The first thing that Thomas Hargrove, founder and chairman of the Murder Accountability Project, says in his interview is that South Africans can’t benefit from the serial killer algorithm because of a lack of data. There’s no local equivalent of the FBI that can provide detailed data to the public, and more’s the pity, because the Murder Accountability Project has just used this data to create an algorithm that can find serial killers.

The open-source, non-profit organisation’s algorithm is ‘capable of detecting serial killers who target multiple victims using similar methods of killing within a specific geographic region’. It allows for those in authority to identify patterns that would have previously been missed, helping them overcome linkage blindness – a term used to describe a phenomenon where police fail to link one case to another when there’s a common offender involved.