Not Scotland Yard

In the United States, there is no one place to report homicides or missing persons (who can sometimes turn out to be murder victims). 

Hannibal Would Have Been Caught Quicker
If The US Had A Central Crime Database.

They have over 17,000 different police agencies.

That means missing persons and homicides get reported and are spread out over 17,000 different agencies. 

Even the FBI didn't have an overall view of crimes until the FBI Behavioural Science Centre in Quantico, Virginia (of Silence of the Lambs and agent Clarice Starling fame) had to set up the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program in 1993, to try and track missing persons / homicides and even that was really only looking for possible serial killers. 

Now apart from the fact that this federal approach to crimes, can obviously lead to some (many?)  killers getting away ....  its estimated that there are around 50 active serial killers at anyone time in the USA .... down from 300 - 250 in the 1970's and 80's - based on the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting programme collations, and Radford University and Florida Gulf Coast University jointly operating a database that tracks serial killers) .... its also rather inefficient with a lot of duplication in databases.

So whilst the FBI does collect and collate some crime data from law enforcement agencies, it's not a comprehensive, real-time central database which means that the resource isn't immediately available to all law agencies as the crimes are reported.   

Now I accept that implementing and maintaining a single, central database would require significant investment in technology, personnel, and infrastructure, it surely would pay back very quickly as state databases would be for lesser crimes (traffic, domestic violence, petty crimes etc), whilst there would be real-time murder, rape, drug trafficking, child abuse etc would be nationally held .... in particular the MO (method of operating) and other details would quickly be able to be linked and identified to spot serial offenders.

Combined with prison details of known offenders (and locations) who had committed similar or identical crimes would be a fast way of eliminating or identifying repeat offender criminals ... for instance a study of 146 sexual offenders found that 34% re-offended within 25 years, usually within the first 15 years of release (fairly obviously individuals under 34 at the time of release, had the highest rates of sexual recidivism, which peaked at 42% after 25 years).  In general, the US criminal recidivism rate is around 70% within 5 years of release, so plenty of repeat offenders who are often in different locations from the original crimes.

But even if it was just a database on a lesser scale, it just seems strange that at least all rapes, homicides and missing people are not on a central real time computer .... I've watched enough real crime US TV shows, to know that there are links between them.