FULL Deep Dive Into Bryan Kohberger and the Idaho College Murders - Megyn's True Crime Mega-Episode
Megyn Kelly's deep dive into the Idaho College murders details how survivor Dylan Mortensen identified suspect Brian Kohberger, whose DNA matched a knife sheath found at the scene of four students' deaths. Despite Kohberger's academic background and lack of prior record, prosecutors rely on touch DNA and cell tower data while facing defense challenges regarding motive and the missing murder weapon. The episode explores alternative narratives involving fentanyl trafficking and questions the roommates' delayed police contact, highlighting the complex forensic hurdles in securing a conviction for this high-profile quadruple homicide. [Automatically generated summary]
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Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel one eleven, every weekday at noon east.
Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show and today's true crime mega episode.
Today, we bring you our deep dive into the story of Brian Kohlberger and the horrific Idaho College murders back in 2022.
All five parts looking at Kohlberger's upbringing, how authorities tracked him down, the circumstances of the crime, and unanswered questions to this day.
Enjoy and we'll see you Monday.
Oh, Chiropractora.
And Maschinenleiter.
And Advocate.
And Alarmcellscoper.
And Reinscapes for a cellphone.
And a Gravelsuspirator.
Søvebønner Kiropraktore Maskinutleire Advokater Alarmselskaper Regnskapsfører, selvfølgelig Begravelsesbyråer Nei, kondolerer Og selvfølgelig elektriker Ja, du har sikkert skjønt det nå TripleTex hjelper alle slags bedrifter med å håndtere årsoppgjøret sitt Husk fristen for å levere skattemeldingen 31. mai Hele Norges regns
And a There are lots of ways.
But suppose you wanted to kill four people, all in the same house, all within moments of one another, and you chose to use a knife.
That could help eliminate the noise, but it would require skill, strength, and endurance.
Murder is hard work, especially if people fight back.
Then there's the really big obstacle.
You want to get away with it.
You're determined to stab four people living in a single home in the still of the night.
And then disappear without leaving a clue to your identity.
Now, that's a more difficult challenge, but you did it.
You have everybody stumped.
It's the perfect crime.
Welcome to a special edition of The Megan Kelly Show, everyone.
I'm Megan Kelly.
And for the first time ever, I'm going to spend the episode today and all five episodes this week taking you on a journey with just you and me as we dive into a true crime case that has captivated the nation.
since it happened a little more than a year ago.
Ever since four young students in Idaho were found dead last November, I have consumed every podcast, every article I could find about this case.
I've watched all the true crime shows.
I've read all the magazine pieces, everything on the internet, and I've done my own reporting on the case, interviewing experts and lawyers to try to make sense of what happened in Idaho.
As we will explore in each episode this week, there is something haunting.
And fascinating about the details of this crime.
It is a mystery, but it's really several mysteries all in one.
In this series, I will bring you some of our reporting, as well as the reporting and incredibly eloquent writing of Howard Bloom.
That was his writing at the top there.
He is second to none when it comes to covering the Idaho murders.
This is the guy.
That's the way this episode started with his words that he used to open his first dispatch on this case for the media outlet.
Airmail news.
It's relatively new and it's very good.
Bloom is a veteran and award winning true crime writer and reporter who has written more than a dozen books and countless articles in his decades long career.
He's done some of the best and most unique reporting on this story.
The Corner Club Murders Begin00:10:56
And his forthcoming book on this case will be published in the spring by HarperCollins.
That's going to be a must read.
And it is Bloom's storytelling that we'll begin with today.
We asked Howard if we could strike a deal.
Where we could use some of his, not just his reporting, but his actual writing and intersperse it with our own so we could bring you some of the interviews and sound bites and so on that we've amassed for you to tell this story.
And he agreed.
It had been a football Saturday in mid November, the last home game of the 2022 season for the University of Idaho Vandals, the Kibbe Dome packed with more than 7,600 fans.
And despite the disappointing loss, Saturday night was still party night.
For a college celebrated in knowledgeable polls as the best party school in the state.
The stately row of wet frats, as they're known on the U of Idaho campus, twisting along Nez Perce Drive, was crowded with the brothers and their dates, high spirited assemblies fueled by blaring music, prospects of mischief, and rivers of alcohol.
Downtown Main Street was hopping too.
The pool tables at Mingle's and the metal sheathed bar at the Corner Club were shoulder to shoulder with students and townies.
Filling the brisk autumn night with the keen of cheery, rowdy late night fun.
And then, in the heavy quiet of the new Sunday morning, four young corpses, all students, all friends, were found hacked to death in their beds in a pale clappered house, little more than a stone's throw away from the heart of the university campus.
There was so much blood, it had seeped through the wooden floors and run down the building's gray concrete foundation in jagged, Red rivulets.
But before we get to that Sunday morning, we need to look back.
We need to talk about the six young students who were in the house that night and what brought them there.
Two of the six went way back.
Maddie Mogan and Kaylee Gonsalves met in 2013 in the sixth grade and became inseparable.
They grew up in the tourist town of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, best friends for years.
Listen to their parents talk about each of them.
Keely was the one that was going to shake the world.
I've yet to come across somebody who has had anything negative to say, which people think, oh, no one would tell you that.
But I mean, I got siblings and they'll tell stories about their brother or their sister.
They're not going to hold back.
So I think she found a way to live in a big family and learned the right ways to get along with people.
And that showed.
Later on in her life, when she was able to go to college and meet all these people.
And May Mogan, yes.
She's just, she was the sweetest, smart, loving.
She was the best.
She never caused me one day of stress in my life.
You know, just she was the best child I could have asked for.
And yeah, we miss her so much.
The night of November 12th, Maddie and Kaylee went out together in Moscow to the Corner Club bar.
More on that in a minute.
Ethan Chapin was in the house that night.
He was a triplet.
He and his brother Hunter and sister Maisie all attended the University of Idaho.
His girlfriend was Zana Kernodal.
She had a tough upbringing, but she was thriving.
Ethan and Zana's parents.
He literally lit up every room, everybody.
He was a friend to all.
He just, he was an incredible human.
Diana was, she was tough.
She was, she was strong.
She was funny.
She just, she just couldn't make you smile no matter what.
And she just had a quirkiness about her that, that not a lot of people possess that kind of talent to be able to light up a room like she did.
On the night of November 12th, 2022, Ethan and Xana went to a party at Ethan's fraternity, Theta Chi.
One of Xana's roommates, Bethany Funk, was at Theta Chi that night as well.
But by 1 45 a.m. on the morning of November 13th, all five roommates, including the fifth, a young woman named Dylan Mortensen, were home in the house on 1122 King Road, along with Xana's boyfriend, Ethan Chapin.
Xana received a DoorDash delivery order at approximately 4 a.m.
And shortly after 4 a.m., reports are that all of the roommates were either asleep or at least in their respective rooms.
The roommates were close, active on social media, Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok.
We see how close they were in the social media posts they made, like this one.
God, it smells like beauty.
That's 9.10.
Guys, can anybody drop me in class?
I'm fucking late for my routine.
I was supposed to be there 10 minutes ago.
Did anybody do their chores today?
Fuck, I'm just gonna do it.
Oh, shit, you guys.
It's 8.
Gotta go.
Jay's gone.
Oh, Jay's gone.
Oh my god, I look horrid.
Oh, Murphy, you look so cute.
Get out of here.
You seriously gotta get out of here.
You're fucking stupid as shit.
Hey guys, I know I talk about myself a lot, but like, what would you guys do in my situation?
Damn, where are you going?
Yeah, guys, because Polly, I failed trouble already.
Is there a wine night?
Like, let's just do a wine night.
Yo, is it okay if I have a party?
Like, just three or four people at most.
So fun, so full of life, so funny, and so unaware of the fate that would soon befall them.
At precisely 8 57 PM on the last full day of her life, in the midst of a busy Saturday, bustling with the flurry of convivial activities generated by a football game in a college town, Kaylee Gonsalves paused before going out for a night at the Corner Club bar with their best friend, Maddie.
She posted a series of photos.
On her Instagram account, which she captioned, One lucky girl to be surrounded by these people every day.
Oh.
The photos are a cheery collection of six college kids, the youngest 19, the oldest 21, bursting with bright-eyed good looks and future promise.
They were meant to be, it appears, visual testimony to the fun the students were having, to the blessings a munificent life had generously bestowed on them.
We know the girl's house on King Road was one that was full of joy in the way a college house often is.
It was the frequent location of parties or informal gatherings.
Many said the door was always open, that the roommates gave the door code out to friends who gave the code to friends, and they would find themselves in the role of host quite often.
On several occasions, the parties brought out the police.
And it is actually, strangely enough, through police body camera footage that we get to know the personalities of these young women.
You can see how respectful they were of law enforcement in these interactions.
Poised, friendly, outgoing.
There was Zanna one night apologizing for a noise complaint made by a neighbor.
What's your name?
Zanna.
Zanna, do you live here?
Yes.
This is the second noise complaint we've had here tonight within two hours.
I'm sorry.
Okay.
So this time it was the blonde gal and the guy on the back porch playing music.
Okay.
So.
I sincerely apologize about that.
I'm just going to bed.
Thanks.
So just so you understand, you could be getting a misdemeanor citation for this, which means you have to go in front of a judge and explain why you couldn't keep the people in your house quiet.
Okay.
Okay.
We've already talked to Maddie once and told her the same thing.
Okay.
The only reason she's not getting a ticket is because she's not standing here in front of me.
But I'm telling you right now, if we have to come back, you're getting a ticket.
Okay.
So I'm fine right now.
You're not getting a ticket right now.
She's trying to go to bed right now.
Okay.
Kaylee, too, takes the lead in engaging with the police when they showed up to a party one night, talking her way out of a potential three hundred dollar fine for a noise violation.
How are you?
Good, how are you?
Good, is this your place?
Yeah.
Perfect, there's no over here.
I see noise.
Noise, yeah.
Yeah.
Big speaker right there?
Yeah.
Nothing against having a party.
Once neighbors start calling in, we have an issue.
Sure.
You go to school?
Yeah.
Okay, who are you?
Senior.
Senior, okay.
So I'll tell you the same thing I told them.
You probably know the drill, right?
Actually, no.
Oh, okay.
So usually, at least for me, I'll give you a verbal warning.
Okay.
Once I have neighbors calling in, it's too loud to be disturbing the piece.
Yeah.
Nothing against having parties.
Nothing against having people over who are overage to drink.
But again, once we start disturbing the neighbors, then we've got an issue.
Yeah.
The noise ticket is up to $300.
Yeah, somewhere around $300 or $200.
It's a pretty expensive ticket.
I don't want to give that to you.
That being said, this is your place.
I'm going to hold you.
I'd much rather you spend that $300 on beer or something fun than the noise ticket, right?
Yeah, thank you.
I appreciate it.
That being said, warnings.
Don't do it again.
Yep.
I'd hate to come back in a few hours and then have a good shooter.
Any questions for me?
No.
All right.
Take care.
The girl's natural warmth.
And respect on these tapes, even in a tense situation, makes their fate that November feel all the more incomprehensible.
In March of this year, Howard Bloom was a guest on The Megyn Kelly Show.
It was episode 515.
He talked about the afternoon of Sunday, November 13th, shortly after 11 58 a.m., the time a 911 call came in from roommate Dylan Mortensen's cell phone.
I personally knew that something serious was wrong because all they Got a report of was an unconscious victim, an unconscious person, rather, at the house.
And they see a group of kids mulling about the house like gulls on a beach, as it was described to me.
An Eerie Unnatural Silence Falls00:03:21
And these kids are silent.
They've been putting up with the university kids all their professional lives as cops.
I don't think they've ever seen silent kids before.
They knew that this was something serious.
Bloom writes that the call was passed to Sergeant Shane Gunderson.
Gunderson, who on that day was midway through a 12 hour shift that had started at 6 a.m., was running the operations division at the sparklingly modernistic, it had opened barely 11 months earlier, Southview Avenue Police Headquarters.
Prior to that moment, he would tell people his tour had been long and slow, a languid weekend morning punctuated by the chimes of the town's many church bells tolling solemnly in the wind.
In fact, he had spent a good deal of that desk bound Sunday morning mulling something other than police business.
Gunderson had been avidly mapping out in his mind a strategy for the eight hour or easily more trek to the summit of Mount Bora.
He and a friend from the University of Idaho Psych Department had been planning for the spring.
It's Idaho's highest point, and the trail up the southwest ridge to the 12,662 foot summit is a steep, hard climb.
And he would admit after a beer or two, it was just the sort of challenge he'd been missing lately.
Now that he had his sergeant's stripes, police work was more about distributing memos and filing papers than getting out into the field.
That bothered him.
Nearly 10 years on the force, he still wanted to be the gung ho officer who had joined up straight out of Lewis Clark State College in nearby Lewiston and worked his way up from patrolmen.
In his early days, he had distinguished himself as a hands on cop, someone out on the streets doing what the Moscow PD calls community policing.
Back then, he'd scored a lot of points both in and out of the department.
As well as winning the Officer of the Year honor in 2017, when he single handedly planned and organized a hot dog barbecue, bringing together the cops and local school kids.
He was from the area, growing up in small town potlatch, and still smarting from his own childhood run ins.
He knew only too well how hard ass cops could sour things, make things confrontational.
It was his job, he'd say with determination, looking out for and working with the citizens of Moscow.
When the 911 call came in, Gunderson had a corporal and two other officers on duty to assist with patrol.
