Science of Deduction

Body Language Cheat Sheet for Writers

As described by Selnick’s article:

The face can be one of the most telling areas of the body in terms of mood and emotion, as well as certain habits. Here are several tips I have collected, particularly from aesthetic physicians that deal with the face and its intricacies extensively:

The ratio of frown lines on the forehead and between the eyebrows and laugh lines around the eyes can indicate which expression the individual is more prone to, and can act as a gauge for their long-term mood trends.

More sun damage (more wrinkles, tanner skin, more freckles, etc.) on the left side of the face as opposed to the right side (in countries were you drive on the right side of the road) indicate an excessive amount of time spent driving during daylight hours and can be a sign that you’re dealing with someone who works in the transportation industry. This is due to the fact that more light hits your face on the side with a window immediately next to it as opposed to the side without a window. The left side of the face would be the side to look at for people who live in countries where they drive on the left side of the road.

A very slightly enlarged side of the face indicates which side the person sleeps on. Namely, the side of the face that is slightly larger will be the side they sleep on, because blood can pool on that side of the face as they rest. Chronic pooling can then cause one side of the face to grow or swell very slightly. This in turn can be a sign of back problems or other chronic pain that would force the individual to sleep solely on one side.

Congratulations! You are officially done with the first month of this training program. Have you noticed improvement in your observational skills? 

Whoa, hold up, what are you even talking about? 

Well, if you don’t know what the training program is, click here for more information, and here for the overview on Weeks 1-4. I hope you’ll join us! 

If the training did not go as well as you expected, don’t get discouraged- chances are that you are more observational now than you were a month ago, and if so, you have fulfilled the main objective. 

If you followed the program religiously, I’m guessing you are ridiculously better now than you were at the beginning, and I applaud you for your dedication! You are well on your way to becoming an astute observer. 

In either case, you now have a choice: repeat the first month, and continue to work on observation, or start our next major part. To be perfectly honest, you may find it beneficial to repeat the observation portion, as it is so so so important. However, also know that some observational exercises will be incorporated as we move forward, and of course you can come back to Weeks 1-4 whenever your heart desires. 

Before we move forward, if you have any comments about how the last month went for you, or any suggestions on what we can do to improve the program, please don’t hesitate to contact us! 

Alright, so the next three weeks are going to be about 

don’t underestimate how long I’ve been waiting to use that. 

The focus on this part of the program is strictly to observe and analyze the behavior of other people. This means we will be looking at how they are acting, not what they are wearing or whose house they are in. Body language is one of the most important skills to have, as it is estimated that up to 93% of communication does not rely on the spoken word (this statistic has been in controversy in it’s creation, and if you would like to know more about where it comes from and why it is possibly misused, see the source at the bottom of this post). 

Disclaimer: Yes, I know the difference between nonverbal communication (which includes tone, voice, etc) and body language. This section will cover body language only as that is easier to observe and deduce from at a distance. 

/ 9 Rules You Must Follow 

1. Observe people!

For this to work, you will have to look at people. Do it from a distance. Do it up close. Observe, observe, observe.

2. Observe behavior in context

Is it cold outside? Is it crowded? What’s the mood of the place? All of these factors must be taken into consideration when looking at behavior. If a person is nervous in a job interview, it is understandable. If they are nervous when talking to their significant other of 20 years, it can indicate something more going on. 

3. Learn universal behavior

More on this in another post, but learning behavior that can be observed in most people is a good foundation to start. Especially when observing from a distance, or observing someone you don’t know. Much of our exercises will be focused on this aspect. 

4. Recognize and decode idiosyncratic behavior

This is essentially the opposite of universal behavior. It is behavior that is unique to a person and easier to recognize the longer you know a person. Think nervous tics. 

5. Establish a baseline

Baselines will be covered in another post, but it the normal behavior for a person. If a person is normally fidgety and jumpy, this is their baseline. If they are normally calm and collected, that is their baseline. Kapeesh? 

6. Watch for clusters

This is an important one. No single movement by itself means enough to deduce from. You must look for clusters of behavior (generally three that indicate the same emotion) to be confident in your hypothesis. The more, the better. 

7. Look for changes

Another very significant one. Changes in body language indicate changes in emotion; therefore you must look out for when someone’s body language changes, and then try to find out why. 

