A national nonprofit group, known for its work identifying serial killings, may have found a pattern in the murders of multiple Black prostitutes and drug addicts in Chicago.
Using a computer algorithm, the Murder Accountability Project has been able to identify 51 strikingly similar cases, starting in 2001, involving women whose bodies were found in some of the poorest parts of the Windy City.
It is not clear if the discovery is a sign of a serial killer, but it is enough for local activists to insist that Chicago Police detectives review the cases, the Associated Press reports. Rep. Bobby Rush has asked the FBI to join the investigation and plans a community meeting to warn about the risk of a serial killer.
“When you put the narratives together … it just screams serial killer,” said Thomas Hargrove, the founder of the Murder Accountability Project.
The work of Hargrove’s organization has proven successful in the past.In 2010, the Murder Accountability Project analyzed a pattern of 15 unsolved strangulations of women in Indiana. Four years later, a man in Gary confessed to killing seven of them.
But Deputy Chief of Detectives Brendan Deenihan of the Chicago Police Department, who is overseeing the detectives, appears skeptical.
He said he does not believe there are “one or two bad guys traveling the city,” preying on women.
The idea of an assailant who is “skipping the white prostitutes to kill the black ones, that doesn’t make sense,” he told the AP, adding that there are “one or two bad guys traveling the city,” preying on women.