judge in the case insisted that I'm not going to just name victim 58 and say that you're guilty of that I need proof that what Ridgeway was confessing to is accurate. So they're able to document 48 victims, they weren't they didn't name them all, by the way, but they were able to prove recovered remains. But the judge quite correctly, wanted evidentiary support for the confessions that Ridgeway eventually made. He probably did kill more than 70 people. But he was convicted for 48. And until Samuel Liddell came along, he was the the lead, he was the worst serial killer in modern times.

Chuck Shute: 42:15

Yeah, so explain to my audience Samuel little, I think I'm just learning about this one myself.

Thomas Hargrove: 42:21

Yeah, so little was every cops nightmare, a mobile serial killer. He traveled the country. In fact, apparently about the only city major city where he didn't kill a woman was Chicago, just about everywhere else. He He was eventually caught when three DNA matches occurred in California. And he was convicted on the DNA. And then there was a cross match in Texas. And so a Texas Ranger went to interview him and after three days of being sworn at and yelled at, he got little to confess to killing 93 women, and they've not been able to identify all of those bodies, they're still working those identifications. I believe they've been able to hard identify about 60 of those victims. But little gets the prize for the most dangerous serial killer in modern times.

Chuck Shute: 43:34

So with littles in there 60 identified how many of those had DNA Do you know?

Thomas Hargrove: 43:40

I don't. In fact, I would really like to know that. I'd also like to know, you think a guy like that should have lit up codice that's the Combined DNA database that the FBI runs? He should have lit up codice for years and years and years. I don't think he did. I don't I'd like to know more. I wish that someone would run an analysis of of littles appearances in the CODIS database. It was kind of late in his career before he caught he'd been killing for decades. Wow,

Chuck Shute: 44:14

that's so scary. Now. So back, this is the Chicago strangler. There was a gap between 2014 and 2017, where there was no murders that that they know of, but that doesn't mean that necessarily there wasn't any they maybe just haven't found those bodies or it's possible you thought maybe he was in prison or he had health problems.

Thomas Hargrove: 44:33

Yeah, sometimes gaps can be an indicator about the killer that the killer doesn't kill during a certain period for a reason. He was out of state or in prison. That's a common reason. Serial killers usually are known to police. That's a phrase that means they've been in trouble before and they usually have a rap sheet Usually, prison time record.

Chuck Shute: 45:03

Oh, my Sorry, I lost you on the video.

Thomas Hargrove: 45:08

Are you still seeing me? Yeah,

Chuck Shute: 45:09

I'm still seeing you. Yeah. There goes. Yeah, we'll just we'll just keep talking. I think hopefully it'll come back. I think it just got a little hot here. But we'll keep talking. Yeah. So anyways, the Yeah. So the you think there's three killers, one is likely white, and two are more African American offenders. Is

Thomas Hargrove: 45:32

that correct? Yes, that's what we believe. And you think that these are all separate?

Chuck Shute: 45:37

Random killers are possibly possible that some of these killers are working together.

Thomas Hargrove: 45:42

So it has happened that killers have worked in pairs, but it's extremely, extremely rare. There is no chat side or bulletin board for serial killers. It's hard for them to find each other. And if they did, they probably wouldn't like each other. So it's rare. But it does happen. So mathematically going with the math, I'd say that these three killers are acting quite independently because that's the most likely likely scenario.

Chuck Shute: 46:15

And so Vaughn is one of them that some of these work. Some of it could have been his work. I also heard the name Arthur Hillard. Is he possibly one of the suspects,

Thomas Hargrove: 46:24

where he was arrested. And this is one for the books. He's the only case we're now down to 50 on salt strangulations. He was arrested. About a year ago, when DNA finally came back. They had some of the victims DNA in his apartment, and it was the victim and they were able to charge him with murder. They immediately announced that we suspect him of two other murders both of men. One was a man that was wheelchair bound, who's who was photographed by a security camera being thrown in a garbage can a big bin by Mr. Hilliard. Hilliard was convicted of in appropriate disposal of human remains, but not of his murder. Well, police said they think that he's guilty of that murder, and of a third murder. And I've talked to chief of detectives, Brendon Deena Han about Hilliard. This is they're thinking that Mr. Hilliard is weird enough. He's violent enough. But they're not sure he's the kind of guy that goes crawling along. Hooker walks looking for prostitutes to murder. They can't they can't put that mo to him. So they think he's a serial killer. They just don't think he's our serial killer.

Chuck Shute: 48:06

Okay, so Okay, so is there any other suspects? Or can you not say?

Thomas Hargrove: 48:11

I'm not to my knowledge. Okay. Well, the police have they think they've cleared one or two cases. I'm not sure they have. They've cleared but are unable to bring cases to court, because the State's Attorney's Office disagrees with them as to whether the evidence is sufficient. That's a common issue in law enforcement that prosecutors don't think it's a winnable case. So I don't know in in one case, that police suspect a boyfriend of one of the one of the Washington Park murders, but they they were never able to take it to trial. And what's odd was, there were two murders that occurred 24 hours apart. at opposite ends of Washington Park. Both victims were put in a large trashcan, Both victims were set on fire. Wow. Was it likely that one of those victims was killed by a boyfriend? Or was it likely that both victims were the victim of a serial killer? The the pattern is absurdly similar. So I don't know. I don't know that they their suspect is right. But you know, only only time we hope will tell. But right now, they're all part of a of a pretty large package of unsolved murders that look quite quite similar.