8. Detect false/ misleading cues

More on this later, but as you become a better and better observer, you will need to learn how to know when someone is being misleading with their body language. This will only come with practice, and needs to be handled carefully, as it is very difficult to tell when someone is lying. 

9. Distinguish comfort from discomfort

The two broadest categories are comfort and discomfort. First, learn cues that will tell you which of the two a person is feeling. From there, you can narrow down further and analyze their situation with more clarity. 

/ Reference Chart

This will be a word document I put together. I suggest you all print out, take with you and use until you until you memorize cues. It is available here. 

Here, you can also access amateur-deductions original posts about body language, which I suggest you read. There is only one right now, but more will be added when I get to them as the course progresses. 

Actions Make Words Look Trivial Part One 

/ Having Trouble?

Read through the body language posts referenced above. 

Read them again.

Read body language books.

Go out and observe people.

Observe your friends and, based on how they act afterwards, determine if you were right (or ask them). 

Ask yourself questions. 

How close are these people based on their body language?

What signals does this person exhibit?

Based on their signals, what can I tell about their state of mind?

Is this person comfortable/ uncomfortable right now?

Is there any one person who is exhibiting behavior different than everyone else in this situation?

Why?

Make up questions like these to keep yourself engaged and alert. 

/ Sources Used

There’s a lot, I’ll keep adding as I remember them. 

What Every Body is Saying by Joe Navarro (Book)

The Definitive Book of Body Language by Barbara and Allen Pease (Book)

Ellipsis Behavior Laboratories (Website)

Six Universal Expressions (Web Article) 

Body Language in the Workplace by Barbara and Allen Pease

The 7% Rule by Philip Yaffe (Web Article)

/ Above All…

Remember that Sherlock Holmes was not born with the ultimate knowledge on how to deduce. He had to learn it, through years of practice. With dedication and patience, you can too.

The focus of the first part of this program is how to increase your observational skills. This part is absolutely critical, for how can you expect to deduce something you can’t see? Do not skimp on this section; if you feel that after week 4, you still can’t remember if your friend’s shirt was red or green, repeat the “Observation” section of the program again (after a second time, though, I’d suggest moving on and building your observational skills as you continue to focus on other aspects).

Read through the “Things to Keep in Mind” and “Having Trouble?” section before you start. Come back to these sections as often as needed.

/ Things to Keep in Mind

Observe, don’t deduce: Right now, the focus is learning to be actively observant. We will focus on analyzing and drawing conclusions later. Making deductions in this stage is not only going to result in inaccuracy, but will severely hurt your progress later on.

Be critical, not emotional: Observe in an objective manner. See things for how they actually are, not how you perceive them to be. Do not clutter observations with your personal biases.

Think this: The scarf is orange and red

NOT this: The scarf is warm colored

This: The car has mud on the tires and dirt on the glass

NOT this: The car is very dirty

See the difference?

The two absolute best questions to ask yourself whenever you observe. Like ever. :

What is missing?

Example: I see a desk with a lamp, a book, a notebook, and a calculator, but no pencils.

What would seem out of place in this situation?

Example: At a busy upscale mall, it would be out of place for someone with a banana costume to walk in. This may be a silly example, but as you go forward, you can have more subtler responses (like a backpack instead of a banana costume), which can be extremely helpful, or, if I may add a dramatic flair, life-saving.  

/ Having Trouble?

Notice these things:

purses

shoes

hands/fingers

exits

number of rows or tables

colors of a room

one type of thing, ex. all the books in the room, or all the houses on the street

the count of anything, ex. how many rings? how many hats (psych, anybody?) do you see? blue cars? long-sleeve shirts?  

people: dress, hair, height, weight, eyeglasses, tattoos, interesting characteristics

Ask yourself these questions:

How many people in the room/building?

How many trashcans in the room?

Describe the ceiling?

How many left turns did you take in a route?

What did the room smell like?

These five questions have been taken from perceptivelogic‘s post that contains 50 observational questions. I highly recommend checking it out to keep you from observing the same type of things over and over again. In fact, if you’d like to go the extra mile, I’d suggest downloading one of those ‘create your own flashcard apps’ and putting one question on each flashcard. Then, whenever you’re stuck on what to observe or simply want to seem busy on your phone so no one tries to talk to you, you have a wonderful list to keep your observational skills from getting repetitive and dull.

