Dr. Sasha Reid is an assistant professor at the University of Calgary, teaching in the Departments of Sociology, Psychology, and in the Faculty of Law. She is also currently a law student at the University of Calgary. Sasha came to media attention when she developed a serial homicide database that suggested patterns in homicides in Toronto that may indicated a possible serial killer. That serial killer was later identified as Bruce McArthur. She has also developed a missing and murdered database (MMD) that has become the largest database of missing and murdered indigenous persons.

I wanted to talk to Sasha primarily about developing a database and what’s involved.

In this episode we talk about:

You can contact Sasha at:

Further Reading:

Vancouver Sun: Why these women are building a database of 12,000 missing, murdered people in Canada and Why victims’ families want Robert Pickton evidence kept and why police say it’s no longer needed

Notes from the start:

We’ve published the first scholarly article for the Alberta portion of the Scavenging Study! The taphonomic impact of scavenger guilds in peri-urban and rural regions of central and southern Alberta. Part I – Identification of forensically relevant vertebrate scavengers is available here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1556-4029.15443

Support the podcast and my research and Buy Me A Coffee. Your contributions will go toward my research, webhosting, and my time. Want to find out more about my research? Check out the Scavenging Study.

Contact me through [email protected] or through my contact form. Follow me on Facebook at The Reluctant Archaeologist, or through Instagram @yvonnekjorlien

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Transcript

Yvonne Kjorlien: So go ahead and say who you are and what you’re currently your current position. I guess if that’s applicable.

Sasha Reid: Yeah, this is actually I think and I hope the hardest question of today.

You know why? Because I’m not anything. I am everything, and so I like to introduce myself as hi. I’m Sasha. I’m a person who does a lot of things. I have a PhD in developmental psychology from the University of Toronto. I studied there. I got my Master’s degrees there in criminology and applied psych. and then my PhD’s in developmental. And then I am a law student right now at the University of Calgary in my last year – wahoo — And I am also an adjunct professor at Ontario Tech, which is awesome and new. So yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, and what faculty are you in adjunct there?

Sasha Reid: Faculty of sociology

Yvonne Kjorlien: Sociology. Wow, it’s cool being an adjunct because then you get to work with and meet all sorts of new people where you may not have a chance to before. Yeah.

Sasha Reid: I know that there’s some people there who are doing their dissertations on serial homicide and I know I’ve been asked to be a committee member in order to be a committee member. I have to be affiliated with the university in some ways that this is the only reason why I haven’t adjunct.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. Yeah, as far as I know in Canada, at least, you don’t get paid for being an adjunct. It’s kind of just a status thing.

Sasha Reid: Yes, it is a thankless position.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right so, let’s delve into your past a little bit and bring us up to date. What attracted you to doing psychology developmental and serial killers and all that good stuff and why go to school? Especially because you’ve probably been doing for over 10 years now, I would imagine.

Sasha Reid: I think we’re coming up on 20. So, okay here’s the rundown…

Yvonne Kjorlien: alright

Sasha Reid: There was never a period in my life where monsters have not been front and center of my daily thoughts. Never. When I was a kid…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Did you encounter a monster when you were a kid?

Sasha Reid: No, I didn’t. I mean, I tried. I went monster hunting with — and I’m not even kidding — my favorite show was Buffy the Vampire Slayer and we lived in the woods. So my lovely next door neighbor and I would go find the best wood, whittle it down into a stake, and then go at night, hunting vampires in the forest.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh, that’s awesome.

Sasha Reid: We’re always looking for something scary. And obviously I didn’t find anything and I grew up a little and I realized monsters do exist, but they’re not like the movies; they’re not vampires and werewolves and whatnot. They’re people and that’s even scarier in a way.

My parents divorced in both the married some very not so kind people and that’s kind of where my introduction to, and I put in quotes, ‘monsters’ that are humans really began to develop. And it was such an isolating experience as a kid feeling so uncomfortable at home and so alone. So I spent a lot of time at the library just reading books, of course about monsters and witchcraft. You kind of just do a little circle and you loop around into abnormal psychology, at least in my library. So I started studying all the abnormal psychology books and I started learning about psychopathy and I thought that’s so interesting. That’s a type of person and it explains, at least in the mind of a child, it explains the bad things that happen to me as a kid. And so just knowing that why did this happen made me feel so much more empowered and safer, and so I wanted to give that to other people too. So then I went into Psych.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I love the question “why?”. I love asking it of everything. I want to know the behind, why something works, why it doesn’t work, why did that happen? Lovely, lovely question.

