On Wednesday, confessed quadruple murderer Bryan Kohberger will be sentenced to two consecutive life sentences plus 10 years. For some of the families of his victims, that won’t be enough.
‘By hiding the truth, we’re protecting our killers,’ Steve Goncalves, father of Kaylee Goncalves, said on CBS News. He is now preparing to deliver a victim impact statement at Kohberger’s sentencing.
‘I need to know the facts. How many times was my daughter stabbed? Was she choked? What happened? That should be part of the victim’s statement,’ he explained. By withholding or failing to force Kohberger to reveal this information, he argued, prosecutors are failing in their duty to expose the barbarity of these crimes.
Indeed, one of the lingering questions in this case is what Kohberger did in the hours after the slayings, to include what he did with the murder weapon – a Ka-Bar knife with a 7-inch blade purchased on Amazon – which investigators never found.
Now, Daily Mail has forensically re-traced Kohberger’s steps, from the moment he fled from the crime scene at 1122 King Road in Moscow, Idaho, to the time he was pictured entering an Albertson’s supermarket nearly 10 hours later.
What this investigation identifies – though information detailed in the original affidavit filed at the time of Kohberger’s arrest in December 2022, as well as original reporting – are the locations that Kohberger may have disposed of the murder weapon even before the authorities knew that a mass murderer was on the loose.
Kohberger escapes
The murders of Kaylee Goncalves, Maddie Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin took place between 4:00 and 4:25am on Sunday, November 13, 2022.
Kohberger’s cellphone went dark during this time, leading the authorities to believe he had turned his phone off while committing the crimes. A neighborhood security camera, however, captured video of a white Hyundai Elantra, later determined to belong to Kohberger, circling 1122 King Road immediately before the killings and then speeding off afterward.
At 4:48am, according to the police affidavit, Kohberger’s cellphone connected to a cell tower, providing the first concrete evidence of his whereabouts after the killings. The cellphone data showed that he was driving south away from Moscow and then west towards his home in the small town of Pullman, Washington.
He arrived at his apartment on Washington State University’s campus at roughly 5:30am, but he wasn’t there long.
Return to the scene
Phone records show that Kohberger returned to the vicinity of 1122 King Road between 9:12am and 9:21am on November 13.
It is now known that in the frenzy of the quadruple murders, Kohberger dropped his Ka-Bar knife sheath, which is stamped with the United States Marine Corps emblem. It was found under the body of Maddie Mogen.
That was an apparent mistake that would ultimately lead to Kohberger’s arrest, as investigators found a trace of male DNA on the sheath’s snap, which matched his DNA.
Had Kohberger realized that he had left the sheath behind and had returned to search for it? Perhaps, but Kohberger did not find the item, and by 9:32am he was back at his apartment in Pullman, where at 10:31am.
Later that morning, Kohberger left his house again, but this time, traveling south.
Ditching the knife?
Following the breadcrumbs set out in the affidavit, the Daily Mail set out on that same route, south from Pullman towards Lewiston, Idaho, on US Highway 195.
It is a 45-minute drive between Kohberger’s apartment and the location, some 35 miles away, where his cell phone next ‘pinged’ a cellphone tower.
The road he took winds through wheat fields, past the occasional farm, through Colton – population 430 – and Uniontown – population 355.
There are no gas stations, no truck stops, no restaurants or stores – nothing, in short, that would have drawn Kohberger that morning except for what lay at his journey’s end.
Kohberger’s destination that day was an area known locally as Hell’s Canyon – deep in the Lewis-Clark Valley, at the confluence of the Clearwater and Snake Rivers.
He crossed the Clearwater River on Memorial Bridge at approximately 12:26pm, a passage that took him from Washington into Idaho, before he crossed back into Washington state some ten minutes later, driving over the Blue Bridge, which traverses the Snake River.
Both rivers are navigable waterways with a minimum depth of 14 feet and frequently used by barges to transport goods. The junction of the river is often busy with traffic.
Each of these bridge crossings would have provided Kohberger with an opportunity to toss the murder weapon into the waters below. Though it’s also possible that he was headed somewhere else.
Riverbank coffee shop
At roughly 12:36pm, Kohberger arrived near Kate’s Cup of Joe, a small coffee hut in Clarkston, Washington.
Here, the Daily Mail spoke to a member of staff who was working that Sunday in November. She recalled seeing a car matching the description of Kohberger’s and said that he didn’t stop at coffee hut’s drive-up window but drove past and parked ‘somewhere behind’ the store.
The worker, who declined to be named, told the Daily Mail, ‘I don’t know what he was doing back there, but he was there for a while before he drove off.’
The parking lot behind Kate’s Cup of Joe abuts Granite Lake Park right at the edge of the Clearwater River, which is about a third of a mile wide. The far bank of the river is empty, marked by only rolling hills.
At Kohberger’s plea agreement hearing on July 2, Idaho state prosecutor Bill Thompson noted that this was the area to which Kohberger headed in the hours after the murders – an indication, perhaps, of Thompson’s suspicions that this is where Kohberger disposed of the knife.
Standing on the bank of the Clearwater, you note how quickly the current flows – and how vast it appears. If Kohberger had stood here and hurled the knife out into these waters, he could have done so with fair confidence that it would never be found.
At 12:46pm, Kohberger’s cellphone was picked up again by a cellphone tower outside of an Albertson’s grocery store, a two-minute drive back in the direction from which he had come. There he was captured on closed-circuit surveillance video.
So what was Kohberger doing in the 10 minutes between when he drove past Kate’s Cup of Joe and when he was spotted outside the Albertson’s?
Perhaps, that question will be answered on Wednesday, if Kohberger is required – as his victims’ families insist – that he reveal the full truth of what happened that day.