September 1, 2021 • 46 mins
What happened to the DNA evidence associated with Hargrove's list. And what happened to Gary's backlogged rape kits?
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
You're listening to a Tenderfoot TV podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Girls.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely
those of the authors and participants and do not necessarily
represent those of iHeartMedia, Tenderfoot TV, or their employees. This
series contains discussions of violence and sexual violence. Listener discretion
is advised. Previously on Algorithm, I spoke with a caller
(00:39):
who told me about Darren Vond's ruse and her theory
about his motivation.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
His mom had to be everything about what he went
out and kieled.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
And I asked Bond's lawyer, Guiko Kasich, what led Von
to change his mind about the death penalty.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
From the very beginning is and when death I want death?
I want death. And then all of a sudden, about.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Three days, four days before we cut the play, he
changed his mind.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
I hoped that Vond might now be open to confessing
to more murders, so I sent him a letter, and
months later I received a response from Vaughn where he
agreed to an interview. I, Darren D. Vaughn would like
to offer you a deal. You would have to write
a report of the corruption that's ongoing at the Wabash
Valley correctional facility, but when I contacted the Department of Corrections,
(01:25):
they told me he wasn't interested. From iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV,
this is algorithm. I'm ben Keebrick. I think beyond a
new confession from Vaughn, one of the best chances we
have of connecting him to additional crimes is DNA. Because
of backlogs in DNA testing across the country, I wondered
(01:46):
if police had ever checked for DNA evidence associated with
the cold cases Hargrove had identified, or with other unsolved
murderers or sexual assaults in the area. I came across
an article from the Northwest Indiana Times that in twenty eighteen,
Lake County, Indiana, had found over two hundred untested rape
kits and made plans to test them. I was curious
(02:08):
what came of that effort. The article mentioned one of
the people involved was Lake County Deputy Prosecutor Nadia Wardrop,
so I reached out to her for comment. Wardrop is
one of four female deputy prosecutors who in twenty eighteen
were brought in to reform the way crimes like sexual
assault were handled. When I emailed Wardrop, she told me
(02:28):
that she wanted to talk, but said she couldn't do
so without permission and forwarded my email to their PR person.
I looped back a week later and she told me
she still hadn't gotten to go ahead, but recommended I
contact the fair Haven Rape Crisis Center. It's a nonprofit
group that was also involved in Lake County's initiative to
test their untested rape kits. I called there and spoke
(02:50):
to Becca Emerson.
Speaker 4 (02:53):
So, my name is Becca Emerson, and I am the
anti trafficking coordinator at fair Haven Rape Crisis Center.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
It turned out that Becca was actually familiar with the podcast.
Speaker 5 (03:03):
Can I ask what podcast this is? I'm a big
podcast listener, like to check out.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
So it's called Algorithm.
Speaker 5 (03:09):
Oh my god, I listened to your podcast.
Speaker 4 (03:12):
I was just listening to the one.
Speaker 5 (03:14):
Oh my god. I'm sorry. Now I'm like all Star starts.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
So when I was looking into this stuff, it looked
like in twenty seventeen, there was this statewide initiative to
look into untested rape kids.
Speaker 4 (03:27):
Yes, that is correct. So the statewide initiative was a
voluntary initiative put forward by our state to see how
many untested kits we had. Because back in twenty seventeen
was when the discussion at a nationwide level of the backlog.
Speaker 5 (03:43):
Was starting to happen. So this was a big hot topic,
and Indiana got on.
Speaker 4 (03:47):
Board and said, we need to test our kids.
Speaker 5 (03:49):
And we need to see how many we have to
do that.
Speaker 4 (03:52):
So there was this initiative. It was not mandatory, and
I believe ninety one out of our ninety two counties
did participate.
Speaker 5 (03:59):
In Lake County was one of them.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
Then I think when I was looking through the report,
you know, they asked for all their jurisdictions to report,
and it looked like maybe not all of them had.
Speaker 4 (04:10):
Yeah, Lake County did not have all of our jurisdiction's report.
Speaker 5 (04:14):
I do know that some of them did.
Speaker 4 (04:16):
And I do have those numbers, but not every jurisdiction
in Lake County participated.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
Do you happen to know which ones didn't or not?
Speaker 5 (04:26):
Off the top of my head. I do know that.
Speaker 4 (04:30):
Hammond Police Department had a pretty high number, one of
our highest cities in our county.
Speaker 5 (04:37):
But I mean, we have.
Speaker 4 (04:38):
I think fourteen different municipalities in our county. We're the
second largest county in the state. So in twenty seventeen,
Lake County came together with our sexual assault Response team
with our Prosecutor's office and said, we need to test
every single kit. We need to test all of them
going back, and we need to test every kit going forward.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
According to the audit, Lake County identified a total of
two hundred and fifty seven untested kits and they determine
that two hundred and thirty eight of those kits should
be tested. So out of this two hundred and thirty
eight kits, how many of those kits have been tested?
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Now?
Speaker 4 (05:11):
All of them we had, Like I said, I know
I can speak for ham And Police Department for sure
because I spoke to that detective directly a while ago
about it. They were taking ten kits every week to
be tested until their backlog was done. And within the
first year after rape kit reform was passed, ham And
Police Department had cleared their backlog. So all two hundred
and thirty eight have been tested as of now.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
And when you say taking ten kits, is that they're
like driving them to the lab where they do the
testing or yes.
Speaker 4 (05:41):
Sir, every person who has possession of that kit, it
needs to be documented who had it and when, so
they have to personally drive that kit to our state lab,
which is about forty five minutes away. So now what
happens when somebody reports in Lake County? The law enforcement
agency who is handling the case now has seventy two
(06:02):
hours to pick up that kit from the medical facility
where it was done, and then the lab tests all
kits that come in on a first come, first serve basis.
So sometimes it may take five to six seven weeks
for the kit to be tested, but every kit is
tested now. And now our entire state has adopted a
tracking system, so when a victim is in the hospital
(06:24):
and getting that exam done, they are given a pin
number so that anytime the victim can go into the
database and see where her kit is so they can
look and see, Okay, it was picked up by law enforcement. Okay,
now it was dropped off at the lab. Okay, now
the lab is testing it.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
So I think I was reading online that the original
plan was to dispose of kits that were like older
than ten years old unless the victim came forward and
specifically requested that their kit got tested. Do you know
what happened with that?
Speaker 4 (06:58):
As far as my understanding, all kits up through twenty
oh seven were tested.
Speaker 5 (07:03):
But I do know that some of our.
Speaker 4 (07:04):
Jurisdictions in our county went back even further and just
tested all of their kits, So there were some that
were tested from prior to ten years.
Speaker 5 (07:15):
Prior to that.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
So some places went back and tested older kids. But
you're not sure about the details of that.
Speaker 5 (07:24):
Oh, I'm not okay.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
You know, I'm kind of curious about that, specifically with
the algorithm stuff, because you know, there might have been
this this serial killer active and kind of like the
nineties to early two thousands. You know, just be interesting
if if there were any kits from that period that
(07:47):
we're getting tested.
Speaker 5 (07:49):
Absolutely.
Speaker 4 (07:50):
Unfortunately I don't know personally, but I mean, if you
find out, let me know, because I've been following algorithms,
so this case is very interesting to me as well.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
I asked doctor Lovell, the researcher that was involved in
Cleveland's sexual Assault kid initiative, whether destroying rape kits was common.
They said they would only test the kits going back
ten years, and that they were going to like throw
away their old kits unless victims came forward and said
that they wanted them still tested. And you know it
(08:22):
seems like costant basically nothing to keep those kits and
kind of you never know even if you don't have
the resources to do it. Now you know that things
will get cheaper and stuff like that.
Speaker 6 (08:33):
Yeah, I think, and we've seen that as well, and
there's been some I think political. Maybe it was CNN,
I can't remember. Anyway, they did a pretty extensive analysis
of destroying rape kits and destroying evidence.
Speaker 3 (08:45):
I found the article level was referring to. CNN had
surveyed over two hundred police departments across all fifty states
and found that almost half of them had destroyed some
untested kits. Sometimes these kids had been destroyed improperly, and
other times they're destroyed in accordance with policy.
Speaker 6 (09:03):
I think you see that quite a bit, that law enforcement.
They all make their their own policies around how long
they keep evidence. Some of them are mandated now by states,
so Ohio now has uh I think it's the thirty
years that they have to keep biological evidence. But you know,
if they're following their practices, which they have you know,
(09:24):
written out, and they say, oh, we only keep things
ten years, otherwise we destroy it, I think some of
those practices need to be re examined, and that means
that you know, tax payers have to fit the bill
to provide more storage facilities. But you know that to
me doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem. And I think
if the technology for DNA is telling us anything, it's
(09:45):
that it's growing so fast and exponentially getting so much
better that you know what, we couldn't get a DNA
profile from now ten years from now, who knows. I mean,
look at what genealogy testing has done, you know. So
the thought that jurisdictions would just throw away evidence would
suggest to me that they somehow think that what they're
(10:06):
doing now has reached the pinnacle of all technology and
that their investigative practices at the time were the best
that they could possibly ever be, two things that I
think you just can't assume. And it's a little disconcerting
to hear about sort of putting all of the onus
onto victims to reach out to the department and say, hey,
I know I had this kit. I thought you tested it.