Sasha Reid: yeah, and you hear it …victims’ family members. They always want to know why. People, I think, are just drawn to the why, and sometimes it’s the most impossible answer. It’s impossible sometimes, and sometimes why isn’t good enough and when you get to that, it’s so traumatizing because it’s not good enough.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I imagine for families who have had a member of their family disappear, has something happened to them, that it’s been a long time and it’s a traumatic experience. And so they probably built In their minds. They want something like horrific and monumental to explain all of this that they’re going through and to have that come across the killer or whoever, the perpetrator, the bad guy say, “I don’t know”, or “They were just there”…

Sasha Reid: Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. It’s not good enough.

Sasha Reid: No, it’s also interesting. I’ve heard it from many different accounts, like many different people have said fortunately in their cases they were solved and they got to actually go to court and see the person who killed their family member and so many people say, “That’s it?” “They’re so small”, or “I had expected something so much different.” “That’s it?” They were expecting actual monsters. It’s interesting.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow. So let’s go through your academic journey to bring you to your PhD. What lead in your undergrad to have you go into grad and then to get a PhD, because that’s a big step.

Sasha Reid: Yes, that’s a huge if you know anything about me, it is I don’t think a lot. I do everything with very little thought. If I had put an ounce of thought into this, I don’t know if I would have done it, but here I am. So undergrad. I started at Lakehead University and it was great. It was close to home, but I wanted to join a sorority and there was no sorority in Thunder Bay. And so of course, I’m going to apply to the University of Toronto, not because it’s the most incredible institution ever, but sororities, of course.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay.

Sasha Reid: Yeah. There’s nothing inspiring there. I started the University of Toronto and it’s incredible and I have the greatest mentors. I’m still so interested in psychopathy and I get to start taking courses like abnormal psychology and brain and behaviour, psychology and the law.  And I’m a super curious person and so I’m always chatting with my professors just trying to get their understanding about these things. And I through that developed really good mentors. One of them is Dr. David Nussbaum, just the most incredible person ever. Right now he studies terrorism. He’s amazing. But when I was an undergrad, he studied psychopathy, and he really took me under his wing and I learned so much from him. When it came time to graduate, I told him, “I don’t know what I want to do.” And I think that’s the only failing I think for him as a mentor. It was very little guidance in terms of what I could do with a psychology degree and an interest in psychopathy. And so instead of pursuing a graduate degree in Psych, I pursued a graduate degree in child development and education. So I’m actually an Ontario certified kindergarten to grade six teacher.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I didn’t see that one coming.

Sasha Reid: Yeah, me neither. I threw that it too. I’m a person who does a lot of things. So I did my Master’s degree in applied psychology and human development slash child education. And that was at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. And it’s two years and it was interesting because, that first year, we did just learn a lot about education and, I don’t know, stuff about teaching. And I was so bored. I went to my supervisor and I told her, “This has been wonderful. I’m so grateful that you took me in. It’s a very, very prestigious program, but I think I’m going to drop out.” And the most incredible thing happened. She said, “Why do you want to drop out?” and I said,” I’m not really interested in being a teacher. I’m so much more interested in deviance.” And she looked at me and she leaned across the table and she said, “Sasha, how could you ever hope to understand deviance without first understanding child development?” And I thought, “Oh my God, you’re right.” And so I stayed in the program and actually that day is when I started my serial homicide database.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Really?

Sasha Reid: Because she’s, yeah, she said you need to understand child development to understand deviance, and if you’re not happy with just doing this, find something else to do on the side to help you get through. And guess what? That was a serial homicide database.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Huh! It’s funny how those, little tiny, they seem tiny, they seem insignificant, but they change the course of our lives.

Sasha Reid: Just that one sentence is all it took and it just seemed to make everything make sense. And she’s so right. Sometimes I look back and I’m like, my God, if I didn’t get my Master’s degree in this I would have been at such a disadvantage. Because I didn’t just learn about children, I worked with children for years, and I saw them develop and I saw these stages, I saw how they think and engage. Oh my God, I’m so glad I didn’t drop out.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow. Amazing advice. And then for your course of action, to develop the serial homicide database on the side. That was a very interesting reaction to that to that sentence.

Sasha Reid: Yeah, I thought you’re right. I’m gonna stay here. I’m gonna do what I have to do, which is going into classes every day and teaching, which I didn’t like, but at the end of the day, I’m gonna come home to a database, which is interesting, which I know how to develop because I know how children develop, so yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Cool. All right. As you know, we do want to talk about databases; however, let’s finish talking about your academic journey through PhD and where you are now, and then we’ll come back to databases. So you went on to do a PhD after that.

Sasha Reid: Nope.

Yvonne Kjorlien: No? Okay.