He could have left the response to them.
He certainly, he'd tell people with a hint of embarrassment, had no intimation of something out of the ordinary.
That morning, he was simply eager to break the monotony.
And as always, he felt strongly it was important for him to get out on the street where people could see him.
He swiftly decided he'd go to the scene too, with his officers.
It was a quick trip.
The roads leading into the university neighborhood that Sunday were as empty as the classrooms.
And as soon as Gunderson's black and white cruiser pulled up behind the neat row of cars parked in the driveway of the austere cantilevered house on King Road, he immediately knew something was very wrong.
Officers Arrive at a Gruesome Scene00:02:42
It was the noise.
There wasn't any, just an eerie, unnatural silence.
A cluster of young people were wandering about, not merely subdued, they seemed stunned.
As if drained by a deep and intense shock.
When the three mystified officers approached the front door, someone in the crowd, it would later be shared, muttered a single plaintive word dead.
Still, Gunderson would confess to others he was unprepared for the strong smell of blood that rose up in his nostrils the moment he walked inside.
The coroner, who had once been an emergency room nurse in an earlier stage of her life, would describe the scene in press interviews as chaos, lots of blood.
Few others would even attempt to put into words what they saw.
There are moments, cops will tell you, that are too profound, too unnerving to be experienced in the present.
All you can do is move forward.
There will be time later to try to make sense of it all.
Procedure takes precedence.
It allows a protective membrane to be stretched between the real and the too real.
All other thoughts, all other feelings become extraneous.
The trio of officers, meanwhile, proceeded with haste to the second floor.
They opened the bedroom door to find two dead bodies, a male and a female.
The pair was gruesomely drenched in blood.
Yet both had their good looking faces, oddly preserved, like masks.
Even at that probing moment, it was difficult.
One of the young officers would later nearly wail to look at the twenty year old pair.
They were Ethan and Xana.
On the third floor, things got, if possible, worse.
In one bedroom, lying in a single bed, were two inert women.
It was Mattie and Kaylee.
They might have been sisters, so similar were the 21 year olds, pretty Barbie doll like sculpted features, their long cascades of thick, streaked blonde hair falling down to their narrow shoulders.
Yet in death there was one gruesome difference.
Kaylee, it would be reported, had been hacked with a particular ferocity.
It was as if her wild assailant, or was it assailants, had been intent on gouging out chunks of her flesh.
Large punctures was how the lacerations had been described.
Mattie's wounds, while no less fatal, appeared less feral, more measured, at least in comparison.
A Delivery Driver Witnesses Horror00:04:19
Across the narrow hallway was one final door.
The officers pulled it open, and at last they discovered a sign of life, a fluffy caramel colored dog.
It was Murphy, Cayley's frisky labradoodle.
He was unharmed, not marred by even a speck of blood.
A small consolation, and barely one at that, for all they had seen and were only beginning to process.
Later that day, around 4 p.m., a police officer named Brett Payne arrived at the scene.
He would go on to interview the two surviving roommates, Dylan and Bethany, who in the affidavit he would file were only identified as DM and BF.
Here is, directly from the affidavit, what he learned from his interviews with both Dylan and Bethany, although it appeared Bethany had slept through the commotion on floors above her first floor bedroom.
DM and BF, quoting here from the affidavit, both made statements during interviews that indicated the occupants of the King Road residence were at home by 2 a.m. and asleep or at least in their rooms by approximately 4 a.m., he wrote.
This is with the exception of Zanna Kernodal, who received a DoorDash order at the residence at approximately 4 a.m.
Law enforcement identified the DoorDash delivery driver who reported this information.
DM stated she originally went to sleep in her bedroom on the southeast side of the second floor.
DM stated she was awoken at approximately 4 a.m. by what she stated sounded like Gonsalves playing with her dog in one of the upstairs bedrooms, which were located on the third floor.
A short time later, DM said she heard who she thought was Gonsalves say something to the effect of, There's someone here.
A review of records obtained from a forensic download of Kernodal's phone showed this could also have been Kernodal.
As her cellular phone indicated she was likely awake and using the TikTok app at approximately 412 a.m.
DM stated she looked out of her bedroom but did not see anything when she heard the comment about someone being in the house.
DM stated she opened her door a second time when she heard what she thought was crying coming from Kernodal's room.
DM then said she heard a male voice say something to the effect of, It's okay.
I'm going to help you.
At approximately 4 17 a.m., a security camera located at 11 12 King Road, a residence immediately to the northwest of 11 22 King, picked up distorted audio of what sounded like voices or a whimper, followed by a loud thud.
A dog can also be heard barking numerous times starting at 4 17 a.m.
The security camera is less than 50 feet from the west wall of Xana Kernodal's bedroom.
DM stated she opened her door for the third time.
After she heard the crying and saw a figure clad in black clothing and a mask that covered the person's mouth and nose walking towards her.
DM described the figure as five foot ten or taller, male, not very muscular, but athletically built with bushy eyebrows.
The male walked past DM as she stood in a frozen shock phase.
The male walked toward the back sliding glass door.
DM locked herself in her room after seeing the male.
DM did not state. that she recognized the male.
This leads investigators to believe that the murderer left the scene.
We'll get back to the affidavit in a bit.
Dylan then locked her bedroom door until the morning in a decision that would just befuddle so many people.
Why?
Why?
Why didn't she do more?
We don't know the answers, but surely we will by the time this case is tried.
Then, sometime after 11 a.m., the roommates attempted to wake their friends.
They were unable to, and they would call others to the house for help.
Police Suspect a Driven Killer00:14:27
There, at least one of those friends, Finally dialed 911.
Howard Bloom again with us back in March.
One can raise all sorts of questions as I do.
At the same time, I think one has to cut this poor girl a little slack.
In many ways, she's a victim too.
She will live with this for her entire life.
She saw something incredible, astonishing, and she just perhaps couldn't deal with it.
Back to Sergeant Gunderson.
He quickly called his boss, Captain Roger Lanier, the head of the 24 Officer Operations Division.
He found him, not unexpectedly for a Sunday, sitting down to lunch with his family.
Lanier was a veteran cop.
He had spent more than 20 years on the force in nearby Lewiston before having been lured six years earlier to Moscow with a captain's rank.
After all his years on the job, he'd become a steady, avuncular presence, a bald headed, genial cop.
Who never got flustered because, as he would tell people, he had seen it all in his day.
But Gunderson's report left him unnerved.
It took me a second, he recalled, a sharp edge even weeks later to the memory.
I really had to think about what I'd just heard.
Four murders in Moscow, Idaho was so out of character.
At the time, they were fairly certain it was college students and it was near the campus, and that area is kind of a campus community.
Once I got over the initial shock, I knew that I was coming to the station.
So I drove in, and everybody just kind of fell into a role that was an all hands on deck moment Sunday afternoon.
It became fairly apparent when I got to the scene that we were going to need resources outside of just what the Moscow Police Department could provide.
But quickly, Lanier's professionalism took control.
He had a thousand questions, and yet he knew the only hope of finding answers would be to follow the previously established protocols.
Dutifully, he gave the orders to set up the perimeters of the crime scene, to bring in the forensic team, and to summon the coroner.
It was standard in a major case.
And if four homicides was not a major case, what was to alert the Idaho State Police?
And he did that, too.
Moscow was the responsibility of the state's District 2 Detective Office in Lewiston, the county seat, and where he'd been on the job for two decades, and he knew many of the state detectives.
There was a companionship.
Still, it was a difficult conversation, but his next call was harder.
The university had to be informed.
It was not just that four students had been brutally murdered in an off campus home, but there was no way of knowing whether the killer or killers planned to strike again.
The students needed to be warned.
At 2 07 p.m., a little over two hours after the three cops had entered the blood soaked house, the University Office of Public Safety and Security sent a vandal alert email to the students and faculty.
Quote Moscow PD investigating a homicide on King Road near campus.
Suspect is not known at this time.
Stay away from the area and shelter in place.
End quote.
A shelter in place order requires people to take refuge in a room with no or few windows.
At this point, busy hours had already quickly flown by.
But despite his marathon of activities, Lanier still had not succeeded in completing one task that was at the top of his mental list.
He had not been able to speak with his boss, James Fry, the chief of police.
By the time Lanier had finally reached him, it was hours after the discovery of the bodies.
And by the time Fry finally entered the home on King Road, it was dark outside, according to several accounts, close to 6 p.m.
For some abstruse reason, he had thought it was important to go home first and change into his chief's uniform.
Perhaps he hadn't fully grasped the magnitude of the disaster.
Or maybe, after nearly 28 years as a Moscow cop, he had felt the imprimatur of his uniform was integral to his ability to command.
But what he saw that evening left him, he would confide to a friend later, physically and emotionally drained.
He was a father of two daughters who had attended the University of Idaho, and he had also graduated from the university nearly three decades earlier.
It was impossible, he said, not to feel a visceral tie to the victims and to their parents.
The cruelty of the crime was deep and affecting, and yet he knew there was police work to be done.
His mind was racing, but quixotically, perhaps, within moments a buried memory pushed itself forward.
What if, Fry asked himself with a sudden alarm, a serial killer had attacked the four students?
I'm pausing here to bring you some of Chief Fry's initial comments to the Moscow, Idaho community from his very first press conference several days after the murders.
My name is Chief James Fry with the Moscow Police Department.
I'm going to be reading from my notes today because I want the information you received to be extremely accurate.
This is a horrible crime that took the lives of Ethan Chapman, Zanucker Nodal, Madison Mogan, and Kaylee Goncalves.
This horrible crime has affected all of us.
the families, the University of Idaho, our community, our country, and our officers.
Based on details at the scene, we believe this was an isolated, targeted attack on our victims.
We do not have a suspect at this time, and that individual is still out there.
We cannot say that there is no threat to the community, and as we have stated, please stay vigilant, report any suspicious activity, and be aware of your surroundings at all times.
Here's what was challenging for the police from Bloom's reporting.
Fact The four students were killed in their sleep, or at least while in their rooms, sometime between 3 and 5 a.m.
In the weeks ahead, they would develop a more precise timeline.
The murders, the authorities deduced, occurred between 4 and 4 25 a.m.
Think about that.
At 4 12 a.m., they had Xana on TikTok, and the murders took place between 4 and 4 25 a.m.
Fact, there was no sign of forced entry or of robbery.
Fact, a single weapon had been used a long bladed knife.
Critically, a tan leather knife sheath, stamped with a U.S. Marine Corps insignia, was found lying next to Maddie Mogan's bed.
Fact, there was no trail of blood outside the house.
Fact, the house was a repository for a large collection of forensic evidence blood, saliva, hair, prints, DNA.
But whether any of those belonged to the killer after the autopsies, the general consensus held that it was a single assailant, still was undetermined.
These were all, the investigators agreed, important pieces in the puzzle.
Yet they were not enough.
For more than three weeks, the early morning conferences ended in a grim litany of what remained unknown.
They couldn't figure out how the killer had gotten away, seemingly without leaving a clue.
And they had no idea why he had chosen these victims.
And now, as the investigation in Moscow plotted on and frustratingly on, an exasperated Chief Fry appealed to locals to become, in effect, Consulting detectives.
We appreciate everybody's help that has been sending in those tips, and investigators are vetting those and they're following up on those.
The response has been very great.
We appreciate all the help from across the nation and our community.
He wanted help to put his men on the right scent.
Detectives are looking for context to the events and people involved in these murders, a Moscow PD press release announced.
To assist with the ongoing investigation, any odd or out of the ordinary events that took place should be reported.
And nearly begging, the release urged your information, whether you believe it is significant or not, might be the piece of the puzzle that helps investigators solve these murders.
The tips poured in.
A new generation of consulting detectives, armed with cell phones and laptops, with access to a vast repository of information from selfies to Facebook pages, and further stoked by the barrage of the raw theories and hearsay disseminated on Reddit and 4chan, embraced the opportunity.
It was a real life mystery.
That had the compelling allure of a particularly thorny CSI episode, and not least, the police were pleading for help.
More than 9,025 email tips were received, in addition to the 4,575 phone calls and 6,050 digital media submissions.
An army of law enforcement analysts was assigned to the long, daunting task to see if in all the oysters there was a single pearl.
Much of it led down rabbit holes of fatuous speculation.
Some of it was not just wrongheaded, but cruel.
Innocent ex boyfriends, a hoodie wearing bystander lurking at a food truck where Maddie and Caley had ordered early morning bowls of carbonara to soak up the alcohol ingested during the last carefree pub crawl of their lives.
A bro neighbor who insisted on sharing rambling anecdotes with every reporter who knocked on his door.
And frat brothers who were rumored to be stoked up on steroids and driven by long gestating grievances.
All were callously and persistently slandered with a malicious authority.
It got so madcap that a history prof at the university decided she had to sue to put an end to one internet sleuth's bizarre speculation that a failed romance with one of the women had driven the teacher to kill.
And then the analysts hit a gold seam.
The overnight assistant manager, her name at her request remains secret, for a gas station on Troy Road, not far from the house on King Road, had decided she might as well see what she could do.
She had not been working the night of the murders, but nevertheless, she spent the downtime on her graveyard shift reviewing the videos recorded by the station's surveillance cameras on November 13th.
I had a weird feeling, she later said.
For two nights, she intermittently kept at it, but found nothing.
Then, on the third night, she spotted a white car speeding down Highway 8 before turning pell mell down a side street.
She took a screenshot of the car and emailed it to the Tip Line address.
