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When accusations of fake news are levelled against an American photojournalist, he tries to reclaim his credibility by setting out to find the subject of his most famous picture - the Tank Man of Tiananmen Square.
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News.com.au
an hour ago
- News.com.au
US man pleads guilty to murdering four university students, prosecutor shares chilling evidence
A US man has pleaded guilty to murdering four university students as part of a deal to avoid the death penalty, with prosecutors in court laying out chilling evidence of the gruesome attack nearly three years after it made headlines around the world. Bryan Kohberger, a former criminology student, pleaded guilty on Wednesday (US time) to four counts of first-degree murder in the 2022 stabbings of University of Idaho students Madison Mogen, 21, Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Xana Kernodle, 20, and her boyfriend Ethan Chapin, 20. The plea was part of a deal that spared the 30-year-old from the death penalty – a decision which divided the victims' families. Kohberger also waived his right to appeal or seek leniency as part of the agreement. The four university students were attacked and stabbed to death around 4am on November 13, 2022, while they were sleeping in their group house near the university's campus in Moscow, Idaho. Two other housemates, Dylan Mortensen and Bethany Funke, were left unharmed. 'Are you pleading guilty because you are guilty?' Judge Steven Hippler asked Kohberger at the hearing on Wednesday. 'Yes,' he replied. Kohberger was arrested for the murders in December 2022. His trial was set to begin next month with jury selection slated for August 4 and opening arguments for August 18. He now faces life in prison without the possibility of parole, with his sentencing set for later this month. 'Cruel': Families split over deal Ms Goncalves' family, who had demanded the death penalty, expressed outrage over the plea agreement. 'After more than two years, this is how it concludes with a secretive deal and a hurried effort to close the case without any input from the victims' families on the plea's details,' the family wrote in a statement shared by their lawyer. The family further called the plea deal 'shocking and cruel' in a statement on Facebook. 'Bryan Kohberger facing life in prison means he would still get to speak, form relationships, and engage with the world. Meanwhile, our loved ones have been silenced forever,' they wrote. However, Ms Mogen's father expressed relief over the agreement. 'We can actually put this behind us and not have these future dates and future things that we don't want to have to be at, that we shouldn't have to be at, that have to do with this terrible person,' he told CBS News. 'We get to just think about the rest of our lives and have to try and figure out how to do it without Maddie and without the rest of the kids.' Prosecutor reveals chilling evidence During the hearing, Prosecuting Attorney Bill Thompson laid out the evidence he would have revealed if the case had gone to trial. 'He killed — intentionally, wilfully, deliberately, with premeditation, and with malice and forethought — Maddy Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, Ethan Chapin, and Xana Kernodle,' prosecutor Thompson told the courtroom before Kohberger formally submitted his guilty plea. It all started in March 2022, when Kohberger was living at his parents' Pennsylvania home and logged onto to buy a military-grade Ka Bar knife and sheath — the same blade he would go on to hack his victims to death with eight months later, according to the New York Post. He then moved to Pullman, Washington – located minutes from the Moscow, Idaho, murder site – in June to pursue a PhD in criminology at Washington State University. By early July, six months before the murders, Kohberger's phone began pinging off the cell tower that served the house — but only during odd hours of the night. Between July and the night of the November murders, Kohberger's phone pinged off that tower 23 times between the hours of 10pm and 4am, prosecutors said, adding that there was no evidence he ever had any direct contact with his victims during that time. But on the day of the killing Kohberger's phone was powered off in Pullman around 2am before being turned back in the Moscow area just before 5am — disappearing from the cellular grid at the exact time of the attack. During that blackout window he drove his White Hyundai from his Pullman apartment and parked it behind the victims' Moscow house, prosecutors said. Evidence like security footage clearly showed the vehicle. Wearing a dark face mask he slipped into the home using the kitchen's sliding door around 4am. He then climbed to the home's third floor where he used his seven-inch Ka Bar blade to butcher Mogen and Goncalves, both 21-year-old college seniors, as they slept alongside each other. There he left the knife's sheath. Kohberger then stole out of the room when he encountered 20-year-old Kernodle on the stairs. She had been awake after picking up a food delivery, and he cut her down and left her dying where she stood. 