Sasha Reid: Because I now felt like I was already in all good and I understand child development and that’s great, but I felt that I had been out of a bit of a disadvantage because I hadn’t yet understood much about deviance, not in a professional sphere. So I applied to get my Master’s in criminology and socio- legal studies at the University of Toronto. And I applied. And I was rejected. Mmm. It makes sense. They kind of — and people do this, and which is why I interviewed myself as, “Hi. I’m Sasha. I’m a person who does a lot of things.” They pigeon-holed me as a person who studies children and somebody asked, “Why are you trying to study crime when you study children?” And I thought, “Oh my Lord. Stop pigeonholing me.” So I wrote them a letter three pages long explaining why they need to change their decision and admit me.

And can you freaking believe it? They did.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yes.

Sasha Reid: They changed their minds. And now on their application website it says, “You cannot write letters to make us change our minds.”

Yvonne Kjorlien: Nice!

Sasha Reid: So I go and I do a one-year Master’s in criminology and I get a better understanding of the sociology of crime. It wasn’t psych-based, which kind of looking back, it wasn’t all that necessary, but it’s a great program. And then after that, I applied to my PhD and I…that was my PhD. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, holy smokes. That’s quite the journey. And so, okay, let’s talk about the database and how that kind of…we know how to it originated now…how did it evolve to the point where you could use it as a predictive model for the Bruce MacArthur case?

Sasha Reid: It’s still very much developing. Okay, so I know that people are really interested in databases. And I think it might also just be helpful to start by saying how this began. Because right now, it looks awesome. And right now it looks like it’s so usable and it did not start that way. And I think that there’s a little bit of beauty in showing the horrors of starting a database. And the fact that it’s okay to fail. I started this database by having these Word templates. So people would add a picture and input qualitative and quantitative data about serial killers, and it was literally just a bunch of Word sheets. And maybe they were five to 13 pages long and they were never actually in an Excel file ever until I got so many of these forms and I was like, what am I supposed to do with this all. I’ve got all this data, but I can’t do any stats with it. That’s when we turned it into an Excel file.

And then, I think people in databases will think Excel is not a database and they’re completely correct: it’s not. But it’s a great place to store data. And that kind of just taught me the importance of learning how to break down variables into zeros and ones. Make it as easy as possible. Because you’re going to eventually have to be able to run analyses with it. So keep it short, keep it simple. If you have a qualitative variable, don’t have something that people can write out. Inevitably people will spell things wrong, they will get things wrong. It will never be uniform. Always have drop-down menus. It just helps to standardize everything. And that was really our problem with Excel. It’s because, when I’d ask people to write in things like victim’s names or the locations of serial killers, so many errors, so many spelling errors. They’re not uniform whatsoever. And so I gravitated over to Air Table. Which is an incredible data platform. And right now that’s where the serial homicide database is held. And I’ve learned so much in putting everything in Excel and failing so hard for so many years. I better understand now the importance of having nested data and making sure most things are drop-down and also always having room at the end for notes. So I have a lot of research assistants who work with me to fill out these databases. Early on they would email me to say, “I wasn’t able to do A, B, C or D. Can you keep that in mind?” I’d get so many emails that I was like, “You know what? We’ll just create a notes section at the end. So you can just put that into the individual profile.” That’s been really helpful. I tangented.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s all good. So it sounds like… okay, let’s go back to your Word sheets. So you said that you had different people filling these out. How were you getting your data? It sounds like it wasn’t just from the research literature. It sounds like you’re getting personal communications.

Sasha Reid: We were trying. No, so this is again the beauty of trying and failing. So I got my research assistant from the University of Toronto. They were all students, I’m a student. We’re all just interested in crimes, psychopathy, abnormal, whatever. And so we tried to figure out — how can we get the best data possible? Because, again, although we’re students who are all still academics and we want good data. Garbage in, garbage out is a real issue. And so we started by looking at books in the libraries. Fortunately University of Toronto has the biggest library ever. And so there’s a ton of books on serial killers there. So we would rent those out and go through them week after week, just pour through those books and take data from those books and put it into the Word documents. You may be wondering, why wouldn’t you just go to Google? Because I’m dumb do everything the hard way first.

I’m trying to make sure no one else does that. But eventually we did end up going and looking at journal articles and there’s not a lot, but there is enough published case studies on serial killers that we could just pick information and pull it into our Word documents. And then the lower tier data…we tried to tier the data right? So first, you’ve got these books that have been published and that are housed in the universities. You’ve got journal articles where people actually worked with serial killers and we look at those. And then we have — not the best data but at least it’s a temporary holdover — information on the internet in a public domain or even in documentaries. So we would take that data and put it into the database and we cite everything that we have in there just to make sure, if you’re questioning this, here’s the source and maybe it’s a good source, maybe not so take it as it is.