/ Sources Used

The Power of Observation (Book)

Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You (Book)

Improve Your Powers of Observation by Taking Field Notes Like a Scientist (Web Article: LifeHacker)

How To Increase Your Powers of Observation (Web Article: Time)

How to Boost Your Observation Skills and Learn to Pay Attention (Web Article: LifeHacker)

How to Develop the Situational Awareness of Jason Bourne (Web Article: The Art of Manliness)

How Can I Get Really Good at Deducing Things Like Sherlock? (Quora)

the-brain-attic (Tumblr Blog)

theartoftheconsultingdetective (Tumblr Blog)

perceptivelogic (Tumblr Blog)

/ Above All…

Remember that Sherlock Holmes was not born with the ultimate knowledge on how to deduce. He had to learn it, through years of practice. With dedication and patience, you can too.

So far, we’ve been filling your dash with a bunch of theoretical knowledge. Which is great and all, but difficult to apply in the dreaded ‘real world’. If you’re the type of person who can take concepts from paper (or a screen) and figure out exactly what you need to do to put it to use, not only do I applaud you, but I also suggest to stop reading this and go about whatever it is you do on a day like today. For those who like a specific program to work through, I hope the following will be useful.

Please note: that I am not a ‘trained professional’, that I am creating this program out of tips, articles, books and exercises I have read, and that I will be trying out this program alongside anyone else who tries it, and thus I do not know the degree of it’s effectiveness (although also please know that everything I include will be cited, so that you can refer to the original materials from which I learned of the information presented).

The program will go as follows:

Weeks 1-4: Observation

Week One

Week Two 

Week Three

Week Four

Weeks 5-7: Body Language

Week One

Week Two

Week Three 

Weeks 8-10: Memory

Weeks 11-14: Picture Deduction

Weeks 15-18: Deduction

**The number of weeks on each section may change as the program continues to be refined.

**Each section has an overview and each week a specific blog post, and as the program continues to be updated, the links will be available on this post.

How Forensic Entomologists Use Insects to Tell If a Body Was Moved After Death:

In some suspicious death investigations, arthropod (insect) evidence may prove that the body was moved at some point after death. Crime scene insects can tell whether the body decomposed at the location where it was found, and even reveal gaps in the crime time line.

Crime Scene Insects Inconsistent with the Body’s Location: The entomologist first identifies all the collected arthropod evidence, cataloging the species present on or near the body. Not every insect belongs in every habitat. Some live in quite specific niches – on limited vegetation types, at certain elevations, or in particular climates. What if the body yields an insect that is not known to live in the area where it was found? Wouldn’t that suggest the body had been moved? 

In his book A Fly for the Prosecution, forensic entomologist M. Lee Goff tells of one such case. He collected evidence from a woman’s body found in an Oahu sugar cane field. He noted that some of the maggots present were a species of fly found in urban areas, not in agricultural fields. He hypothesised that the body had remained in an urban location long enough for the flies to find it, and that it was later moved to the field. Sure enough, when the murder was solved, his theory proved correct. The killers kept the victim’s body in an apartment for several days while trying to decide what to do with it.

Crime Scene Insects Inconsistent with the Crime Timeline: Sometimes insect evidence reveals a gap in the time line, and leads investigators to the conclusion that the body was moved. The primary focus of forensic entomology is the establishment of the postmortem interval, using insect life cycles. A good forensic entomologist will give detectives an estimate, to the day or even the hour, of when the body was first colonised by insects. Investigators compare this estimate with witness accounts of when the victim was last seen alive. Where was the victim between when he was last seen and when insects first invaded his corpse? Was he alive, or was the body hidden somewhere?

Again, Dr. Goff’s book provides a good example of a case where insect evidence established such a time gap. A body found on April 18th yielded only First Instar Maggots, some still emerging from their eggs. Based on his knowledge of this insect’s life cycle in the environmental conditions present at the crime scene, Dr. Goff concluded that the body had only been exposed to insects since the previous day, the 17th. According to witnesses, the victim was last seen alive two days prior, on the 15th. It seemed that the body must have been somewhere else, protected from exposure to any insects, in the interim. In the end, the murderer was caught and revealed he had killed the victim on the 15th, but kept the body in the trunk of a car until dumping it on the 17th.

Crime Scene Insects in the Soil: A dead body lying on the ground will release all its fluids into the soil below. As a result of this seepage, the soil chemistry changes substantially. Native soil organisms leave the area as the pH rises. A whole new community of arthropods inhabit this gruesome niche. A forensic entomologist will sample the soil below and near where the body was lying. The organisms found in the soil samples can determine whether the body decomposed at the location where it was found, or prior to being dumped there.

