Peter Sutcliffe was interviewed nine times and the accent on a hoax tape counted in his favour. The tape had been played to the nation, and walking away from it would have meant admitting the enquiry had chased the wrong voice. Former senior detective Bob Pointer and private investigator Ben Cardall take the sunk cost fallacy into the incident room and the interview room, on both sides of the table.

In this episode:
- What the sunk cost fallacy is, and what theatre tickets and Concorde reveal about it
- Barry Staw's escalation research and why the most senior person in the room is most at risk
- The Yorkshire Ripper enquiry, the Wearside tape and the Byford Report
- How investigators rate the same evidence differently depending on their theory
- Spotting the sunk cost fallacy in witnesses and subjects who have committed to a story
- Why authentic dissent beats a devil's advocate, and Holmes's Norbury protocol
- Sincere listening, ORBIT and the premortem as field tools

If you have ever defended a theory because of what it cost you, subscribe and tell us in the comments which case you held onto too long.

Tags: sunk cost fallacy, escalation of commitment, tunnel vision investigation, confirmation bias, investigative interviewing, behavioural analysis, Yorkshire Ripper investigation, Byford Report, ORBIT interviewing, premortem, Sherlock Holmes deduction, Deductionist podcast

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#podcast #ripper #sunkencost

Hannah Fry went through every past season of The Traitors looking for statistical patterns, then got recruited as a traitor herself. Maths can predict human behaviour across a crowd with unnerving precision. Point it at one person and the predictions fall apart, for reasons chaos theory explains.

In this episode:
• Why crowds behave like equations, from Hannah Fry's London riots model to the near repeat burglary effect
• How geographic profiling narrows a search without naming a suspect
• What the mathematics of love leaves out, and how overfitting fools analysts
• Chaos theory done properly, with Edward Lorenz, the butterfly effect and the MusicLab experiment
• Why 160 machine learning teams still could not predict human behaviour in individuals
• Bayesian reasoning as the bridge from pattern to person, tested on the taxicab problem
• The Sally Clark case and the statistical errors that convict the innocent

Subscribe for the method behind every case, and learn to predict human behaviour without ever having to guess.

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Music provided by https://robertjohncollinsmusic.com/`

#maths #traitors #behaviour

The evidence in a romance scam is all there in writing. Every message, every apology, every “be careful, there are scammers on here” sits in the chat log like a frozen crime scene. Dr Elisabeth Carter, criminologist and forensic linguist, reads those crime scenes line by line, by hand, and she joins Ben Cardall and Bob Pointer to show exactly how the crime is built.

Most people picture a romance scam as a lonely pensioner and an oil rig sob story. The language shows something far more deliberate: credibility first, rapport second, then a slow transition where the scammer turns vulnerable and the victim offers the money nobody asked for. Elisabeth explains genre mapping (why the exaggeration we tolerate in normal dating, and the countdown clocks we tolerate on Black Friday, make red flags look green), how organised crime groups pass victims between operators to keep them awake, where sextortion enters, and why AI has made the old spelling mistake test useless.

Bob brings the reverse order technique from interview practice, Ben brings a super recogniser’s view of deepfake dating profiles, and the live chat brought receipts. You’ll leave with one rule that would stop most romance scam attempts dead in their tracks.

Victims of romance fraud get called gullible. The research describes grooming, coercion and abuse. By the end of this episode, you’ll see why.

🎧 Scam Secrets with Dr Elisabeth Carter, Shari Vahl and Alex Wood (BBC Radio 4): https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/scam-secrets/id1828899532 or search “Scam Secrets” on BBC Sounds
🔗 Dr Elisabeth Carter, Kingston University: https://www.kingston.ac.uk/about/staff/dr-elisabeth-carter
📖 Elisabeth’s latest book: The Language of Romance Crimes (Cambridge University Press)
🚨 Report fraud (England, Wales, NI): https://www.reportfraud.police.uk or 0300 123 2040
🚨 Scotland: call Police Scotland on 101

Subscribe if you want to see whether the Real Life Sherlock reputation survives ninety more pages of this.

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Spotting lying, we are told is just Somebody freeze framed a grieving parent's face, announced "duping delight" to four million followers, and the comment section returned a verdict before the police did. The lie detection science says that person was running on a coin flip with a ring light. Ben Cardall and former senior detective Bob Pointer take the microexpressions truth apart, then rebuild what the research says about how to tell if someone is lying without guessing.

In this episode:
- Why watching Lie to Me made viewers worse at recognising honest people
- The 2 percent problem: how rarely microexpressions appear, and why they show up on truth tellers too
- What the research on murderers' televised pleas found, and why it cannot convict anyone from one clip
- The 54 percent wall: 24,483 judges, and why cops, judges and psychiatrists score like students
- The 900 million dollar airport programme that never caught a threat
- What Ekman got right, including the Othello error most of his fans have never heard of
- How to tell if someone is lying with methods that move accuracy: Strategic Use of Evidence, verifiable detail and cognitive load

If you have ever been certain about a face, watch this before you decide you know how to tell if someone is lying.

Tags: how to tell if someone is lying, lie detection science, microexpressions truth, microexpressions, Paul Ekman, deception detection, true crime analysis, body language myths, Aldert Vrij, strategic use of evidence, investigative interviewing, Deductionist Podcast

Many a true word is spoken in jest and only some of them from Sherlock. Except on page eighteen of Cain's Jawbone, where it isn't. One word has been swapped, and I read straight past it three times.

