Bryan Kohberger pleaded guilty Wednesday to the premeditated slaughter of four University of Idaho undergrads — but a slew of glaring loose ends remain.
Prosecutors gave a step-by-step timeline of the 30-year-old killer’s actions before, during and after the gruesome pre-dawn 2022 slaying in Moscow, Idaho, but they failed to explain Kohberger’s possible motive.
But the “why?” wasn’t the only burning question that has tantalized followers of the case for two and a half years.
Where is the knife?
Kohberger purchased a KA-BAR military-style knife, sheath, and sharpener from Amazon in March 2022 — some eight months before he even moved to the area, prosecutors said.
Police recovered the knife sheath at the crime scene with his DNA on it, but the murder weapon itself was nowhere to be found.
Cell phone tower records place Kohberger’s phone near a rural village outside Moscow at around 4:45 a.m., roughly a half hour after the killings, which means he could have ditched it in any number of Idaho fields and pastures along the way.
Did Kohberger know any of the victims, and why did he target them?
Kohberger didn’t break into a random house: Cell phone tower records placed Kohberger in the victims’ neighborhood 23 times in the months before the murders, and security camera footage shows his car circling their block like a shark before finally moving in for the kill.
Early reports claimed Kohberger had cyberstalked one of the victims and bombarded her with Instagram messages, but his lawyers later insisted he had no connection to the victims at all.
So how did he know about Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle, Madison Mogen and Ethan Chapin?
The only hint prosecutors offered on Wednesday was suggesting Kohberger might not have entered the house intending to kill all four victims.
Whose ID did Kohberger have hidden at his parents’ house?
In 2023, a police source told NewsNation investigators had found an ID “connected to someone from the quadruple homicide” carefully hidden at Kohberger’s parents’ house.
The report prompted frenzied speculation that Kohberger had kept a victim’s ID as a souvenir.
That now seems unlikely: A victim’s ID would have been a major piece of physical evidence and would likely have come up in the courtroom.
But the ID could have been any number of things: A fake ID for a potential escape off the grid, or even just the Amazon gift card prosecutors said he used to purchase the knife.
One colorful theory suggests Kohberer had a Joker-style calling card to leave at the scenes of future murders.
Whatever it was, we’ll likely never know.
Is Kohberger a psychopath?
Kohberger’s defense revealed that he had OCD and mild autism, but they said those traits has no bearing on the crimes he was accused of.
A jury trial could have involved psychological evaluations of Kohberger and evidence for what psychologists call “dark tetrad” personality traits: Narcissism, sadism, Machiavellian manipulativeness, and, of course, psychopathy.
Why did Kohberger return to the scene of the crime?
Cell phone tower records suggest Kohberger went back to his victim’s neighborhood roughly five hours after the bloody deed.
Was it to recover a piece of evidence, perhaps even the missing knife? Or just to admire his deadly handiwork?
He certainly seemed to be proud of himself, as evidenced by a grinning, “thumbs up” selfie he took when he got home.