Two days later, Moscow police arrived at the gas station to confiscate hours of surveillance footage.
And after just a quick view, they began to feel the hunt was on.
Encouraged, they reached out on a hunch to Kane Franzich.
Recently retired and now investing in real estate, he was a freewheeling guy who shares on his website that he.
Listens to classic vinyl while drinking single malt scotch.
He also owned a six unit rental complex on Linda Lane, about three tenths of a mile from where the bodies had been found, with a surveillance camera fixed to the roof.
I downloaded it and gave them access to everything from 2 a.m. through noon on Sunday, the 13th, he said.
Once those tapes were reviewed, the same telltale white car was spotted.
And again, it appeared to be making a breakneck getaway through the dark a.m. streets.
With this confirming sighting, a different pace, a different mood took over the investigation.
The team felt they could now march forward with a purpose.
The FBI laboratory enhancement had succeeded in deciphering the blurred image of the car.
They believed it was a white 2011 to 2013 Hyundai Elantra.
And there were 22,000 Hyundais in the region that matched the search criteria.
And one of them, the police were starting to suspect, had been driven by a killer.
From the affidavit released in January, quote, a review of footage from multiple videos obtained from the King Road neighborhood showed multiple sightings of Suspect Vehicle 1, starting at 3 29 a.m., ending at 4 20 a.m.
These sightings show Suspect Vehicle 1 makes an initial three passes by the 11 22 King Road residence and then leaves via Walenta Drive.
Based off my experience as a patrol officer, this is a residential neighborhood.
With a very limited number of vehicles that travel in the area during the early morning hours.
Upon review of the video, there are only a few cars that enter and exit this area during this time frame.
Suspect Vehicle 1 can be seen entering the area a fourth time at approximately 4 04 a.m.
It can be seen driving eastbound on King Road, stopping and turning around in front of 500 Queen Road, number 52, and then driving back westbound on King Road.
When Suspect Vehicle 1 is in front, Of the King Road residence, it appeared to unsuccessfully attempt to park or turn around in the road.
The vehicle then continued to the intersection of Queen Road and King Road, where it can be seen completing a three point turn and then driving eastbound again down Queen Road.
Suspect vehicle one is seen next departing the area of the King Road residence at approximately 4 20 a.m. at a high rate of speed.
The White Sedan Flees the Scene00:06:43
Now to Bloom's reporting.
Finding the one Elantra that would lead to an arrest loomed as a needle in a haystack sort of challenge.
The search, even with a small army of burrowers, was a nearly impossible task.
Then, as the holiday season approached, a hint of a Christmas miracle.
Chief Fry, for once upbeat, met late in the morning of December 20th with Rand Walker, the department psychologist, and Rod Olps, one of the police chaplains in the courthouse law library.
It was one of the few places they could huddle where the chief felt no one would be listening.
I'm going to need you two to get ready, he said with a deliberate coyness.
I'm going to need you before too long.
The two men eagerly asked whether there had been a break in the case.
Fry did his best to rein in a pregnant smile.
All I'm saying, he reiterated, is I need you both to stand by.
I might be calling you very soon.
But at 4 30 that afternoon, the Moscow police public communications team issued a flash update.
Investigators are aware of a Hyundai Elantra located in Eugene, Oregon, and have spoken with the owner.
The vehicle is not believed to have any relation to any property in Moscow, Idaho, or the ongoing murder investigations.
And just like that, the psychologist and the chaplain knew that the chief, despite the hopeful conversation earlier that day, would not be calling them anytime soon.
Meanwhile, as the hunt for the Elantra proceeded with tedious concentration, The no less discouraging challenge of finding a clue in the forensic evidence, a vast muddle of prints, blood, and DNA that had been collected in the house, was brought vividly home.
Body cam footage was released of a call at the King Road residence two months before the murders by a trio of Moscow cops in response to yet another noise complaint from an annoyed neighbor.
The body camera footage, Bloom would write, was at first seen as deeply poignant.
The house seemed to be nearly shaking with festive noise.
Tyler Childers' feathered Indians boomed from the speakers.
Kids were calling happily to one another a giddy mix of bouncy energetic voices.
It was a Thursday night and there was a party going on.
This is what it's like to be young.
To more acerbic minds, the footage was a small self contained story about the tensions of policing in a college town.
The kids being kids were seen giving the police a sly run around, and the cops being cops.
Retaliated with a display of petty vengeance.
A confiscated stash of beers and Trulies was poured onto the driveway.
Yet this being Moscow and this house being destined for infamy, this burst of class warfare would have an unexpected coda.
One of the smirking cops spilling the booze would in time be part of the team that first discovered the bodies.
Another would help load the cardboard cartons holding the murdered students' belongings into a U haul for the grim trip to the police parking lot.
To the informed and dispassionate view of the FBI's scientific experts, however, the body cam footage was seen solely in operational terms, and it was dispiriting.
It made clear that just about anyone and everyone had access to 1122 King Road.
The door was always open, and a stream of people were constantly coming and going.
The analysts moaned that there would be so much forensic evidence, it might be easier to determine who in Moscow had never been inside the house.
Rather than their having any realistic hope of ever finding a suspect.
And yet, perhaps it wasn't a 2011 2013 Elantra after all.
Investigators were given access to video footage on the Washington State University campus located nearby in Pullman, Washington.
A review of that video indicated that at approximately 2 44 a.m. on November 13, 2022, a white sedan, which was consistent with the description of the white Elantra, Known as Suspect Vehicle 1, was observed on WSU surveillance cameras traveling north on Southeast Nevada Street at Northeast Stadium Way.
At approximately 2 53 a.m., a white sedan, which is consistent with the description of the white Elantra known as Suspect Vehicle 1, was observed traveling southeast on Nevada Street in Pullman, Washington, toward SR 270.
This is Howard Bloom here quoting from the affidavit.
SR 270 connects Pullman, Washington to Moscow, Idaho.
This camera footage from Pullman, Washington was provided to the same FBI forensic examiner.
The forensic examiner identified the vehicle observed in Pullman, Washington as being a 2014 to 2016 Hyundai Elantra.
At approximately 5 25 a.m., a white sedan, which was consistent with the description of Suspect Vehicle 1, was observed on five cameras in Pullman, Washington and on WSU campus cameras.
What was it doing there?
Well, shortly after midnight on November 29th, Washington State Police Officer Daniel Tiengo reported that he had identified a 2015 white Elantra on campus with a license plate LFZ8649.
It wasn't from Washington, though, or Idaho.
It was registered to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
According to the affidavit, just minutes later, a different officer, Curtis Whitman, located that car in the parking lot of an apartment complex that houses WSU students.
The vehicle belonged to a graduate student and a teacher's assistant named Brian Christopher Kohlberger.
His major was criminology.
Kohlberger would be driving that car shortly after the identification, far away from Washington and Idaho and the scene of that gruesome quadruple murder.
It was headed for a cross country drive.
He had a passenger in the car, too his father.
Little did they or the small town community of Moscow, Idaho.
Or the country that had become obsessed with and terrified by this story, have any idea that the police and the FBI were tracking their every move as they made their way back home to Pennsylvania?
Brian Kohlberger Starts His Journey00:04:04
But not before a few bizarre chance encounters with authorities along the way.
We'll be back tomorrow with that.
With Triple Tex, we will see the Enkelt of Leveres Gottemelingen for Nettbetiki.
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And what is it?
Triple Tex is the first time to see the Leveres Gottemelingen.
The first time to see the Leveres Gottemelingen is the 31. Mai.
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Triple Tex.
The case captivated the country for weeks.
Four college students murdered inside their Idaho home.
Was it a home invasion gone wrong?
Was it drug related?
Was it something far more personal?
Welcome to the Megyn Kelly Show.
I'm Megyn Kelly.
This week, we are bringing you a special edition of the show focused on the true crime case that I, along with millions of others, became absolutely obsessed with beginning just over one year ago.
There's so much mystery and confusion around the story.
On Monday, we told you about the gruesome and horrific murders.
And today, we dive into how the suspect was identified and how he was caught.
And we will begin to get into the key question.
Who is Brian Koberger and what possible motive did he have for this crime?
To take you through the intricacies of all this, we're bringing you some of the fantastic writing and reporting of Howard Bloom, who covers this case in great detail for airmail news.
In addition to those articles, his forthcoming book on the case will be published in the spring by HarperCollins.
That will be a must read, and we will have Howard back on to talk about it when it comes out.
But for now, We're going to take you back to November 25th, 12 days after the murders and Bloom's writing.
To the investigators' rising sense of excitement, the circumstantial theory they had been secretly incubating for weeks was growing stronger and stronger.
Back on November 25th, Moscow PD had whispered to local lawmen to keep their eyes peeled for a white 2011 through 2016 Hyundai Elantra.
We still are asking people to call in on any spotting of white Elantra.
You know, we appreciate all the tips that we've gotten, not only from local Moscow, but state, but across the nation.
And we're following up on all those.
Remember, according to the affidavit, the forensic examiner initially believed it to be a 2011 to 2013 Elantra, but after further review, amended that to make it 2011 to 2016.
A car like this had been caught on surveillance video dashing about the neighborhood not far from King Road, from the crime scene in the early morning hours immediately following the murders.
Four days later, Daniel Tiengo, a Washington State University police officer, Was diligently spending the midnight hours on his quiet graveyard shift going through the inventory of white elantras registered at the university, and up popped one belonging to a brian Kohlberger.
A half an hour later, another WSU officer drove over to the graduate student parking lot and eyeballed the vehicle, only to discover the car now had Washington state plates, not Pennsylvania anymore.
Payne Finds a Telltale Photograph00:03:06
Later in the still new morning, this morsel of intelligence interesting.
But certainly nothing provocative was passed on to Corporal Brett Payne, the gung ho former Army MP who was the Moscow police's lead investigator.
Payne dutifully typed the car's registration details into the motor vehicle's record system, and the screen quickly displayed a photograph of Brian Koberger as well as his state driver's license information.
The license revealed that Koberger is a white male and a sturdy six feet and one hundred and eighty five pounds.
But it was the photograph that held Payne's studious gaze.
He swiftly zeroed in on the eyebrows.
They were bushy.
And that, Payne realized with a mounting sense of triumph, was precisely the sort of telltale clue he had been praying for over the past two weeks.
For all along, since the very first days of this grim case, he and the small inner circle of investigators had been guarding an explosive secret.
They had an eyewitness.
Dylan Mortensen, one of the two 19-year-old surviving roommates, had seen the killer.
At a little past 4 a.m., just about when the detectives theorized the four students had been hacked to death, she had heard a plaintive cry.
Anxious, she opened the door to her second floor room and saw someone, a man dressed ominously in black, walking toward her.
He was, she would vividly recall the details forever etched deep in her memory, at least five feet ten, not bulked up, but still trim like an athlete.
And he wore a mask that covered his mouth and nose, but not his eyes.
Or his eyebrows.
A profound and vehement fear seized hold of her.
A, quote, frozen shock phase was how she would try to describe her galloping emotions.
But the black clad intruder continued past her as if she were invisible and headed toward a sliding glass door that led out of the house.
For reasons that continued to be bound tight with the bands of mystery, Dylan returned to her room, locked the door, and did not emerge until after 11 a.m.
Only then did she summon friends who, in a state of full blown panic, at last called 911.
But as she later related her unnerving experience to police interrogators, she shared one detail that at the time seemed small, if not irrelevant.
The man in black had bushy eyebrows.
And now, sixteen long days after the murders, Brett Payne found himself staring at a photograph of a man who might, just might, be the intruder Dylan had seen.
Walking purposefully through her home.
There were a few other very notable elements that police would find in the house, which was detailed in the 18 page affidavit written by Payne on December 29th, just ahead of the arrest of Kohlberger.
DNA Evidence and Shoe Prints Found00:02:53
Here's what Payne wrote in that affidavit I also later noticed what appeared to be a tan leather knife sheath laying on the bed next to Maddie Mogan's right side when viewed from the door.
The sheath was later processed and had K bar USMC. and the United States Marine Corps eagle globe and anchor insignia stamped on the outside of it.
The Idaho State lab later located a single source of male DNA left on the button snap of the knife sheath.
We'll get back to the affidavit in one sec.
That single source of male DNA would prove to be crucial, as you will hear later on.
In an episode of The Megyn Kelly Show from earlier this year, we talked with Cece Moore about the DNA that was found at the crime scene.
Cece is known as the DNA detective and is one of the leading experts on what's called genetic genealogy.
Listen, I think that he went to great lengths to not leave DNA.
He likely had gloves on.
He was.
You know, educated about this, you would think he certainly would have made sure he wasn't leaving DNA behind, but he must have handled that knife sheath earlier when he didn't have gloves on.
That's my guess.
But I also want to point out that they don't have to reveal everything they have in the affidavit, and you know that, of course.
And so I think it's very possible they have additional DNA.
And even if they didn't, they might buy now because I'm sure they've been going through all of that physical evidence batch by batch, sending that to the Idaho crime lab.
And trying to detect any additional DNA.
So, I don't think we'll really know what they have until this case progresses.
And hopefully, they will find more DNA or already have.
It might be more complex, meaning there might be mixtures of blood.
Cases I've worked where there was a frenzied stabbing, almost always the knife has slipped and cut the suspect as well.
But then you have a mixture, and you might even have a mixture of three people in this case.
Maybe you have his blood plus.
Two of the victim's blood, for instance, and they have to do what's called deconvolution, where they extract out the victim's DNA and are left with just that suspect's DNA.
