Bryan Kohberger’s former criminology professor fears she may have inspired him to slaughter the four University of Idaho students he’s expected on Wednesday to plead guilty to murdering – and now wants to study him to determine how the red flags were missed.
“I have to look at the framework of what I taught and wonder, did I inspire him in some way?” Dr. Katherine Ramsland, who taught Kohberger at Pennsylvania’s DeSales University, told NewsNation on Tuesday.
The forensic psychologist spoke out one day after her ex-student accepted a plea deal over the 2022 slayings, which is expected to see him pleading guilty at a hearing on Wednesday.
Ramsland conceded that her serial-killer courses could inspire some sickos – noting that “unfortunately, in this field, that’s what we live with.”
Ramsland, who served as advisor and instructor to Kohberger when he started on the forensics track in the fall of 2018, said she now wanted to use him as a research subject and acknowledged she never suspected he would go down such a dark path.
“There really isn’t anything that stood out to me,” she said, adding that she didn’t observe any “red flags” typical among the psychos she’s studied — including the BTK serial killer Dennis Rader.
“He seemed eager to be in the classroom. He was polite, he was respectful, intense and curious.”
“I really thought Bryan Kohberger was a promising student who really could have made a mark in this career in a very positive way,” she added.
The professor, who has published 73 books and authored over 2,500 articles, said she’d be willing to interview Kohberger in a bid to help identify warning signs, “developmental trajectories” and other triggers.
“I want to understand how he was able to completely fool me,” Ramsland said.
“If he wanted to do that, I know he has the intellectual capacity to do it, to be self-reflective and think about how his life came to this,” she added.
“I have questions for him that I think nobody else but me could ask.”
Kohberger is expected to accept the plea deal Wednesday to avoid a death penalty sentence in the grisly murders of Kaylee Goncalves, Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle and Madison Mogenut.
He tried to assert his innocence up until the bitter end, only bowing out to the deal a little over a month before his scheduled trial and mere days after a judge denied his last-ditch effort for a delay.
As part of the deal, the accused killer won’t have to reveal a motive for the slayings – leaving many, including the victims’ families and Ramsland, grasping at straws.
Elsewhere in the interview, Ramsland admitted that she was “completely floored” when authorities first arrested Kohberger over the murders.
She said she tried “to give him the benefit of the doubt” but abandoned all hope after he presented such a flimsy alibi.
students tomorrow to avoid the death penalty.
“I was completely floored. I didn’t believe it. And his demeanor that we saw on media was that he was confident that he was going to be able to prove his innocence, so I wanted to wait and see,” Ramsland said.
Kohberger had originally claimed that he had been out for a drive in an unspecified location at the time of the murders.
He also outright ignored Idaho statute, which required him to provide names and home addresses for witnesses who could corroborate his whereabouts.
As part of his plea deal, he will have to spend life in prison with no opportunity for parole.
