Uncovered: A Cold Case Platform

Story

Every Year, More Than 5,000 Killers Get Away With Murder.

Since 1980, more than 250,000 cases have gone cold where either a murder took place or a missing person was considered to have experienced serious bodily harm.

Needless to Say…

Nationally, the number of unsolved missing and murder cases continues to rise. Every year, more than 5,000 cases go unsolved, and the cases that go cold most often feature victims who are Black, Indigenous, people of color, sex workers, or people who are LGBTQ+.

By cultivating resources and visualizing cold cases to activate Citizen Detectives, we’re building a community around collective impact. By no means do we think we can do this in one day, one month, or even one year, but it’s past time to start working on something that matters—together.

The statistics are unsettling:

Indigenous women face murder rates that are more than 10 times the national average.
80% of trans women killed in the past five years were Black, and only 42 percent of the cases resulted in an arrest—declining murder clearance rates exclusively occurred among homicides of Black victims.
Moreover, sex workers are 18 times more likely to be murdered. These aren’t just statistics, they are people—who deserve justice.

What We’re Building

Society’s most challenging problems cannot be solved by government and nonprofits alone. Public Benefit Corporations (B Corporations) work toward reduced inequality, lower levels of poverty, a healthier environment, stronger communities, and the creation of more high-quality jobs with dignity and purpose.

That’s why we chose to organize as a B Corporation and use our tech and business experience to create a company with a purpose. Our mission is to:

Bring peace to the families of murdered or missing people
Reduce the burden on law enforcement
Help influence public policy in support of equality in criminal justice reform
Help overturn wrongful convictions

At the forefront of our product, we want to give victims their identities back. Too often they have been reduced to mere labels. Society’s reaction to these labels has consequences resulting in different levels of attention, sympathy, and perceived worthiness. But we are talking about someone’s mother, someone’s son, someone’s best friend, someone’s spouse, and every human being’s life is valuable. Thus, each victim profile on Uncovered will focus on the individual, their personality, and their full life experience.

We are visualizing the timeline of events and overlaying each onto a map of locations, bringing these two pieces of information together in a way it’s never been done before. We are cataloging the people involved, not just suspects, but the relationships of friends, family members, acquaintances, and witnesses. We are indexing the sources of each piece of information to not only show our work, but for those who want to dig deeper.

With disparate information everywhere, today there is no single source of truth for these cases. To acquire our initial data, we are sourcing all publicly available information from newspaper articles, respected media outlets, blogs, podcasts, and documentaries. We will expand our reach using data co-ops such as NamUs, The Murder Accountability Project, The Charley Project, The DNA Doe Project, and many others. In the beginning, this data will be manually curated with an eye toward automating steps as we scale.

Using the open-source Neo4j platform, we are building a data model that focuses intently on Persons, Objects, Locations, and Events. Unlike a traditional tree database, we are not limited to single-direction nodes with preset rules and hierarchy. Instead, our application of graph theory allows us to explore unstructured discovery of our data without rules and connect dots that have never been seen before.

Our members are able to connect with fellow Citizen Detectives, learn techniques on what to look for and how to help, and subscribe to the cases that interest them to stay updated when new information is found. We count on active participation from our members to submit their research publicly or anonymously through a verification and substantiation process.

No one can do everything, but everyone can do something. With Uncovered, everyone can contribute to keep these cases in the public and work to uncover answers. From learning new techniques for ethical Citizen Detective work to accessing information on cases that didn’t get proper representation in the media, the community, or in the justice system, we believe the more resources we can provide to digital volunteers and citizen solvers mean more Citizen Detective communities and the real opportunity to take a collective interest and turn it into actionable advocacy.

Can YOU Help Solve the Next Case?

We’ve learned that knowing a victim or living in the area where a crime was committed are the two biggest drivers in whether or not someone will take interest in or get involved with a case. With your support, we can expand our reach and show even more people how they can help.

Use of Proceeds

For the past 18 months, we’ve worked nights and weekends bootstrapping our way to what you see today. So far, everything has been manually curated. With your financial support, we’ll be able to:

Reach more families to share their stories
Make progress toward automation of data acquisition
Expand our partnerships with universities, law enforcement agencies, content creators, and journalists
Open the community for more members to connect, share, and learn
Begin building our data science engine to automatically expose the gaps in each case

What People Are Already Saying

What Else You Can Do to Help

Join our mailing list
Add your name to our community waitlist
Follow us on social media and share our mission and campaign
Submit an unsolved case that matters to you
Tell a friend about us