And so it's possible that that could have taken more time, which is possibly why they were focusing on this knife sheath for the affidavit.
And speaking of other evidence, here's more from the affidavit.
During the processing of the crime scene, investigators found a latent shoe print.
This was located during the second processing of the crime scene by the ISP forensic team by first using a presumptive blood test and then amino black, a protein stain that detects the presence of cellular material.
Tracking the 8458 Phone Signals00:05:39
The detected shoe print showed a diamond shaped pattern similar to the pattern of a Vans type shoe sole just outside the door of DM's bedroom located on the second floor.
This is consistent with DM's statement regarding the suspect's path of travel.
The comings and going of that white Hyundai Elantra, similar to the one Kohlberger owned, Would be studied in great detail.
This is what we know.
On August 21st, 2022, Brian Kohlberger was detained as part of a traffic stop that occurred in Moscow, Idaho, by Corporal Duke.
At that time, Kohlberger, who was the sole occupant, was driving a white 2015 Hyundai Elantra with Pennsylvania plate LFZ8649, which was set to expire soon.
Kohlberger was reportedly pulled over less than two miles from the site of the murders.
In that stop, which occurred just before midnight, he received a ticket for failing to wear a seatbelt, according to the traffic citation.
While video of that encounter has not been released publicly, we know from the affidavit that Kohlberger provided his phone number as ending in 8458, and that investigators conducted electronic database queries to begin to trace that phone number and the pings related to it.
We also know that on October 14th, 2022, less than a month before the murders, Brian Kohlberger was detained again as part of a traffic stop by a WSU police officer.
This one was for running a red light.
And that body cam footage has been released.
Take a look.
Hi, I'm Officer Loengis.
Stops being audio and video recorded.
I think you know why I stopped you.
You ran the red light.
What actually happened was I was stuck in the middle of the intersection.
Yeah.
So I was behind you the whole time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But never even occurred to me that that was actually something wrong.
I'm actually just from a very rural area, so we just don't have crosswalks.
Oh, unless I visit an area where there are crosswalks, and then it's not very frequent.
Yeah, I do apologize if I was asking you too many questions about the law.
I wasn't trying to like, no, no, no, not at all.
Like, I understand you're not from here.
So investigators had Kohlberger's cell phone data, and what did they do with it?
They tried to see if they could find.
Where that phone was pinging on the night of and the morning after the murders.
This is from the affidavit.
On November 13, 2022, at approximately 2 42 a.m., the 8458 phone was utilizing cellular resources that provide coverage to 1630 Northeast Valley Road, apartment G201, Pullman, Washington, hereafter, the Kohlberger residence.
At approximately 2 47 a.m., the 8458 phone utilized cellular resources that provide coverage southeast of the Kohlberger residence.
Consistent with the 8458 phone leaving the Kohlberger residence and traveling south through Pullman, Washington.
This is consistent with the movement of the white Elantra.
At approximately 2 47 a.m., the 8458 phone stops reporting to the network, which is consistent with either the phone being in an area without cellular coverage, the connection to the network is disabled, such as putting the phone in airplane mode, or that phone is turned off.
The 8458 phone does not report to the network again until approximately 4 48 a.m., at which time it utilized cellular resources that provide coverage to Idaho State Highway 95 south of Moscow, Idaho, near Blaine, Idaho.
Between 4 50 a.m. and 5 26 a.m., the phone utilizes cellular resources that are consistent with the 8458 phone traveling south on Idaho State Highway 95 to Genesee, Idaho, then traveling west toward Uniontown, Idaho, then north back to Pullman, Washington.
At approximately 5 30 a.m., the 8458 phone is utilizing resources that provide coverage to Pullman, Washington, and consistent with the phone traveling back to the Kohlberger residence.
The 8458 phone's movements are consistent with the movements of the White Elantra that is observed traveling north on Stadium Drive at approximately 5 27 a.m.
Based on a review of the 8458 phone's estimated locations and travel, the 8458 phone's travel is consistent with that of the White Elantra.
Further review indicated that the 8458 phone utilized cellular resources on November 13, 2022, that are consistent with the 8458 phone leaving the area of the Kohlberger residence at approximately 9 a.m. and traveling to Moscow, Idaho.
Specifically, the 8458 phone utilized cellular resources that would provide coverage to the King Road residence between 9 12 a.m. and 9 21 a.m.
The 8458 phone next utilized cellular resources.
That are consistent with the 8458 phone traveling back to the area of the Kohlberger residence and arriving to the area at approximately 9 32 a.m.
Investigators found that the 8458 phone did connect to a cell phone tower that provides service to Moscow on November 14, 2022, but investigators do not believe the 8458 phone was in Moscow on that date.
The 8458 phone has not connected to any towers that provide service to Moscow since that date.
Interstate Watchers Monitor the Chase00:16:17
We'll get back to the affidavit in a bit.
So that's where things stood as of the end of November, or at least as the end of November approached.
Christmas was nearing, and the police did not believe that they had enough yet to make an arrest.
And now, as Howard Bloom puts it, the discovery that Kohlberger had apparently turned off his phone during the time when the murders occurred was further tantalizing knowledge.
But it was not enough.
They also sourly realized to persuade a judge to issue an arrest warrant.
All they could do for now was store this intelligence away until another vital part of the puzzle could be unearthed.
The crucial eureka moment that would allow them to tie all the disparate pieces into a firm knot, a knot that not even the most industrious defense attorney could ever hope to unravel.
The entire country, or so it often seemed, was complaining that the case was dragging on and on without resolution.
It would be a disaster, not just professionally, but also for their own peace of mind, because Moscow was, for many of them, A home town, too.
If Kohlberger slipped out of the police's grasp before handcuffs could be firmly locked around his wrists.
And that brings us to the journey that was to come, as Brian Kohlberger was set to begin a cross country journey with the FBI and other law enforcement monitoring closely, or at least trying to.
And he would have a guest on this journey, his father.
As Bloom writes, Michael Kohlberger, the father, was worried about the snow.
Only days earlier, he had flown from Philadelphia to Seattle, then caught a twin engine Embraer 170 jet for the one hour or so shuttle flight into the frigid Pullman Moscow Regional Airport.
And now, December 13th, he was already heading back home.
Only this time it would be a road trip.
It was a fatiguing back and forth cross country jaunt, especially for a 67 year old.
But Kohlberger had promised his son, Brian, who had nearly a month off before classes resumed at Washington State University.
That he would accompany him on the drive back home for the Christmas break, and he was determined to make good on his pledge.
Over the years, there had been some rough, combative times between the two of them.
He'd even had to get Brian into rehab to kick his teenage heroin habit.
But now the young man seemed on a good path.
Studying for a PhD in criminal justice offered a promising career trajectory for Brian.
And it can be imagined it must have puffed up a father with a prideful sense of parental accomplishment.
After all, Michael's own life had been tarnished by not one, but two embarrassing bankruptcies, and his workdays were a drudgery.
Spent as a maintenance man at the dreary high school his three children had attended.
Perhaps he was even looking forward to this road trip as a way to revitalize his relationship with his son, a way to bury once and for all any lingering remnants of their old antagonisms.
But now, Michael, as he'd later recount to an associate, was largely focused only on the forecast.
When it snowed in the Northwest, the accumulations were routinely measured in feet, not inches, Michael knew.
And so he wanted to get going.
When the weather came in, it would be rough traveling in a seven year old Hyundai Elantra without four wheel drive.
You'd be slipping and sliding all over the road.
So he urged Brian that they should pack up and get going now.
His son agreed.
Only once they were on the road, Brian did something his father would later casually share with one of the mechanics at the garage near their home in Albrightsville, Pennsylvania, who had serviced the car after the trip, that had caught him by surprise.
Before Michael had headed out to Washington, he had Googled the route back home.
The quickest, most logical drive was pretty much a straight line plowing across the country along I 90.
Brian, however, buttonhooked south toward Colorado, where he'd pick up I 70.
It seemed to make little sense.
Colorado in mid December was snow country.
There was no telling what might suddenly come blowing down from the Rockies.
But Brian, according to what his father told people, insisted the northern route across I 90 promised wintry conditions.
Better to head away from the weather, even if it added hours or even a day to the trip.
It was a strategy that, when explained that reasonable way, was practical, even prudent.
But it seemed like something more devious to the FBI.
Unknown to either the father or the son, the Bureau had been determined to keep a watchful eye on that white Hyundai's trek across America.
Only sources in law enforcement would confide with a bristle of embarrassment not long after the car had pulled out of its space in the graduate housing parking lot fronting 1630 Northeast Valley Road in Pullman, Washington.
They lost it!
For several alarming hours or more, the authorities are keeping the precise details of the screw up very close to the vest for reasons you could understand.
The chief suspect in a quadruple homicide that had shocked the nation had seemingly vanished.
The Bureau's watchers called it a hat box operation, and the jargon was a throwback to an era when G men sporting fedoras would be out in force on the street to monitor a target's every move.
A sea of hats would box the suspect in.
These days, the watchers have a few more tricks at their disposal undercover vehicles, surveillance vans, low flying fixed wing planes, and that's just for starters.
But the name has stuck.
And the surveillance on Brian Kohlberger, according to published reports and interviews with officials, was Hatbox all the way.
But as Kohlberger headed across the country in the very car they believed had been captured in the blurry surveillance footage, his father mystifyingly at his side, they had lost him even before the hatbox op could get underway.
A mood of panic rapidly escalated into one of despair.
Frantically, they began to search the records of automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, in nearby states.
It was an exercise in futility nothing, not a single hit.
Then they got lucky.
U.S. Route 6 passes straight through the small town of Loma, Colorado.
And eight years ago, the Colorado Department of Transportation thought it was high time to install Loma's first traffic light.
It went up in 2015 at the bustling, things being relative, of course, intersection of Route 6 and Highway 139.
It wasn't long after that when the engineers decided they might as well affix an ALPR to the light pole.
And on December 13th, It caught Washington State plate CFB 8708, the white 2015 Elantra, registered to Brian Kohlberger.
Now, we should pause here in Bloom's reporting to note that the FBI disputes that they ever lost Kohlberger during his trip across the country.
Quote The FBI is aware of reports detailing alleged FBI surveillance on Idaho murder subject Brian Kohlberger, an FBI spokesperson said.
There are anonymous sources providing false information to the media.
For his part, Bloom points to the affidavit itself and its curious wording, which notes the following Investigators believe that Kohlberger is still driving the 2015 White Elantra because his vehicle was captured on December 13, 2022, by a license plate reader in Loma, Colorado.
Bloom says his sources were within the FBI, that he trusts them, and he stands by his reporting.
Speaking of Bloom's reporting, back to it here.
With this sighting, the hat box op was once again underway.
The watchers would keep their eyes covertly on the car all the way to Pennsylvania.
Fate had mercifully bestowed on them a second chance, and they were determined not to stumble.
Still, they were not prepared for what happened next.
The interstate was as flat and empty as the landscape.
Any threat of snow had vanished.
The dome of sky above I 70 was reassuringly blue.
In Michael Kohlberger's calm and steady universe, There was no reason to suspect that the FBI was lurking in the shadows.
Even the suggestion of such clandestine goings on would likely have struck him as preposterous.
But then, as the Hyundai crept through Hancock County, Indiana, something changed.
At 10 41 on the morning of December 15th, as the car approached the 107 mile marker on the interstate, Brian Kohlberger saw red and blue lights flashing in his rearview mirror.
Can you imagine?
A sheriff's car was demanding that the vehicle pull over.
Brian obeyed.
He waited behind the wheel as the officer approached.
What would happen next seemed destined to play out as high drama.
At the very least, the car approximately fit the description of a vehicle observed in the aftermath of a quadruple murder.
The driver, the Moscow Police Department had alerted the nation, was to be considered a person of interest in their investigation.
As Deputy Nick Ernstes walked with slow, measured steps toward the passenger side of the Hyundai, where Michael sat, There seemed to be no escape.
There would be no springing free.
The time of reckoning had arrived.
Only as the tape from Ernstus' body cam revealed.
The ensuing confrontation was all denouement, more farce than tragedy.
The conversation between the Kohlbergers and the deputy moved forward with its own abstruse logic, a litany of non sequiturs that seemed as if it had been inspired by a madcap Abbott and Costello routine.
When the deputy officiously demands, Where they are heading.
Brian's response suggests nothing more than a casual drive.
We're going to get some Thai food right now.
That's when the father decides it's his turn to play the straight man.
Well, we're coming from WSU.
Here's some of that incredible encounter captured on Body Cam.
Where are you headed?
I'm going to, uh, I can't.
Well, we're coming from WSU.
And, but, we're scanning.
You're coming from Washington State University and you're going there?
Oh.
We're going to be going to Pennsylvania.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, we're finally letting you describe the Bowers.
So, you all work at the university there?
Actually, do better.
To the Indiana deputy, the initials have no meaning.
It's all beyond him.
So, both the father and son, eager to please, attempt to remedy the confusion and, in the process, only add to the officer's puzzlement.
He can't decide whether both of them work at the university or who, in fact, is the student.
or if they've headed out from Washington state on a cross country road trip to get Thai food in Pennsylvania.
In the end, perhaps eager to escape from this madness, he warns them not to tailgate and lets them go without a ticket.
As the body cam footage ends, it is difficult to discern who's happier to be driving off, the Kohlbergers or the deputy.
Yet a quick nine minutes after they're back on the interstate, Brian once again sees flashing lights in his rearview mirror.
