Bryan Kohberger: The crime student turned cold-blooded murderer

Telegraph

15 hours ago

Bryan Kohberger was studying for a Phd in criminology in 2022 when he was accused of butchering four University of Idaho students in their sleep.
When the autistic 30-year-old pleaded guilty to the brutal murders on Wednesday, his former professor questioned whether her module on serial killers may have served as inspiration.
'I have to look at the framework of what I taught and wonder, did I inspire him in some way?' Dr Katherine Ramsland, a psychologist at Pennsylvania's DeSales University, told NewsNation.
Dr Ramsland, who taught Kohberger during his undergraduate degree said she never observed any 'red flags' about her former student, but conceded psychopaths might be drawn to her area of study.
'Unfortunately, in this field, that's what we live with,' she said.
It's a compelling explanation to a case that sent shockwaves through the remote farming community of Moscow, grabbed headlines around the world and set off a nationwide manhunt that lasted for weeks, ending in the arrest of Kohberger.
In the years since, a motive for the killings has never been established. Nor has a connection between Mr Kohberger and the victims – Kaylee Goncalves, Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle and Madison Mogen – who were stabbed to death at their rental home near campus in the early hours of Nov 13, 2022.
With Kohberger's August trial looming, his lawyers' decision to plead guilty, in a last-ditch effort to avoid the death penalty, has left families of the deceased divided, at least some of whom had hoped for their day in court.
'We are beyond furious at the state of Idaho,' the Goncalves family wrote on Facebook. 'They have failed us.'
Following Kohberger's arrest, friends were left baffled by how a 'polite', 'curious' Phd candidate from an affluent background could have carried out such a heinous and calculated crime against four complete strangers.
'It's wild,' Jack Baylis, a Pennsylvania friend of Mr Kohberger's at the time, told The New York Times. 'Bryan himself would've been fascinated by it.'
But in the weeks after his detention, details of the student's troubled past, involving heroin use and suicidal thoughts, began to surface, painting a picture of a more mentally unstable character.
'I feel like an organic sack of meat with no self worth,' he wrote in 2011, when he was 16, adding: 'As I hug my family, I look into their faces, I see nothing, it is like I am looking at a video game, but less.'
The posts were made on an online forum called Tapatalk, where he also professed to experience the 'constant thought of suicide' and a feeling of being able to do 'whatever I want with little remorse'.
Mr Kohberger graduated high school in Pennsylvania in 2013, where he was allegedly bullied for his weight (he posted online of having lost half his body weight) and later began using heroin, friends told The New York Times.
Messages seen by the newspaper suggested that after attending rehab, he got clean and told a friend in October 2018 that he was interested in studying 'high-profile offenders'.
According to a police affidavit, Mr Kohberger applied for an internship with the Police Department in Pullman Washington, where he was living while studying criminology at Washington State University, in the months before he murdered the four students.
On the night of the murders, Kohberger slipped into the house via the kitchen's sliding door before climbing to the stairs to the third floor, where he used his seven-inch blade to stab Mogen and Goncalves as they slept alongside each other, according to court documents.
He left the room, where he encountered Kernodle, who was awake after picking up a food delivery. After killing her, he went into her bedroom to find, Chapin, her boyfriend, asleep and stabbed him to death.
The day of the murders, the two surviving female housemates called the police at around noon to report that one of the victims was unresponsive, presuming they were unconscious.
Responders arrived at the three-storey home to find all four victims dead, spread out between the house's bedrooms.
Post-mortems showed some of the victims were likely asleep when they were killed, while others showed signs of defensive wounds.
One of the surviving housemates, Dylan Mortensen, said she woke up 'a short time' after 4am because she thought she heard Goncalves say: 'There's someone here', according to court documents.
Ms Mortensen said she looked out her bedroom door and couldn't see anything, but later thought she heard 'crying' from Kernodle's room before a male voice said: 'It's okay, I'm going to help you.'
She said she opened the door again, this time seeing, 'a figure clad in black clothing' with a mask covering their mouth and nose walking toward her. She 'froze' in shock, according to the affidavit, and the person walked past before she locked herself in her room.
At 4.20am, Ms Mortensen began frantically calling her housemates. Bethany Funke, the other surviving housemate, replied to her message and the pair exchanged a string of panicked texts in which Ms Mortensen described the figure in a 'ski mask' and said she was 'freaked out'.
The next morning, the pair sent more messages to their housemates at 10.20am, but did not get a reply. Shortly before noon, they called 911.
As police scrambled for leads in the wake of the murders, they asked for information about a white Hyundai Elantra sedan which passed the home on three occasions on the night of the killings.
Authorities eventually learned Kohlberger owned a car of that description which he had driven to his parents home, a gated community in Pennsylvania, in the days afterwards.
A search of the house recovered rubbish that matched the DNA to a knife sheath left at the scene, the affidavit said.
Online shopping records also showed that Mr Kohberger, months earlier, had purchased a military-style knife matching the sheath, and his claim that he was on a solo drive at the time of the killings did little to absolve him.
Most troubling of all, cellphone data and surveillance video showed that Mr Kohberger visited the victims' neighbourhood at least a dozen times before the killings, suggesting he was canvassing his victims.
During his detention, Kohberger's lawyers exhausted all avenues to bar the prosecution from seeking the death penalty for his crimes, claiming their client's autism diagnosis diminished his responsibility.
Following his guilty plea in exchange for a life sentence, some of the victims' families have expressed relief that they can now 'put this behind us'.
But Kohberger's punishment will provide little relief to Goncalves's family, who have demanded a 'full confession' of the events on the night their daughter was killed.
'Bryan Kohberger facing a life in prison means he would still get to speak, form relationships, and engage with the world,' Goncalves's 18-year-old sister, Aubrie, said.
'Meanwhile, our loved ones have been silenced forever. That reality stings more deeply when it feels like the system is protecting his future more than honouring the victims' pasts.'