This is episode five of my live attempt to solve Cain's Jawbone, the 1934 literary murder puzzle by Torquemada. A hundred pages printed out of order, six murders, six killers, and a solution only a handful of people have ever cracked.

Last episode was three ways to hide a body in a sentence. This one opens the second drawer.

His toolkit. The anti-proverb, the namesake and the mock-heroic. Three techniques Torquemada uses on pages 11 to 20, and every one of them works by looking completely ordinary. I am not sure that Sherlock would have taken this long to solve it but I am doing the best I can haha

My toolkit. The concordance, the anachronism test and stylometry. Three methods built to catch exactly that, borrowed from 13th century friars, a Renaissance forgery hunter, and the statisticians who unmasked J.K. Rowling's pen name.

Along the way you'll get the Moses illusion, a garden cricket in full medieval armour, a nickname for Alexander that made me very excited for all of ten minutes, and the line on page eighteen that tells you what the six killers will look like.

Then I'll tell you where the solve actually stands.

No spoilers. Not now, not when I finish, not ever. If you're solving it yourself, everything here is technique, not answers.

Sources mentioned
Wolfgang Mieder on the anti-proverb (1982)
Thomas Erickson and Mark Mattson, the Moses illusion (1981)
Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock
Hugh of Saint-Cher's Bible concordance (c. 1230)
Lorenzo Valla on the Donation of Constantine (1440)
Frederick Mosteller and David Wallace, Inference and Disputed Authorship (1964)
Patrick Juola and Peter Millican, the Robert Galbraith analysis (2013)

If you've spotted something I've missed, tell me in the comments. Spoiler-free, please. I'll check it against the ledger.

#cainsjawbone #reallifesherlock #truecrime #puzzle #torquemada #sherlock

Cain's Jawbone is a 1934 literary puzzle by Edward Powys Mathers, pen name Torquemada. 100 scrambled pages, six murders, no key, no instructions, and only four verified solutions in ninety years.

In a bid to live up to the the Real Life Sherlock title I have been given. Professionally, on stage, on camera, that name is the whole premise, read people, catch what others miss, work it out before anyone else does. This book does not care what I go by. 20 pages in, and it's taken longer than I'd like to admit for the method to start paying off. But it finally is.

Every detail I've checked has turned out to be doing real work, real quotations, real history, real legal language buried in places it shouldn't be. And one name keeps turning up in completely different rooms of this book, wearing a completely different mood each time. I'm not telling you the name. I'm not telling you the pages. But I'll tell you the book rewards suspicion, and I've stopped trusting anyone in it, including the narrator.

This episode also opens the actual toolkit, the real literary techniques a book like this uses to hide things in plain sight, so you can start spotting them yourself before I say another word.

No spoilers. Not when I finish, not ever. Every viewer gets the same blank page I got, including the Real Life Sherlock.

Follow along. This is going to take a while.

Subscribe if you want to see whether the Real Life Sherlock reputation survives ninety more pages of this.

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#sherlockholmes #cainsjawbone #puzzle

Ai is here and David Clarke spent his career catching fraudsters, first as a City of London Police Fraud Squad chief, then building the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau from the ground up. Now he's watching artificial intelligence industrialise the exact crime he built his life around stopping. This conversation is about what happens when the con artist never sleeps, never runs out of voices, and gets smarter every week.

In this episode:

David explains how AI has moved fraud from mass blast scams to attacks personalised to the individual victim, and why that shift is the one nobody's prepared for. He walks through why he calls the current fraud landscape the worst he's seen in 45 years, official statistics included, and where those statistics are quietly undercounting the real damage. He breaks down AMLiss, the tool he built to catch red flags buried inside multilingual contracts and business communications before they become a problem. He makes the case that expecting ordinary people to spot deepfake fraud on their own is naive, and lays out what should replace that expectation instead. He pitches his "Digital Fortress" concept, a nationwide system linking banks, telecoms, and law enforcement against AI driven crime, and argues for who should be running it. He talks through what actually changes moving from fraud squad detective to corporate chief security officer. And he gives the one tell that gives away an AI run scam before the money ever moves.

Subscribe if you want to see whether the Real Life Sherlock reputation survives ninety more pages of this.

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#podcast #ai #guildhawk

Your best performer might be running on narcissism, Machiavellianism, or psychopathy, and the org chart rewards it. This is the Dark Triad without the textbook, applied to the office and the relationships you can't just walk away from.

In this episode:
- What the Dark Triad actually is, and what it isn't (it's not a diagnosis)
- The difference between admiration seeking and rivalrous narcissism at work
- Why Machiavellianism plays the long game across quarters, not meetings
- Corporate psychopathy: the B Scan and why charm is the tell, not the alibi
- The halo effect and why confident people get away with it
- A validated fast-read method (Dirty Dozen scale) and how to use it responsibly
- The organisational cost data behind toxic leadership traits

If you work with people, you work with this. Listen before your next performance review.

Subscribe if you want to see whether the Real Life Sherlock reputation survives ninety more pages of this.

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Music provided by https://robertjohncollinsmusic.com/`

#podcast #darktriad #psychology