And then after we all got very comfortable with that, we started reaching out more to psychiatrists or psychologists, law enforcement, detectives, people who’d actually worked with these offenders, and just tried to see if there’s anything that they were actually able to share. We tried to get court documents where serial killers actually shared their own statements or where a childhood evaluation had been done. Just because that’s the best information you can possibly get, but, again starting out, I did not know that. I didn’t. So now I know. And for my PhD, I will say this: I definitely wanted to contact serial killers. I went to Yorkville Mall. There’s a store there. It’s called Papyrus. They sell cards and I went there and I bought a hundred empty cards, beautiful cards with beautiful colored envelopes to send to serial killers. Because I am so dumb. And I kind of put that in my ethics that I was going to be like mailing serial killers and getting in touch with them, and that was not gonna fly. So my supervisor and I had a discussion about that and he’s like, “No, you’re never going to get ethics.” Which, he’s correct. I wanted to, but no, I never ended up physically mailing those letters out.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow. Yeah, that’s one of those was it really really Brave or really really not so smart.

Sasha Reid: Yeah, that’s kind of like the tagline of my life. Brave, but not so smart. Yup.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, so I want to ask you — it’s actually really great that we are now chatting instead of a year ago when I first contacted you because of Chat GPT and OpenAI and all these AI because they’re all essentially predictive models built on the databases that, AI who knows where they’re getting their data, they’re pillaging the net for literature, essentially English, but, yeah, that’s their data set and they’re building these databases and they’re using them as predictive models that now look like Chat GPT that in essence mimic the English language. So I was kind of wondering, if you wanted to just take a minute and postulate, if you could throw your database into an OpenAI computer and have it run some analyses. Would you be open to doing that and see what patterns would come out of that?

Sasha Reid: Without thought without question: 100%.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yes, Let’s do it.

Sasha Reid: Listen, because there’s a lot of reasons for this. One: I am, and I don’t know if this is controversial or whatnot, I love Chat GPT. I am an enormous proponent of it. Ethics aside, which you can’t actually just put ethics aside, but for a moment, can we just please, this is revolutionary. It is fascinating and it is beautiful and it has helped my life in ways that I did not even know we’re possible and just on a cat side. I will tell you because I have to actually Chat GPT 4. I freaking love this. I asked it to write a song about a bad cat named Mr. Vinegar — meaning my cat, Theo — and to write the song in the style of Michael Jackson’s Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough and then draw a picture. And it gave me cutest song and picture. It was: how can you hate this? But in terms of writing proposals for things like — you’re an academic, I’m an academic — proposals are literally just verbatim the same thing over and over: here is my question, here is the method. Why do I have to say this 1,000 times over? It will do it for you. Obviously you check it. You edit it. You make it good. But hours of time saved every day.

So I love it, and in the name of giving back to something that gives me so much, I’d be very happy to put my data in there. I took it from the internet too. There’s very little in the serial homicide database that’s not already in the public domain. Whatever was explicitly told to me to don’t share this information, yeah, I would absolutely take that out. Violations of privacy are really really big issue. But everything you took was from the public domain, so I’m happy to throw that back there. I’d love to see what it would show. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right? Because there’s only so much as a human we can analyze it, until we go blind.

Sasha Reid: Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: But we are human we are liable to make mistakes, we can only see what we’re going to see at the moment and we have a subjective interpretation of how live. How we perceive our reality is based on who we are. So to have a machine take a whack at it without those biases. That would be cool.

Sasha Reid: It’s completely in line with the way I do work. So I never do work independently or alone because I think people can get stuck in intellectual silos and that’s never a good thing. So on my team, I’ve got doctors and lawyers and had historians, geographers, people from every single different background so that I can see, where are my blind spots? What are you seeing that I’m not seeing? And just adding Chat GPT to that or predictive AI, there’s just another member of the team, in my opinion. So I’m very happy to use it. I haven’t yet and I’m actually surprised because I have that ability. I’m gonna see I’m gonna do it today. I’m gonna let you know how it goes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Especially with 4 because can’t you upload quite a bit more data into four?

Sasha Reid: You can upload entire spreadsheets, PDFs, everything, yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Then you can with…my god. Yeah.

Sasha Reid: I know.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Keep me in the loop. I am so excited about that.