I was reading an article on John Boyd’s decision making strategy and it was very informative. I’m not going to go into great detail about what the article stated. However I will give you a short description of it and how one could use the information as a consulting detective. John Boyd was a Korean fighter pilot who gained in rank due to his view on war-philosophy. He, from what I can tell, is extraordinarily smart. Boyd’s most important contribution that revolutionized war was his decision making strategy; OODA. It stands for Observe-Orient-Decide-Act. Observe your situation and surroundings. Orient yourself to the Environment. Decide your course of action. Then execute said course of action.

This is great for war and political strategies. Why not use it for other things like per se detective work. Lets create a situation. You are solving a case involving the murder of some person. You have so far inferred that they were involved in gang activity to some degree and that this was there undoing. You follow his steps back to an abandoned building. You enter and all so inconveniently the gang members happen to be there and now you’re trapped. What do you do?Well lets work this out logically using our newly acquired OODA strategy.

First we Observe. Take in all of the information that you can. Then get rid of the needless stuff. Right now your primary mode of living is to get out and ultimately solve the case. So that is the only type of data you need to worry about. Now Orient yourself with your environment. How many people are there and where are they. How could this get in the way of getting out. What about the case can you infer. After you got all of the information that is useful to you decide what your going to do. Are you going to just run for it, try to talk to these oafs logically, or fight it out. The last one seems impossible, especially being outnumbered by possibly armed brutes. Though you can once again defeat them using this same OODA method. If you’ve ever seen the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes movies then you would know that logic is key in a fight.

These charts are useful. But for this situation I’d like to give you something a bit more useful for our intentions.

Just in case you haven’t seen the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes fight scenes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGCMfprPJoA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buE_jLEZrf4

(P.S: When punching the head or face use side of your fist opposite of where the thumb is located. This is a somewhat fatty part of the hand called the hammer fist that creates a most convenient hitting platform for hard objects.)

(P.P.S: Observe + Orient = Situational Awareness)

In my experience, deducing whether a person is right-handed or left-handed is the easiest thing to learn. Took me no time to master it. If you have watched BBC’s Sherlock, I’m sure you’re already a pro at this.

However, sometimes, you might find a person is fairly confident at using both hands. Most probably that person is left-handed as the world that we live in discriminates left-handed people. Many things are designed for the convenience of right-handed people. Left-handed people have to adapt to this situation so they learn to use their right hands too.

Besides that, in certain rare cases, you might also find a person who writes with his/her right hand but performs other tasks using his/her left hand. I would say that person is definitely left-handed because his/her parents or teachers might have forced him/her to write with the right hand at a young age. There are a handful of parents and teachers think that it is wrong to write with the left hand.

This is the part that everyone thinks of when they talk about making mind palaces. Creating a palace is as simple as imagining the inside of a large square and adding a door. Don’t add pegs yet, that’s the next part. There are two ways to format a palace but that’s not important to know yet, we’ll talk about that in part 9. A palace should serve a purpose. Rarely should you just randomly put data into a room (exceptions include mostly sorting palaces, which are large series of rooms specific for holding random information to later be sorted through). 

Your first palace should be for practice. Your bedroom will do fine. Just imagine an empty room. Add colour, any colours you want. Make the room, just the space with walls, floor, and ceiling, as personalised as you want. Palaces can be different sizes. I use a few sizes as templates: closet, bedroom, living area, auditorium, great hall, atrium, and ballroom. You can of course go bigger and smaller, these are just checkpoints to gauge the general size or data capacity.

The Brain Attic is the centre of the my mind palace. If you intend to have a massive monolithic mind palace like Sherlock then you need this part, no matter what you want to call it. Within the Brain Attic are stored the most important pieces of data as well as a log which holds links to recently used data sequences. Being the centre of such an enormous web, it has links to virtually everything, however, it is a very small palace. Consider it to be the core of a planet. The closer to the middle the more dense it is. The Brain Attic is small but everything in it is deeply encoded and heavily compressed. Imagine that you’re trying to fit a table of contents of Google in a bedroom, and you have to have more than enough space to move around. 