(10:27):
How was I to know you didn't test it? And
the cost of testing, by the way, as I said,
has gone down quite dramatically, So just the testing is
about five hundred dollars in Ohio, and then to have
someone you know read the results and write a report
is about another five hundred dollars. So you know, you're
really talking about one thousand dollars per kit, which in
the criminal justice system isn't a huge cost, you know,
(10:51):
relative to the outcomes.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
I followed up with the Wake County Prosecutor's office to
see if they had more information about what had happened
to their older kids. I also wanted to know which
jurisdictions within Lake County had participated in the audit. And
I've been trying to get answers to these questions since
the first.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
Week of July.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
It's now the last week of August and I've still
heard nothing. And it's important to get answers to these questions.
When you claim you've solved your rape kit backlog, there's
a big difference between doing a proper accounting of all
backlog kits and testing them and doing a partial accounting
and then throwing away a substantial number of kits. After
(11:31):
radio silence from the Lake County Prosecutor's Office, I continued digging.
I came across another article about the initiative from the
Chicago Tribune. It mentions that out of the two hundred
and fifty seven kits found in the audit, one hundred
and ninety four were found in Hammond, thirty one in
East Chicago, and twenty two in Maryville. So if you
add up those numbers, two hundred and forty seven of
(11:53):
the kits were found from those jurisdictions alone. That leaves
a maximum of ten kits that could have been found
in Gary, despite the fact that Hammond found one hundred
and ninety four kits and they have an almost identical
population to Gary. I think the most parsimonious explanation here
is that Gary didn't participate in the audit, and it's
unclear to what extent they've kept backlog kits or tested them.
(12:17):
I was also curious about why Lake County had chosen
to destroy kits more than ten years old. That would
mean they would not include kids from two thousand and
seven or before. Interestingly, two thousand and seven is the
last year that Hargrove's algorithm observed an increase in unsolved strangulations,
and Vaughan was arrested the very next year. I wondered
(12:42):
at first whether ten years might be the statute of
limitations for rape in Indiana, but when I looked into it,
type one felony rape has no statute of limitations in Indiana,
So it's unclear to me why those kits would not
be preserved. But even if Lake County had retained and
tested all their kits, it wouldn't necessarily be able to
(13:03):
link Darren Vaughn to a homicide only to a sexual
assault because the twenty seventeen initiative in Indiana and most
of the initiatives to address rape kit backlogs don't include
DNA from homicide victims.
Speaker 5 (13:16):
I do believe that.
Speaker 4 (13:17):
This statewide audit was only for kits taken from a
victim in a hospital.
Speaker 5 (13:21):
I don't know if any.
Speaker 4 (13:23):
Of them were taken from homicide victims.
Speaker 6 (13:26):
In Kyga County, if there was a murder rape, it
went to the homicide unit as compared to the sex
crimes unit. So if there was a rape, no homicide it,
it was investigated differently and went to different units. So
for the rape kits that we look at, there wasn't
murders as part of that. There were rape homicides, but
(13:48):
those were sort of in a different category.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
Yeah, and so you guys didn't go back and look
at those homicide associated ones as well.
Speaker 6 (13:57):
Not as part of the sexual salt kit initiative, but
I know that Kyga County Prosecutor's office might also be
looking at some of the rape homicides because there's funding
now at the federal level to do some of that doing.
I think what you're talking about here sort of expanding
out the scope of it.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
In fact, last October, the Cuyahoga Prosecutor's Office announced that
it had received a million dollar grant from the US
Department of Justice to continue their sexual assault kit testing program,
and part of that grant includes a pilot project to
do forensic genealogy on thirty two samples from sexually motivated homicides.
(14:37):
Forensic genealogy is the technique that was used to catch
the Golden State killer. It doesn't just look for complete
matches with someone on the CODIS database, but looks for
partial matches and CODIS and public DNA databases to find
relatives of the perpetrator. Then genealogical techniques and further investigation
can be used to identify the offender. Other grants from
(15:00):
the Department of Justice or funding similar efforts to help
solve cold case homicides. It appears, though, that the emphasis
is on going back to cold cases where a DNA
profile of the perpetrator had already been generated, but that
they had never matched it to a suspect, and the
grants give money to use forensic genealogy to try to
find that match. I couldn't find any grants funding going
(15:22):
back and doing an accounting of all the cold case evidence.
Doctor Lovell wonders if an approach similar to Cuyahoga County's
sexual assault kit initiative might benefit homicide investigations as well.
Speaker 6 (15:34):
Sachi, you know, as successful as it has been, I
think it shows that there's great value in going to
the cold cases in cold case homicides as well and
really trying to see is there evidence that could be tested.
Is there something in terms of genealogy that could be
done where all the evidence tested, you know, was it
tested using current techniques or was it only tested for zerology?
(15:57):
You know, things like that that they're starting to ask
those questions.
Speaker 3 (16:02):
Last July, over a year ago now, I'd reached out
to the Lake County corners to try to find out
more information about the victims Hargrove had identified. I was
curious if DNA evidence was collected and if it was
ever tested and submitted to CODIS, the federal DNA database.
I was unable to get answers from the coroner's department
about these cases, perhaps because they were unsolved and therefore
(16:25):
still open. I'm not sure, but I wonder to what
extent older samples from cold cases have gone untested the
way rape kits were. I hope that DNA evidence from
old homicides like this have been preserved, and I hope
if they haven't been tested yet, one day they will
be investigating the algorithm and then Darren Vaughan has been
(17:00):
a roller coaster. It wasn't at all what I imagined
when I first began working on this project. And sometimes
I feel I've gotten so far off my original path
that I worry that I've gotten lost, that I'm missing
something big, or maybe missing the forest for the trees.
And sometimes I find myself wondering what's the point of
solving these cold cases in the first place. Of course,
(17:23):
they could potentially lead to the arrest of a violent criminal,
a perpetrator who might kill again. But if we're looking
specifically for a connection to Vaughan, then what's the point
if he's already serving life in prison. I was hoping
to find a connection to previous crimes to prove that
Hargrove's algorithm had predictive value, that it was able to
(17:44):
identify an active serial killer before the police did, and
therefore that it would be a valuable tool for law enforcement.
I think there's no doubt that the algorithm identified that
something very unusual was going on in Gary with its
identification of fifteen unsolved strangulations over a sixteen year period.
I think it's very possible that some of these murders
(18:05):
were the work of Vaughan or another serial killer. On
the other hand, Gary is a very unusual city where
many murders go unsolved, and it's a city full of
abandoned buildings where bodies can be hidden or even dumped
from homicides and other jurisdictions.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
So is this algorithm perfect? No? Can it produce false results? Absolutely.
What we tell people always is what the algorithm does
is to identify clusters of murders that have an elevated
probability of containing serial murder. That just means if the
(18:43):
FBI says that serial murder occurs in less than one
percent of all homicides. We no longer believe that, but
that's the official reckoning for how common serial murder is. Well,
if less than one percent of murders are likely to
be serial, our algorithm will do better than that. It
will identify murders that have a better than one percent
(19:04):
probability of containing serial murders. It turns out way better
than one percent. We frequently are determining cases that are connected.
But there is a failure rate, and what are some
of the things that can go south on the algorithm.
If you have a police department that has a relentlessly
(19:25):
low clearance rate, like the Flint, Michigan Police Department, everything
looks serial because there's a low clearance rate for every
kind of murder, and there's not much you can do
about that. And that's a problem because we're becoming less
and less likely to solve a murder. In the United
States today, there are dozens of major cities where most
(19:47):
murders go unsolved. That means we're going to get false
positives because of the algorithm's technique. We're trying to overcome
those challenges, and we have actually We've made some improvements
in the methods, but it's a problem.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
I want to look at the algorithm and the ways
it might be better used shortly, but first I want
to get hypothetical for a moment. Let's say we found
evidence that Vaughn was connected to one or more murders
on the algorithm's list, proof that Hargrove was right in
his twenty ten letter. What should police have done. Create
a task force to look into evidence that might connect
(20:27):
the crimes, notify the public, and what if police find
something more concrete, like DNA evidence or firearm forensics that
definitively link multiple murders, does the public have a right
to know that information, even though publicizing that information could
let the killer know the detectives are onto them. It
(20:48):
seems to me that in a situation like Vonn's twenty
fourteen murders and Gary, where the victims share characteristics, that
the police would have had some obligation to warn other
possible victims. But it's hard for the police to stop
a future homicide from taking place, and in the case
of Vaughn's twenty fourteen murders and Gary, police weren't even
(21:08):
aware of the murders until after Vaughn's arrest. There was
a strong suggestion that some of the victims, like Tira Batty,
had been murdered thanks to Marvin Clinton's own investigation, But
without discovering the bodies and submitting supplemental homicide reports to
the FBI, Hargrove's algorithm wouldn't have been able to detect
the cluster of Vonn's twenty fourteen crimes. That made me
(21:30):
curious about how many missing persons there are out there,
and how many of them are really homicide victims. So
I called up Todd Matthews and then to get the
levels on my end. Can you tell me what you
had for breakfast this morning?
Speaker 1 (21:45):
I had coffee. I had about five cups of coffee today.
I'm like a snake, ill like it once a day.
