The man arrested over the brutal murders of four University of Idaho students is a crime expert who was studying for a Ph.D in criminal justice just 10 miles from where the slayings took place.
Bryan Kohberger, 28, was arrested after a SWAT team made a raid at the location in Chestnuthill Township, Pa., where he was staying at around 3 a.m. Friday.
Police also seized a white Hyundai Elantra matching the description of a car they had being trying to locate and Kohberger’s DNA has been matched to samples recovered at the scene of the killings, according to CNN.
Kohberger was pursuing a doctorate in criminal justice at Washington State University in Pullman, a short drive from Moscow, where the murders took place. He completed his first semester earlier this month.
Shortly after his arrest, the university took down a grad student page listing his name and police were pictured raiding the apartment where he had stayed.
He also received a master of arts in criminal justice from DeSales University in Center Valley, Pa., in 2022. The university later put our a statement saying they were aware of his arrest and “devastated by this senseless tragedy.”
While at DeSales, Kohberger posted in a Reddit community for former prisoners to ask for help with a research survey about “how emotions and psychological traits influence decision-making when committing a crime.”
In the post “student investigator” Kohberger wrote his project “seeks to understand how emotions and psychological traits influence decision-making when committing a crime.”
Questions he asked respondents took on eerie new significance in light of his alleged crimes, including: “Before making your move, how did you approach the victim or target?” “After committing the crime, what were you thinking and feeling?”
“Did you prepare for the crime before leaving your home? What were you thinking and feeling at this point? And “why did you choose that victim or target over others?”
Kohberger had appeared to evade the combined efforts of the Moscow Police, Idaho State Police and FBI for over six weeks following the slayings during which authorities offered little information beyond saying they were looking for a knife, which was the murder weapon.
However, CNN reported an FBI surveillance team from the Philadelphia had been tracking Kohberger for four days before his arrest.
A motive for Kohberger’s crimes or whether he’d had any previous relationship to any of his victims had not emerged late Friday. Little has emerged about his personality, beyond his obsessive-compulsive eating habits.
A former school friend told the Daily Beast Kohberger started boxing in his senior year of high school and had taken criminal justice classes with a view to potentially becoming a cop.
“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,” Nick Mcloughlin told the outlet.
Records showed Kohberger appeared briefly in a Monroe County court where he was ordered held without bail and is due to be extradited after a hearing on Jan. 3.
His arrest comes almost seven weeks after Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Madison Mogen, 21, Xana Kernodle, 20, and Ethan Chapin, 20, were stabbed to death in their beds as they slept in their off-campus home on Nov. 13.
The murders were the first in Moscow in seven years and have rocked the small college community. Earlier this week, police confirmed they were sifting through 20,000 tips in connection with the case.
Police say the four students were murdered sometime between 3 and 4 a.m. but they were not discovered until hours later, after roommates Dylan Mortensen and Bethany Funke became worried they could not reach their friends and called police, who made the grim discovery.
