A long but interesting read.
Meet the Serial-Killer Whisperer
This woman has the world’s most comprehensive database on what makes serial killers tick
Last year, in late-July, Sasha Reid went to her desk in her apartment just outside Toronto. Her cat, Giz, hopped onto her lap. It was late, and the sun had already gone down. She booted up her champagne-colored MacBook Air and began searching through recent police reports from Canada, looking for people who had been reported missing for more than 72 hours, which is when most law enforcement agencies open cases.
Reid, a 30-year-old criminologist and developmental psychologist who’s finishing her PhD at the University of Toronto, has been collecting information on missing persons for more than two years. She’s amassed an in-depth database of thousands of them — drawing from official Search and Rescue (SAR) reports, the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC) database, collecting tips from crime-beat journalists as well as from friends and family of those missing — in order to obtain the age, ethnicity, demographic, and geographical information of victims. For some of this data collection, she’s delegated research responsibilities to 13 volunteer undergraduates at the University of Toronto. Often, she cross-references this database with another database that she’s been working on for closer to four years — her “serial killer” database — which includes up to 600 variables on the behavioral and psychological development of every known serial killer since the fifteenth century, making it the most complete database on the developmental traits of serial killers in existence.
That night in July, while updating her missing persons database, Reid came across a curious pattern. Looking at Ontario police records, she found and entered data on Skandaraj “Skanda” Navaratnam, a thin 40-year-old refugee from Sri Lanka with black hair and sunken brown eyes, who had disappeared in September 2010, and had been last seen leaving a nightclub in Toronto’s gay district. Later in the evening, Reid found and logged Majeed “Hamid” Kayhan, a 58-year-old man who’d come to Toronto from Afghanistan and had also disappeared years earlier, in October 2012, also in Toronto’s gay district. When, later in the evening, she came across Abdulbasir Faizi, a 42-year-old, also from Afghanistan, who had disappeared in December 2010 in Toronto, Reid became particularly suspicious. All were middle-aged men, probably gay, and from a similar geographic area with a similar physical appearance — all had either beards or goatees and brown or black hair. And yet, while they’d been missing for between five and seven years, the police neither had much information on them nor had they linked them together. ...
https://medium.com/s/thenewnew/meet-the-serial-killer-whisperer-dccd0a6c6b9b