This room is your comfort palace (though there are palaces just for comfort and emotional support), it can be anything you want as long as you feel comfortable there, know it like the back of your hand, and can store lots of data in it. Personally I use a warmly lit study/small library with oak walls and shelves and a tall cedar ceiling and an endless supply of hot black tea, like Hogwarts library (there’s sticky notes all over it covered in binary though so make sure you keep yours clean and tidy). This room will be the first place in your mind palace you go to, consider it a menu which leads to everything else.

The reason the Brain Attic has to be small is because our brains can’t see large and wide areas in our minds eye, only so much loads at a time. However, there’s a lot of information so the information must be compressed into sub-palaces - sub-palaces are palaces within other palaces, kinda like one of those images with unlimited resolution that never end when you zoom in farther and farther.

So to do this you need something to act as the first mini palace. A painting would work great because you can imagine yourself virtually going into it. Layer one is around the rim of the painting, put a few small associations there, just enough to make it useful taking up space in your precious memory. Then layer two, inside the painting. This part is a little harder, imagine yourself inside that scene. It may help to pretend the scene in the painting is a GIF, a lot of my palaces have GIF associations standing around Live associations and Still associations. Once you have that covered put memories in it. Then you have layer three, but there’s nothing left to add to. This is when you extend the painting by making something inside of it a new palace. If there’s a poster or billboard, put an image on it of something that can repeat the process.

Here’s a few things which will show what I mean: (Click me) (or else I’ll haunt you for however long it would’ve taken to view these)

A mind palace is to memory as Google is to the internet. You don’t search the internet through Google, you search for information through Googles massive index of the internet. If there isn’t something in the index then nothing but a runtime error code comes up. Imagine your memory as a bunch of tiny dots. There are millions of these tiny dots, but lets pretend there’s only 10. Now make connections between the dots that are associated to each other. Well anything could be associated to just about anything else if you think about it, and there’s so many ways in which things could be connected, you’d end up a huge writhing mass of lines rather than dots. Now try to find something specific and important in that cluster. Sure the connections may lead you to what you want, but they may also lead you in the opposite direction.

How does Google fix this problem? They send out spiders which find everything to do with your search, then each piece of data is criticised using a set of questions about the information. Half a second later you have a set of search results which best fit what you’re looking for. A mind palace can be the same way through training.

There is a large difference a regular brain and a catalogued brain. If you make and maintain a mind palace, you’ll be affecting the Hippocampus (the part of your brain which deals with both memory and spatial reasoning). Normally, memory would look like a large intuitive cluster of dots with unlimited connections. With a mind palace, however, it would look almost the same, except that large cluster would be a bunch of smaller clusters with a single connection going to the centre of each one. It would be organised and easy to navigate. Basically you’d be looking at a giant, intuitive, interactive table of contents of your memory.

For example, my mind palace, which is based on a system I created originating from computer coding languages ,basic mnemonic devices, and the Method of Loci, has four main clusters which further breaks down:

CONTACTS (People) LOCATIONS (Places) INVENTORY (Things) LIBRARY (Concepts and ideas)

Contacts breaks down into eight subgroups:

Acquaintances

Family

General Friends

Close Friends

Best Friends

Mentors

Colleagues

Enemies

Locations breaks down into six subgroups:

Europe (51)

Africa (54)

Asia (48)

Australia/Oceania (15)

North America (23)

South America (15)

Inventory is directly related to Locations so any items are organised by their location. Inventory has it’s own subgroups (such as environment, food, or office) but all possible subgroups completely depends on your Locations.

Library breaks down into my adapted version of the Dewey Decimal System. It’s in a palace based on many of my favourite libraries and book stores, which breaks down into thirteen floors, one for each subgroup:

A - Attic (Holds most important items and a log of recent actions throughout the entire palace. This is the brain, per se, of it).

9 - History and Geography

8 - Literature

7 - The Arts

6 - Applied Sciences

5 - Natural Sciences

4 - Maths

3 - Languages

2 - Social Sciences

1 - Philosophy and Religion

G - Ground (Holds general knowledge and logs of all actions that happen within floors 1 through 9).

B - Basement (Holding place out of the natural set of paths for information without a place to go yet).

L - Locked (Holds all locked sub-palaces that fall under the Library palace. Locked items are suppressed from both the conscious and subconscious mind. If executed properly, you could virtually lock away entire sections of your memory of events and plan for them to surface at a specific time. I will talk all about locked palaces in its own post about how bad they are for you, how useful they are for passing interrogations, and how they are triggered by specific sequences of differing stimuli).