The Kohlbergers are stopped again.
This time, it's a state trooper who pulls them over.
And here again, we can watch some of the body cam of that remarkable interaction.
Once more, at the very least, their car should create a shock of recognition.
After the nationwide Moscow PD vehicle alert, it's a ticking bomb.
Only against all odds, they're again simply reprimanded for tailgating and sent on their way without a ticket.
Former CIA analyst and the creator of Of the CIA's deception detection program.
Phil Houston, he's actually a human lie detector, joined us earlier this year about these traffic stops.
He gave his expert opinion on Kohlberger's exchanges in them.
Watch this.
When he asked, Where are you going? when a police officer stops you on the side of the road and says, Where are you going? he's looking for your destination, so to speak.
And Brian lies about, conceals the destination and really lies about what they're actually doing, which is traveling all the way across country.
You know, from Washington to Pennsylvania.
He says instead, he answers, we're just going to get some typhoon right now.
He, Brian, clearly doesn't want to engage the officer at all.
He doesn't want to give him any information.
His dad recognizes, I think, how bad Brian's answer sounded.
And therefore, he's the one that got them back on the right path saying, look, we're from Washington State and, you know, and we're, we're, We're going elsewhere.
We do have a destination.
More from Bloom here and his reporting that draws from his conversations with sources inside the FBI.
Yet, unbeknownst to either the father or the son, it will be only a matter of time before their luck runs out.
And while Michael's previous worries did not come to fruition, this one will.
And what were the FBI thinking as they, from a discreet distance, observed their targets being pulled over not only once, but mind bogglingly twice by the authorities?
There is an iron rule, law enforcement veterans will tell you, that in any long running op, the unexpected is to be expected at any time.
The outrageous, in fact, must be regarded as inevitable.
Yet, according to sources familiar with the Bureau's skittish temperament, as these two unanticipated traffic stops played out, knowing patience was not the guiding standard that December day.
The agents were frustrated and they were angry.
The possibilities were too dangerous.
The main problem shared law enforcement officials with an arm's length familiarity with the FBI's surveillance operation was the watchers' helpless passivity.
All they could do was observe from a distance and wonder.
Had diligent Indiana lawmen spotted the car traveling down the interstate and immediately connected it to the white Hyundai that was wanted by the Moscow PD?
Were the locals about to make an arrest before the final incriminating piece had been fitted into the puzzle?
If that happened, it had the potential to be a catastrophe.
The suspect would be alerted, and perhaps then, if he was advised by a canny lawyer, the army of investigators would never have the opportunity to make their airtight case.
Their second concern, however, was an even more dangerous prospect.
Was the suspect armed?
Would someone who they believed had killed four people hesitate to kill again?
Would the highway cops become victims, too?
Or would the suspect simply gun the Hyundai and race down the highway?
The spectacle of another OJ like chase might be imminent.
In the end, none of the apprehensive watchers' anxieties came to fruition.
But a hard lesson, according to what other law enforcement officials heard, had been learned.
This case had to be wrapped up soon.
If not, anything could happen.
There were too many imponderables.
Time was not on their side.
A Trash Pull for Genetic Clues00:06:06
In the antsy days following the Kohlbergers' arrival, at last in the Poconos on the afternoon of December 16, the Moscow police suffered through variable moods.
There were bursts when there was no denying that a great push forward.
Was underway.
Corporal Brett Payne, the PD's lead investigator, obtained a search warrant.
And then a day later, on December 23rd, he received those records of Kohlberger's cell phone for the 24 hours before and after the homicides, the ones we told you about earlier when we were quoting from the affidavit.
Just as the case was nearing the finish line, cops in Moscow moaned they had no choice but to hand it off to the Pennsylvania State Police.
Kohlberger was now on the state's playing field.
They'd be the ones who would take the ball over the goal line.
Major Chris Paris had been handpicked by the FBI to run the op for the Stadies, and he was a shrewd choice.
He looked like a linebacker, and he had a gruff, no nonsense edge.
But he was also a thoughtful, scholarly man.
He'd graduated magna cum laude from the University of Scranton, and he went on to get a law degree from Temple.
And perhaps most valuable given the circumstances, Paris possessed a lawyerly sense of discretion.
He shared the secret that a suspect was in the crosshairs with just an eight person working group.
A leak, a promiscuous whisper, and the whole case might be blown.
For although Kohlberger was unaware, apparently, of it at the time, the Stadies and the suspect were playing an intricate game of cat and mouse.
There was Kohlberger observed taking his Hyundai in for servicing at a garage in Effort, Pennsylvania, not far from his parents' home.
Next, he's spotted wearing gloves as he gives the vehicle a meticulous cleaning.
And of course, these are actions that can mean nothing or everything.
It just depends on the preconceived notions that influence your judgment.
A little harder to dismiss, though, is Kohlberger's sneaking over to deposit some trash in a neighbor's garbage pail at around 4 a.m. one morning.
Getting rid of incriminating evidence or just a bit of mischief?
Once again, evil is in the eye of the beholder.
But all this was before the great trash robbery.
That was what some wags at Troop N, the state police barracks that was running the surveillance op, later dubbed the pilfering.
On December 27, Major Paris received a request from the FBI to plunder the trash bins outside the Kohlberger residence.
That same day, once the Stadies were certain no one was looking, two troopers swooped in and made off with a pile of the Kohlberger's family detritus.
The purloined parcel was quickly shipped across the country to Meridian, Idaho.
There, at the Idaho State Police Crime Lab on South Stratford Drive, a forensic team went to work sorting through the trash.
It turned out to be a treasure trove.
For all along, the Moscow police had been holding on tight to a second secret, one that was no less charged than the statement from the eyewitness a knife sheath stamped with a U.S. Marine Corps eagle, globe, and anchor insignia.
Had been found lying on the bed next to Maddie Mogan's bloody corpse.
And from the sheath's button snap, a speck of male DNA had been recovered.
It was a minuscule sample, but it was all that was needed.
When compared to Michael Kohlberger's DNA lifted from the garbage that had been clandestinely carried off, it proved nearly conclusively, the techies confidently rejoiced, that it was his son's DNA on that knife sheath.
The next day, December 29, a triumphant Brett Payne sat down to finalize the arrest warrant for Brian Kohlberger.
When he was done, he had no time to enjoy the moment of high achievement.
Instead, full of a tense urgency and animating conviction that every moment counted, he hand delivered the 18 page document to the courthouse.
Moments after Judge Megan Marshall signed off, a call was made to Pennsylvania.
It's a go, Major Paris was told.
Here's how Payne wrote about the discovery in the affidavit.
On December 27, 2022, Pennsylvania agents recovered the trash from the Kohlberger family residence located in Albrightsville, PA.
That evidence was sent to the Idaho State Lab for testing.
On December 28, 2022, the Idaho State Lab reported that a DNA profile obtained from the trash and the DNA profile obtained from the sheath identified a male as not being excluded.
As the biological father of suspect profile, at least 99.9998% of the male population would be expected to be excluded from the possibility of being the suspect's biological father.
And here is CC Moore on the trash pull.
This is pretty common when investigative genetic genealogy has pointed law enforcement toward a certain individual or family, and they'll do what's called a trash pull.
If they can't just follow that person and pick something up that they dropped, Then they'll typically resort to waiting for that person to put their trash out on the curb.
And most states allow this.
It's considered abandoned at that point.
And then they go through the trash and try to find an item that might have DNA on it.
But when it's a home like this, a household where there's multiple people, they don't know exactly whose DNA they're going to get.
More from Bloom.
Dynamic entry is only used to serve an arrest warrant when the threat matrix is code red.
Confusion Over Knife Sheath DNA00:06:23
You go in with overwhelming force, pounding down the doors, breaking windows, and setting off explosive devices.
The strategy is meant not just to surprise the suspect, but also to scare the living daylights out of him.
Because there's one thing that's always rising up in the mind of any tactical cop charging through the front door.
If the target's waiting inside to ambush you, it doesn't matter too much what sort of tactics you use.
This is his turf.
He has the advantage.
And if he's determined not to give up without a fight, bad things can happen.
At just after midnight on December 30, a Pennsylvania State Police Special Emergency Response Team, or SERT, S E R T, Assembled at the gray barn like Troop N barracks in Hazleton, Pennsylvania.
There were about 24 of them, the usual 16 entry team members and maybe eight sharpshooters, and they were packing Glock.
40 caliber pistols were generally the weapon of choice, and the point men, as a rule, carried two pistols.
Those who would be the first through the door were also armed with stubby black HK MP5 submachine guns.
It was a brutal weapon, particularly in an enclosed space.
The backups had short-barreled Remington 870 12 gauges.
It was a shotgun meant for killing, not wounding.
Over military style camo uniforms, they wore heavy, load bearing, tactical body armor fitted out with level four strike plates.
The early morning arrest of Brian Kohlberger would be a code red op, dynamic entry all the way.
It was so quiet, it seemed as if the cocking of a single rifle would rouse people from their slumber.
But then all hell broke loose.
A door flew off its hinges, windows shattered, explosive charges boomed.
The CERT team stormed the stunned Kohlberger's white clappered home.
In the end, Without a single shot being fired, Brian Koberger was let off in handcuffs.
I recognize the frustration with the lack of information that's been released.
However, providing any details in this criminal investigation might have tainted the upcoming criminal prosecution or alerted the suspect of our progress.
Mr. Koberger was taken into custody without incident.
The scene was turned over to the FBI evidence response team for processing.
Mr. Koberger was then turned over to the Monroe County Prison, where he has remained in their custody since.
On January 4th, shackled and in a red jumpsuit, Kohlberger was flown in a tiny fixed wing single engine Pilatus across the country.
The plane landed at Moscow Pullman Regional Airport, the same airport where, only about three weeks earlier, Michael Kohlberger had arrived in anticipation of a convivial road trip with his son.
But as Bloom writes, nothing in this case would be easy.
There existed quite a few bad facts.
Bad facts is a phrase.
Defense lawyers like to bandy about.
It's a term that's meant to draw an epistemological distinction between what is objectively real and what is subjective opinion.
Just because the prosecutor says it's true, well, that doesn't make it so.
And the bad facts riddling the probable cause affidavit that police used to obtain Kohlberger's arrest, as well as those in the laundry list of seemingly provocative items found in a search of Kohlberger's apartment in Washington, are indeed disturbing.
Item.
The affidavit cites a shoe with a diamond shaped pattern similar to the pattern of a Vans type shoe style found at the scene of the crime.
Well, does Kohlberger own a pair of vans?
And even if it is established that he does, there's a photo that shows at least one person in the house on King Road wearing vans prior to the murders.
Item.
The cell phone tower data that links Kohlberger to the scene of the murders is more an approximation.
Of his whereabouts than an exact location.
And being in the vicinity is not at all the same as being at the scene of the crime.
More damaging, the affidavit, with a remarkable candor, admits to some confusion in this sort of analysis.
Quote Investigators found that the phone did connect to a cell phone tower that provides service to Moscow on November 14, 2022.
But investigators do not believe the phone was in Moscow on that date.
What?
The prosecution is stating that the cell phone evidence is correct only some of the time.
How's that going to fly with a jury?
Item the white Hyundai Elantra.
While there are photos of the car zooming through the Moscow streets on the night of the murder, there is no clear photo of Kohlberger at the wheel that evening, not a single one.
Item, the DNA on the knife sheath snap.
It is apparently touch DNA.
That is, it's derived from a fingerprint rather than a drop of blood.
And that's pretty shaky evidence, often more guesswork than science.
The courtroom reality is that in case after case, touch DNA has been tarnished by a motley collection of false positive results.
A smart defense attorney might argue that there's just as much likelihood of touch DNAs being accurate as a juror's winning the lottery.
Who would want to condemn someone to execution based on those odds?
Item the eyewitness identification.
Well, a lot of people have bushy eyebrows, and the testimony from a witness who was in quote frozen shock phase, as she put it, might be problematic at best.
And that's without even getting into why she waited seven hours or so before making sure the police were notified.
The poignant truth might very well be that Dylan Mortensen, although she was not physically attacked, was another victim that night.
And that she is in no shape to take the witness stand to face a rapid firing, if not mean spirited, defense counsel.
Item the murder weapon.
Where is it?
The police have not found the long bladed knife used in the killings, and they have so far not been able to establish that Kohlberger owned such a weapon.
Visual Snow and Mental Fog00:10:01
But arguably the most perplexing question that the prosecutors will have to wrestle with if they hope to persuade a jury is why.
Why?
What was the motive for someone to kill four college students in cold blood?
And so far, there isn't an answer.
But the exploration for a motive needs to take us into an examination of Brian Kohlberger himself, who he was at an early age, who he became, an attempt to get inside his head and really learn about what makes this guy tick.
As it turns out, the trip into the psyche of Brian Kohlberger. Would be a fascinating and deeply disturbing one.
And that is where we will pick up next episode.
We'll see you tomorrow.
Triple-Tex is a flexible transport program.
It works perfectly for any transport.
And a spranger.
And a honey frisure.
And a alpine anleger.
And a panehagger.
And a glass bottle.
silver bottle for handling.
And a silver bottle for handling.
And all the other things that you can do for the transport.
And a nice transport program.
And a glass bottle.
I am stuck in the depths of my mind where I have to constantly battle my demons.
Am I here or am I fake?
I feel myself slipping away.
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, everyone.