Just ate something nice and solid.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
After he helped identify it Jane Doe through webslew Thing,
Matthews founded the Dough Network in nineteen ninety nine. It
was a national database for missing persons and also unidentified bodies,
with the hopes of connecting John and Jane Doe's to
missing person reports. Similar to Hargrove, Matthews realized that police
departments struggle with solving these kinds of cases, So we
(22:15):
decided to create the Dough Network as a tool to
help police officers and amateur slews with their investigations.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
That person could be alive and well, you don't know
their circumstances. Some people it's mental illness, some it's dementia,
drug abuse. Sometimes an accident, sometimes it's murdered. You just
never know what you're going.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
To get In almost a decade after Matthews created the
Dough Network, the Department of Justice decided they wanted to
make their own official version called NamUs. That's nam us,
and they brought in Matthews to help.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
The Department of Justice actually first contacted me with NamUs
in two thousand and seven to help them do what
DO Network proved was possible.
Speaker 3 (22:57):
Like the DO Network, nemusless information like a missing person's demographics,
when and where they were last seen, and a description
of the circumstances of how they want missing. All that
is available to the public. But with NAMIS, detectives working
on the case can log in and access additional items
the evidence.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
You know, something that though network wouldn't necessarily have its
hands on like the dental records, DNA fingerprint analysis.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
Do you have a sense of kind of to what
extent technology is being used in terms of police checking
cell phone records or credit card records, things like that.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
You do see a lot of that, you know, pinging
the cell phone and then if a cell phone's been disabled.
You know, that kind of leads you to think of
foul play possibly, But it is getting better as far
if you if you swipe a card or carry a phone.
It's hard to go missing. It's not easy to be
a missing person and still work a sleep, you know,
do something. It's it's hard to make yourself missing on
(23:57):
purpose now, for the good or the bad. It's just
harder to do it. And but it's going to happen.
You know, people are going to be able to get
around some of those things. They truly want to be missing.
And that's where some of the privacy concerns come in.
You know, if I want to go missing, can I
is it morally okay for me to just allow my
family to think that I'm you know, I don't know
where I am. Yeah, a lot of issues, a lot
(24:18):
of things to think about.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
This podcast is kind of looking into the work of
this serial killer, and he was caught for one murder,
confessed to six more murders, and led the police to
their bodies. You know, some of them had been reported
missing at that point. Others hadn't even been reported missing.
I guess I'm curious of just like, how how good
(24:43):
of a sense do we have of how big this
problem actually is, and kind of are we doing everything
we can be doing to keep track of this stuff
and monitor it.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Well, it's a silent mass disaster. It's called the nation's
silent mass disaster because of the time frames the distances.
Speaker 3 (25:03):
According to NIMUS, there are currently over twenty thousand missing
person cases is. Some of those will be resolved quickly
with the missing person found alive and safe, but some
are people who have been killed but their body was
never found where if it was found, they're a John
or Jane Doe waiting to be identified. But Matthew says
the database isn't yet comprehensive. Whether cases get entered into
(25:27):
NAMIS varies from state to state and jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
My homestead of Tennessee, I work with local officials and
in thirty days in Tennessee, you're supposed to go if
you're missing or unidentified in Tennessee within thirty days, you're
supposed to go on the name of this website. Now, whether
that happens or not, you know, there's no punishment phase
or not. And the requiring of use of names in
state law actually does other things. It begins a training
(25:55):
process with law enforcements, so it now will be part
of the training academies so that they know the laws
that are required. And eventually, you know, things will change,
and I think we planned a lot of stats that
are going to grow and evolve knowledge. It's going to
get better, and I think we're all going to get
better at it. It just seems like it takes so long.
If you're the family member of a missing you know,
(26:16):
two seconds is a very painful time period. You know,
there's probably nothing more scary than having a missing family
member and you have no control over it. You have
no idea if they're alive, they're dead, they're hungry, they're cold.
You know, you have no idea of what to do
or even word again looking you know, that's probably one
of the most helpless feelings as described to me people
(26:37):
that have done it all been described very similarly, the
most helpless feeling that they've ever had. You know, I've
had people I've known for years and they know of
my work and recognize and appreciate it, and then suddenly
they're in that situation. That's when things change dramatically. You know,
(26:58):
you don't know until you're sitting in that chair, you
don't know how bad it can be. Literally, there's a
local missing person and I've known the boy's aunt for
more than twenty years. Now I hear from her more frequently.
They're looking for him. He's a young adult, he's had
some drug issues, and he might not necessarily be on
the top of the list for law enforcement to look for. Yeah,
(27:20):
it doesn't change her situation. He's still her nephew and
she wants him found. Now. I don't blame her. And
it's just by the time you realize how bad it
can be, you're probably already snake bit, you know.
Speaker 3 (27:35):
And when you say, like, not at the top of
the list for law enforcement to look for, what what
do you mean by that?
Speaker 1 (27:41):
Well, a lot of times if somebody has had some trouble,
it's just like, well are they missing or they just
stand out of the way, have they done something? Are
they hiding out for some reason? So it's just hard
to sometimes see somebody that they might recognize as a
criminal as a vulnerable victim. Now, I know the local
boy that's missing, he has a really bad case of
(28:01):
diabetes and he cannot survive with that medication. So unless
he's found some way to buy medication some were he
can't have survived. And his family knows that. So where's
he at? So now into like day sixty five of
his disappearance, the family realized that he can't survive. He's
not come back to them, and it's getting way down
(28:21):
the line now, you know. Now it's recovery of remains
instead of finding somebody potentially in a bad situation.
Speaker 3 (28:29):
Does that police attitude frustrate you or do you think
that that is just kind of the way that it is.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
It is the way that it is. It does get
frustrating at time, especially when you know somebody like this person.
I knew that family, and it's always this my son
and never do that. Yeah, will my daughter didn't have
a tattoo? Maybe she did, you just didn't know about it.
So you're going to hear somebody say my child would
never do that. My adult child would never, ever, ever
ever not call me. And most of the time it's
(28:59):
just like, well, maybe it is possible. But then when
you do know people and you know who they are
and their story is really making sense, and it's like, yeah,
you're you're right. Probably would not be without medication for
this period of time, So something's wrong. Even though he
might have done things that put him on the wrong
side of the law, ultimately he is in danger. So
(29:20):
we have to think about this differently. So it is
frustrating at times, but understand because when I was with
Department of Justice with NamUs, the volume of people reaching
out can be overwhelming. So I can see how you
can quickly get frustrated getting multiple calls, and we have
to make it easier to do. We have to make
more tools available to the family. They can enter their
own missing person case and name us. They can start
(29:42):
the ball rolling, so instead of waiting for law enforcement
to it, they can start the process. They'll have to
be validated, but at least it gives them something to
do instead of waiting for somebody to come and help them.
They can start the process. Because when you're getting validation
reports coming back from a program that's developed by the
Department of Justice. I mean, I think they're not just
going to tell Justice Agency how they'll be bad. We're
(30:03):
not going to look for him, you know. I think
once they see that, we don't really need you to
create a profile. US has a profile kind of takes
a little bit out of their control and has that helped.
It has helped, It's helped tremendously as it cleared it
up completely.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
No, when you kind of like look really big picture,
is there a direction that we're heading with technology or
the way we investigate stuff.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
It's only going to improve ultimately. You know, it's going
to be quicker to do the DNA test, encouraging the families.
Like every at one point in time, every singer at
my local high school's fingerprinted because I will go and
bring local law enforcement in the forensic class and will
thumb print everybody or fingerprintedy rdy to get a ten
print and then you know, you put it away and
God forbid, I hope I never have to see it again.
(30:48):
So there's there's lots of things that can be done,
but I mean it's at some price. You know, you
are going to have to think about things that make
you uncomfortable, and you know, thinking of a person that
might be deceased, and that's not what you want, but
it is what it is. We're all going to die eventually,
and I think we can accept a natural death. It's
just we're not programmed to have a missing person. There's
(31:09):
no funeral, there's no closure, there's no explanation for it.
There's no way to process. I've seen families grow stronger
as a result of it, and then they go on
to pass state laws and advocate and make sure nobody
suffers what they suffer. I've seen other families deteriorate because
of it because there's no way to move on. It
just can be devastating. I had a local lady that
(31:31):
her son's been missing for many years and she wanted
to show me something. She tuk me to the grave.
She actually had a tombstone put up for her son
next to her and her husband. She goes, if we're gone,
can you make sure he's buried here? If his body's found.
She's given up. You know, she's she knows that she's
at the end, and she's getting older, and you know
(31:52):
it's going to become more and more difficult for her
to try to find, and her hope of finding him
during her lifetime is fading, and she only ones now
is can you make sure he's buried here? Will you
let him know our wishes? I don't want him lay
in a lab in a box. You know, I can say,
you know what, I'll do everything in Yeah, I know
your wishes and I'll make them known. You know. I
have to think about will I even be around when
(32:14):
his body's found? If it's found, so I think the
best way to do is to tell that story, mention
it somewhere, and then you know, that's it. You just
have to share.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
When I began researching this show, I asked myself the question,
with all the data we're collecting, storing, sorting, why is
it that we're getting worse at solving homicides When it
comes to policing. We are starting to do more with data,
but we're not really doing it in any kind of
systematic way. I think it's reasonable to worry about new
(33:01):
technologies like facial recognition, that they might be moving our
country towards some sort of surveillance state. But I think
the real nightmare right now is much more banal. We're
missing important connections we could be making and letting killers
go free. One of the things that surprised me about
Hargrove's algorithm was how simple it was. This wasn't some
(33:23):
sort of deep learning neural network getting fed mountains of data.