I’ve gotten a few messages related to deducing a person’s occupation,

like this one:

and this one:

How can i know if someone works outdoors or indoors??? — sherlockholmes1928

and this one:

This is one of the more difficult deductions to make about a person. There are thousands of occupations. Some people work multiple jobs, or have changed careers multiple times. Context is key, as with everything. I will say that it might be more reliable simply to deduce a person’s field, since within a field there are potentially hundreds of occupations, or even the nature of their job. For example, start with deciding whether or not someone deals with customers on a regular basis, works in a highly skilled or technical field such as the sciences or the medical field, or if they work in the arts. If you can narrow down the category, that’s an excellent start.

It is also fairly simple to deduce a person’s financial situation; the status of their clothes, watch, phone, etc etc. From there, you can decide their relative wage, which can possibly lead you to what type of occupation they may have.

One of the best ways to learn more about occupations is to observe them. Next time you’re sitting in class having difficulty paying attention, observe the mannerisms of your teachers or professors. Notice their vocabulary, the way they present themselves, and what they wear. If you happen to see them outside of a professional teaching setting, pay even more attention to these things to notice the difference in and out of the workplace.

Be aware that a persons’ work clothes and casual clothes are likely to be different, and this difference can widen the more prestigious the profession is. Some businessmen do make it habit to wear suits or at the very least nice clothing outside of the workplace, but it is all a matter of preference. Someone working at a retail clothing store may not have a strict uniform, so their work clothes and casual clothes overlap greatly. This has to do with having a job versus a profession.

Realize that women have more options for professional attire - many blouses can double as casual and dress tops. A woman wearing something along the lines of a nice ruffly blouse and a pencil skirt outside of work might have to wear similar clothes to work.

For both genders, however, shoes can often overlap in work and home life, so pay specific attention to them. Open-toed shoes, for example, are generally considered inappropriate for work (except for certain outdoor occupations, especially those to do with the water like life-guarding and guiding whitewater rafts). Many professional businesswomen wear heels or dress flats to work.

Sometimes it might be easier to deduce what a person doesn’t do for a living.

Hands and fingernails can be good indicators of what a person does or does not do.

If they are well-kept and clean, they do not have a job in manual labor.

If they are manicured and painted, or are fake, they likely do not work with their hands heavily (this does not include computer-related jobs, as nails don’t get in the way).

Tattoing in prison is not permited but we still see inmates with their bodies fully covered with tattoos. Those who tattoo have to improvise, they use from ink they get in pens to paper clips, basically anything they can get their hands on to serve as a tattooing device. It’s severely dangerous, these unsafe methods can lead to infection and serious diseases. Many inmates get tattoos that associate them with their gang or beliefs and proudly display them, using it as a message to the other inmates.

Tatoo Meanings

Teardrop tattoo - It means the inmate might have murdered someone. It normaly means one teardrop for each murder.

Spiderweb tattoo - Inmates who have a spiderweb tattoo on their elbow might be serving or already served a long sentence.

Barbed wire tattoo - The barbed wire tattoo normaly marks the years the inmate has to serve, that can be seen by the number of barbs on the wire.

Dots tattoo - This is a tattoo that’s drawn in the inmates hand. Three dots means “ Mi Vida Loca “ or “ My Crazy Life “, it’s often seen in Hispanic gang members. A tattto with five dots represents the inmate ( the dot in the middle) and the cell walls around him ( the four dots). A single dot tattoo which is normaly placed on the cheek means the inmate in question is a pimp.

Five Pointed Crown - This pointed crown is associated with the Latin Kings, one of the biggest gangs in the US.

Swastika tattoos, AB, 666, shamrocks or SS - These tattoos are used by what is known as the Aryan Brotherhood, a White Supremacist prison gang.

MS13 - This tattoo is linked to the gang MS13 from Los Angeles, the tattoo is often done in places where it’s easily visible.

 Spades, hearts, diamonds and clubs - It normaly means the inmates enjoys gambling.

Clock without hands - This tattoo is often found in inmates that are doing life or really long sentences. It’s a way of saying time is meanings, that’s why the clock has no hands.

Dagger tattoo - A dagger that seems to be inserted in the inmates neck could mean that he’s available to be hired to kill another inmate.