'Her room was not on the third floor, it was on the second floor,' Mr Thompson said, his voice shaking. 'He encountered Xana, and he ended up killing her, also with a large knife.' Kohberger then moved into her bedroom where her boyfriend – 20-year-old Mr Chapin – was sleeping, and attacked him. 'We will not represent that he intended to commit all of the murders that he did that night, but we know that that is what resulted,' Mr Thompson said. As Kohberger was leaving the house one of the two housemates who were left alive and untouched peered into a hallway and saw a man with 'bushy eyebrows' exiting the home. From there a neighbour's security footage showed Kohberger's car peeling out of the neighbourhood, and cell records indicate he was back home in Pullman around 5.30am. He then drove back to his victims' home around 9am, phone records show, but by 9.30am he was back home and taking a bizarre photo of himself flashing a thumbs up in his apartment bathroom. From there, he began desperately trying to cover his tracks. Over the next days, he took a trip to Lewiston, Idaho — a town prosecutors noted was filled with rivers and fast-moving water. They believe that's where he dumped the murder weapon, which was never found. He also began searching online for another knife and sheath, and tried in vain to delete his purchase history on Amazon. He also changed his car's registration from Pennsylvania to Idaho in an apparent attempt to throw investigators off his trail, Thompson said. Then he carried on with his life. 'Mr Kohberger proceeded to finish his semester of studies at Washington State University and return to Pennsylvanian for the holidays,' Mr Thompson said. But in the weeks following, investigators began to identify him as a suspect. After searching his parents' trash, were able to pull DNA off a Q-Tip that tests proved was related to the DNA was found on the sheath left by Mogen's bloodied body. Kohberger was arrested soon after, and the full scope of his attempts to hide his crimes became apparent as they began to search his home and belongings. 'I think we can all look to our own cars. Those compartments in the doors where you try to keep them clean where you put stuff? There's always some degree of crud in there – they were spotless,' Mr Thompson said. 'Defendant's car had been meticulously cleaned inside.' Prosecutors said evidence indicated Kohberger had even called on his criminology studies to cover up the crime, explaining he had recently written a paper on crime scene analysis. 'That was part of the defendant's plan in covering up this. The defendant has studied crime. In fact, he did a detailed paper on crime scene processing when he was working on his pre-doctorate degree,' Mr Thompson said. 'He had that knowledge and skill,' he added. The motives behind the murders has never been established. Kohberger's sentencing is set for July 23.
News.com.au
an hour ago
- News.com.au
Hollywood legend's affairs exposed: ‘Did as I pleased'
Clint Eastwood openly committed adultery during his marriage to Maggie Johnson, a new biography claims. In Clint: The Man and The Movies, biographer Shawn Levy wrote about the 95-year-old actor's alleged affairs that he had while he was married to Johnson from 1953 to 1984. 'By many accounts, including his own, he more or less comported himself as if he were a bachelor,' Levy wrote of Eastwood, according to People. Johnson, according to Levy, was fully aware of her husband's infidelities at the time. 'One thing Mag had to learn about me was that I was going to do as I pleased,' Eastwood told Photoplay in 1963, per Levy. 