The night sky over Idaho is famous for being about the darkest in the US and Bryan Kohberger would tell police that he was out driving around in his car late that night three years ago because he was ‘watching the moon and the stars’.
In fact, his attention was focused on a student house in the university town of Moscow, where the night was about to get immeasurably darker. Kohberger slipped in through an unlocked door and slaughtered four of the occupants in their beds with a combat knife. The four friends were aged 20 to 21 and all students at the University of Idaho.
As grisly as they seemed motiveless, the killings of the three young women and one man in the early hours of November 13, 2022, transfixed America like few crimes in living memory.
The countrywide horror wasn’t hard to understand. Millions of Americans had children just like Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin – barely out of high school and now living the often hard-partying student life away from home.
Kohberger, a 30-year-old criminologist with an unnerving personality and a fascination with forensic science and serial killers, has now admitted all four murders in a bid to avoid the state’s death penalty. He is expected to be sentenced later this month, but faces four consecutive life sentences.
By allowing Kohberger – a socially awkward, autistic loner with a history of unsettling behaviour towards young women – to avoid a trial, prosecutors will never have to explain the abiding mystery of his motive.
Why did he target four students who, though they lived a ten-minute drive from Washington State University where he was studying for a PhD in criminal justice, he had apparently never even met?
Although there are various theories, we may never know for certain. Some believe Kohberger, who fellow students said loved to show off how clever he was, simply wanted to prove he could commit the ‘perfect murder’.
Bryan Kohberger (in his high school yearbook photo) struggled with heroin addiction in his teen years
Bryan Kohberger, 30, pictured following his arrest after knifing four University of Idaho students to death
Many experts believe he was a misogynous ‘Incel’ (or involuntary celibate, who blame women for their sexual failings) who wanted to dominate women and specifically targeted one of his victims – ‘Maddie’ Mogen – who he’d seen at a local vegan restaurant and followed avidly on social media.
Pretty and blonde, 21-year-old Mogen epitomised the type of woman he both coveted and despised, and he became darkly obsessed with her, it’s claimed.
Whatever the twisted motive, prosecutors say Kohberger parked his car, a white Hyundai Elantra, at the back of the house at around 4am. It was a Sunday morning and the occupants of the three-storey off-campus house had gone to bed very late after a busy Saturday night of bars and parties.
On the top floor were the bedrooms of Mogen and Goncalves, who kept a dog, while Kernodle and housemate Dylan Mortensen had rooms on the floor below. A fifth student, Bethany Funke, occupied the bottom floor.
Entering through an unlocked sliding door to the kitchen at the back of the house, their visitor ignored the two bedrooms on that middle floor of the house and went straight up a narrow flight of stairs to where Mogen and Goncalves, bosom buddies since school days, were sleeping together in Mogen’s bed.
He killed both of them with a Ka-Bar combat knife he’d bought months earlier and, making a rare but fatal error, left its tan leather sheath by Mogen’s body. Both victims’ blood were later found on the sheath along with DNA from a third person who turned out to be Kohberger.
According to prosecutors, he then went back downstairs and found housemate Xana Kernodle who – according to her phone activity – was still awake. He killed her with the seven-inch bladed knife too and also dispatched Chapin, her boyfriend, who was sleeping in Kernodle’s bedroom. Prosecutors emphasised that there was no ‘sexual component’ to the crimes (even if some insist sex was central to the motive) and that every victim was stabbed ‘multiple’ times.
Victims (clockwise from top) Maddie Mogen, Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle and Kaylee Goncalves photographed hours before their deaths
Bryan Kohberger, pictured in an old photo from Soundcloud, had a teenage battle with addiction
Kohberger left alive the two other women in the house, despite coming face-to-face with one of them. Dylan Mortensen was due to testify at trial that she’d been woken by noises, initially believing Goncalves was playing with her dog. Then she heard crying coming from Kernodle’s room and a male voice she didn’t recognise say something like ‘It’s OK, I’m going to help you’.
After hearing crying again, she opened her door and saw a figure with ‘bushy eyebrows’ and wearing black clothing and a ski mask coming towards her.
Mortensen froze and the unknown person walked past her. Locking herself in her room, she began texting her housemates but only got a response from Funke downstairs. Although the text messages revealed their increasing panic, the pair didn’t call the police for another eight hours (an odd and never-explained detail that defence lawyers had planned to exploit in a trial).