It was a simple, handcrafted algorithm getting basic demographic information
about the victims along with the method of killing year
in jurisdiction. And you can imagine that with richer data
and a more involved algorithm, patterns might emerge more clearly.
(33:44):
In fact, Hargrove has been working on an updated algorithm.
I know you said, you know that you're still in
publication for the algorithm two point zero. Is there anything
you can talk about that.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
We want to get into a peer review journal, and
so we're still writing. I can tell you that what
is different about the newer version of the algorithm is
it dynamic evaluates each murder. What the old algorithm did
was just to create a group and then to assess
(34:15):
what the clearance rate was for the group. The new
algorithm individually assesses each murder and then decides whether or
not that murder looks suspicious and that individual assessment is
better and so it definitely is an improvement over the
old and so once we get it published, we'll make
it available. But we need that confirmation that we're onto something,
(34:39):
and so we need others to look at it. And
right now we're struggling with following the format for pure
reviewed publications. And apparently one of our reviewers is a
former cop and took offense to what we did. I
guess he or she thought that the algorithm made police
look bad. I don't understand that, because we've got several
(35:03):
former cops on the list of authors with this project,
that it's not our intent to ever make law enforcement
look bad. We're just trying to provide a new tool
and the toolkit.
Speaker 3 (35:16):
I'm hoping that a bunch of people listen to this podcast,
and some of them might be data scientists or people
like that. And I was curious, if someone wants to
help you with this kind of work, they have some
idea of something they want to try with the data,
is that something you're interested in.
Speaker 2 (35:35):
We make our data available. If you go to murder
data dot org and go to the data and docs tab,
you can download everything, absolutely everything, the original algorithm and
the raw data, and we encourage folks to use the
data and see if they can come up with something useful.
(35:56):
We are hoping that someone may be able to get
artificial intelligence to do clever things with these records. So far,
all attempts that have been made have not been successful,
but that doesn't mean something good mightn't happen in the future.
So we're hoping that bright people will take free data
and see if they can come up with something clever.
Speaker 3 (36:20):
At the beginning of the podcast, I also mentioned as
startling statistic that homicides today are being cleared at a
much lower rate than in previous decades. No one knows
exactly why the clearance rate for homicides is decreasing, but
Hargarve has some ideas.
Speaker 2 (36:37):
Murder begets murder, and unsolved murder really begets murder. When
most killings go unsolved, there starts to develop a narrative
that the only way I'm going to get justice for
my loved ones is to take the law into my
own hands. Also, murderers who walk the street are available
to kill again. Why wouldn't they they got away with
(36:59):
it the first time. We are convinced that serial murder
is much much more common than anyone ever dreamed of,
even in their ninth Mars. Now, that's not to say
that serial sexual murder is on the rise. It's not.
The traditional Hollywood kind of serial killer is definitely on
the decline. But the statistical serial killer, anyone who kills
(37:24):
two or more people in separate incidents, that really is
is certainly more common than is recognized. It is quite
likely that the most common type of serial murder is
the gang enforcer on a local street gang. How many
of those killings get solved? I mean, increasingly, people who
(37:45):
have gotten an adept at committing murder and getting away
with it are just getting away with it. We believe
that the decline in homicide clearance rate is primarily driven
by a lack of leadership, a lack of public passion
that murders should be solved, a lack of re sources
(38:08):
for homicide detectives, a lack of accountability. The clearance rate
for homicides should be a metric that policymakers carefully follow
in determining whether or not a police department is effective.
When mayors of cities pledge to get a handle on
their murder problem, generally speaking, the murder rate starts to drop.
(38:33):
Improved clearance rates will reduce the rate of which murder occurs.
It's not easy and it's not cheap. Increasingly there's a
competition for limited resources in major cities. Many cities cannot
afford their pension plan. I mean, the fiscal challenges for
modern government are becoming extreme. We in America have to
(38:57):
make major crimes a higher priority. We cannot dismiss murders
because well, just the kinds of people that get murdered
I don't care about, which I'm afraid maybe part of
the dreadful calculus as to what's happened. It is our
hope at the Murder Accountability Project that our data become
a political force. That people can look up the rate
(39:19):
at which murders are cleared in their communities, and if
they don't like what they see, they should have a
conversation with their mayor and their city council members. That
unsolved murder is simply unacceptable.
Speaker 3 (39:31):
And Hargrove's analysis of the declining clearance rate for murder
shows that it is driven by homicides where the victim
is black.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
The entirety of that declining homicide clearance rate was born
by African American victims. In cases of Caucasian murder, Asian murder,
Native American murder, those murders are about as likely to
be solved today as they were fifty years ago. That's
(39:59):
just a fact, and we should never ignore what the
data show us today.
Speaker 3 (40:04):
If your loved one is murdered and they're white, there's
over a six seventy five percent chance someone will be
arrested for the crime. If they're black, the chance someone
will be arrested drops below sixty percent, And the chance
of being murdered is much higher for Black Americans, particularly
young black men. As I mold over these statistics, I
(40:26):
kept thinking back to my interview with Kerrie Rice, the
police officer who responded to Vaughan's gasoline incident. When I
googled him, I saw an article about how one of
his sons had been shot and killed.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
You know.
Speaker 3 (40:39):
I saw that your family has kind of personally been
affected by violent crime, yea, And I was just wondering
if you wanted to talk a little bit about that
and how it, you know, if it has changed the
perspective on the work that you do.
Speaker 7 (40:57):
Like I say I have, I've had a lot of
family members killed in this city all the way back
far of ninety eight, but my nephew was Kilo actually
before that and eighty six my older brother was killed.
It really didn't affect me too much and doing my job.
(41:19):
I know, I still had a job to do, and
I did it, and it really, you know, after a while,
you don't think about it too much. The last two
people in my family actually they had two sons that
were killed within in the past year.
Speaker 3 (41:33):
So yeah, I mean, I guess it's homicide is one
of the leading causes of death for young black men.
And you know, I don't know if you have any
thoughts from kind of your perspective and law enforcement or
just in general what people can do as individuals or
(41:54):
what we can do as a broader society to change that.
Speaker 7 (42:00):
Well, I really believe that there's two main things that
need to be done, and one of them I was doing.
I was running truancy court, making sure the kids went
to school and got an education. And it's a shame
that you have to make Some parents actually send their.
Speaker 1 (42:17):
Kids to school, but.
Speaker 7 (42:18):
They just don't understand how that affects a kid when
they get older. I guarantee you at least seventy percent
of people we arrest here. And Geary, you don't have
a high school diploma, and I think that fees into
the crime because everybody gonna grow up, everybody gonna want things,
and you can't even reason fell out application your you know,
(42:39):
your job.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
Choices are limited.
Speaker 7 (42:41):
So uh.
Speaker 1 (42:42):
And another thing.
Speaker 7 (42:43):
That I really think need to be addressed is mental health.
You have a lot of females and if it's sexually
molested and never got any treatment. They had a lot
of males they have missed either sexually molested or have
been in the car with somebody around somebody and they
got shot and killed, or they've been shot before and
they patched the body up, but they never talked to
(43:05):
them about the mental issues. And you know, most men,
they refuse to be a happen me and I like say,
after what happened, you know in my family, I had
to go, and I'm glad I went. But the average person,
average male, don't want to go and they just don't
understand unless they need it. But that's a lot of it,
you know, the lack of education and people been abused
(43:28):
and have no clue even now how that's really affecting
their everyday decisions.
Speaker 3 (43:35):
Hargrove's algorithm can definitely highlight a place where something is
going wrong, but when it comes to preventing future homicides,
I don't think technology is going to provide us with
any magic bullets. The real solutions are going to be
less glamorous. They're solutions that sound almost like cliches, things
we already know we should be doing. Supporting children and
(43:59):
protecting them from abuse, providing mental health services, cleaning up
neighborhoods and demolishing derelict buildings, and taking violent crime seriously,
regardless of who the victim is or where the crime
took place. This is the end of the weekly episodes
(44:20):
of Algorithm, but it's not the end of the show.
Many factors facilitated Darren Vond's killing spree, and there's still
some angles I'd like to explore. I've already got bonus
episodes planned and ideas for another season, but I'd love
to hear your questions and your ideas. Please reach out
to me or call and leave a voicemail at eight
(44:40):
eight eight five zero one three three zero nine. We're
going to have another Q and A episode soon, and
if you haven't yet. Please do you subscribe to our
podcast speeds you don't miss any updates and you can
find all this information and the social media for the
podcast in the show notes. This episode was written and
produced by me ben Keebrick Algorithm is executive produced by
(45:03):
Alex Williams, Donald Albright, and Matt Frederick. Production assistance and
mix by Eric Quintana. The music is by Makeup and
Vanity Set and Blue Doot Sessions. Thanks to Christina Dana,
Miranda Hopkins, Jamie Albright, Rima l k Ali, Trevor Young,
and Josh Thain for their help and notes. For more
(45:25):
podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 (45:39):
You know, the awful truth is you could just about
pick any major American city and take a shovel. I
promise you. Serial murder is more common than we ever
want to believe. If this project ends up having legs,
Atlanta would be a good place to go. Frankly, that's
the largest cluster our computer knows about. In fact, he
(45:59):
was of the opinion that some of these might be
solvable
You're listening to a Tenderfoot TV podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Girls.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely
those of the authors and participants and do not necessarily
represent those of iHeartMedia, Tenderfoot TV, or their employees. This
series contains discussions of violence and sexual violence. Listener discretion
is advised. Previously on Algorithm, I spoke with a caller
(00:39):
who told me about Darren Vond's ruse and her theory
about his motivation.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
His mom had to be everything about what he went
out and kieled.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
And I asked Bond's lawyer, Guiko Kasich, what led Von
to change his mind about the death penalty.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
From the very beginning is and when death I want death?
