How difficult would it really be to get away with murder in the United States of America?
While doing research for Mother Mercy, I decided to look into how plausible the premise of the story really was.
Turns out, getting away with murder is easier than you think. Even as a true crime buff myself, I was shocked when I saw the numbers. The Guardian, The New York Times, and Project Cold Case all had some pretty grim statistics to report.
According to the Texas Attorney General, there are over 270,000 unsolved homicides in the US. Between 1965 and 2023, there were a total of 94,375 homicides in Texas alone. of that number; 26,009 still remain unsolved.
According to NPR, murder is on the rise, and the closure rate is on the decline.
It gets worse. Law enforcement has also underreported homicides. What do you mean, Chandra? How can law enforcement not report a crime?
To be honest, I’m not sure exactly how it works, but when the data is gathered, it seems that medical examiners have more reports indicating homicide as the cause of death, than law enforcement does. So that’s bad.
To make matters worse, statistics indicate that a disproportionate number of cases that make up the massive decline in homicide closure rates are cases where the victim is in a marginalized group. Native Americans, African Americans, the elderly, and infants are all at risk for under reporting. This issue is exacerbated by the fact that these communities are so often targeted by law enforcement.
I have more research to do in this regard, but yeah, Mother Mercy isn’t really that far out there. While Abby uses different methods to obfuscate, the idea is that she takes advantage of an inherently flawed system and uses the gap in enforcement to provide a service to underserved communities.
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Chandra Arthur 
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