The intruder left by the same sliding door and roughly five minutes later, the Hyundai car was captured on a neighbour’s surveillance camera speeding away so fast it almost lost control on a corner, said prosecutor Bill Thompson at a hearing a week ago.
An emotional Thompson told the court that Kohberger intended to kill when he entered the home that night but may have not planned to kill as many people as he did.
‘We will not represent that he intended to commit all of the murders that he did that night, but we know that is what resulted,’ he said.
What seems undeniable is Kohberger hadn’t intended to be caught. Prosecutors pointed out that Kohberger did a pre-doctorate study on crime scene processing, so would have detailed knowledge of what investigators would be looking for.
He switched off his mobile phone for nearly two hours so its location wouldn’t be recorded.
Prosecutors believe he drove along back roads to return to his flat just over the state border in Pullman, Washington, in order to avoid surveillance cameras on the major routes.
Kohberger then returned to the crime scene at 9am, staying for about ten minutes, and after he’d got home again, he took a selfie on his phone, giving a thumbs-up sign.
Kohberger later changed his car registration from Pennsylvania – where his family live 2,500 miles away – to Washington state, complicating the efforts of investigators searching surveillance camera footage. Under Pennsylvania law, cars don’t have to carry a front licence plate, making it harder to identify the vehicle.
Police surround the four students’ house in the town of Moscow, Idaho, following their slayings
In fact, surveillance cameras hadn’t captured the Elantra’s number plate near the student house, but the vehicle was spotted by college police in a campus car park at Washington State University and found to be registered to Kohberger.
By the time investigators finally linked him and his car with the murders weeks later, he’d been able to scrub his flat and office completely clean. ‘Spartan would be a kind characterisation. There was nothing there, nothing of evidentiary value was found,’ said Thompson of Kohberger’s university lodgings.
His ‘spotless’ car, meanwhile, had been ‘essentially disassembled inside’ so that it could be ‘meticulously cleaned’. The knife has never been recovered but, judging by Kohberger’s phone movements, he may well have thrown it in a local river 30 miles south of Moscow.
What he couldn’t scrub clean, however, was his mobile phone data, which – when matched to cell tower records – revealed Kohberger had been visiting the area of the student house since early July, in all 23 times and always been the hours of 10pm to 4am. There’s no indication he’d had any contact with his victims over that time.
And, of course, investigators also had that knife sheath and its crucial DNA sample. FBI agents posed as rubbish collectors so they could retrieve bags left outside the Pennsylvania home of his parents. They found a Q-tip cotton wool stick that contained DNA that was identified as belonging to the father of whoever’s DNA was found on the knife sheath. Police had the critical piece of evidence and, five days after Christmas, a heavily armed SWAT team pounced on the parents’ house, where Kohberger had gone for the holidays and had been spotted wearing surgical gloves whenever he went outside.
Kohberger refused to speak at his subsequent court arraignment at which he pleaded not guilty. His lawyers repeatedly tried to get the death penalty formally struck from the case on the grounds he’d recently been diagnosed with autism.
His parents – Michael, a retired maintenance worker, and Maryann, who worked with additional support needs children – struggled for years with a son who had lived at home until he moved to Washington State University at 28 to do his PhD.
In his teens, Kohberger developed a rare and debilitating neurological condition known as ‘visual snow syndrome’ in which those affected see static in their vision.
They can also suffer tinnitus, and Kohberger told fellow sufferers in an online forum that he sometimes heard ‘demons in my head mocking me’.
He claimed online he felt ‘de-personalised’ and he could ‘do whatever I want with little remorse. I might spiral out of control’.
At middle school, he was overweight and bullied, especially by the girls. He reportedly developed an intense crush on a pretty blonde girl, a future cheerleader who rebuffed him.
He turned to drugs in high school and became a heroin addict.
His father reportedly told friends Kohberger ‘wasn’t the same person after the drugs’. In his mid-teens, he would steal from a neighbour to pay for his heroin, once even burgling her house while she was visiting her son, his friend and a fellow addict, in prison.
