“In the early hours of November 13, 2022, four University of Idaho students were fatally stabbed while they slept in an off-campus three-story rented home in Moscow, Idaho. On December 30, 2022, a suspect, 28-year old Bryan Christopher Kohberger was arrested,” Wikipedia says (here).
Okay, that’s the crime and suspect. The police chief says he’s confident they’ve “got their man,” but Kohberger is presumed innocent until found guilty in legal proceedings, and he told his Pennsylvania public defender (who only handled his extradition to Idaho) that he “looked forward to being exonerated.”
That’s where things sit on Friday, January 6, 2023. What do the cops have on him? From various sources, I’ve compiled the following:
- He lived a short distance, about 10 miles, from the crime scene.
- His car matches the description of one caught on surveillance video near the crime scene at the approximate time of the crime (see story here).
- He replaced his car’s Pennsylvania plates with Washington plates five days after the murders (see story here), but this isn’t suspicious in and of itself, because he relocated to Washington to attend Washington State University (WSU) beginning in fall semester of 2022, and state law requires new residents to get state plates. As it typically takes several weeks to get them, they probably were ordered before the murders, and the timing of the plate swap so soon after the murders likely is a coincidence.
- But police who had him under surveillance in Pennsylvania saw him wearing surgical gloves, watched him meticulously clean his car “inside and out,” and observed him depositing garbage bags in neighbors’ trash bins at 4 a.m. (see story here). That behavior is odd, to say the least, and is consistent with trying to get rid of evidence.
- A knife sheath left at the crime scene had DNA on that closely matched his father’s DNA. This doesn’t mean his father did it; rather, it points to someone in his close family, including him, having handled the knife sheath found at the crime scene.
- Phone records show his phone was near the victims’ home “at least a dozen times” from June 2022 onwards, inferentially carefully “casing” the place (see story here, which explains why the police thought the house was “targeted”), including on the morning after the murders before police were notified and the crime hit the news — and was switched off during the time of the murders, possibly deliberately so its location couldn’t be traced.
- One of the surviving roommates encountered the killer in the house, and Kohberger roughly matches that witness’s description.
- People who knew Kohberger in Pennsylvania (a relative and a college friend) reportedly said he struggled with heroin addiction in high school and college (see story here), and family members described him as “OCD” and having “weird eating habits.” In other words, he was a weirdo and drug user.
The media, of course, have already convicted him in the press, and are saying things about him like (1) he had cannibalistic urges, (2) he was trying to commit the perfect crime, (3) he may be responsible for other murders. None of this is verified by witness testimony or other court-quality evidence. It’s inevitable that when you have a sensational crime like this, all sorts of people are going to weigh in with their personal opinions and speculation, the more lurid the better. I’m not necessarily saying be skeptical, I’m only saying reserve judgment until we have trustworthy facts from reliable sources.
I’m not, of course, saying he’s innocent. As someone trained to be a journalist and a lawyer, I’m just careful with facts. I also believe in legal process. So I’m not going to say he’s guilty or innocent, because that’s for a jury to determine. I’m simply laying out some of the information that’s been reported. Want my opinion? Four people are dead of non-natural causes, and I don’t think Martians from a UFO killed them. There’s a suspect in custody, and we’ll just see where it goes from there.
One thing’s for certain, though: DNA has been a game-changer in criminology, and other factors such as surveillance cameras and cellphone location tracing have made it harder to get away with “the perfect crime.” As a Ph.D. student in criminology, Kohberger would know this.