'She had to accept that, because if she didn't, we wouldn't be married.' The Rahwide star was also reportedly quoted by Levy as saying, 'I'm independent, a vagabond, and [Johnson] accepts me as I am and doesn't strangle me with female possessiveness.' Levy also wrote that in Richard Schickel's 1997 book, Clint Eastwood: A Biography, Eastwood admitted that his affairs ''just became… I don't know… addictive… like you have to have another cigarette.' Clint: The Man and The Movies further alleges that the Oscar winner picked up women in his acting classes, on studio lots where he worked and at the apartment complex he lived in with Johnson. The Post has reached out to Eastwood's rep for comment. During Eastwood and Johnson's marriage, they welcomed two children: son Kyle, 57, and daughter Alison, 53. The couple called it quits as Eastwood was years into his alleged affair with actress Sondra Locke, whom he cast in his 1975 film The Outlaw Josey Wales. In her 1979 autobiography, Locke claimed that Eastwood told her 'there was no real relationship left' between him and Johnson, according to People. After Locke and Eastwood split in 1989, she alleged in her book that she had two abortions and a tubal ligation since the director told her he didn't want more kids. (Eastwood denied Locke's claims). Eastwood also had an alleged affair with stuntwoman Roxanne Tunis during his marriage to Johnson. Their relationship reportedly last 14 years, during which Tunis gave birth to their daughter, Kimber, 61. The actor's second marriage was to news reporter Dina Ruiz from 1996 to 2014. They have a daughter, Morgan, 28. The famed actor is also dad to son Scott and daughter Kathryn with flight attendant Jacelyn Reeves and daughter Francesca with British actress Frances Fisher. His oldest child, Laurie, was born in 1954 and was reportedly placed for adoption without his knowledge, per People. They reconnected years later. Most recently, Eastwood was in a 10-year relationship with Christina Sandera until she died of a heart attack at age 61 in July 2024. 'Christina was a lovely, caring woman, and I will miss her very much,' Eastwood said in a statement after Sandera's death. The pair, who met at a restaurant in California, mostly kept their relationship out of the spotlight. They walked their last red carpet together in 2019.
ABC News
3 hours ago
- ABC News
ACT Supreme Court finds Chinese national guilty over part in violent home invasion
A Chinese national has been found guilty in the ACT Supreme Court of his part in a brutal attack during a violent home invasion where the victims said their attackers suggested they were from Chinese special forces. Xiantao Shang, 38, has been found guilty of aggravated burglary and assault by joint commission after he went to the apartment with a second man in June 2023, looking for a woman known as 'Linda'. Shang said she owed him over $100,000, with more owed to the other man, 46-year-old Wengao Zheng. The debt appeared to be gambling related. 'Linda' had not been answering their calls and had left town for a while. Before the home invasion the pair discovered she had returned to Canberra. Justice Verity McWilliam said in her judgement 'Linda' had once been the lover of Zheng, who did some "detective work of his own" tracking her to the apartment through a site advertising sexual services. Zheng pleaded guilty to his role in the home invasion. The court heard the men laid a trap, getting a third person to make an appointment. When they arrived at the apartment the woman who lived there said they pushed the door aggressively and forced their way in, speaking in Mandarin Chinese and demanding to speak to 'Linda'. The woman's husband told them to leave and called police, when the altercation kicked off. "Do you know what we do in China? We were in the special forces," the male victim said Zheng told him. Later, Zheng admitted that it wasn't true and that he had never been in the military, saying he only made the comment to frighten the couple. He also said he'd spoken to the pair in the aftermath. "We were here to look for someone, we were not here to fight," Zheng said to the couple. "If you could have talked nicely, we would not be in this." For his part, Shang maintained he had only acted in self defence. But Justice McWilliam rejected that, saying the couple were subjected to a brutal attack, where the man was punched and kicked, and the woman attacked as she tried to pull Shang away from her husband. Justice McWilliam said she accepted Shang didn't punch the woman in the face, and that an alleged punch to her chest was actually a push, but she said the woman had been kicked to the ground. She said it was Zheng's behaviour that was of most concern. "I find that he set upon the female complainant in a manner that even he admitted was consistent with him losing physical control," Justice McWilliam said. Justice McWilliam said even though Shang had admonished Zheng for hitting a woman, it was too late, and the elements of the offence by joint commission had been proven. Shang will be sentenced in September.
