It’s believed to be his first kill.
And the body count was high: four students at the start of their exciting journey into adulthood all murdered in their sleep using a military-style knife.
But for mass killer Bryan Kohberger, the night apparently didn’t go as planned.
Now, Dr Gary Brucato, a clinical and forensic psychologist who co-led the largest study ever on mass murders, has revealed what he believes was Kohberger’s real plot that fateful night in Moscow, Idaho.
‘I think he planned to sexually assault and kill one victim,’ Brucato told Daily Mail. ‘In other words, to attack her sleeping and possibly even remove her from the home.
‘But everything went to hell. His intel failed him and he wound up committing a mass murder.’
Latah County Prosecutor Bill Thompson revealed during Kohberger’s plea hearing that the killer did not intend to murder all four victims that night – but stopped short of revealing who the intended target was.
Brucato believes this one chosen victim was 21-year-old Madison Mogen, based in part on the path Kohberger took after breaking into 1122 King Road in the early hours of November 13, 2022.
The killer went straight up to Mogen’s room on the third floor where he found her and her best friend Kaylee Goncalves sleeping in the same bed, prosecutors revealed.
‘I’m sure he thought his victim was going to be isolated, and he gets in there and is completely caught off guard,’ Brucato said. Kohberger stabbed the two best friends to death.
On his way back downstairs, he encountered Xana Kernodle on the second floor, who was still awake, having just received a DoorDash order.
He killed her, followed by her boyfriend Ethan Chapin who was asleep in bed.
Kohberger then left through the back sliding door on the second story, passing roommate Dylan Mortensen who had been woken by the noise and had peeked round her bedroom door.
Mortensen and Bethany Funke – a roommate who was in her room on the first floor – were the only survivors.
Brucato believes Kohberger was ‘shocked’ to find Goncalves in the room with Mogen and then to find Kernodle awake, disrupting his plan to assault and kill Mogen.
But, his decision to kill a sleeping Chapin – and the nature of his injuries – reveals a ‘special hostility’ toward finding another man inside the house, he explained.
According to a recent Dateline, citing police sources, the killer had ‘carved’ Chapin’s legs and then sat down in a chair in Kernodle’s room.
‘I think the special hostility towards Ethan, where he takes the time to carve the hamstrings, is because a male interrupted his fantasy,’ Brucato explained.
‘He had a very particular fantasy. He was very angry about it not going as planned.
‘He just killed three people before Ethan. He now kills Ethan, who’s sleeping and totally defenseless, and he needs to be getting out of dodge, but instead, he takes the time to sit down and carve the hamstrings of Ethan. Why would he do that?… I think he had a special anger towards the male for interrupting his fantasy.’
Before Kohberger was even on law enforcement’s radar for the murders, Brucato, serial killer expert Dr Ann Burgess and former FBI profiler Greg Cooper had created a profile of the suspect.
This profile found that – despite killing four victims in a mass murder spanning just 13 minutes – the assailant was no ordinary mass murderer or spree killer.
Instead, this was the work of a ‘budding serial killer’ acting out a ‘sexually motivated fantasy’ to have control and domination over women, Brucato said.
When Kohberber was then arrested on December 30, 2022 – and more information came out about both him and the murders – this profile solidified.
‘As the story progressed, it became clear Kohberger was doing things that are much more characteristic of serial killers than they are of mass murderers,’ Brucato explained.
He pointed to several characteristics and behaviors to back up this theory.
Among them is Kohberger’s cell phone and online history – namely his porn choices, the photos of women on his phone and his searches for the serial killer Ted Bundy – which were revealed in a recent Dateline show.
According to the episode – which sparked an investigation into an apparent evidence leak – Kohberger searched for porn containing the words ‘drugged’ and ‘sleeping.’
He also reportedly used his phone to browse images of female students from Washington State University and University of Idaho, many of them in bikinis – and many of them close friends or online followers of the three murdered women.
Kohberger also made several internet searches for Bundy – who killed at least 30 women including female students in a sorority house in Florida.
‘Based on the pornography and the trolling and the preoccupation with Bundy, this was more of a sexually-motivated fantasy,’ Brucato said.