Sasha Reid: Okay, we’re so geeky I love it.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I mean as soon as I learned what everybody’s calling AI, what it actually is and what it actually is is that it’s a predictive model based on data. Like, holy crap! How many more instances can you get about that? I mean we’ve been doing predictive models for God knows how long I’ve been trying to start my own database to develop a predictive model. You’ve done exactly that. So let’s get the machines on board.

Sasha Reid: Yes. A hundred percent. Now, the issue with that always is it goes back to that very fundamental basic: garbage in, garbage out.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yes.

Sasha Reid: Which is why working with predictive models, working with AI, you have to remember this is a symbiotic relationship. It will only give you whatever you put into it. So if you’re giving it garbage, it’s gonna put out garbage and you have to be aware of that and you have to be kind of humble about that. Right? I know in academia, for whatever reason, people have the biggest egos. I think it prevents them from recognizing their own fallibility. So yeah, some data sets are not really good. Sometimes you’re going to get garbage. And when you publish that garbage and you put that out there in the world, that’s a problem. But we can stop that by just, at the outset, if we’re going to start a database, keep that, I don’t know, make one of those little motivational stickers and put it at your computer: garbage in, garbage out. And just work on that basis and be humble enough to recognize that you have a job to get good data and then through your symbiotic relationship with AI, see what you can do.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Fabulous advice. I like it. All right, let’s talk about what you’re doing now with said database because you don’t have just this one serial homicide database. You’ve got another one too.

Sasha Reid: Yeah, so the other one is called the missing murdered database or the MMD and that one I started in my PhD. So, during my PhD, I was working on the serial homicide database, but it got very rote. It’s the same thing over and over and over. And so I just wanted something that was a little more, I don’t know, a little different. I wasn’t necessarily looking to create a database but something happened. One of my friends from my hometown was listed as missing.

I was just looking into cases of cold cases and I came across hers and it said she was missing. And I was like, my gosh, that’s horrible. What? It was such a moment of “Holy crap. I know this person. We went to school together. We walked in the halls together.” We weren’t friends friends. I think that’s going a bit far. We were acquaintances. We had our own teenage dramas, but we knew each other. And she was missing. And then I looked further and I found out that she had actually been found deceased. And that was such a “Whoa.” I’ve never, I’ve had friends in high school who died from car accidents, but never who went missing and were found to deceased. And so I didn’t know what to do. I’m very bad with figuring out what to do with my emotions. I’m so a psychologist. I’m such a quack, but I didn’t know what to do. And so I put her name in an Excel file — because, yes, I was still in Excel during that time — but I put it in an Excel file and I just kind of kept it there. Because that’s the best thing I can do. Just put it in the box and figure out what to do. And then I thought, “that’s really interesting’ and I started populating her name the same way I populate my serial homicide database: name, age, race, when they went missing, where they were found. I just, for whatever reason, got caught in a loop and I continued to do it. And I found I had another acquaintance who went missing and was found to deceased — that’s two. Since that time, I’ve had many more. It’s a problem, as a person from the North. Indigenous communities are very very much struggling with the issue of missing and murdered people. And so that’s my community and these people are going missing and being found to deceased. So I’ve had a lot of people, a lot of friends of mine in the database, which is super unsettling. But I just continue to add to it because it gave me something to do, to hold those emotions for my missing murdered friends, and also to take my mind away from serial homicide which, it gets overburdening sometimes, very overwhelming.

And so yeah, I made that database. And now it’s become the nation’s largest database on missing murdered people. This only speaks to my compulsive nature, it should not have become this.

Yvonne Kjorlien: You got to play to your strengths, right?

Sasha Reid: Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: If you’re good at it, use it. So, you use the serial homicide database as a predictive model to help catch Bruce McArthur. Have either of these two databases helped in other ways that you can mention.

Sasha Reid: Yeah, so okay first I did not help with Bruce McArthur. That was a total fluke. I am just this low life grad student sitting in her computer too late at night doing random things and I found something neat and tried to share it. That is I think the extent of my involvement. But it did, like it was really a cool moment to take that information, put it on a map and see statistically this is atypical. Zooming-in even closer. Oh, wow, all these victims are very similar. And based on what I know as a serial homicide researcher, like that’s red flag right there. So that was a really cool moment: just realizing there is utility in the database beyond just understanding how people develop. That was the primary goal: how does serial killers develop. But because we added that additional information of location and victimology, we were able to find…at least build a very tiny model to show, yeah, this is a statistical anomaly and people are going missing.

