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Center Valley, Pennsylvania

B ryan’s new classmates in the psychology program at DeSales University call him “the Ghost.” There’s something spooky about him.

Every day he enters class in the same uniform—a wrinkled, black long-sleeved button-down and a tan leather jacket. He’s always carrying his silver laptop and a Starbucks coffee cup.

A lab partner, Josh Ferraro, likes how organized Bryan is with their biology project: testing how caffeine affects the heart rate of water fleas. But the guy’s eyes seem unnaturally wide open, and they’re constantly darting around while his face is completely still.

It’s unnerving, Josh thinks.

Josh notices that Bryan becomes less aloof and more animated in Psychological Sleuthing, a class taught by Dr. Katherine Ramsland, a famous criminologist. But it’s fair to say they all love this particular class. Because it’s fun.

Dr. Ramsland takes her students into a building they call “the crime scene house.” It’s like a theater set. The students pretend they’re detectives called in to investigate a crime.

They’re given a scenario like this: “The gun was found here, there was brain spatter on the roof, two bullet holes there, and a rifle was in Johnny’s hands.” Then they’re asked to theorize as to what happened.

Dr. Ramsland teaches her students that killers get tunnel vision when they are committing murder. That’s why mistakes get made. Amid the high adrenaline and hyper-focus on the act itself, killers can forget things they otherwise would not.

Bryan takes careful notes. He will later write in an essay for his finals that he’s learned “staging is common” among killers. And that investigators must wear “fiber-free” clothing to avoid having their DNA contaminate the crime scene.

The DeSales students also study criminal profiling; they learn what sort of person chooses what sort of murder weapon. Typically, Ramsland tells them, white men choose knives.

They are taught about digital forensics and learn that it’s almost impossible to delete one’s digital footprint.

And they learn about procedure and law—for example, how the legal process would likely play out if one of them was charged with murder.

Not that anyone thinks that would happen. Most of the students expect to go into law enforcement. Bryan is no exception. He texts his friend Jack that he wants to catch high-profile offenders.

Dr. Ramsland emphasizes to these future crime fighters how difficult it is to spot the killers in their midst before they strike.

She’s an expert on serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and Ed Kemper. She wrote a book based on her years of correspondence with Dennis Rader, the infamous BTK Killer, whose moniker stood for his grisly methods: bind, torture, kill.

Rader, she tells the class, did not kill for fifteen years while he was busy raising his own child.

How to differentiate between him and us?

Dr. Ramsland says there’s a new theory arguing that psychopaths aren’t the product of socioeconomics and environment alone.

Biology has a larger role than people previously thought.

The brains of psychopaths are structurally and functionally different from other people’s.

Which means the only way to cure a psychopath is to get him therapy at a very early stage, by around age four, and try to train his brain to change.

Bryan listens carefully to this and takes more notes.

His classmates can’t see what he is writing.