Offender list may have saved Meagher: academics Murdered: Jill Meagher. Two criminologists who tracked nearly 900 murderers after their release from prison are calling for the establishment of a national database of violent criminals to predict the risk of repeat offending. Australian National University professors Roderic Broadhurst and Ross Maller say such a database would have prevented the death of Jill Meagher, whose murderer fitted the classic profile of somebody likely to reoffend. Their study of 894 West Australian males released from prison between 1984 and 2005 found that 20 per cent committed another violent offence, and 13 committed another homicide. But those who might have reoffended in other states were not included. Factors such as the early onset of offending, violent offending, repeat offending, persistent lack of compliance, substance abuse and whether the subjects were employed or in a relationship can help predict if somebody is likely to reoffend, with those in some groups 40 per cent more likely to do so. Adrian Bayley had been sexually assaulting women since his teens, had continued to do so after imprisonment, failed to report to parole officers and fractured a man's jaw while on parole before he raped and murdered Ms Meagher in a Melbourne alley. "You don't have to be a statistician to work out that he's going to be dangerous," Professor Broadhurst said. What troubled him most was a report suggesting the reason authorities had not revoked Bayley's parole when he broke the man's jaw was that it was not a sexual assault. All the research tells us that it doesn't matter too much whether it's a sexual assault or a non-sexual assault. He shouldn't have been on the streets given his risks. We think the methodology for risk assessment needs to be improved.