I'm Megan Kelly, and welcome to episode three of a special edition of the show focused on the fascinating and disturbing case of Brian Kohlberger and the quadruple murder in a sleepy college, Idaho town last year.
We started the week diving into the gruesome stabbings and got to know the victims a bit.
Yesterday, we walked through how Koberger was identified and the incredible series of events that led to his arrest.
Today, we take a look at who Brian Koberger is the man accused of this barbaric crime, atrocities which he denies having anything to do with.
As we bring you that story, we are thrilled to rely in part on the fantastic writing and reporting by journalist and author Howard Bloom, who covered the Idaho murders in great detail for airmail news.
Bloom's forthcoming book on the case will be published in the spring by HarperCollins.
Brian Christopher Kohlberger is 28 years old, but the quotes I read you at the beginning of this episode are from way back in 2011 when he was just 16.
It has been reported by multiple outlets, including Bloom in the airmail, that Kohlberger wrote often on an early social media platform called Tappa Talk.
He described a condition he had, or claimed to have, known as visual snow.
It's something I discussed with Bloom when he was a guest on The Megyn Kelly Show in March.
Watch.
Doctors can't even agree on whether visual snow is a psychological state or a disease.
And since they can't agree on what it is, they also differ on how to treat it or if it can be treated.
The best sources I found for any insight into this are really in novels.
Camus' The Stranger opens up with a character who talks about feeling nothing that eventually leads to a murder on the beach.
Sart has a In one of his novels, writes about a character that has the same sort of disassociation from the world.
It's, you know, it's existentialism on one level and it's also dislocation from the world on another.
And if you, you know, if everything means less than zero, as Elvis Costello sings, you know, then you can do anything.
Anything is then justified because it doesn't matter.
From Bloom's Reporting.
They are the raw, bedeviling forces that drove him, he explains, to contemplate suicide.
They are the painful demons, he wails to a friend, that drove him to search for a sort of relief by mainlining heroin.
And at the root of all his swirling emotions, he diagnoses in the online postings with an unwavering certainty, is visual snow.
Visual snow is a rare but very real and chronic neurological condition.
To those who suffer from it, the world is viewed through a glass darkly.
It's like looking at a television screen and the pictures fluttering.
The image is obscured by amorphous grayish waves and scattering flickering dots.
But is it a disease or is it a psychological condition?
Doctors, according to the sparse literature, throw up their hands in frustrated confusion.
They just don't know.
And what can't be diagnosed is even more difficult to treat.
But for the teenage Brian Kohlberger, if his online posts are any reliable guide, visual snow had at times buried his existence in an avalanche of despondency and desperation.
His posts were calls from the wild.
Some of Koberger's most telling teenage posts give us a window into who he might become.
We have voiced them over here October 29th, 2010.
I have completely disconnected from reality.
I feel all the time that I'm living in my own reality.
It seems as if my brain chemistry is altered from this, even though I am certain it's not.
First, I felt very uninterested in the things I usually like to do, but then it changed to the point I saw no reason for anything.
And everything became boring to me.
It feels at times completely disconnected and as if I can't live like a normal person.
When I think about my future, I think about how I will barely remember my mother and father, et cetera, because I have an altered memory and also have been unable to think of them due to the 10 things I think about nonstop all at once visual snow, altered brain, tinnitus, disappointment, regret, et cetera.
I think that possibly I could have brought this onto myself from post traumatic stress disorder or something similar, but I can't tell what it is.
I remember how it was before and remember that I felt like it before.
It is all real bullshit.
If I have any chemistry change, I have this detox program that can fix it.
May 12th, 2011.
I always feel as if I am not there, completely depersonalized.
Mentally, I experience fog, lack of comprehension at some times.
Feel like my life is a movie.
Depersonalization.
Depression.
No interest in activity.
Constant thought of suicide.
Crazy thoughts.
Delusions of grandeur.
Anxiety.
Poor self image.
Poor social skills.
No emotion.
I feel like nothing has a point to it.
When I get home, I am mean to my family.
This started when VS or visual snow did.
I felt no emotion, and along with the depersonalization, I can say and do whatever I want.
With a little remorse.
Everyone hates me.
Pretty much.
I am an asshole.
July 4th, 2011.
I have had this horrible depersonalization go on in my life for almost two years.
I often find myself making simple human interactions, but it is as if I'm playing a role playing game such as Oblivion.
I can see what is going on.
I am slightly into it, but I can pause the game and focus on my real life.
In this case, my life is the game, and my old self can be reached by pausing the game.
But how?
I often think of things that humans do, things I have done my whole life.
I feel like an organic sack of meat with no self worth as I am starting to view everything as this.
Everything I have ever done makes no sense.
How did things get this way?
How am I wearing this shirt?
And who decided that humans shall wear shirts like this?
Are we all just advanced animals with possession, or is there more?
More that I can't see.
I can't connect.
I view everything as if I would if I was playing oblivion, pointless and full of nothing, out of reality.
I'm moving out of my house.
My last holidays were already lived.
But where was I?
As my family group hugs and celebrates, I am stuck in this void of nothing, feeling completely no emotion, feeling nothing.
I feel dirty like there is dirt inside my head, my mind.
I am always dizzy and confused.
I feel no self worth.
I am intelligent, but I feel the opposite.
I say things I don't mean.
The last holiday in my house, the house I grew up in, the house I once contributed to, the house I once fell at home in, is past.
As I hug my family, I look into their faces.
I see nothing.
It is like I am looking at a video game, but less.
I feel less than mentally damaged.
It is like I have severe brain damage.
I am stuck in the depths of my mind.
These posts paint a picture of a severely depressed, disturbed young man, riddled with pain, feeling himself, quote, slipping away from the bounds of normality, constantly burdened by visual snow and the sound of screaming.
Anger, Rage, and Tinder Messages00:07:32
Torture.
And it wasn't just the posts on Tapa Talk.
As Bloom lays out, there was also bristling anger uncovered by internet sleuths who have traced his teenage email to a posting on SoundCloud.
11 years ago, Kohlberger's defiant moods took flight in a howling rap song.
You are not my equal, you are evil, but I'm the devil, he challenges.
Listen.
Of course, Bloom writes, these posts and lyrics are the work of a teenager.
More than a decade has flown by since they were written.
Nevertheless, perhaps the anguish posts and the ferocious song are also a warning.
Out of words come events.
The future cannot exist without having been envisioned in the past, and one more puzzlement in this case must be confronted.
Are these teenage thought dreams the intimations of an adult future?
During high school, reports suggest Kohlberger was a bit of a misfit and an outcast.
He was overweight, and according to friends who knew him at the time, he fell into drugs, first marijuana and then heroin.
He began focusing on eating healthier, found kickboxing, began to lose weight in the process.
Here is high school friend Jack Bayless speaking to local NBC affiliate King 5 TV.
He was definitely heavier set, and that caused issues in school.
I believe it was the weight loss first.
Weight loss first, and I was, you know, I want to say 14.
To maybe 16, in between there was the big weight loss.
I could be wrong on this, but I'm pretty sure that's what it was.
And then it was the drugs.
He got in drugs via an acquaintance of his.
It was definitely heroin.
It was pretty darnly.
But Koberger was able to straighten his life out, or so it seemed.
Whether his internal anguish ever abated is a much trickier question, as we discussed with Howard Bloom.
Everyone has talked about how he seems to be planning the murders.
So, Carefully doing this and that.
I think he was really spending the past year at least trying to overcome all his internal demons to not try to find a way to prevent himself from killing people.
I mean, at this point, he's made a remarkable recovery from a young man, a teenager who used heroin.
He's gotten into a junior college and succeeds to get into college.
And he winds up at a very reputable graduate school in criminal justice where he's a teaching assistant.
He's doing everything.
He's pushed his father out of his life.
Now he's taking his father back into life.
They're going to make a cross country trip home for Christmas.
He's doing all this.
And at the same time, he knows who he is and how he will always be an outsider.
And he's trying to find his way in.
And he really can't.
I think that's also an untold story, hard speculation at this point.
That we want to try to get more of come June.
This man who sees himself as someone more sinned against than sinning, and that his life is, in its way, a horror story.
It's also a tragedy, too.
After Koberger graduated high school, he went to college at DeSales University in Pennsylvania.
He got his bachelor's degree in 2020 and a master's degree in criminal justice in 2022.
One professor of his, Dr. Michelle Bolger, who advised Kohlberger on his master's thesis in the criminal justice department at DeSales University, she's very well respected, told a Daily Mail reporter he was a brilliant student.
In my 10 years of teaching, she raved, I've only recommended two students to a PhD program, and he was one of them.
He was one of my best students ever.
Here's more from those who knew him, including friends and classmates.
He wanted to do something that impacted people in a good way.
People were not his strong suit.
And I think through his criminology studies, he was really trying to understand humans and try to understand himself.
I think a lot of people who were close to him are feeling this massive amount of guilt.
Why didn't I see it?
Did I miss something?
Where did it go wrong?
He seemed very comfortable around other people.
Was fairly quick to offer his opinion and thoughts, and he was always participating fairly eagerly in classroom discussions.
Does anything else come to mind that Brian said to you in the past that today you think might be of interest?
There was a comment that he made, and it was this kind of a flippant guy talk thing.
At one point, he just idly mentioned, you know, I can go down to a bowl or a club and just have pretty much any lady I want.
Looking back over the last four months is that I feel like there should have been signs that I should have seen, and I didn't.
I was blindsided.
While Kohlberger may have bragged about his luck with the ladies, no girlfriend has emerged at all from any point.
One woman posted a TikTok about a date she says she had a single date with Kohlberger, which did not go well.
Watch.
We matched on Tinder.
We talked for a couple hours.
And then he was like, hey, you want to go to the movies with me tonight?
And I was like, sure.
We ended up going back to my dorm.
And he kind of invited himself inside.
He kept trying to touch me, not like inappropriately, just like trying to tickle me and like rub my shoulders and stuff.
And I was like, Why are you touching me or what are you doing?
And he would just like get super serious and he's like, I'm not.
And I'm like, You are though.
And he's like, I'm not touching you.
Kind of like trying to gaslight me into thinking that he didn't touch me, which is weird.
But then I was like, I'm just going to run to the bathroom quick.
And he was like, okay.
And then he followed me to the bathroom, which I thought was kind of weird.
So I proceeded to pretend to throw up to get him to leave.
He ended up messaging me on Tinder that he was going to go.
And I was like, awesome.
My plan worked.
And then about an hour later, he texted me and said I had good birthing hits.
Some who observed him in his role as a teaching assistant saw a man anything but comfortable.
When he was standing in front of the class, it was like he was, you know, in a box.
He was very, I don't know, uncomfortable, I guess.
Like it felt like he was perpetually uncomfortable.
Though Koberger's online postings appeared to stop, those ones we went over when he was about 16, his criminal justice studies brought more public outreach.
Thinking Feelings Behind the Crime00:09:20
Like the Reddit post from his time at DeSales asking for research participation from criminals.
Some criminologists say it's pretty standard for the field to send things like this out, but still, it's chilling when you know what he would later be accused of.
Hello, my name is Brian, he writes, and I am inviting you to participate in a research project that seeks to understand how emotions and psychological traits influence decision making when committing a crime.
In particular, this study seeks to understand the story behind your most recent criminal offense, with an emphasis on your thoughts and feelings throughout your experience.
In the event that your most recent offense was not one that led to a conviction, you may still participate.
What sort of questions did Kohlberger ask?
Here's what was uncovered from the survey itself.
Questions included the following Did you struggle with or fight the victim?
Did you prepare for the crime before leaving your home?
Please detail what you were thinking and feeling at this point.
How did you travel to and enter the location that the crime occurred?
After arriving, what steps did you take prior to locating the victim or target?
Please detail your thoughts and feelings.
Why did you choose that victim or target over others?
Before making your move, how did you approach the victim or target?
Please detail what you were thinking and feeling.
What was the first move you made in order to accomplish your goal?
Please detail any thoughts and feelings at this point.
How did you accomplish your goal?
Please explain what you were thinking and feeling.
Before leaving, is there anything else you did?
How did you leave the scene?
After committing the crime, what were you thinking and feeling?
After DeSales, Kohlberger moved west, a criminology doctoral student now at Washington State University.
He began the program in the fall of 2022, mere months before the murders in the neighboring state.
Almost immediately upon his arrival in Washington, he applied for an internship at the nearby Pullman Police Department.
In the application essay, which Idaho cops later shared, Kohlberger, with apparent self-affirming pride, wrote that, He had an interest in assisting rural law enforcement agencies with how to better collect and analyze technological data in public safety operations.
So, what should we make of Kohlberger's interest in criminology and his attempts to work with local police?
It's a question I asked CIA officer and expert in deception, Phil Houston, earlier this year.
In my mind, this fits into the category of what we call countermeasure behavior.
So, it's starting out very early.
And what I mean by early is there's still months off from a killing.
But in his mind, he may well have had something in his mind that he was going to do that was bad.
So, joining the police department or having some connection by the police department in his mind might very likely have served two purposes.
First of all, from the persuasion context, he's an insider now.
Why would anyone look at him immediately as the perpetrator?
And then, secondly, if he's inside, It's possible he may get some access to what's going on in the investigation, to details of the investigation that may give him some early warning if the police do start to zero in on him.
It does not appear Kohlberger ever landed that police internship.
However, he did have a meeting with the chief of police.
Inside Edition obtained an email exchange between Kohlberger and Gary Jenkins, the top cop.
In Pullman, Washington, at the time.