So we do continue to use that. We’re trying to make it a lot more technological than it is. When I first did that it was using Google Maps and a calculator. It was really easy. But now we’ve got this incredible colleague at the University of Toronto. She’s a — I’m gonna get it wrong — biostatistician extraordinaire. She studies the movement patterns of sharks and she’s actually working in the database to see if she can when people are going to go missing, where people are going missing, and whether there may be a serial killer involved. And the reason she’s able to identify whether a serial killer is involved is because in the MMD — the missing murder database — we include all solved cases of Canadian serial killers, right? That’s your training data.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right, right. Yeah, because you won’t know whether or not they’re involved if you don’t involve them at the beginning. You need to know that they are involved, train the database first…ah!

Sasha Reid: Yeah, so we train the MMD on all solved Canadian serial homicides, not just homicides. Serial homicides. Because serial killers actually have a really unique way of hunting and hunting is a gross word, but truly that’s what they’re doing. And so we can actually track and see those patterns when they start and how they develop and we can see that in the database. It’s super clear. So by being able to train the MMD on the basis of those solved cases, we’ve got something that we can use to better predict. It’s not always perfect. But it’s something.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So I’m just thinking here. So it sounds like you needed to figure out the pattern in order to apply the pattern to see if there was a pattern.

Sasha Reid: Kind of. We didn’t necessarily understand the pattern. We know that serial killers, just qualitatively case studily, we know that serial killers kill in a very specific way, whether that’s location, whether that’s victim, whether that’s weapon. They’re very routine in some ways, not every way, in some way. But if there’s routine in some way then there’s some sort of predictive capacity there, right?

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Sasha Reid: And then when you layer on top of that other unsolved cases where there are victim clusters and you compare that against your training data, you can see either is – kind of lining up with that — or it’s just an anomaly.

Sasha Reid: It’s not perfect, but it is a start.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right right. Cool. Yeah, I’m thinking of what you’re saying. And of course this is what 10 years after you first started creating your databases and I’m looking at the mountain of possible work that I would need to do on my own stuff to get to that point and I’m like I just don’t know if I’m up for that. But, hey, anybody out there who wants to create a dispersed remains database. I am convinced there patterns. There have already been patterns showing up in the literature which is why I want to create a database. I have tried to start it, but I’m saying now if you want to get on that, whoever’s listening: yes, do it, go for it. It needs to be done.

Sasha Reid: I mean, you’ll never be able to do it alone. And I think that creating a database alone is a problem because, think about this: when you’re creating databases, you’re looking at variables even at the point of which variables do I include in my database? That’s a really important choice.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yes.

Sasha Reid: I was able to create my serial homicide database with a very robust understanding of child development. Every year I’m still adding variables: “Oh, I didn’t think of that.” Yeah, which is super annoying but you need to be able to be open to thinking about: What are the right variables? What am I trying to capture with this? Because sometimes you can over-include variables. I know I’ve over-included variables. We’ve wnded up deleting things. But you have to make sure that you’re including a lot. And you can’t do that on your own. No one person knows so much that they can just create the most flawless, full variable database. Bring in other people to help.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, I just think after doing this for 20 odd years now, I think I’m screaming into the abyss and that’s part of the reason why I started those podcasts is just to get the knowledge out there and say, “You know what? This is important. It needs to be heard and I’m putting it out there for those who want to hear it.” And sometimes you just gotta let it go and see where it lands.

Sasha Reid: That’s the best you can do. Really.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah.

Sasha Reid: And creating databases too. There’s It’s gonna turn out. There’s no guarantee it’s ever going to be able to do anything,…

Yvonne Kjorlien: right

Sasha Reid: but I think when the heart is in the right place and you’re putting this together because you’ve seen something and you recognize that there is a possibility, it’s worth pursuing. For better for worse.

Yvonne Kjorlien: For better or worse.

Sasha Reid: It’ll just be cool and fun and horrible at the same time, but mostly good.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right, let’s talk about some of… the you’re doing a law degree right now. Sasha, what up?

Sasha Reid: Yes.

Sasha Reid: Wake up every morning and ask myself that same question.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, so you finished your PhD, you’ve got these two databases, you’re working with tons of people, and you move to Calgary to start a law degree.

Sasha Reid: I moved Calgary and I started teaching. So I moved here and I started teaching at the University of Calgary. I was teaching in the sociology department, the psych department, and the undergrad department of law. And so I taught for about two years. And I was teaching of courses, a lot about wrongful convictions. I was teaching a lot of psych courses too, but the law department kind of gave me a lot of freedom. So I was really interested in wrongful convictions because they’re so connected to psychology. So I wanted to teach a course on that. And I taught a course on the West Memphis Three for about four semesters, two years in total. Let me just tell you about the West Memphis Three. You will never come across — with maybe one exception — a crazier case in this.