I want death. And then all of a sudden, about.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Three days, four days before we cut the play, he
changed his mind.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
I hoped that Vond might now be open to confessing
to more murders, so I sent him a letter, and
months later I received a response from Vaughn where he
agreed to an interview. I, Darren D. Vaughn would like
to offer you a deal. You would have to write
a report of the corruption that's ongoing at the Wabash
Valley correctional facility, but when I contacted the Department of Corrections,
(01:25):
they told me he wasn't interested. From iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV,
this is algorithm. I'm ben Keebrick. I think beyond a
new confession from Vaughn, one of the best chances we
have of connecting him to additional crimes is DNA. Because
of backlogs in DNA testing across the country, I wondered
(01:46):
if police had ever checked for DNA evidence associated with
the cold cases Hargrove had identified, or with other unsolved
murderers or sexual assaults in the area. I came across
an article from the Northwest Indiana Times that in twenty eighteen,
Lake County, Indiana, had found over two hundred untested rape
kits and made plans to test them. I was curious
(02:08):
what came of that effort. The article mentioned one of
the people involved was Lake County Deputy Prosecutor Nadia Wardrop,
so I reached out to her for comment. Wardrop is
one of four female deputy prosecutors who in twenty eighteen
were brought in to reform the way crimes like sexual
assault were handled. When I emailed Wardrop, she told me
(02:28):
that she wanted to talk, but said she couldn't do
so without permission and forwarded my email to their PR person.
I looped back a week later and she told me
she still hadn't gotten to go ahead, but recommended I
contact the fair Haven Rape Crisis Center. It's a nonprofit
group that was also involved in Lake County's initiative to
test their untested rape kits. I called there and spoke
(02:50):
to Becca Emerson.
Speaker 4 (02:53):
So, my name is Becca Emerson, and I am the
anti trafficking coordinator at fair Haven Rape Crisis Center.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
It turned out that Becca was actually familiar with the podcast.
Speaker 5 (03:03):
Can I ask what podcast this is? I'm a big
podcast listener, like to check out.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
So it's called Algorithm.
Speaker 5 (03:09):
Oh my god, I listened to your podcast.
Speaker 4 (03:12):
I was just listening to the one.
Speaker 5 (03:14):
Oh my god. I'm sorry. Now I'm like all Star starts.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
So when I was looking into this stuff, it looked
like in twenty seventeen, there was this statewide initiative to
look into untested rape kids.
Speaker 4 (03:27):
Yes, that is correct. So the statewide initiative was a
voluntary initiative put forward by our state to see how
many untested kits we had. Because back in twenty seventeen
was when the discussion at a nationwide level of the backlog.
Speaker 5 (03:43):
Was starting to happen. So this was a big hot topic,
and Indiana got on.
Speaker 4 (03:47):
Board and said, we need to test our kids.
Speaker 5 (03:49):
And we need to see how many we have to
do that.
Speaker 4 (03:52):
So there was this initiative. It was not mandatory, and
I believe ninety one out of our ninety two counties
did participate.
Speaker 5 (03:59):
In Lake County was one of them.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
Then I think when I was looking through the report,
you know, they asked for all their jurisdictions to report,
and it looked like maybe not all of them had.
Speaker 4 (04:10):
Yeah, Lake County did not have all of our jurisdiction's report.
Speaker 5 (04:14):
I do know that some of them did.
Speaker 4 (04:16):
And I do have those numbers, but not every jurisdiction
in Lake County participated.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
Do you happen to know which ones didn't or not?
Speaker 5 (04:26):
Off the top of my head. I do know that.
Speaker 4 (04:30):
Hammond Police Department had a pretty high number, one of
our highest cities in our county.
Speaker 5 (04:37):
But I mean, we have.
Speaker 4 (04:38):
I think fourteen different municipalities in our county. We're the
second largest county in the state. So in twenty seventeen,
Lake County came together with our sexual assault Response team
with our Prosecutor's office and said, we need to test
every single kit. We need to test all of them
going back, and we need to test every kit going forward.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
According to the audit, Lake County identified a total of
two hundred and fifty seven untested kits and they determine
that two hundred and thirty eight of those kits should
be tested. So out of this two hundred and thirty
eight kits, how many of those kits have been tested?
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Now?
Speaker 4 (05:11):
All of them we had, Like I said, I know
I can speak for ham And Police Department for sure
because I spoke to that detective directly a while ago
about it. They were taking ten kits every week to
be tested until their backlog was done. And within the
first year after rape kit reform was passed, ham And
Police Department had cleared their backlog. So all two hundred
and thirty eight have been tested as of now.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
And when you say taking ten kits, is that they're
like driving them to the lab where they do the
testing or yes.
Speaker 4 (05:41):
Sir, every person who has possession of that kit, it
needs to be documented who had it and when, so
they have to personally drive that kit to our state lab,
which is about forty five minutes away. So now what
happens when somebody reports in Lake County? The law enforcement
agency who is handling the case now has seventy two
(06:02):
hours to pick up that kit from the medical facility
where it was done, and then the lab tests all
kits that come in on a first come, first serve basis.
So sometimes it may take five to six seven weeks
for the kit to be tested, but every kit is
tested now. And now our entire state has adopted a
tracking system, so when a victim is in the hospital
(06:24):
and getting that exam done, they are given a pin
number so that anytime the victim can go into the
database and see where her kit is so they can
look and see, Okay, it was picked up by law enforcement. Okay,
now it was dropped off at the lab. Okay, now
the lab is testing it.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
So I think I was reading online that the original
plan was to dispose of kits that were like older
than ten years old unless the victim came forward and
specifically requested that their kit got tested. Do you know
what happened with that?
Speaker 4 (06:58):
As far as my understanding, all kits up through twenty
oh seven were tested.
Speaker 5 (07:03):
But I do know that some of our.
Speaker 4 (07:04):
Jurisdictions in our county went back even further and just
tested all of their kits, So there were some that
were tested from prior to ten years.
Speaker 5 (07:15):
Prior to that.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
So some places went back and tested older kids. But
you're not sure about the details of that.
Speaker 5 (07:24):
Oh, I'm not okay.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
You know, I'm kind of curious about that, specifically with
the algorithm stuff, because you know, there might have been
this this serial killer active and kind of like the
nineties to early two thousands. You know, just be interesting
if if there were any kits from that period that
(07:47):
we're getting tested.
Speaker 5 (07:49):
Absolutely.
Speaker 4 (07:50):
Unfortunately I don't know personally, but I mean, if you
find out, let me know, because I've been following algorithms,
so this case is very interesting to me as well.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
I asked doctor Lovell, the researcher that was involved in
Cleveland's sexual Assault kid initiative, whether destroying rape kits was common.
They said they would only test the kits going back
ten years, and that they were going to like throw
away their old kits unless victims came forward and said
that they wanted them still tested. And you know it
(08:22):
seems like costant basically nothing to keep those kits and
kind of you never know even if you don't have
the resources to do it. Now you know that things
will get cheaper and stuff like that.
Speaker 6 (08:33):
Yeah, I think, and we've seen that as well, and
there's been some I think political. Maybe it was CNN,
I can't remember. Anyway, they did a pretty extensive analysis
of destroying rape kits and destroying evidence.
Speaker 3 (08:45):
I found the article level was referring to. CNN had
surveyed over two hundred police departments across all fifty states
and found that almost half of them had destroyed some
untested kits. Sometimes these kids had been destroyed improperly, and
other times they're destroyed in accordance with policy.
Speaker 6 (09:03):
I think you see that quite a bit, that law enforcement.
They all make their their own policies around how long
they keep evidence. Some of them are mandated now by states,
so Ohio now has uh I think it's the thirty
years that they have to keep biological evidence. But you know,
if they're following their practices, which they have you know,
(09:24):
written out, and they say, oh, we only keep things
ten years, otherwise we destroy it, I think some of
those practices need to be re examined, and that means
that you know, tax payers have to fit the bill
to provide more storage facilities. But you know that to
me doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem. And I think
if the technology for DNA is telling us anything, it's
(09:45):
that it's growing so fast and exponentially getting so much
better that you know what, we couldn't get a DNA
profile from now ten years from now, who knows. I mean,
look at what genealogy testing has done, you know. So
the thought that jurisdictions would just throw away evidence would
suggest to me that they somehow think that what they're
(10:06):
doing now has reached the pinnacle of all technology and
that their investigative practices at the time were the best
that they could possibly ever be, two things that I
think you just can't assume. And it's a little disconcerting
to hear about sort of putting all of the onus
onto victims to reach out to the department and say, hey,
I know I had this kit. I thought you tested it.