It was a great pleasure to meet with you today and share my thoughts and excitement regarding the research assistantship for public safety, wrote Kohlberger.
Great to meet and talk to you as well, responded Jenkins.
Jenkins would go on to take a job as the campus chief of police at Washington State University, the force that would later help identify Kohlberger's vehicle as the one police believed was seen leaving the murder site that evening.
After the murders, Kohlberger may have returned to an old habit, posting about himself online.
You see, there was massive interest in this case online, and several reporters believe Kohlberger himself was among the crew on social media openly discussing the case.
One Facebook user named Papa Roger was a regular poster in a discussion group about the murders.
One of his posts seemed to indicate he knew something about the circumstances of the murder.
Or at least took a very lucky guess.
Quote Of the evidence released, the murder weapon has been consistent as a large fixed blade knife.
This leads me to believe they found the sheath, he wrote.
This was before there were public reports that police had indeed found the knife sheath inside that house.
Meanwhile, on Reddit, in the Moscow Murders group, Moscow being the town where the killings took place, One user named Inside Looking seemed to have inside details about the method behind the murders.
Quote, speculation, it began.
Quote, killer parked behind the house, approached property through tree line, entered sliding door and left it open, committed murders and exited sliding door.
One knife, according to the coroner's statement.
Time of murder, approximately 3 20 a.m. to 3 40 a.m., according to car fleeing scene.
And on camera on Highway 8, approximately 3 45 a.m.
Vehicle left skid marks upon exit.
End quote.
Since Kohlberger was arrested and held without bail, Papa Roger and Inside Looking have not posted on Facebook or Reddit.
As one might suspect, Brian Kohlberger's troubles were not limited to his head.
His interactions with women were awkward and at times inappropriate, as we alluded to earlier.
There were reports of him getting kicked out of a high school vocational law enforcement program after complaints from several girls, creepy interactions with women in college.
And more recently, Dateline of NBC reported Kohlberger befriended a female colleague at Washington State who contacted him after she thought, Someone had broken into her apartment.
Kohlberger helped her, reports NBC, by installing security cameras at her place.
According to Dateline, authorities believed it was Kohlberger himself who had broken into that apartment and that he installed the cameras so that he would be able to spy on this young woman, or perhaps something even more sinister.
Former FBI criminal profiler Candace DeLong was a guest on this program in January 2023, and she had this to say about Kohlberger.
And women.
One of the things I find interesting and possibly telling a lot of female friends from high school, college, and even recently in his RAB program talk about him, various things to say.
No former girlfriend or former intimate person has come forward, possibly because you know it could be, oh my gosh, you know, I was wrong to be involved with this guy.
But I wonder if he simply hasn't had an intimate relationship, a romantic relationship.
And the reason I think that is, I without question, these uh.
This was a targeted murder, and one of the victims, the two blondes, was brutalized, stabbed many more times than the other one.
I think she was probably the target.
One of the things that I think of regarding motivation is: was this motive?
There was no sexual assault, but there was certainly a display of.
Anger and rage, and possibly revenge.
There are many murders, and it's happening more lately by men murdering women in this way, angers, multiple stab wounds.
It's rarely a gunshot.
It's stabbing someone, of course, is in their face, personal, I hate you, I hate you, that kind of thing.
Involuntary Celibacy and Grievance00:04:39
And that's what we see here.
So I am wondering if he, well, there's actually a term for it.
Megan, and it's in cell, which stands for involuntarily celibate.
So, no lovers that we know of, never mind girlfriends.
But what of his family?
His mother, Marianne, worked at the same local school district as his father.
She was an aide for special needs students.
He has two older sisters, Amanda and Melissa, the latter of whom was a mental health therapist.
Some reports indicate that both sisters were fired from their jobs after Brian's arrest.
And what about his father, the maintenance worker, the one who flew out to make that long trip across the country with Brian as the FBI was tracking him?
More here from my interview with Howard Bloom.
Here's his father.
He's 67 years old, doesn't have a ton of money.
Clearly, he's a janitor.
He's been bankrupt twice.
He's going to fly out to first, you got to go to Seattle.
Then you got to fly on another flight into Washington Pullman, go across country, and then you're going to quickly make a turnaround.
And he's looking.
I think this is what people have told me to try to get back, make amends with his son, say, you know, you were on the wrong path.
I tried to set you right.
There was a great deal of antagonism between us, but now things are hunky dory.
This is a bright future.
You're going to have a good playing job.
You're going to be a professor.
All things are good.
Little does he know, you know, what's going on in his son's world.
I think this trip across America, this father to son journey, is.
The center of its own interesting little drama.
That trip took Brian back to his childhood home and to the place where police would ultimately arrest him.
Reports were that upon making their dynamic entry, police found Kohlberger awake just before 1 30 a.m., wearing rubber gloves and packing his trash into Ziploc bags.
He did not resist, and the police effected a search of the premises.
From his parents' home, police recovered a cell phone, a laptop, two containers of a green leafy substance, along with black face masks, a black hat, and several articles of dark colored clothing, along with a book with underlining on page 118.
As well as a Glock 22, 40 caliber handgun, and empty magazines.
They also found a Smith Wesson pocket knife and more.
Back at Kohlberger's student residence in Washington State, police searched as well, retrieving a stained mattress cover, a computer tower, various receipts, the dust container from a Bissell Power Force vacuum cleaner, a fire TV stick with a cord and plug, and what's described as one possible animal hair strand.
His childhood home and his graduate student housing both poured through by police looking for any clue as to why, how, anything tying Kohlberger to this crime.
The home of his boyhood unhappiness and the adult home to what seemed a new kind of grievance and a freedom now to act on it.
Retired FBI profiler James Fitzgerald.
Ted Kaczynski was about the same age when he launched his first bomb in Chicago and four of them right after that.
Some people, it takes longer to mature in terms of their criminal sophistication or devolve in terms of their psychological disorders.
And I'm not clinically saying that.
So, who knows exactly what happened?
I think a big factor with BK is that I think he grew up in Northeastern Pennsylvania.
I'm from Philadelphia originally.
I know that area.
He went to school a little bit away from there.
But look what he finally did at the age of 28 or so.
He travels 2,500 miles across country.
He's far away now, finally, from the tentacles of his parents.
Of his familial upbringing, the home, the neighborhood where he grew up.
And he may be thinking for the first time, I am finally on my own.
I can do what I want.
I don't have any daily reporting or weekend reporting to any parents or authority figures.
This is my opportunity.
It doesn't mean he moved out there consciously to kill four people.
It's just that it was Jupiter aligning with Mars with a few other planets in there.
And of course, not in a good way.
We have really this, I say, hodgepodge or mishmash of all kinds of personality issues finally coming together.
For him.
And again, for some people, that happens in a good way.
Kohlberger Travels Two Thousand Miles00:11:21
You know what?
I'm finally going to college.
I'm finally going to join the military, graduate school, whatever.
This guy, it was about paying back, sort of as we call it, a grievance collector.
Some psychologists use that term.
All these grievances that built up, the foundations were laid of brick by brick by brick.
And it's finally hit sort of this crescendo in, and of all places, Moscow, Idaho.
And this, Aligns at the same time, and these poor four victims are the ones to pay the price for his, the alleged grievances placed against him.
Grievance and perhaps the related emotion of envy.
We're going to get to that soon.
Of course, this all presumes that Kohlberger is in fact guilty.
But what if?
What if?
Next episode the prosecution's case against Brian Kohlberger, plus Kohlberger's defense.
It may be better than you think.
We'll see you tomorrow.
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And a free Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
I'm Megan Kelly.
On this special edition of the show, we bring you deep into the fascinating and disturbing case of Brian Kohlberger and the murder of four young college students in Idaho.
The trial of Brian Kohlberger is expected to begin sometime in 2024.
We have brought you the details of the murder that November early morning, of Kohlberger's arrest, and we went deep into the psyche of the man accused of committing these heinous crimes.
Today, we examine the trial ahead.
What is the case, legally speaking, against Brian Kohlberger?
What are the key components you should expect prosecutors to lean on when they get in front of a jury?
And keep in mind, we are going to get to watch as all of this plays out.
The judge has agreed.
To televise this trial.
Now it will be with courtroom cameras and without media, but America will have a front row seat for The People versus Brian Kohlberger.
It may sound like an open and shut case for the prosecution, but trial attorney after trial attorney, seasoned pros, have been warning us all year not so fast that this case is far from a slam dunk for prosecutors.
It's not going to be easy.
But first, remember, Brian Kohlberger, through his attorneys, maintains that he is innocent.
Following his arrest, his initial public defender in Pennsylvania, Jason Labar, released a statement on Kohlberger's behalf that reads Kohlberger is eager to be exonerated and looks forward to resolving these matters as soon as possible.
Eager to be exonerated.
Mr. Kohlberger, the statement goes on, has been accused of very serious crimes, but the American justice system cloaks him in a veil of innocence.
He should be presumed innocent until proven otherwise, not tried in the court of public opinion.
One should not pass judgment about the facts of the case unless and until a fair trial in court, at which time all sides may be heard and inferences challenged.
Labar told NBC's Today show that Brian believes he will be exonerated.
He believes he's going to be exonerated.
That's what he believes.
Those were his words.
When we interviewed Phil Houston, author of the book Spy the Lie and former CIA officer, he noted that exonerated comment.
He did release a statement to us, all of us, through his lawyer that he looks forward to being exonerated.
So he's definitely trying to tell us, I am going to be found not guilty, but the words used raised a red flag for you.
Why?
There's something very important missing from that statement, Megan, and that is I didn't do it.
And it is in their efforts to focus on convincing everybody that they didn't do it, they forget to say, I didn't do it.
And it is not a truthful fact for them.
In fact, they're dealing mentally with an ugly fact, which is, I did do it.
And so that gets pushed to the background.
And now I have to focus on strategy and how do I get out of this?
Since the arrest, we have heard bits and pieces from Kohlberger's defense team.
In May, at Kohlberger's arraignment, he and his attorney made the bizarre decision to stand silent and make the judge enter Kohlberger's not guilty plea.
And, Ms. Taylor, is Mr. Kohlberger prepared to plead to these charges?
You are, we will be standing silent.
Because Mr. Kohlberger is standing silent, I'm going to enter not guilty pleas on each.
Charge has one, two, three, four, and five.
Kohlberger sat there in an orange jumpsuit but did not speak.
Kohlberger's defense team has been very active in hammering the prosecution with motion practice.
In June, in an effort to get the DNA evidence thrown out, the defense floated a theory that Kohlberger's DNA might have been planted on the knife sheath and described the process as rigged, saying the state was purely focused on Kohlberger and used a quote, Bizarrely complex DNA tree experiment to make their match.
They tried to dismiss the grand jury indictment entirely, claiming that the grand jury had been misled about the proper standard of proof.
That was not successful.
And then, in a formal objection, the defense team has gone public with one hint of what we believe is to come at trial, claiming Kohlberger has an alibi.
This is something they would be required to disclose, and we'll get into it in just a bit.
And of course, the big news came in August, with the trial just six weeks away as of then.
Kohlberger waived his right to a speedy trial, and the trial that was set to begin in October was postponed indefinitely.
His defense team argued they needed far more time to prepare and go through all the material provided to them by the prosecution, especially as the state said they plan to seek the death penalty in this case.
So here we sit with no trial date as of December 2023.
Soon, we will take you down an incredible road, a truly fascinating possibility about an entirely different direction this case could take once those defense attorneys get on their feet.
A theory expertly crafted by the longtime journalist and author Howard Bloom, who covered this case in great detail for Airmail News.
Bloom's forthcoming book on this case will be published in the spring by HarperCollins.
You're not going to want to miss that.
We're going to bring you some of Bloom's writing throughout this episode.
With his agreement.
But let's start with the case against Kohlberger.
The DNA evidence found on the knife sheath in the house on 1122 King Road.
That's critical.
But as Bloom writes, the DNA here may not be exactly irrefutable.
The consumer DNA kits that are sold in your local CVS need about 750 to 1,000 nanograms to find out all they need to know about you.
That's not much, it's smaller than a speck of floating dust and a whole lot less substantial.
A single nanogram is as heavy as a breeze.
It weighs a few trillionths of a pound.
There's nothing to it.
But crime scenes often contain a whole lot less DNA than that.
The forensic teams will routinely wind up with only 100 or so nanograms of DNA.
Yet scientists can nevertheless work their magic and use even this microscopic amount of genetic evidence to nail the criminal.
The problem, however, was that the DNA on the knife sheath here Authorities would concede on background, was less than 100 nanograms.
A whole lot less.
A mere fraction, in fact, of a single nanogram.
Nothing more than just a handful of microscopic sized cells.
In total, according to knowledgeable sources, about 20 cells, reports Bloom.
Maybe they whispered, even fewer.
The DNA sample was as small as a fragment of a speck balanced on the head of a tiny pin.
It no longer mattered that they had previously drawn a blank trying to make a link between the DNA on the knife sheath, button, and Brian Kohlberger.
They had succeeded in doing the next best thing, and they were convinced that was good enough.
They had matched the speck of DNA recovered from the murder house to the DNA embedded in the trash of Michael Kohlberger, the suspect's father.
And while moralists might find biblical authority for the argument that the father, Is not responsible for his son's alleged sins, the more practical geneticists had found an indisputable link.
Quote, at least 99.9998% of the male population would be expected to be excluded from the possibility of being the suspect's biological father.
End quote.
