The Criminal Profiling Masterclass

Inside a Profiler's Mind: Four Sessions on Criminal Profiling

Think like a profiler. Reason like a scientist.
You've probably watched the shows. The detective looks at a crime scene for a few seconds, pauses, and describes the killer right down to his childhood. It's great TV, but is it how profiling actually works?

Across four sessions, criminologist and forensic psychologist Rithin Joseph separates movie myth from method. We go from 19th-century attempts to spot criminals by the shape of their skulls, to the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit, to the maths of where offenders live, to how profiling is actually done in 2026. Every session digs into real true crime cases, runs its own hands-on simulation, and has much more along the way, so you won't just be listening. You'll be profiling.

Each session stands on its own, so come to one or come to all four. Book all four and get a discount, for anyone who wants the full case file.

21st November, 12–2 PM: Can You Tell If I'm a Serial Killer?
Profiling's real history is messier than the legend, and much more interesting. We start with Lombroso and phrenology, who believed you could read criminality in someone's face, and look at why those ideas caught on and why they fell apart. Then we follow Hans Gross's turn toward evidence, James Brussel's famous (and contested) Mad Bomber profile, and the rise of the FBI's behavioural analysts. Along the way we ask what profiling can actually tell an investigator, and what it never can.

22nd November, 12–2 PM: Same Crime, Different Profiles: Who Gets It Right?
Two profilers look at the same crime scene and come back with two different suspects. How does that happen? This session gets into the reasoning behind profiling: patterns drawn from many offenders versus clues taken from one case, and the FBI's famous split between "organised" and "disorganised" offenders, with cases like BTK and Jeffrey Dahmer as reference points. We'll look at where that split helps and where it falls apart, and at the biases that slip in without anyone noticing. Then we'll test ourselves on a fictional scene that has two competing profiles.

28th November, 3–5 PM: Where Do Killers Live? The Geography of Crime
A series of crimes leaves more than physical evidence. It leaves a map. Using David Canter's investigative psychology and Kim Rossmo's geographic profiling, we'll look at how offenders move through a city: comfort zones, anchor points, and why distance matters. The DC Sniper case runs through the session. Then we'll take a fictional cluster of crime locations and try to narrow the search ourselves. A warning in advance: these maps deal in probabilities, not GPS coordinates.

29th November, 3–5 PM: What Criminal Profiling Looks Like in 2026
Instead of asking "what kind of person would do this?", modern profiling asks "what does the evidence actually show?" This session introduces Behavioral Evidence Analysis, which reads the crime scene, the victim's circumstances and the sequence of events before it reaches for any stereotype. We'll work out the difference between how a crime was committed and what it might reveal about the person behind it. Then we'll read a fictional case file twice and watch our conclusions change as new evidence comes in.

All sessions at the Gully Labs store, Panchsheel Park.

About the speaker

Rithin Joseph is an Assistant Professor at the School of Behavioural Forensics, National Forensic Sciences University, Delhi, where he teaches criminology and forensic psychology. He is certified in investigative tools including the polygraph, BEOS brain profiling, Layered Voice Analysis and EyeDetect. He is Co-Investigator on an ICSSR-funded study predicting recidivism among first-time offenders, co-author of Crime as the Cause of Criminality and BRICS: Unravelling the Abyss, and a gold medallist in his Master's in Criminology.
Four sessions, four case files, and you'll never watch a crime show the same way again.

What's included
Four standalone sessions led by a practising forensic psychologist
Real true crime cases unpacked in every session
Hands-on simulations at every session, from competing profiles to crime maps and case files
A clearer sense of what profiling can and can't actually do
A discount when you book all four sessions

What's not included
No drinks
No notebooks or pens, so bring your own. There will be plenty to scribble down.
No prior knowledge needed, and no actual serial killers :p