An arrest was made Friday in the case of four murdered college students in Idaho. The suspect in the case was a grad student named Bryan Kohberger who attended a school just across the border in Washington from where the killing took place. Police tracked Kohberger as he drove across the country and then arrested him.
Authorities carefully tracked the man charged in the killings of four Idaho college students as he drove across the country around Christmas and continued surveilling him for several days before finally arresting him Friday, sources tell CNN…
Investigators honed in on Kohberger as the suspect through DNA evidence and by confirming his ownership of a white Hyundai Elantra seen near the crime scene, according to two law enforcement sources briefed on the investigation.
Kohberger, who authorities say lived just minutes from the scene of the killings, is a PhD student in Washington State University’s Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, the school confirmed…
Genetic genealogy techniques were used to connect Kohberger to unidentified DNA evidence, another source with knowledge of the case tells CNN.
Kohberger’s public defender in Pennsylvania claimed he was shocked by the arrest. He’s going to waive an extradition hearing and will be returned to Idaho sometime next month for prosecution. He’s been charged with four counts of first degree murder. His background reads like something out of a detective novel.
Seven weeks after the slayings of four University of Idaho students shocked the campus, police announced they believe the killer is a Washington State University graduate student arrested Friday in Pennsylvania…
Before coming to WSU, Kohberger graduated from DeSales University in 2020 with a bachelor’s degree in psychology. In the spring of 2022, he received his masters of arts in criminal justice also from DeSales, a private Catholic University in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, according to the university’s website…
While working on his master’s degree, Kohberger researched how emotions and psychological traits influence decision-making when committing a crime, according to a research survey posted online through the university.
The Lehigh Valley News, a nonprofit online news site in Pennsylvania, reported that Kohberger was a student of DeSales forensic psychology Professor Katherine Ramsland, an expert on serial killers who has written dozens of books, including “How to Catch a Killer” and “The Mind of a Murderer.” She also has consulted with several TV shows focused on crime, including CSI, according to her online university biography. She wrote “Confessions of a Serial Killer,” a biography of Dennis Lynn Rader, who tortured and murdered 10 people, including a family of four in Wichita, Kansas, in 1974. Rader wasn’t arrested until 2004. The book was published in 2016.
He was a teaching assistant in undergraduate classes and people who knew him say he seemed a bit odd.
Hayden Stinchfield said Kohberger was the teacher’s assistant in one of Stinchfield’s criminology classes. He seemed disengaged most of the time and was a harsh grader, Stinchfield said.
”He was definitely kind of a creepy guy,” Stinchfield said.
Stinchfield said Kohberger seemed more distracted and disheveled in the days after the killings, letting his facial hair grow out.
”We noticed distinctly, like, oh, he must be going through it. He’s, yeah, he’s looking a lot worse,” Stinchfield said.
That could be taken as an indication of guilt. Was he trying to change his appearance after the crime? Kohberger’s apartment has been searched but the search warrant and the rest of the arrest warrant information hasn’t been made public yet, so the media doesn’t really have much to go on as far as a motive. Someone who knew him in high school said he was bullied a lot, particularly by girls.
Sarah Healey, who went to Pleasant Valley High School with Kohberger, said he was shy and kept to himself and a small group of friends, but some of their classmates – especially girls – mocked Kohberger and threw things at him.
“It was bad,” Healey said. “There was definitely something off about him, like we couldn’t tell exactly what it was. I remember one time when I was walking in the hallway, and he stopped me and was like, ‘Do you want to hang out?’”
At that point, they didn’t know each other or run in the same social circles, said Healey.
“It was just weird,” she said. “But Bryan was bullied a lot, and I never got a chance to say something to defend him, because he would always run away.”
The father of one of the victims says he has identified some possible connections between Kohberger and his daughter but he was unwilling to share the details.
Steve Goncalves said no one in the family knows or recognizes the suspect, but in the hours since they’ve first learned his name they are starting to see connections between him and Kaylee Goncalves that they aren’t ready to discuss yet.
“Now that there’s a person and a name that someone can specifically look for and see if there’s any connections in any way. So they’re just trying to figure it out,” the family’s attorney, Shanon Grey, told ABC News.
Here’s some coverage of the arrest from ABC News.
Discussion about this post