Okay, we are in the 1980s, height of the satanic panic. We are in the bible belt, United States, Arkansas, baby. You’ve got these three kids who know each other, two are best friends, Jason and Damian, and then you’ve got Jesse Misskelly. And Damian gets pointed at by the police because he looks like the type of person who would kill because he looks like a satanist. There’s three young boys who are murdered in the Robin Hood Hills in that area and so he was immediately just pointed out. So just becomes this entire case of moral panic and hysteria and group think tunnel vision. It’s incredible, an incredible case. But I taught that for so many years and I thought, you know what? I can’t teach this anymore. I can’t sit here and I know that things like this happen, so I’m gonna go to law school and I’m gonna get people who don’t deserve to be in prison out of prison. And I’m gonna teach people about psychology so that they’re not using these tactics to ruin the lives of innocent people.

So now I’m in law school, actually doing this, which is like insane. I’m working on an Innocence Project case right now where basically the same kind of things happened in this person’s case. I can’t talk too much about it, but I can say it’s an innocent person who’s been in prison now for 35 years and this is a Canadian case. So there’s some big problems. I’m working on that case.

And I’m just doing a lot of really interesting investigations where psychology and the law overlap. So I will graduate soon and I hope to create a law firm. That’s the next goal. So we’ll see what happens. But I want to create a law firm where we utilize psychological knowledge and the law to help victims of crime and to help advocate for people who feel like they’ve been exposed to an injustice.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, that’s monumental, Sasha. Just saying.

Sasha Reid: Thank you.

Yvonne Kjorlien: But if you can build two databases, yeah, I think you’ll have no problem. You’ve already done two monumental things already.

Sasha Reid: The team and I, the team and I should reiterate. I have never done this alone.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow. Holy smokes. I hope to touch base with you again in a couple years and see where you are with that because, yeah, I mean, those instances where there is a wrongdoing and you’ve got an innocent person in prison. I think that’s an indicator that there’s somehow something systemic that’s not right.

Sasha Reid: Mm- Yeah, and sometimes it is actual, I don’t know how to even say this, misconduct or there’s actual intent and malice to do this. But a lot of times it just comes down to the fact that humans are fallible. We make mistakes. We are prone to all of these cognitive biases and that’s why I also say always stay humble. You are a fallible person because you are a person. And so just being able to help people recognize that I think it’s a really helpful thing in the law. Yeah. We’ll see.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So who did I talk to? I talked to the Midnight Order didn’t I?

Sasha Reid: You talked to the Mini Midnight Order. All right, let me tell you about my groups because they’re like the beating heart and soul of the work that I do. So first, we have the Midnight Order and there’s only so much I can say about that because we do have our documentary TV series coming out sometime in 2024, but this is a group of extraordinary women. They are psychologists, they’re doctors there soon to be police…extraordinaires…everyone, If I don’t know what you are, you’re a something “extraordinaire.” Police extraordinare. And they do all of on-the-ground work with me.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay.

Sasha Reid: So that’s the Midnight Order. And then the other group, the one that you met originally was called the Mini Midnight Order and it was Mini Midnight Order because I hadn’t actually had time to think of a good name for them yet. But I have since come up with the name. So they are the Society of Umbra Scientia.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay.

Sasha Reid: It means the Society of Shadow Science. Okay, listen, if you are going to be an academic, if you are going to do anything in this world and have a group, you better give it the coolest name ever or else. What are you doing in your life?

Yvonne Kjorlien: I’m sensing those to sorority days coming back.

Sasha Reid: Yes. I just think why wouldn’t you name it something cool. I am not going to name this Alpha Duck.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Unless there’s some sentimentality with the alpha duck.

Sasha Reid: Yeah, just have fun with the names that you make for things. So they’re the Society of Umbra Scientia. And this group helps me with the database. They help me specifically with the MMD. And they’re extraordinary. They’ve been helping me with this for over a year. The input information about missing murdered people. We try to have weekly meetings where I’ll invite people, yourself included, just to share the cool things that you do. Because one thing that’s really important for me, and this comes back to having been mentored myself, having a mentor is super important. I recognize that the one flaw with my mentor is that they didn’t show me what I could do. And with my team I tried very much to mentor them because I don’t have any money to pay anybody anything. I am a student. So what I try to do is make sure I’m giving them opportunities for them to shine. So whether that’s helping them get reference letters or write proposals or introducing them to people in the field just so they know what’s out there. That is on me to do and I’m happy to do that. So I always try to mentor people so that they know: one, they can do it.  Right, enough with this Imposter Syndrome. Like, no. You can do it. Like I’m done. I’m over that. You can do it. You have the skills. Everyone else who’s on the top two is just flailing and doubting themselves every day as well. Stop it. Get over yourself and go do it. So that. I try to get that instilled. And then also just helping them connect with people. Like here is what is available. And it’s been good. We’ve had people get into medical school, grad school. And I’m just like they’re doing it, they’re doing it because they can see it and it’s so beautiful.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Nice. Nice. All right, and the other group that you were talking about. Calvaria?

