The Marshall Project was awarded a 2024 EPPY Award for its investigation with St. Louis Public Radio and APM Reports that dug into why more than a thousand homicides committed over the last decade in St. Louis remain unsolved.
The Marshall Project and our partners were recognized in the Best Collaborative Investigative/Enterprise Reporting category for the five-part investigative series, Unsolved.
Journalists at St. Louis Public Radio and APM Reports fought for years in court to get the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department to release records around homicide clearance rates. The records were finally released in 2023, which is when The Marshall Project joined the project.
The records revealed that St. Louis police had solved less than half of the city’s homicides in the previous decade, and just 31% of homicides committed in 2019, a low point for the city. While Black people made up 90% of those killed in that time, police disproportionately solved homicides of White victims.
“We’re honored and delighted that Unsolved was awarded an EPPY for the long and rigorous investigation into why so many homicides went unsolved,” said Susan Chira, editor in chief of The Marshall Project. “We thank our partners at APM and St. Louis Public Radio and were grateful we could team up to expose the flaws that left so many families feeling abandoned.”
Alysia Santo, a staff reporter at The Marshall Project, collaborated on the series with Rachel Lippmann from St. Louis Public Radio, and Tom Scheck and Jennifer Lu from APM Reports. Dave Mann at The Marshall Project helped edit the series along with Emily Corwin from APM Reports, and Brian Munoz and Brian Heffernan from St. Louis Public Radio.
“It’s such an honor to be recognized by the judges for this collaboration,” Santo said. “We’re grateful for our reporting partners and our sources, who bravely shared their experiences so we could tell these stories.”
The reporters built relationships with grieving families and documented a devastating lack of communication and trust between police and the communities they serve. Families described fruitless efforts to contact detectives assigned to their loved ones’ cases.
The package opens with an immersive map that brings readers into one of St. Louis’ most violent neighborhoods. Photos, data and interactive elements further contextualized the story.
The project led St. Louis to change its policies around the release of that data, making it easier for citizens to understand their communities and hold the government accountable.
Clearance rates for homicide in St. Louis have improved since the period examined in the investigation. But thousands of grieving family members still await answers for the kilings of their loved ones.
The judges commended The Marshall Project and its partners for their aggressive pursuit of accountability from public institutions.
“Too often, the ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ practice at too many news outlets means the victims — as well as the perpetrators — are forgotten as reporters move on to the next attention-grabbing event,” the award committee noted in its announcement.
The EPPY Awards honor excellence in digital journalism and have been awarded by Editor & Publisher Magazine for 26 years. The EPPYs honor outstanding achievements in multimedia journalism from legacy newspapers, broadcasters, digital media and academic institutions. The award committee comprises more than 40 media professionals and academic experts.