He explained that the pornography of women drugged or sleeping – and the decision to attack his victims at night while they slept – is about ‘a desire to express some kind of domination or control over women who were essentially rejecting him.’
Meanwhile, the images of the women in bikinis, he said, exhibits ‘trolling behavior’ and shows that his victim was ‘interchangeable.’
Kohberger is also believed to have planned to kill for some time. He bought the murder weapon, a KaBar knife, in March 2022 – eight months before the murders and five months before he had even moved from Pennsylvania to Washington.
Brucato said this shows Kohberger planned to kill before he picked his chosen victim.
‘What you have is a person who has the fantasy that they’re going to kill well before they go out and find the victim,’ he said.
‘That’s typical of a serial killer, because the victim is just a symbol. I just go out and cast, like a casting agent. I have a script, and then I go out and I find the woman who looks the part.’
Brucato explained that, to a serial killer, the ‘first and most important factor is that the person looks the part in your fantasy.’
He calls this the serial killer’s ‘prototype.’
For Kohberger, Brucato said the pictures of women on his cell phone show his prototype was ‘an attractive young woman who symbolized the kind of popular girl who has rejected him.’
How he then found and selected his chosen victim remains a mystery; there is no known connection between Kohberger and any of the victims.
But, as Brucato explained, with serial killers it is often ‘opportunistic.’
He could have spotted Mogen in passing somewhere, found her while trawling social media, or seen her on the social media account of another woman he met at a party, he suggested.
‘Through some kind of happenstance, he crosses paths with the woman that he becomes hyper-focused on, who in his mind is the perfect enactment of that fantasy,’ he said.
‘But then you also need it to be practical. Like they live in a house that he could easily get into, that is in the particular geographic location he wants.’
Cell phone data, revealed by prosecutors, shows Kohberger was in the vicinity of the home at 1122 King Road 23 times before the murders – mostly at night.
Brucato believes Kohberger was watching Mogen through the windows to try to learn ‘everything about her.’
As well as stalking and surveilling her in person, he likely also used social media for his ‘intel gathering,’ Brucato explained.
‘What you have to picture is an intel gathering and it’s sort of like when a predatory animal makes smaller and smaller loops around its victim until they attack. They build their nerves up, they study their movements and then they jump,’ he said.
‘You have a guy who’s building his nerve up watching the house, studying it, and then he’s like, ‘okay, it’s D-day, it’s time to go in.’
Serial killers also often live double lives – and can masquerade as upstanding citizens, Brucato explained.
In Kohberger’s case, he was studying a PhD in criminology at college.
But, secretly, he was also buying a murder weapon, becoming obsessed with Bundy and viewing ‘dark sexually perverse material and becoming fixated on violence,’ Brucato said.
‘Based on his studies and everything else, I think he got fascinated by this idea of killers that have this kind of dark side that’s hidden, the fragmentation of the self,’ he said.
‘On the one hand, he’s fighting it by studying these things and trying to understand himself, and on the other hand, he is becoming increasingly fascinated with the power of it.’
He added: ‘We see the classic progression where he starts out being nasty or condescending to women, looking at violent pornography… but then eventually, that’s not enough.’
As a serial killer carrying out his first murder – if he had gotten away with it – it’s likely Kohberger would have killed again.
‘There would be a possibility of him going on to kill again because when you play out a fantasy – particularly where the victim here involves interchangeable women – you will keep going out to play the fantasy out,’ he said.
‘After a cooling-off period, you have that desire or need again or something in life upsets you and you go out and you do it again.’
And Kohberger would have learned from his mistakes the first time round.
‘Each time you try to perfect it. You try to change your MO to get it closer to what you were fantasizing about,’ Brucato said.
‘The signature element stays the same. In other words, the idea you are expressing hostility towards women who reject you and assaulting them for that reason – that doesn’t change. What changes is how you go about it.’
Brucato said Kohberger would have learned ‘a lot of things’ from his first kill and tried to correct them for next time, such as carrying out better surveillance, preventing his car being captured on camera, not leaving the the knife sheath at the scene and learning that the absence of cell phone data can actually tell a story.
He added: ‘If he had not been caught, he would have been frustrated by all his mistakes – and he would have tried to do it better next time.’