Kohberger went into rehab while still a teenager and appeared to turn himself around, taking up boxing – becoming a fitness fanatic and staunch vegan.
However, he remained desperately shy and awkward with girls, who often found him overbearing and ‘creepy’.
At DeSales University in Pennsylvania, where he obtained degrees in psychology and criminal justice, other students called him The Ghost, because he would glide silently into classes and vanish immediately afterwards. Some of the female students complained to staff Kohberger made them feel ‘uncomfortable’: he was clearly very intelligent but arrogant and abrasive with it.
He was banned from a local bar near his parents’ home for endlessly harassing female staff, the sort of obsessive behaviour which he allegedly did with Maddie Mogen, whose social media photos he always ‘liked’.
However, even Katherine Ramsland, a forensic psychology professor at DeSales and one of the foremost experts on serial killers, didn’t have him down as a potential murderer. ‘He was very polite, respectful, seemed genuinely engaged with the material as a potential researcher, teacher, somebody who was interested in a career,’ she said. When she heard he’d been arrested, Dr Ramsland – the author of books such as The Mind Of A Murderer and How To Catch A Killer – was convinced the police had made a mistake.
It was Dr Ramsland who taught Kohberger about a mass murderer – wealthy British-American Elliot Rodger – who has been cited as a potential direct influence on him. In 2014, when he was 22, Rodger became an Incel hero when he murdered six people and injured 14 others with knives, pistols and his car during a killing spree in Isla Vista, California, before killing himself.
Rodger left a video and 137-page ‘manifesto’ in which said he wanted to punish women for him still being a virgin despite ‘being the supreme gentleman’. He targeted female students at his university, two of whom died.
Kohberger’s superiors’ recommendation that he was PhD material (one of them described him as ‘one of my best students ever’) only fuelled his arrogance – and his misogyny. At Washington State University, where he began his doctoral studies in the summer of 2022, he regularly interrupted women students, rolling his eyes and winking conspiratorially at men. One of the latter revealed how Kohberger had once confided that, though he knew he could have any woman he wanted, he believed they belonged in the kitchen and the bedroom.
He once followed one of the women he taught out to her car while others complained he was grading them worse than the men. By the time he committed the killings, his superiors had reportedly resolved – after repeated warnings – to sack him as a teaching assistant. Without that income, he would have been unlikely to have been able to stay at the university.
Incel killer Elliot Rodger, who’d been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, had repeatedly mentioned his particular hatred for pretty blonde girls, whose lack of interest in him appeared to infuriate him.
Did Kohberger think the same? Forensic psychiatrist Dr Carole Lieberman believes Kohberger studied psychology and criminology because he was ‘trying to learn how to commit the perfect crime’. However she said it was ‘especially significant’ that Mogen and lookalike best friend Goncalves may well have reminded him of ‘the blonde cheerleader who rejected him in middle school’. She went on: ‘He took out the rage that he built up over the years, towards this first love and all the subsequent women who rejected him, with each bloody stab of the knife.’
Kohberger pleads guilty to the murders of the four Idaho university students at the Afa County Courthouse in Idaho on July 2, 2025
Two books on the Idaho killings – one by investigative journalist Howard Blum and a forthcoming one by James Patterson and Vicky Ward – argue Kohberger set out to kill Maddie Mogen and the other victims were, as Blum phrased it, ‘grim collateral damage’. Even the name chimed with Rodger’s case as he identified a former friend, Maddy Humphreys, who came to ‘represent everything I hate and despise’.
It certainly makes sense. Two housemates were ignored while Kaylee Goncalves – who’d actually moved out of the house ahead of her graduation but had returned her for the weekend – had been sharing Mogen’s bed that night.
And even if he’d never been inside the house before, Kohberger would have known its layout – including the Mogen bedroom for which he made a beeline – as the housemates had recently posted a TikTok video of themselves wandering around their home imitating each other.
Police believe Kohberger repeatedly parked his car in a cul-de-sac behind his victims’ house, a vantage point that gave him a particularly good view of Mogen’s bedroom window.
Some of the families of those he killed are outraged by the prosecutors’ decision to offer him a plea deal when they had so much evidence against him.
For them, Kohberger would have made a fitting first recipient of a new law recently introduced by Idaho’s governor – making death by firing squad the state’s primary method of execution.