(10:27):
How was I to know you didn't test it? And
the cost of testing, by the way, as I said,
has gone down quite dramatically, So just the testing is
about five hundred dollars in Ohio, and then to have
someone you know read the results and write a report
is about another five hundred dollars. So you know, you're
really talking about one thousand dollars per kit, which in
the criminal justice system isn't a huge cost, you know,
(10:51):
relative to the outcomes.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
I followed up with the Wake County Prosecutor's office to
see if they had more information about what had happened
to their older kids. I also wanted to know which
jurisdictions within Lake County had participated in the audit. And
I've been trying to get answers to these questions since
the first.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
Week of July.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
It's now the last week of August and I've still
heard nothing. And it's important to get answers to these questions.
When you claim you've solved your rape kit backlog, there's
a big difference between doing a proper accounting of all
backlog kits and testing them and doing a partial accounting
and then throwing away a substantial number of kits. After
(11:31):
radio silence from the Lake County Prosecutor's Office, I continued digging.
I came across another article about the initiative from the
Chicago Tribune. It mentions that out of the two hundred
and fifty seven kits found in the audit, one hundred
and ninety four were found in Hammond, thirty one in
East Chicago, and twenty two in Maryville. So if you
add up those numbers, two hundred and forty seven of
(11:53):
the kits were found from those jurisdictions alone. That leaves
a maximum of ten kits that could have been found
in Gary, despite the fact that Hammond found one hundred
and ninety four kits and they have an almost identical
population to Gary. I think the most parsimonious explanation here
is that Gary didn't participate in the audit, and it's
unclear to what extent they've kept backlog kits or tested them.
(12:17):
I was also curious about why Lake County had chosen
to destroy kits more than ten years old. That would
mean they would not include kids from two thousand and
seven or before. Interestingly, two thousand and seven is the
last year that Hargrove's algorithm observed an increase in unsolved strangulations,
and Vaughan was arrested the very next year. I wondered
(12:42):
at first whether ten years might be the statute of
limitations for rape in Indiana, but when I looked into it,
type one felony rape has no statute of limitations in Indiana,
So it's unclear to me why those kits would not
be preserved. But even if Lake County had retained and
tested all their kits, it wouldn't necessarily be able to
(13:03):
link Darren Vaughn to a homicide only to a sexual
assault because the twenty seventeen initiative in Indiana and most
of the initiatives to address rape kit backlogs don't include
DNA from homicide victims.
Speaker 5 (13:16):
I do believe that.
Speaker 4 (13:17):
This statewide audit was only for kits taken from a
victim in a hospital.
Speaker 5 (13:21):
I don't know if any.
Speaker 4 (13:23):
Of them were taken from homicide victims.
Speaker 6 (13:26):
In Kyga County, if there was a murder rape, it
went to the homicide unit as compared to the sex
crimes unit. So if there was a rape, no homicide it,
it was investigated differently and went to different units. So
for the rape kits that we look at, there wasn't
murders as part of that. There were rape homicides, but
(13:48):
those were sort of in a different category.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
Yeah, and so you guys didn't go back and look
at those homicide associated ones as well.
Speaker 6 (13:57):
Not as part of the sexual salt kit initiative, but
I know that Kyga County Prosecutor's office might also be
looking at some of the rape homicides because there's funding
now at the federal level to do some of that doing.
I think what you're talking about here sort of expanding
out the scope of it.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
In fact, last October, the Cuyahoga Prosecutor's Office announced that
it had received a million dollar grant from the US
Department of Justice to continue their sexual assault kit testing program,
and part of that grant includes a pilot project to
do forensic genealogy on thirty two samples from sexually motivated homicides.
(14:37):
Forensic genealogy is the technique that was used to catch
the Golden State killer. It doesn't just look for complete
matches with someone on the CODIS database, but looks for
partial matches and CODIS and public DNA databases to find
relatives of the perpetrator. Then genealogical techniques and further investigation
can be used to identify the offender. Other grants from
(15:00):
the Department of Justice or funding similar efforts to help
solve cold case homicides. It appears, though, that the emphasis
is on going back to cold cases where a DNA
profile of the perpetrator had already been generated, but that
they had never matched it to a suspect, and the
grants give money to use forensic genealogy to try to
find that match. I couldn't find any grants funding going
(15:22):
back and doing an accounting of all the cold case evidence.
Doctor Lovell wonders if an approach similar to Cuyahoga County's
sexual assault kit initiative might benefit homicide investigations as well.
Speaker 6 (15:34):
Sachi, you know, as successful as it has been, I
think it shows that there's great value in going to
the cold cases in cold case homicides as well and
really trying to see is there evidence that could be tested.
Is there something in terms of genealogy that could be
done where all the evidence tested, you know, was it
tested using current techniques or was it only tested for zerology?
(15:57):
You know, things like that that they're starting to ask
those questions.
Speaker 3 (16:02):
Last July, over a year ago now, I'd reached out
to the Lake County corners to try to find out
more information about the victims Hargrove had identified. I was
curious if DNA evidence was collected and if it was
ever tested and submitted to CODIS, the federal DNA database.
I was unable to get answers from the coroner's department
about these cases, perhaps because they were unsolved and therefore
(16:25):
still open. I'm not sure, but I wonder to what
extent older samples from cold cases have gone untested the
way rape kits were. I hope that DNA evidence from
old homicides like this have been preserved, and I hope
if they haven't been tested yet, one day they will
be investigating the algorithm and then Darren Vaughan has been
(17:00):
a roller coaster. It wasn't at all what I imagined
when I first began working on this project. And sometimes
I feel I've gotten so far off my original path
that I worry that I've gotten lost, that I'm missing
something big, or maybe missing the forest for the trees.
And sometimes I find myself wondering what's the point of
solving these cold cases in the first place. Of course,
(17:23):
they could potentially lead to the arrest of a violent criminal,
a perpetrator who might kill again. But if we're looking
specifically for a connection to Vaughan, then what's the point
if he's already serving life in prison. I was hoping
to find a connection to previous crimes to prove that
Hargrove's algorithm had predictive value, that it was able to
(17:44):
identify an active serial killer before the police did, and
therefore that it would be a valuable tool for law enforcement.
I think there's no doubt that the algorithm identified that
something very unusual was going on in Gary with its
identification of fifteen unsolved strangulations over a sixteen year period.
I think it's very possible that some of these murders
(18:05):
were the work of Vaughan or another serial killer. On
the other hand, Gary is a very unusual city where
many murders go unsolved, and it's a city full of
abandoned buildings where bodies can be hidden or even dumped
from homicides and other jurisdictions.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
So is this algorithm perfect? No? Can it produce false results? Absolutely.
What we tell people always is what the algorithm does
is to identify clusters of murders that have an elevated
probability of containing serial murder. That just means if the
(18:43):
FBI says that serial murder occurs in less than one
percent of all homicides. We no longer believe that, but
that's the official reckoning for how common serial murder is. Well,
if less than one percent of murders are likely to
be serial, our algorithm will do better than that. It
will identify murders that have a better than one percent
(19:04):
probability of containing serial murders. It turns out way better
than one percent. We frequently are determining cases that are connected.
But there is a failure rate, and what are some
of the things that can go south on the algorithm.
If you have a police department that has a relentlessly
(19:25):
low clearance rate, like the Flint, Michigan Police Department, everything
looks serial because there's a low clearance rate for every
kind of murder, and there's not much you can do
about that. And that's a problem because we're becoming less
and less likely to solve a murder. In the United
States today, there are dozens of major cities where most
(19:47):
murders go unsolved. That means we're going to get false
positives because of the algorithm's technique. We're trying to overcome
those challenges, and we have actually We've made some improvements
in the methods, but it's a problem.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
I want to look at the algorithm and the ways
it might be better used shortly, but first I want
to get hypothetical for a moment. Let's say we found
evidence that Vaughn was connected to one or more murders
on the algorithm's list, proof that Hargrove was right in
his twenty ten letter. What should police have done. Create
a task force to look into evidence that might connect
(20:27):
the crimes, notify the public, and what if police find
something more concrete, like DNA evidence or firearm forensics that
definitively link multiple murders, does the public have a right
to know that information, even though publicizing that information could
let the killer know the detectives are onto them. It
(20:48):
seems to me that in a situation like Vonn's twenty
fourteen murders and Gary, where the victims share characteristics, that
the police would have had some obligation to warn other
possible victims. But it's hard for the police to stop
a future homicide from taking place, and in the case
of Vaughn's twenty fourteen murders and Gary, police weren't even
(21:08):
aware of the murders until after Vaughn's arrest. There was
a strong suggestion that some of the victims, like Tira Batty,
had been murdered thanks to Marvin Clinton's own investigation, But
without discovering the bodies and submitting supplemental homicide reports to
the FBI, Hargrove's algorithm wouldn't have been able to detect
the cluster of Vonn's twenty fourteen crimes. That made me
(21:30):
curious about how many missing persons there are out there,
and how many of them are really homicide victims. So
I called up Todd Matthews and then to get the
levels on my end. Can you tell me what you
had for breakfast this morning?
Speaker 1 (21:45):
I had coffee. I had about five cups of coffee today.
I'm like a snake, ill like it once a day.