Here is what 151 Serial Killers did about the question of hiding bodies:

Put in Trash Bags (along highways): Patrick Kearney and David Douglas Hill (The trash bag murders), Bob Berdella (Put remains in can for collection by trash collectors), Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard W. Rogers, Lonnie Franklin Jr., (victims covered by trash bags, found near dumpsters), Bruce Mendenhall, Larry Eyler , Jefferson Davis Parish Louisiana serial killings (unsolved), Robert Pickton, The Family murders (Adelaide, Australia), Jeffrey S. Mailho, Vlado Tanevski, Jeffrey S. Mailhot

Fed them to Animals Joe Ball, Ottis Toole, Robert Pickton, Belle Gunness, Carl Panzram, Fred Waterfield & David Gore

Sold them as food Fritz Haarmann, George Karl Grossman, Joe Metheny

Under houses, crawlspaces, basements John Wayne Gacy, Kendall Francois, Jesse Harding Pomeroy, David Maust, Anthony Sowell

Rivers or other bodies of water John Wayne Gacy, California Astrology Murderer, Gary Ridgeway, Sean Vincent Gillis, Lewiston Valley Killer, Amelia Dyer, Fritz Haarmann, Wayne Williams

Shed Dean Corll

In or around Dumpsters in Alleyways Daytona Beach SK (unsolved), George Russell, Eight Street Killer (Miami unsolved, 31 victims)

In the woods or fields Gary Ridgeway, Ted Bundy, The I-45 Killer or Killer(s),east Texas and Montrose Killer(s), “killing fields” murders, Fort Myers killer, Gary G. Grant, Jim Ruzicka, Gary A. Shaw, The 1969 Parkway Murders, Ted Bundy

Rural Locations Robert Lee Yates

Didn’t bother Dennis Radar, Angel Maturino Reséndiz, Zodiac Killer, Richard Ramirez, Jack the Ripper, Jesse Pomeroy, Herbert Mullin, Aileen Wuornos, Danny Rolling

Under the bed Jeffrey Dahmer, Earl Nelson

Left them ‘posed’ Albert Desalvo, Danny Rolling, Lonnie Franklin Jr, George Russell

Dismemberment, cannibalism, hid some remains Albert Fish, Jeffrey Dahmer, Joachim Kroll, Arthur Shawcross, Henry Lee Lucas & Ottis Toole, Bob Berdella, Edmund Kemper III, Richard Trenton Chase, Douglas Clark & Carol Bundy, Andrei Chikatilo, Alfred Packer, Mark Sappington, Surender Koli and Moninder Singh Pandher

In house or apartment Fritz Honka, Jose Luis Calva, John Christie, Charles Albright, Harrison Graham, Gary Heidnik, Moses Sithole, Tommy Lynn Sells, Dennis Radar, Richard Ramirez

Burried them Andrei Chikatilo, Juan Corona, Gilles de Rais, The Bloody Benders, Delfina and Maria de Jesus Gonzales, Pedro Alonso Lopez, Dorothea Puente, Reginald Christie, Fred and Rosemary West, Gordon Northcott

Just dumped the bodies Kenneth Alessio Bianchi and Angelo Buono

Burned Gilles de Rais, Steven Avery, Sudhakar Gajare, Uresh Warik, Ravi Poojary, Charles Sobhraj, Nicolae Bonner, Thomas Svekla, Jeremy Bryan Jones, John Childs, Dr. Marcel Petiot, Herman Webster Mudgett (H. H. Holms), Countess Erszebet Bathory, Paul Runge, The Alberta Serial Killer, Larry Bright

Dissolved in acid (or kept hidden in vats or drums) John George Haigh, Javed Iqbal Mughal, Nuevo Laredo, Santiago Meza López, Jeffery Dahmer

Dumped near highways (and deserted roads – vacant lots) Rory Conde, Bruce Mendenhall, Robert Lee Yates, Jr., James Ruzicka, Randy Kraft, Randy Woodfield, Dewayne Lee Harris, Keith Jesperson, Gary Michael Hilton, Donald E. Younge Jr, Edmund Kemper, Derrick Todd Lee, Highway of Tears Killer (unsolved), Ortega Highway, (The 44-mile stretch of highway, officially part of California Route 74, where many bodies have been found, William Bonin threw one here, so did Randy Kraft, Patrick Kearney did too), Mack Ray Edwards, Clifford Olson, Larry Eyler, New Bedford Highway killer (unsolved), Phillip Jablonski, Larry Bittaker, Roy Norris