Hunt for a possible serial killer is Job One for all-female team of investigators

Sasha Reid was a Ph.D. student in Canada when one of her friends from high school went missing.

“She was smart, and she had a beautiful smile, and a great laugh,” Reid says. “And it's a story that we hear all too often: An indigenous girl goes missing, an indigenous girl is found dead. And that's exactly what happened in her case. First, she was missing, then she was dead.”

So, Reid, who is now a psychologist, established one of the world’s largest databases on missing and murdered people. The database that started because of one girl now includes more than 11,800 entries

But Reid’s work didn’t end there. Reid, along with an all-female team she has put together called The Midnight Order, uses her expertise in data science, science, criminology, and psychology to solve overlooked crimes, with a special interest when a serial killer may be responsible for unsolved murders. Their team uses the Missing and Murdered Database in tandem with another database that Reid built, which tracks the developmental markers of serial killers.

Reid and her team of investigators offer an in-depth look at their work in a new Freeform docuseries, “Sasha Reid & The Midnight Order.” Episode 1 is available now on Freeform and on Hulu. Episode 2 will be released on Tuesday, July 16. Additional episodes will debut Tuesdays on Freeform at 10:00 p.m. ET, and available the next day on Hulu.

ABC Audio’s companion podcast to the series, "Inside the Midnight Order," is available on podcast streaming platforms.

"I can't do this work alone," Reid says. "I wanted to build a community of the best and brightest -- for like-minded women who wanted to study serial homicide and the complex factors of victimology."

The team’s first case comes from a woman who calls Reid to tell her that she suspects her ex-husband may be responsible for several unsolved murders. To protect the woman’s identity given the sensitive nature of the information she is sharing, the woman is given the code name “Veronica,” while her ex-husband is referred to as “Archie,” in a nod to the comic book characters that Reid loves.

Veronica shared with Reid that Archie was very abusive during their relationship. She suspected that he might be involved in some unsolved murders of women in Canada in the early 1980s and provided information on several potential victims, including timelines, newspaper clippings, and maps showing where people went missing and where their bodies were found.

The women had gone missing or were discovered murdered, and their cases have never been solved.

"She spent a lot of time trying to get the police to listen to her," Reid says.

And when that didn't work, she sought Reid’s help.

“You can just hear the anguish and desperation in her voice. It's actually very heartbreaking to hear somebody basically saying, ‘Somebody, listen to me.’ So our commitment to Veronica is that we're here to listen."

Reid and her team examine the information to see where it might lead. The investigators discovered that most of the victims were young, white females.

Two of the women, Christine Prince and Donna Awcock, were sexually assaulted and murdered. Their bodies were disposed of near water. The Midnight Order dialed in on Prince and Awcock, who were both nannies, after Veronica pointed out how Archie had an obsession with nannies.

Even though it's a decades-old crime, Reid said she wanted to visit the locations where the bodies were found to delve deeper into the psychology of the perpetrator.

"Where a body is dumped can tell us a lot about the psychology of the offender," Reid says as she investigates a crime scene. "The body was thrown right there, right? On that side. Are they looking for seclusion where they can spend time with a victim? Is this a crime of opportunity? It could be. Or is it premeditated? Going to the crime scenes helps you to inhabit the mind of that killer."

The team went to Toronto, where Prince was last seen. Once they arrived, they spoke with Stacy Gallant, a retired detective for the Toronto Police. He told Reid he always thought that there was an accomplice in Prince’s murder.

"If Archie was working with a partner, it would likely be somebody he knew, and knew very well," Reid says. "How many of the 20% are sexually motivated murderers, though? Well, I do not have time to look into all of that."

Veronica described Archie as always being alone, never with friends or a group. He didn't seem to have a close connection to anyone. It would be odd for Archie to have an accomplice based on Veronica's information about him. So, to dive deeper into the case, the investigators shifted their focus to Ontario, where Awcock was last seen.

Awcock’s body was found in a location 25 minutes away from where Archie lived in 1983. To get the investigation going, Reid found a family member of Awcock.

"Tammy is Donna Awcock's sister, and she's agreed to meet with us," Reid says. "And this is the first time we'll be meeting with a family member of a victim."

Tammy told Reid that Awcock went to the store to grab two packs of cigarettes while babysitting. When Awcock arrived at the store, she bought the cigarettes and left.

The next day, the family thought she was still at at her job, but it turned out she wasn't there.

"So we started knocking on doors," Tammy said. "Nobody could find her, didn't know where she was. So my mom called the police and they said, ‘well, you gotta wait 24 hours because we classed them as a runaway.’ We knew Donna didn't run away. So we started up a search. There was about 200 people from the complexes. Two boys went to Fanshawe. That's where they found Donna down in the basement."

Reid, who says that her database helped police identify Bruce McArthur as the serial killer behind the murders of eight gay men in Toronto between 2010 and 2017, details the work for this current case with her team in the Freeform docuseries, peeling back the layers to help determine whether Archie – or someone else – is responsible for the cold case murders.