The Hound of the data points

摘要

Until he was called in on the Beltway Sniper investigation, Detective Kim Rossmo's most confounding case was the South Side Rapist. For almost a decade, an unknown assailant, his face bandit-wrapped in a scarf, had been stalking women in quiet Lafayette, Louisiana, and then assaulting them in their homes. He remained at large in 1998 when Rossmo, then a detective inspector with the Vancouver Police Department in Canada, was called in to help. The police were under pressure. The town was hungry for an arrest. There was a glut of raw information. But after a couple of thousand tips and close to a thousand suspects―numbers that would be dwarfed by the 15,000 tips a day that the sniper case would generate, but a sea of data all the same―investigators were no further ahead.