Few crimes in recent years have been more horrific than on the day in November 2022 that Idaho police found four young students brutally stabbed to death in an off-campus home.
The three women and one man — Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin — had been asleep in bed when an unknown intruder stole through the house, killing each of them but strangely sparing two other housemates who’d been on a lower floor.
The case transfixed America, but revulsion turned to mystification when, nearly seven weeks later, the FBI arrested a PhD student more than 2,000 miles away who appeared to have no connection with the vivacious foursome, all students at the University of Idaho in the town of Moscow.
Bryan Kohberger, then 28, had been studying criminology less than ten miles from Moscow at Washington State University. But it was on the other side of the U.S., in Pennsylvania, where he was arrested, after he and his father Michael had driven to their family home, unaware the FBI had tailed them across the country.
Denying he killed the four, Kohberger has yet to go on trial but he faces the death penalty — by firing squad if lethal drugs aren’t available.
Now, Pulitzer Prize-nominated investigative journalist Howard Blum claims in a new book that he can shed crucial fresh light on the puzzling crime. He insists that Kohberger didn’t come to the house on Moscow’s King Road that night intent on a killing spree.
After months probing the case, he argues that Kohberger intended to kill only one of the students — pretty blonde ‘Maddie’ Mogen, 21 — and that the others were merely ‘grim collateral damage’.
Blum believes that the super-shy and mentally troubled Kohberger — who found connecting with women particularly difficult — encountered Maddie after visiting the vegan restaurant where she worked part-time as a waitress (Kohberger is a strict vegan).
That’s when the fascination began, says Blum. Even if he hadn’t spoken to Maddie on that occasion, he was able to keep tabs on her and her housemates through their frequent posts on social media.
Blum says ‘obsessions came easily’ to Kohberger, whom he believes ‘continued to follow her over many nights’. It has been noted that the living areas of the students’ house had large windows overlooked by trees from which someone could spy on them without detection.
‘While the roommates hosted party after party at the house on King Road, he was often watching from the shadows,’ writes Blum.
In his book, When Night Comes Falling, which comes out tomorrow and which the Mail has seen, Blum also asks how much Kohberger’s parents knew, given they reportedly ignored his suspicious behaviour at the time of the killings.
According to Blum, Kohberger’s father dismissed the concerns of his psychologist daughter Melissa when she suggested her brother might be responsible for the murders.
After his arrest, the Kohbergers released a statement of sympathy for the victims’ families but added that they had ‘fully cooperated with law enforcement agencies in an attempt to seek the truth and promote his presumption of innocence’.
Investigators are working on the theory that the masked killer, clad all in black, got into the three-floor student house through an unlocked sliding glass door into the kitchen on the first floor just after 4am. (Earlier, he’d three times parked his car near the house but then driven away as —Blum believes — he hesitated over going through with his plan.)
Although two of the housemates had bedrooms on the first floor, as Blum notes, the intruder ignored them and made a beeline for a flight of narrow stairs up to the top floor, where Maddie, who studied marketing, slept.
He went into her bedroom first and found her sharing her bed with her best friend, Kaylee Goncalves. Kaylee, 21, had moved out of the house ahead of her graduation but had returned for the weekend.
The killer fatally stabbed them both with a seven-inch combat knife but clumsily left its sheath tangled in Maddie’s sheets. The sheath later provided investigators with crucial DNA.
He then went downstairs, where he ran into Ethan Chapin who, alerted by the noise, had stepped out of his girlfriend Xana Kernodle’s bedroom. Kohberger stabbed both of the 20-year-olds.
Dylan Mortensen, 21 — one of the two housemates who survived the night — said she heard crying from Xana’s room and a man’s voice saying words to the effect of: ‘It’s OK. I’m going to help you.’
She went to her door and says the killer — whose ‘bushy eyebrows’ could be seen despite his mask — walked past her in the corridor. Unaware of the massacre that had unfolded, she returned to bed but locked her door.
‘I believe his target was Maddie Mogen, and her alone,’ Blum writes. ‘He had no knowledge that Kaylee had returned for the weekend to show off her new car, or that he would find her in Maddie’s bedroom. And he only encountered Ethan after he had descended… Yet once Xana overheard the encounter and spoke up, she, too, was doomed . . . The killer needed to escape, and they were in his way.’
Prosecutors have tried to establish a motive but Blum argues that it can be found in Kohberger’s turbulent history. His parents — Michael, a retired maintenance worker, and Maryann, who worked with special-needs children — had struggled for years with a son who lived at home until he moved to Washington State University at 28 to do his PhD.
In his teens, he developed a rare and debilitating neurological condition known as ‘visual snow syndrome’ — 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 ‘depersonalised’ and that he could ‘do whatever I want with little remorse. I might spiral out of control’. He turned to drugs in high school and became a heroin addict.
By the end of school, it seemed he had turned himself around and he became a fitness fanatic. But he was still desperately shy and awkward with girls, who often found him overbearing and ‘creepy’.
Later, female students in his criminology department complained to staff that he made them feel ‘uncomfortable’.
In fact, Kohberger’s academic superiors had sacked him as a teaching assistant amid growing concern about his offensive behaviour towards women at his university. While Kohberger reportedly followed both Maddie and her lookalike best friend Kaylee on Instagram, he seemed more interested in Maddie, ‘liking’ all her photos.
Some believe the killer may have seen a TikTok video posted by the housemates which mapped out where each of them slept in the house.
Blum, who has been privy to at least some theories of the investigators, speculates: ‘Did the killer hate the victims, hate the way their images marched through his mind, and love himself so excessively that he had no choice but to rid the world of their rebuking presence?’
After insisting his father come out to Washington so they could drive to the family home in Pennsylvania, Kohberger allegedly tried to cover his tracks.
His sister, psychologist Melissa, grew suspicious when she saw him don surgical gloves to vacuum his car, separate his personal rubbish into Ziploc bags and sneak out at night to put their family rubbish in neighbours’ bins. But when she shared her ‘increasingly certain deduction’ with her father, after a ‘long, agonised silence’ he walked away, says Blum.
The evidence against Kohberger — including his mobile phone’s movements, CCTV footage of his car, DNA, a receipt for a knife purchase and his suspicious disposal of rubbish — is compelling. Yet the defence insists there is ‘no connection’ between their client and the victims.
Blum admits much of his theorising is speculative. But if Kohberger remains silent and continues to deny everything, it might be as close as we’ll come to understanding what happened that night.