The University of Idaho Murders (Update #1)

There has been an update in the University of Idaho Murders (episode #226 from just a few weeks ago). Earlier today, authorities announced that they had detained 28-year-old Bryan Kohberger, a graduate student from nearby Washington State University...

Hey everyone. It's been approximately one week since our last major case update, and... I'm back again with yet another.

This update is for a story that I covered quite recently, just a few weeks ago, in fact: the University of Idaho murders from the small town of Moscow. If you recall, in that episode, I detailed the murders of four young college students who were murdered inside of a home near campus.

The home, which was lived in by five young women at the time, was a split-level home that had one or two living on each floor. Three of the victims lived on the upper floors: 21-year-old Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves, and 20-year-old Xana Kernodle. The fourth victim was the latter's boyfriend, 20-year-old Ethan Chapin, who lived nearby but was staying the night in Xana's bedroom.

In the weeks after this murder occurred in November 2022, the area - the nation, really, along with the true crime community - was alight with speculation and gossip... rumors about who had committed the crime. However, in today's update, we'll touch upon a couple of notes that I tried to emphasize in my episode: not only the connection between Moscow, Idaho and Pullman, Washington, a neighboring college town just a few miles away; but the prospect of the killer being someone not on anyone's radar, someone that was previously unknown to the public.

As it turns out, the killer was someone that no one had previously suspected. And he just-so-happened to live approximately eight miles away from the crime scene, in Pullman.

Earlier this morning - December 30th, 2022 - police announced that a suspect for this crime was in custody, having been arrested on the other side of the country.

28-year-old Bryan Christopher Kohberger was arrested early on Friday morning, at approximately 3:00 AM, in an operation carried out by the Pennsylvania State Police, local SWAT teams, and the FBI. He was arrested in Chestnuthill Township, located in the Pocono Mountains, and is now being held at the Monroe County Prison in Pennsylvania, pending extradition to Idaho.

Because this is a very recent development, many details about the suspect and his possible connection to the victims remains unknown and/or undetermined. However, based on the reporting that's come out over the past handful of hours, we can already gain a pretty good understanding of the type of person that Bryan Kohberger was.

The 28-year-old was raised in Albrightsville, Pennsylvania, and grew up in a family involved in mental health work. He attended college in Pennsylvania, graduating from Northamptom Community College in his hometown in 2018 as a psychology major. He then went on to attend DeSales University, where he majored in Criminal Justice and Criminology. There, he obtained a bachelor's degree in 2020 and then completed his graduate studies in June 2022.

During this time, he worked as a security guard with the Pleasant Valley School District nearby. This was valuable work experience for him, because - as he told many of his friends and family members - he planned to ultimately become a police officer.

After completing his Master's, Kohberger then set his sights on even higher education: he enrolled in a PhD program at Washington State University, in Pullman, where he continued his criminology studies. While the dates haven't been confirmed quite yet, it seems like he began this work just a few months ago, in the Fall Semester in 2022, and worked as a teaching assistant.

A registered libertarian voter, Kohberger also happened to drive a white Hyundai Elantra... which, if you recall, police had thrown out as a possible vehicle of interest just weeks ago, right before I uploaded my original episode. His arrest in Pennsylvania signifies that he had returned home to visit his family over winter break, but it's unknown if he planned on returning to Pullman for the next semester.

As recounted by an old friend, Nick Mcloughlin, who spoke with the Daily Beast earlier today, it seems that Bryan Kohberger's personality seems to have shifted over the last few years. According to Mcloughlin, Kohberger used to be "down to earth," but as they approached senior y ear, Kohberger reportedly lost a lot of weight and began to turn "aggressive," a development that coincided with him taking up boxing as a hobby. As recounted by Mcloughlin:

"He always wanted to fight somebody, he was bullying people. We started cutting him off from our friend group because he was 100 percent a different person."

It also appears that Bryan Kohberger was pretty active on social media. Users have found Instagram accounts from him that reportedly followed at least a couple of the victims, although I have not seen this for myself so I cannot confirm it. What I can confirm, though, is that he appears to have been active on Reddit, posting under the username /u/Criminology_Student. Using this username, he frequently posted questions aimed toward ex-convicts, asking them to participate in surveys in criminal justice, primarily focused on how they felt when committing their crimes. He specifically asked:

"My name is Bryan, and I am inviting you to participate in a research project that seeks to understand how emotions and psychological traits influence decision-making when committing a crime. In particular, this study seeks to understand the story behind your most recent criminal offense, with an emphasis on your thoughts and feelings throughout your experience. In the event that your most recent offense was not one that led to a conviction, you may still participate..."

Some of the questions included in the survey were:

"What steps did you take prior to locating the victim or target? Detail your thoughts and feelings."

"Why did you choose that victim over others?"

"Before making your move, how did you approach the victim or target? Detail what you were thinking or feeling."

"What was the first move you made to accomplish your goal? Detail any thoughts or feelings at this point."

"How did you leave the scene?"

"Did you struggle with or fight the victim?"

To me, it feels like this survey - and his criminology research in general - may have been a way for Bryan Kohberger to live vicariously through others. Or, perhaps, it was just really hands-on research, something he planned to carry through into killing. It's possible that he tried to learn as much as possible from ex-convicts in order to carry out the "perfect crime," something that others like Ted Bundy and Israel Keyes have attempted to in the past... but we all know how their stories played out.

Funnily enough, as Reddit user /u/WannabePicasso points out:

"Feels like a too on the nose episode of Criminal Minds or Dexter where the writers were out of ideas."

In my original episode, I wanted to emphasize the connection between Moscow and Pullman, because I noticed that a lot of publications that covered the story just... weren't. Even a lot of the websleuths that were focusing in on the case seemed to talk about Moscow as if it were an isolated island, but ignored the neighboring college town just a few miles down the road. It's actually this, above everything else, that encouraged me to make the episode (as I normally try and avoid the stories that are covered as naseum everywhere else).

While I won't claim to have made any grand prediction about this case, I did know that it was just as likely for the killer to have been from Pullman as Moscow, and a part of me always wondered if that was why the FBI was brought in so early in the investigation. Moscow P.D. has gone almost unusually silent since releasing the detail about the Hyundai Elantra to the press, and I think that it's very possible that authorities were able to track it across state lines, to nearby Pullman.

In my original episode, I also theorized that the killer was likely someone that websleuths hadn't fingered as the killer. That's because, while many online have good intentions, they don't always have the right information... and often end up getting hyper-focused in on certain details or persons that just aren't pertinent. We saw that a lot in this case, with a lot of people connected to the victims being singled out as suspects on Twitter, Reddit, Websleuths, and other social media sites and message boards. It was honestly horrific, and I just hope that these websleuths have learned their lesson about maligning strangers for horrific crimes.

As I mentioned minutes ago, Bryan Kohberger has been detained by police in Pennsylvania, and has been charged with four counts of first-degree murder, along with felony burglary. An FBI surveillance team from Philadelphia had been tracking him for four days, likely in an attempt to not only observe his actions and whereabouts, but to obtain DNA from him, which they've likely matched up to evidence left behind at the crime scene. Those are just guesses on my part, however... at least, so far.

Because he was detained out-of-state, officials in Idaho are unable to say much of anything when it comes to the specifics of this case. However, I will include the audio from today's press conference, and you can listen if you want. Just be warned: there's not a lot of surprising or new information contained within it, and we'll likely learn more about Bryan Kohberger and the details that led to his arrest when he is extradited to Idaho.

Until then, I hope that my friends in Moscow and Pullman feel a little bit safer, knowing that this scumbag is off the streets.