Just ate something nice and solid.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
After he helped identify it Jane Doe through webslew Thing,
Matthews founded the Dough Network in nineteen ninety nine. It
was a national database for missing persons and also unidentified bodies,
with the hopes of connecting John and Jane Doe's to
missing person reports. Similar to Hargrove, Matthews realized that police
departments struggle with solving these kinds of cases, So we
(22:15):
decided to create the Dough Network as a tool to
help police officers and amateur slews with their investigations.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
That person could be alive and well, you don't know
their circumstances. Some people it's mental illness, some it's dementia,
drug abuse. Sometimes an accident, sometimes it's murdered. You just
never know what you're going.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
To get In almost a decade after Matthews created the
Dough Network, the Department of Justice decided they wanted to
make their own official version called NamUs. That's nam us,
and they brought in Matthews to help.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
The Department of Justice actually first contacted me with NamUs
in two thousand and seven to help them do what
DO Network proved was possible.
Speaker 3 (22:57):
Like the DO Network, nemusless information like a missing person's demographics,
when and where they were last seen, and a description
of the circumstances of how they want missing. All that
is available to the public. But with NAMIS, detectives working
on the case can log in and access additional items
the evidence.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
You know, something that though network wouldn't necessarily have its
hands on like the dental records, DNA fingerprint analysis.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
Do you have a sense of kind of to what
extent technology is being used in terms of police checking
cell phone records or credit card records, things like that.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
You do see a lot of that, you know, pinging
the cell phone and then if a cell phone's been disabled.
You know, that kind of leads you to think of
foul play possibly, But it is getting better as far
if you if you swipe a card or carry a phone.
It's hard to go missing. It's not easy to be
a missing person and still work a sleep, you know,
do something. It's it's hard to make yourself missing on
(23:57):
purpose now, for the good or the bad. It's just
harder to do it. And but it's going to happen.
You know, people are going to be able to get
around some of those things. They truly want to be missing.
And that's where some of the privacy concerns come in.
You know, if I want to go missing, can I
is it morally okay for me to just allow my
family to think that I'm you know, I don't know
where I am. Yeah, a lot of issues, a lot
(24:18):
of things to think about.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
This podcast is kind of looking into the work of
this serial killer, and he was caught for one murder,
confessed to six more murders, and led the police to
their bodies. You know, some of them had been reported
missing at that point. Others hadn't even been reported missing.
I guess I'm curious of just like, how how good
(24:43):
of a sense do we have of how big this
problem actually is, and kind of are we doing everything
we can be doing to keep track of this stuff
and monitor it.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Well, it's a silent mass disaster. It's called the nation's
silent mass disaster because of the time frames the distances.
Speaker 3 (25:03):
According to NIMUS, there are currently over twenty thousand missing
person cases is. Some of those will be resolved quickly
with the missing person found alive and safe, but some
are people who have been killed but their body was
never found where if it was found, they're a John
or Jane Doe waiting to be identified. But Matthew says
the database isn't yet comprehensive. Whether cases get entered into
(25:27):
NAMIS varies from state to state and jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
My homestead of Tennessee, I work with local officials and
in thirty days in Tennessee, you're supposed to go if
you're missing or unidentified in Tennessee within thirty days, you're
supposed to go on the name of this website. Now, whether
that happens or not, you know, there's no punishment phase
or not. And the requiring of use of names in
state law actually does other things. It begins a training
(25:55):
process with law enforcements, so it now will be part
of the training academies so that they know the laws
that are required. And eventually, you know, things will change,
and I think we planned a lot of stats that
are going to grow and evolve knowledge. It's going to
get better, and I think we're all going to get
better at it. It just seems like it takes so long.
If you're the family member of a missing you know,
(26:16):
two seconds is a very painful time period. You know,
there's probably nothing more scary than having a missing family
member and you have no control over it. You have
no idea if they're alive, they're dead, they're hungry, they're cold.
You know, you have no idea of what to do
or even word again looking you know, that's probably one
of the most helpless feelings as described to me people
(26:37):
that have done it all been described very similarly, the
most helpless feeling that they've ever had. You know, I've
had people I've known for years and they know of
my work and recognize and appreciate it, and then suddenly
they're in that situation. That's when things change dramatically. You know,
(26:58):
you don't know until you're sitting in that chair, you
don't know how bad it can be. Literally, there's a
local missing person and I've known the boy's aunt for
more than twenty years. Now I hear from her more frequently.
They're looking for him. He's a young adult, he's had
some drug issues, and he might not necessarily be on
the top of the list for law enforcement to look for. Yeah,
(27:20):
it doesn't change her situation. He's still her nephew and
she wants him found. Now. I don't blame her. And
it's just by the time you realize how bad it
can be, you're probably already snake bit, you know.
Speaker 3 (27:35):
And when you say, like, not at the top of
the list for law enforcement to look for, what what
do you mean by that?
Speaker 1 (27:41):
Well, a lot of times if somebody has had some trouble,
it's just like, well are they missing or they just
stand out of the way, have they done something? Are
they hiding out for some reason? So it's just hard
to sometimes see somebody that they might recognize as a
criminal as a vulnerable victim. Now, I know the local
boy that's missing, he has a really bad case of
(28:01):
diabetes and he cannot survive with that medication. So unless
he's found some way to buy medication some were he
can't have survived. And his family knows that. So where's
he at? So now into like day sixty five of
his disappearance, the family realized that he can't survive. He's
not come back to them, and it's getting way down
(28:21):
the line now, you know. Now it's recovery of remains
instead of finding somebody potentially in a bad situation.
Speaker 3 (28:29):
Does that police attitude frustrate you or do you think
that that is just kind of the way that it is.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
It is the way that it is. It does get
frustrating at time, especially when you know somebody like this person.
I knew that family, and it's always this my son
and never do that. Yeah, will my daughter didn't have
a tattoo? Maybe she did, you just didn't know about it.
So you're going to hear somebody say my child would
never do that. My adult child would never, ever, ever
ever not call me. And most of the time it's
(28:59):
just like, well, maybe it is possible. But then when
you do know people and you know who they are
and their story is really making sense, and it's like, yeah,
you're you're right. Probably would not be without medication for
this period of time, So something's wrong. Even though he
might have done things that put him on the wrong
side of the law, ultimately he is in danger. So
(29:20):
we have to think about this differently. So it is
frustrating at times, but understand because when I was with
Department of Justice with NamUs, the volume of people reaching
out can be overwhelming. So I can see how you
can quickly get frustrated getting multiple calls, and we have
to make it easier to do. We have to make
more tools available to the family. They can enter their
own missing person case and name us. They can start
(29:42):
the ball rolling, so instead of waiting for law enforcement
to it, they can start the process. They'll have to
be validated, but at least it gives them something to
do instead of waiting for somebody to come and help them.
They can start the process. Because when you're getting validation
reports coming back from a program that's developed by the
Department of Justice. I mean, I think they're not just
going to tell Justice Agency how they'll be bad. We're
(30:03):
not going to look for him, you know. I think
once they see that, we don't really need you to
create a profile. US has a profile kind of takes
a little bit out of their control and has that helped.
It has helped, It's helped tremendously as it cleared it
up completely.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
No, when you kind of like look really big picture,
is there a direction that we're heading with technology or
the way we investigate stuff.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
It's only going to improve ultimately. You know, it's going
to be quicker to do the DNA test, encouraging the families.
Like every at one point in time, every singer at
my local high school's fingerprinted because I will go and
bring local law enforcement in the forensic class and will
thumb print everybody or fingerprintedy rdy to get a ten
print and then you know, you put it away and
God forbid, I hope I never have to see it again.
(30:48):
So there's there's lots of things that can be done,
but I mean it's at some price. You know, you
are going to have to think about things that make
you uncomfortable, and you know, thinking of a person that
might be deceased, and that's not what you want, but
it is what it is. We're all going to die eventually,
and I think we can accept a natural death. It's
just we're not programmed to have a missing person. There's
(31:09):
no funeral, there's no closure, there's no explanation for it.
There's no way to process. I've seen families grow stronger
as a result of it, and then they go on
to pass state laws and advocate and make sure nobody
suffers what they suffer. I've seen other families deteriorate because
of it because there's no way to move on. It
just can be devastating. I had a local lady that
(31:31):
her son's been missing for many years and she wanted
to show me something. She tuk me to the grave.
She actually had a tombstone put up for her son
next to her and her husband. She goes, if we're gone,
can you make sure he's buried here? If his body's found.
She's given up. You know, she's she knows that she's
at the end, and she's getting older, and you know
(31:52):
it's going to become more and more difficult for her
to try to find, and her hope of finding him
during her lifetime is fading, and she only ones now
is can you make sure he's buried here? Will you
let him know our wishes? I don't want him lay
in a lab in a box. You know, I can say,
you know what, I'll do everything in Yeah, I know
your wishes and I'll make them known. You know. I
have to think about will I even be around when
(32:14):
his body's found? If it's found, so I think the
best way to do is to tell that story, mention
it somewhere, and then you know, that's it. You just
have to share.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
When I began researching this show, I asked myself the question,
with all the data we're collecting, storing, sorting, why is
it that we're getting worse at solving homicides When it
comes to policing. We are starting to do more with data,
but we're not really doing it in any kind of
systematic way. I think it's reasonable to worry about new
(33:01):
technologies like facial recognition, that they might be moving our
country towards some sort of surveillance state. But I think
the real nightmare right now is much more banal. We're
missing important connections we could be making and letting killers
go free. One of the things that surprised me about
Hargrove's algorithm was how simple it was. This wasn't some
(33:23):
sort of deep learning neural network getting fed mountains of data.
