Bryan Kohberger’s first two victims were sleeping when he stole into the off-campus house in Moscow, Idaho around 4 a.m. Nov. 13, 2022.
Best friends Maddy Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves were in bed together as he butchered them with a Ka-Bar knife he had bought months earlier on Amazon, prosecutors revealed Wednesday.
Prosecuting Attorney Bill Thompson choked up as he summarized the details that a weeks-long trial would have revealed about the cold-blooded and ruthless blood-lust murders that Kohberger admitted to on Wednesday.
His guilty plea — which has divided the victims’ families, including the Mogens and the Goncalveses — means Thompson’s run-down of the evidence may be the best picture the world ever gets of what happened inside that home near the University of Idaho campus.
Thompson suggested that Kohberger may have been plotting the senseless quadruple homicide for nearly six months.
“He killed — intentionally, willfully, deliberately, with premeditation, and with malice and forethought — Maddy Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, Ethan Chapin, and Xana Kernodle,” prosecutor Thompson told a Boise courtroom Wednesday before Kohberger, 30, formally submitted his guilty plea.
Kohberger’s deal means he’ll be safe from execution by firing squad — on the table if he were found guilty at a trial which was scheduled for August — but he will spend his life in prison serving four consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole.
The shocking confession comes as the prosecution amassed piles of damning evidence that pointed directly at Kohberger, which Thompson laid out in bare detail ahead of the plea Wednesday.
It all started in March 2022, when Kohberger was living at his parents’ Pennsylvania home and logged onto Amazon.com to buy a military-grade Ka Bar knife and sheath — the same blade he would go on to hack his victims to death with eight months later.
He then moved to Pullman, Washington — located minutes from the Moscow, Idaho, murder site — in June to pursue a PhD in criminology at Washington State University.
By early July, six months before the murders, Kohberger’s phone began pinging off the cell tower that served the house — but only during odd hours of the night.
Between July and the night of the November murders, Kohberger’s phone pinged off that tower 23 times between the hours of 10 p.m. and 4 a.m., prosecutors said, adding that there was no evidence he ever had any direct contact with his victims during that time.
But on the day of the killing Kohberger’s phone was powered off in Pullman around 2 a.m. before being turned back in the Moscow area just before 5 a.m. — disappearing from the cellular grid at the exact time he was hacking his victims to death.
During that blackout window he drove his White Hyundai from his Pullman apartment and parked it behind the victims’ Moscow house, prosecutors said. Evidence like security footage clearly showed the vehicle.
Wearing a dark face mask he slipped into the home using the kitchen’s sliding door around 4 a.m.
He then climbed to the home’s third floor where he used his seven-inch Ka Bar blade to butcher Mogen and Goncalves — both 21-year-old college seniors — as they slept alongside each other. There he left the knife’s sheath. It had his DNA on it, which would later ensure his downfall.
Kohberger then stole out of the room when he encountered 20-year-old Kernodle on the stairs. She had been awake after picking up a food delivery, and he cut her down and left her dying where she stood.
“Her room was not on the third floor, it was on the second floor,” Thompson said, his voice shaking. “He encountered Xana, and he ended up killing her, also with a large knife.”
Kohberger then moved into her bedroom where her boyfriend — 20-year-old Chapin — was sleeping, and butchered him.
“We will not represent that he intended to commit all of the murders that he did that night, but we know that that is what resulted,” Thompson said.
As Kohberger was leaving the house one of the two housemates who were left alive and untouched peered into a hallway and saw a man with “bushy eyebrows” exiting the home. From there a neighbor’s security footage showed Kohberger’s car peeling out of the neighborhood, and cell records indicate he was back home in Pullman around 5:30 a.m.
He then drove back to his victims’ home around 9 a.m., cell records show, but by 9:30 a.m. he was back home and taking a bizarre photo of himself flashing a thumbs up in his apartment bathroom.
From there, he began desperately trying to cover his tracks.
Over the next days he took a trip to Lewiston, Idaho — a town prosecutors noted was filled with rivers and fast-moving water. They believe that’s where he dumped the murder weapon, which was never found.
He also began searching online for another knife and sheath, and tried in vain to delete his purchase history on Amazon.
He also changed his car’s registration from Pennsylvania to Idaho in an apparent attempt to throw investigators off his trail, Thompson said.
Then he carried on with his life.
“Mr. Kohberger proceeded to finish his semester of studies at Washington State University and return to Pennsylvanian for the holidays,” Thompson said.
But in the weeks following, investigators began to identify him as a suspect.
After searching his parents’ trash, were able to pull DNA off a Q-Tip that tests proved was was related to the DNA was found on the sheath left by Mogen’s bloodied body.
Kohberger was arrested soon after, and the full scope of his attempts to hide his crimes became apparent as they began to search his home and belongings.
“Spartan would be a kind characterization, there was virtually nothing there,” Thompson said of Kohberger’s Pullman apartment.
And his car had been “pretty much disassembled internally,” Thompson added, characterizing it as being scrubbed absurdly clean.
“I think we can all look to our own cars. Those compartments in the doors where you try to keep them clean where you put stuff? There’s always some degree of crud in there – they were spotless,” Thompson said. “Defendant’s car had been meticulously cleaned inside.”
Prosecutors said evidence indicated Kohberger had even called on his criminology studies to cover up the crime, explaining he had recently written a paper on crime scene analysis.
“That was part of the defendant’s plan in covering up this. The defendant has studied crime. In fact, he did a detailed paper on crime scene processing when he was working on his pre-doctorate degree,” Thompson said.
“He had that knowledge and skill,” he added.
Despite the laundry list of evidence, it still remains unclear why Kohberger carried out the killings — and his guilty plea means the world may never know as has no legal obligation to provide a motive.
His sentencing is set for July 23. Kohberger will have an opportunity to speak after listening to victim impact statements, though it is unclear if he will say anything.