Sasha Reid: Calvaria? The Order of Calvaria, It means the Order of Skulls, obviously.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I like it. 

Sasha Reid: Thank you. You would. So this is Sue Brown and myself. Sue Brown is the staff lawyer and director of advocacy for Justice for Girls. She is an incredible superstar. If I met her earlier, she would a hundred percent be on my Midnight Order team, like we’re kindred spirits. So she’s one of the people that I’m working with all of these cases that are coming out of BC. So right now I’m doing a lot of work on miscarriages of justice, wrongful convictions, homicide cases, cold cases within the province of BC itself. So I work side by side with her. We meet every week, and we kind of just have a rundown of the cases that we’re working on.

Trying to get access to information from the RCMP, etc all these different. It’s tricky. It’s not fun, but it’s interesting because slowly every week we chip away at these cold cases, whether that’s meeting people, talking with people, getting information from the courts, or actually visiting certain sites, certain locations themselves. So right now, and I think I can mention this because this is coming out in two weeks. We have written a coalition letter addressed to the RCMP, the Government of Canada, and the Government of British Columbia where we’re basically asking them to put a moratorium on applications to dispose of evidence from the Pickton case. There’s about 14,000 pieces of evidence right now they’re trying to dispose of however that looks whatever that entails. I’m not too sure. We’re trying to figure that out. But until there’s clarity around that and until the families are notified, we’re trying to stop that. So that’s one of the things that we’re doing.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Interesting

Sasha Reid: It is.

Yvonne Kjorlien: When you put it in that light, I understand that. Because I just did a podcast with Kimberly Moran out of the states talking about the ethics of human remains. When I came up through undergrad, I mean, yes, I was taught about the ethics of working with human remains, but it wasn’t so much in the limelight about where the collections that we work with in school came from. Because you could always tell the plastic cast from the real thing and it was always preferable to work with the real thing because when you get out into the real world, whatever you wanted to do with your life, you were going to be working with the real thing. And the real thing feels much different and you also are likely to get representation of disease and pathology and what have you on a real collection then you would a plastic cast. But it was never really talked about where those real ones came from and fast forward 20 years with the whole social justice thing that we’re now involved in and people don’t even want to take pictures of real human remains because they could be done without the knowledge or consent of the individual who had died. Because the individual could have died a hundred years ago in that skeleton could have been in a school collection for a hundred years. I mean, who knows? Or without the consent or knowledge of their next of kin. So there’s all of this. It’s grown into this bigger picture. And so dealing with something like a case like the Pickton case. It was investigated 20 years ago and they have all this evidence which could potentially involve remains or the possessions of the deceased. I could see that the family might want those, or at least want to know that those possessions are being disposed of.

All right. You mentioned you want to open your own law firm. Anything else that you wanted to do in the world? World peace?

Sasha Reid: We’ll put that on maybe next year’s roster.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay.

Sasha Reid: You know what I’d actually like to do? Take a break.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Like an actual vacation what? Wow.

Sasha Reid: An actual vacation. I would love to. I think it’s so easy to get caught up, especially I just noticed working on so many advocacy cases how easy it is to get very caught up in the emotion of it. It just goes with you everywhere. So taking a break would be really nice. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Do you think you could actually take a break? Like, because you mentioned that emotional involvement, can you just stop that?

Sasha Reid: No, no because the last time I had a break was COVID and it was during COVID that I was like I’m gonna go to law school. So that was my break. I studied to get into law school. I think it’s actually more of a danger for me to take a break than just keep going. I get ideas.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, I know sometimes yeah. Yeah, the break does it’s a gap that needs to be filled and it gets filled with other stuff that you could be doing.

Sasha Reid: Yes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Sounds like a good idea, yeah. All right. I think we’re gonna finish up there. Thank you very much, Sasha. I look forward to touching base again with you and see where you’re going with all of this and what waves you’re making in the field of law.

Sasha Reid: I love how you laughed when you said that. Thank you.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I mean you you’re making waves already. It’s just a matter of time really.

Sasha Reid: Yeah, I look forward to updating you and also as usual relying on your incredible expertise for some of the strange things that I’m doing.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Always, always willing to talk to you about scavengers and scattered remains. Absolutely.

Sasha Reid: Thank you so much for having me here. It was a pleasure.