Chuck Shute: 49:41

Yeah. And then you're doing a great job getting this data. So what else can we can people do to help? I know you'd mentioned that Denmark is a country that has a better clearance rate for murder and then they make changes rather than incarcerating people. You know, because incarceration just makes for a better criminal. They I try to help people get back on their feet, and maybe something like that could help our country.

Thomas Hargrove: 50:05

Yeah. A few years ago, I gave a presentation for the International Homicide investigators Association. And they gave me a free lunch. And I was sitting next to the chief homicide investigator for Denmark, who was a sweet, sweet man. And to make conversation I asked him, How many murders Do you have a year in Denmark? And he said, oh, about 50. And I asked about Good heavens, that's like a slow weekend and most of our cities, how many? How many of those do you clear through arrest? And he said every year about 49. And I was just astonished that they're claiming a 98% clearance rate, which turns out to be the truth. And I told him, boy, you shouldn't be attending this conference. You should be leading it. Yeah, he is very, very interesting guy. And this is a demonstration of how we got it wrong in America. If a homicide is investigated by local police, and the police are unable to make an arrest. That's the end of it. There is no layers of review. The State Police don't call the same as that case going to have you made any progress. Is there anything we can suggest? Can we give you any resources? The federal government doesn't call to ask the same questions. None of that happens. It's all local government and local government only and that local government may be broke. In Denmark, every murder crosses this guy's desk. And if a case has gone unsolved, after a few weeks, he'll call and ask do I need to come out there? What's it going to take to clear this? Tell me what you've got, tell me what you've done so far. You need more resources, what's it going to take, and having that kind of conversation and for a local detective, to know that he or she will have to defend his work? Before a federal review, you know, this guy works for the national government probably assists and making sure that you've dotted all the i's and cross the T's. And as I was sitting with this guy talking, I was thinking I'd hate to be a killer, and have this guy on my ass. Right? Really sharp. He was probably the best homicide detective in Denmark, and he was in charge of it all. And I think it's comforting to know that there's one guy who looks at every murder, especially the unsolved murders. And we don't have that in this country, we don't have any of that.

Chuck Shute: 52:38

So that's kind of one of the biggest things that people can do is, I think, shine a light on this. That's why another one of the reasons I'm having you on here is to kind of bring attention to it, because obviously, we need more resources. That seems to be the number one thing, there's needs to be more resources to police and homicide and, and all this stuff, right.

Thomas Hargrove: 52:57

And people need to cooperate, we need to heal the relationship between police and the public that they serve. We need that. We're hoping that the data we post becomes a political force unto itself. We have urge people to go to murder data.org, click on clearance rate, call up your hometown, and look at how many murders you have, and how often those murders are cleared. And if you don't like what you see, and increasingly the odds are you won't like what you see, we hope you don't sit on that knowledge. We hope that you'll have a conversation with your mayor, your city council member, your neighborhood association president just start calling and keep calling. Yeah, you get to call. I mean, it doesn't have to be this way. And when cities do make clearing homicides a priority, they start solving more murders. And when they do that, like magic, murders start to decline. And so you get a clearance bonus that you'll get fewer murders in the future to investigate, because you've been clearing murders

Chuck Shute: 54:07

right now. That's exactly right. And it's scary to think there's these killers out there walking free, that really is upsetting. So I hope that people will, you know, do what you say and maybe share this episode or go on your website. And people can donate because you guys are nonprofit that will help with your research as well.

Thomas Hargrove: 54:26

And some expenses involved in our lawsuit. But yeah, yeah, we're all volunteer, nobody gets paid. But yeah, we'd appreciate a few donations. Primarily though, we want you to get involved in what the realities are in your town. And if you don't like what you're seeing to, to get involved. Absolutely. That's what democracy is. And democracy ultimately is the the resource that will turn this problem around. We want elected officials to know that if I don't get a handle on my murder problem, I'm going to have to run against someone who's going to campaign that he or she will.

Chuck Shute: 55:08

Right. Oh, that's great. I love that. That's perfect. Well, thank you so much for doing this. Sorry, I lost you with the camera. I can see you. And I'm glad you can at least hear me. But I appreciate you taking the time to come on the show. And I will put the website in my show notes so people can go check that out and donate if they want. And take your advice and get involved. Okay, thanks, Chuck.

Thomas Hargrove: 55:27

All right. All right. Thanks,

Chuck Shute: 55:29

Thomas. Bye. Bye, bye. Well, okay, I hope you enjoyed that interview. I know I did. And I want to thank Thomas for taking the time to come on my show. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to check out some of my other interviews. And make sure to subscribe to the show wherever you listen to watch so that you don't miss any future episodes. And please bear with us with the technical difficulties. We're changing up a lot of the equipment right now with the camera, and the lighting, and all that stuff. But when we do get it right, it's gonna be amazing. And if you're just listening to an audio, you're probably not even gonna notice a difference, because our audio has always been pretty strong for quite a while now. And if there's ever audio issues, it's usually on the guests. And unfortunately, that's just part of doing interviews on Zoom and these live streams sites, but I will continue to try and improve the show as much as I can. And I appreciate all your support and patience with this. Thank you so much. Have a great rest of your day and remember to shoot for the moon