It was a simple, handcrafted algorithm getting basic demographic information
about the victims along with the method of killing year
in jurisdiction. And you can imagine that with richer data
and a more involved algorithm, patterns might emerge more clearly.
(33:44):
In fact, Hargrove has been working on an updated algorithm.
I know you said, you know that you're still in
publication for the algorithm two point zero. Is there anything
you can talk about that.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
We want to get into a peer review journal, and
so we're still writing. I can tell you that what
is different about the newer version of the algorithm is
it dynamic evaluates each murder. What the old algorithm did
was just to create a group and then to assess
(34:15):
what the clearance rate was for the group. The new
algorithm individually assesses each murder and then decides whether or
not that murder looks suspicious and that individual assessment is
better and so it definitely is an improvement over the
old and so once we get it published, we'll make
it available. But we need that confirmation that we're onto something,
(34:39):
and so we need others to look at it. And
right now we're struggling with following the format for pure
reviewed publications. And apparently one of our reviewers is a
former cop and took offense to what we did. I
guess he or she thought that the algorithm made police
look bad. I don't understand that, because we've got several
(35:03):
former cops on the list of authors with this project,
that it's not our intent to ever make law enforcement
look bad. We're just trying to provide a new tool
and the toolkit.
Speaker 3 (35:16):
I'm hoping that a bunch of people listen to this podcast,
and some of them might be data scientists or people
like that. And I was curious, if someone wants to
help you with this kind of work, they have some
idea of something they want to try with the data,
is that something you're interested in.
Speaker 2 (35:35):
We make our data available. If you go to murder
data dot org and go to the data and docs tab,
you can download everything, absolutely everything, the original algorithm and
the raw data, and we encourage folks to use the
data and see if they can come up with something useful.
(35:56):
We are hoping that someone may be able to get
artificial intelligence to do clever things with these records. So far,
all attempts that have been made have not been successful,
but that doesn't mean something good mightn't happen in the future.
So we're hoping that bright people will take free data
and see if they can come up with something clever.
Speaker 3 (36:20):
At the beginning of the podcast, I also mentioned as
startling statistic that homicides today are being cleared at a
much lower rate than in previous decades. No one knows
exactly why the clearance rate for homicides is decreasing, but
Hargarve has some ideas.
Speaker 2 (36:37):
Murder begets murder, and unsolved murder really begets murder. When
most killings go unsolved, there starts to develop a narrative
that the only way I'm going to get justice for
my loved ones is to take the law into my
own hands. Also, murderers who walk the street are available
to kill again. Why wouldn't they they got away with
(36:59):
it the first time. We are convinced that serial murder
is much much more common than anyone ever dreamed of,
even in their ninth Mars. Now, that's not to say
that serial sexual murder is on the rise. It's not.
The traditional Hollywood kind of serial killer is definitely on
the decline. But the statistical serial killer, anyone who kills
(37:24):
two or more people in separate incidents, that really is
is certainly more common than is recognized. It is quite
likely that the most common type of serial murder is
the gang enforcer on a local street gang. How many
of those killings get solved? I mean, increasingly, people who
(37:45):
have gotten an adept at committing murder and getting away
with it are just getting away with it. We believe
that the decline in homicide clearance rate is primarily driven
by a lack of leadership, a lack of public passion
that murders should be solved, a lack of re sources
(38:08):
for homicide detectives, a lack of accountability. The clearance rate
for homicides should be a metric that policymakers carefully follow
in determining whether or not a police department is effective.
When mayors of cities pledge to get a handle on
their murder problem, generally speaking, the murder rate starts to drop.
(38:33):
Improved clearance rates will reduce the rate of which murder occurs.
It's not easy and it's not cheap. Increasingly there's a
competition for limited resources in major cities. Many cities cannot
afford their pension plan. I mean, the fiscal challenges for
modern government are becoming extreme. We in America have to
(38:57):
make major crimes a higher priority. We cannot dismiss murders
because well, just the kinds of people that get murdered
I don't care about, which I'm afraid maybe part of
the dreadful calculus as to what's happened. It is our
hope at the Murder Accountability Project that our data become
a political force. That people can look up the rate
(39:19):
at which murders are cleared in their communities, and if
they don't like what they see, they should have a
conversation with their mayor and their city council members. That
unsolved murder is simply unacceptable.
Speaker 3 (39:31):
And Hargrove's analysis of the declining clearance rate for murder
shows that it is driven by homicides where the victim
is black.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
The entirety of that declining homicide clearance rate was born
by African American victims. In cases of Caucasian murder, Asian murder,
Native American murder, those murders are about as likely to
be solved today as they were fifty years ago. That's
(39:59):
just a fact, and we should never ignore what the
data show us today.
Speaker 3 (40:04):
If your loved one is murdered and they're white, there's
over a six seventy five percent chance someone will be
arrested for the crime. If they're black, the chance someone
will be arrested drops below sixty percent, And the chance
of being murdered is much higher for Black Americans, particularly
young black men. As I mold over these statistics, I
(40:26):
kept thinking back to my interview with Kerrie Rice, the
police officer who responded to Vaughan's gasoline incident. When I
googled him, I saw an article about how one of
his sons had been shot and killed.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
You know.
Speaker 3 (40:39):
I saw that your family has kind of personally been
affected by violent crime, yea, And I was just wondering
if you wanted to talk a little bit about that
and how it, you know, if it has changed the
perspective on the work that you do.
Speaker 7 (40:57):
Like I say I have, I've had a lot of
family members killed in this city all the way back
far of ninety eight, but my nephew was Kilo actually
before that and eighty six my older brother was killed.
It really didn't affect me too much and doing my job.
(41:19):
I know, I still had a job to do, and
I did it, and it really, you know, after a while,
you don't think about it too much. The last two
people in my family actually they had two sons that
were killed within in the past year.
Speaker 3 (41:33):
So yeah, I mean, I guess it's homicide is one
of the leading causes of death for young black men.
And you know, I don't know if you have any
thoughts from kind of your perspective and law enforcement or
just in general what people can do as individuals or
(41:54):
what we can do as a broader society to change that.
Speaker 7 (42:00):
Well, I really believe that there's two main things that
need to be done, and one of them I was doing.
I was running truancy court, making sure the kids went
to school and got an education. And it's a shame
that you have to make Some parents actually send their.
Speaker 1 (42:17):
Kids to school, but.
Speaker 7 (42:18):
They just don't understand how that affects a kid when
they get older. I guarantee you at least seventy percent
of people we arrest here. And Geary, you don't have
a high school diploma, and I think that fees into
the crime because everybody gonna grow up, everybody gonna want things,
and you can't even reason fell out application your you know,
(42:39):
your job.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
Choices are limited.
Speaker 7 (42:41):
So uh.
Speaker 1 (42:42):
And another thing.
Speaker 7 (42:43):
That I really think need to be addressed is mental health.
You have a lot of females and if it's sexually
molested and never got any treatment. They had a lot
of males they have missed either sexually molested or have
been in the car with somebody around somebody and they
got shot and killed, or they've been shot before and
they patched the body up, but they never talked to
(43:05):
them about the mental issues. And you know, most men,
they refuse to be a happen me and I like say,
after what happened, you know in my family, I had
to go, and I'm glad I went. But the average person,
average male, don't want to go and they just don't
understand unless they need it. But that's a lot of it,
you know, the lack of education and people been abused
(43:28):
and have no clue even now how that's really affecting
their everyday decisions.
Speaker 3 (43:35):
Hargrove's algorithm can definitely highlight a place where something is
going wrong, but when it comes to preventing future homicides,
I don't think technology is going to provide us with
any magic bullets. The real solutions are going to be
less glamorous. They're solutions that sound almost like cliches, things
we already know we should be doing. Supporting children and
(43:59):
protecting them from abuse, providing mental health services, cleaning up
neighborhoods and demolishing derelict buildings, and taking violent crime seriously,
regardless of who the victim is or where the crime
took place. This is the end of the weekly episodes
(44:20):
of Algorithm, but it's not the end of the show.
Many factors facilitated Darren Vond's killing spree, and there's still
some angles I'd like to explore. I've already got bonus
episodes planned and ideas for another season, but I'd love
to hear your questions and your ideas. Please reach out
to me or call and leave a voicemail at eight
(44:40):
eight eight five zero one three three zero nine. We're
going to have another Q and A episode soon, and
if you haven't yet. Please do you subscribe to our
podcast speeds you don't miss any updates and you can
find all this information and the social media for the
podcast in the show notes. This episode was written and
produced by me ben Keebrick Algorithm is executive produced by
(45:03):
Alex Williams, Donald Albright, and Matt Frederick. Production assistance and
mix by Eric Quintana. The music is by Makeup and
Vanity Set and Blue Doot Sessions. Thanks to Christina Dana,
Miranda Hopkins, Jamie Albright, Rima l k Ali, Trevor Young,
and Josh Thain for their help and notes. For more
(45:25):
podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 (45:39):
You know, the awful truth is you could just about
pick any major American city and take a shovel. I
promise you. Serial murder is more common than we ever
want to believe. If this project ends up having legs,
Atlanta would be a good place to go. Frankly, that's
the largest cluster our computer knows about. In fact, he
(45:59):
was of the opinion that some of these might be
solvable
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