Meaning the DNA on the knife sheath button belonged, the Idaho authorities asserted, to Michael Kohlberger's son, Brian.
So, they had the knife sheath with a miraculous DNA match, but minuscule amounts and apparently only touch DNA, which, as we discussed in episode two, is not exactly a smoking gun.
A defense attorney can do a lot to poke holes in touch DNA.
And while the knife sheath was found, the knife was not.
Where's the supposed murder weapon?
Still nothing on that, as far as we know.
Eyewitnesses and Phone Pings Analyzed00:15:17
Then there's the evidence around the white 2015 Hyundai Elantra.
That happens to be Kohlberger's car.
And separate but related, the cell phone pings from Kohlberger's phone.
That's not a slam dunk for the prosecution here either.
Take, for instructive example, the now infamous sightings of the white Hyundai Elantra on surveillance camera footage in the vicinity of the King Roadhouse in the pre dawn minutes subsequent to the savage killings of the four college students.
Within days of the murders, the Moscow police had gathered a stream of video.
Featuring what they quickly dubbed Suspect Vehicle One.
Only they had a problem with the quality of the images.
They were flickering, recorded in varying light.
The pixels had captured a fast moving white car, but that was about all the local cops could say for sure.
So the promising but far from conclusive videos were swiftly dispatched to Building 27958A, Pod E, Quantico, Virginia.
That was where the forensic examiners of the Image Analysis Unit of the FBI. Operational Technology Division worked their magic using a bit of software that had been originally developed at the cost of about $1 million taxpayer dollars for a secretive Defense Department outfit nestled deep in the clandestine heart of the deep state, the Irregular Warfare Technical Support Directorate.
With the click of a few computer keys, the program searches through a staggering inventory of cars until it ultimately, according to the confident government description, Identifies the make and model of the vehicle in a still image.
And it worked, like a charm, on the handful of videos the Moscow cops had gathered.
Or more precisely, three charms.
The FBI forensic examiner first deduced that suspect vehicle one was a 2011 through 13 Hyundai Elantra.
Then, upon further review, to use the chagrined phrase of the candid Idaho authorities, he decided the mysterious Hyundai.
Might very well be actually a 2011 through 16 vehicle.
And when he pored over the image of a car consistent with the Hyundai near the murder scene that was caught on camera not long after the killings racing toward Pullman, Washington, he deduced that it was a 2014 through 16 Hyundai.
That is, he cast a pretty broad net, and he cast it three times to boot.
Still, when it turned out that Brian Kohlberger owned a 2015 white Hyundai Elantra, it was right in the ballpark of the FBI's analysis of the make and model of Suspect Vehicle One.
But it was a super dome sized ballpark.
It had been stretched to cover five full years of cars.
A smart defense attorney could drive a fleet of Hyundais through a speculative gap that wide.
And that wasn't all.
There was further cause for hand wringing in the aftermath of the FBI's vaunted forensic image analysis.
Despite all the inventive manipulation of the pixels in the video footage of suspect vehicle one, the analysts still could not come up with a legible shot of the license plate.
They couldn't even offer a guess.
They had no idea.
Even more vexing, there wasn't a single legible image of the driver.
The bureau wizards tried all sorts of photographic tricks to pull a face from the blur, as you can imagine.
In the end, however, the best they could decipher was a dark, murky shadow.
Hovering over the steering wheel, and he can't slap handcuffs on a shadow.
At a glance, the new evidence seemed deeply incriminating.
Kohlberger's car was arguably placed near the King Road house immediately before the murder and later hightailing it away from the scene of the crime in the pre dawn aftermath.
His cell phone pinged to towers that seemed to correlate to the Elantra's route.
However, when examined closely, it turned out that the maps had been sketched with a swirling impressionistic hand.
Rather than with a cartographer's rigor.
What went unmentioned deliberately when the police shared their handiwork with the public was that those cell phone towers cast a wide net.
Their range can be as broad as 14 miles.
And in a cozy town like Moscow, that takes in a whole lot of territory.
It's more wishful thinking than solid detective work to put Kohlberger's phone at a precise spot at a certain time.
Being in the vicinity is not the same as being at an exact address.
Just ask anyone whose Amazon delivery wound up at a neighbor's house, or any of the combative defense attorneys who've succeeded in convincing courts to question the reliability and accuracy of the FBI's attempts to map the signal footprints cast by cell towers.
Our Megan Kelly Shell lawyers, they come on for a segment we have called Kelly's Court.
They know the challenges here, as famed former prosecutor Marsha Clark and defense attorney Mark Garrigos discussed with me when we had them on earlier this year.
The car was spotted there by surveillance cameras.
Before the fact, for weeks before the fact, which indicates the possibility of stalking.
And then you have the cell phone pings that corroborate the movements of the car.
Then you have the observation by DM, the other girl who lives there, that makes it very clear the intruder is there.
And also, she has the one characteristic of bushy eyebrows that did go along with his appearance.
And that's not the strongest thing.
And I'm never a big fan of eyewitness identification cases.
But when you start to put it all together, it is starting to look that way.
Now, you're right at this point.
It's not a slam dunk.
It looks very much like it's moving in that direction, but that's why they're continuing to investigate.
And, you know, of course, they're going to turn his apartment upside down.
They're going to turn this crime scene upside down.
And we're going to see a lot more in days to come.
Go ahead, Mark.
What are your thoughts on that?
I don't disagree with Marcia.
I think that you've got, to me, it's probable cause all day long.
However, I've said it before and I'll say it again there's so many holes in this.
I've had, I can't tell you the number of murder cases that have turned out that cell phone evidence ended up exonerating my client as opposed to showing that he was guilty.
As I'm sitting right here, I could be using my phone and it could be pinging onto two towers 12 miles away from each other just by virtue of the amount of traffic on one of the towers.
So I've never been a fan of the cell phone triangulation.
It's a good tool to try to get you there, but I've used it to show that somebody was 40 miles away at the time of the crime and exonerated them.
So that's not going to get them there.
They also, the fact that the phone was not being used, During the two hour period.
I know law enforcement speculates that he turned it off.
There's other explanations, like he wasn't there.
So, those kinds of things, you get jury instructions to say two reasonable alternatives.
You got to pick the one that points towards innocence.
They need more evidence.
There is at least one other arrow in the prosecution's quiver the possibility of an actual eyewitness.
As we told you about in episode one, her name is Dylan Mortensen.
Yes, one of the surviving roommates claims to have actually seen the killer.
Despite the fact that she never called the police until someone else did it from her phone more than seven hours later.
Still, she described to police the next day seeing someone 5'10 or taller, male, not very muscular, but athletically built with bushy eyebrows.
This physical description, while vague, certainly matches Kohlberger.
Will it be enough?
As Bloom writes, cop after cop promises that the single unshakable reason Kohlberger will be sent by the state to his richly deserved death is Bill Thompson.
The county prosecutor.
Thompson, his long white biblical beard flailing about as the wind roars.
Thompson in his down home uniform of jeans and fleece vests.
Thompson, the wry musician who plays rock, folk, country with his band.
Thompson, who had been in office for over 30 years.
Thompson, who had famously done the impossible in the closely followed Rachel Anderson murder case and won a conviction without the body ever being found.
An improbable victory that sent no less a culprit than a blood relative of Al Capone to jail for life.
Rumor has it that this will be Thompson's last hurrah.
There is no way cops believe that he would retire to idle away his days strumming his guitar and casting his fishing rod without having secured his already impressive reputation with a final victory in a big trial like this.
And trials just don't come any bigger.
than this one in Lehigh County.
But will it all be enough?
Will it be enough for a prosecution to prevail?
To the defense.
First up, Ann Taylor, Kohlberger's lead public defense attorney, in action from this year.
As the court knows, we have been representing Mr. Kohlberger since the very end of December of 2022.
And during the course of the last several months, there has been a lot of discovery that's been requested and a lot that's been supplied.
I come here asking the court to compel discovery.
I'm seeking an order directing that we receive this discovery.
As we told you, the defense has made clear that they.
Plan on arguing that Kohlberger has an alibi.
Well, here's what we know.
In August, defense attorney Ann Taylor and her team filed a formal statement disclosing that Kohlberger plans to use an alibi defense.
She's required to tell the court that.
But she teased that it would be a unique one.
From the filing, quote, Mr. Kohlberger has long had a habit of going for drives alone.
Often he would go for drives at night.
He did so late on November 12th and into November 13th, 2022.
Mr. Kohlberger is not claiming to be at a specific location at a specific time.
At this time, there is not a specific witness to say precisely where Mr. Kohlberger was at each moment of the hours between late night, November 12th, and early morning, November 13th, 2022.
He was out driving during the late night and early morning hours of November 12th through 13th, 2022.
Counsel for Mr. Kohlberger is aware that case law broadens the definition of alibi with the statutory requirement of a specific location to more broadly include.
Disclosure of information that tends to state the person claiming alibi was at a place other than the location of an offense.
Mr. Kohlberger has complied to the extent possible at this time.
Corroboration of Brian Kohlberger not being at 1122 King may be brought out through cross examination of the state's witnesses.
At this time, Mr. Kohlberger cannot be more specific about the possible witnesses and exactly what they will say.
The defense has been hampered by the state's own choices.
The state chose a secret grand jury rather than the planned preliminary hearing.
Had the state moved forward with the preliminary hearing, the defense would have had the opportunity to develop testimony through cross examination and witness presentation and That's it.
That's his quote, alibi.
He was out driving alone.
But there also may be corroboration of him not being at the location brought out through some unspecified future cross examination of someone and witness presentation, but we don't know of exactly whom.
Now, we do know that Kohlberger's neighbor in Washington state said that Kohlberger was often active at night.
But what about that night, November 12th, leading into the 13th?
Could there be more to the story?
His lawyers have been diligent.
They have pounded the courthouse table with motions, a rat a tat tat of demands for discovery, objections to protective orders, and so on.
Even a curious request for the personnel files of three of the cops who played a role in helping to clamp the cuffs on Kohlberger.
It's a seemingly desperate strategy that has left the Moscow, Idaho authorities bemused, Howard Bloom reports.
In the second floor detective shack of the Moscow Police Department building, the mood is, he says, haughty and confident.
S O D D I, the cops taunt derisively.
Some other dude did it.
How many times have they heard that, and how did those cases work out?
We got our man, they insist, and there's no way he's going to wiggle out of this.
With an attention grabbing, oratorical drumroll, defense sources enumerate the large, lingering mysteries the prosecution has refused to address.
And they very pointedly make the case that these inconvenient truths, when lined up end to end, hint at another still untold story.
Consider the timeline for the murders, the prosecution asserts, was an extremely tight window.
Remember, one victim was on her phone looking at TikTok at 4 12 a.m., and police estimate the suspect was gone by 4 25 a.m.
Could a single assassin, a graduate student, not a Sicario, get the job done with such disciplined professionalism?
And then disappear into the night without leaving a single drop of his blood in the house, in his car, on his clothes, or in his apartment?
The stunned cops arriving on the scene had described what they encountered as a bloodbath.
Is this lack of blood evidence testimony to the killer's fastidiousness or a prod to go down other ruminative paths?
And remember, too, Cayley's father had found a measure of small comfort in the fact that his brave daughter had, the coroner had revealed to him, fought back like a tiger.
And yet, no traces of cuts, scrapes, or bruises were observed on Brian Kohlberger.
Four young, fit targets, and he somehow traipsed away with his pasty skin as smooth and unblemished as any sedentary academic's.
Then there's the coroner's autopsy reports.
What was behind the delay in the determination of Ethan's wounds?
The autopsy was performed on November 17th, but the report on his death was not issued for nearly a month, December 15th.
Autopsy Wounds Raise New Doubts00:05:23
Had there been a problem in reaching the findings, a final analysis that had been subject to weeks of debate?
The coroner's descriptions of the wounds, as noted in court documents, seems to differ from floor to floor in the house.
Kaylee and Maddie.
Lying in the same bed on the third floor, he suffered through, quote, visible stab wounds.
Yet on the floor below, Xana succumbed to, quote, wounds caused by an edged weapon.
What does that mean?
Ethan's, again, that's Xana's boyfriend, were, quote, caused by sharp force injuries.
Why the difference?
Was there some doubt in the coroner's mind that the wounds were all caused by the same weapon?
And speaking of the murder weapon, Where is it?
The knife, or is it knives, used in the attack has not been found.
There is not an incriminating trace of a weapon that can be tied to Kohlberger, at least not that we know of.
But these suspicions are just preludes to the bigger mysteries that keep the defense up at night.
In an objection to the state's motion for a protective order they had filed late in June, the team zeroed in on a few of the lingering questions.
It is a revelatory document and a provocative one.
They point out that back in December, the prosecution was made aware of two additional males' DNA found inside the King Road house, as well as male DNA on a glove found outside the residence just days after the murders.
If the DNA had been Kohlberger's, the prosecution would have been screaming this revelation from the Moscow rooftops.
The state's stony silence, the defense believes, can mean only one thing the DNA comes from three other men.
And so the obvious and yet very pertinent questions remain unanswered who are they?
And how do these three unknown men fit into the horrific events of that night, if at all?
And there is still another ticking bomb in the court document.
The motion dramatically demolishes the tantalizing press reports that had been buzzing around the case for several months.
Forget the unfounded stories about online direct messages between Kohlberger and one of the victims.
Forget the alleged run in at a Main Street Moscow restaurant where two of the girls worked.
The defense asserts plainly that there is no connection, quote unquote, Between Mr. Kohlberger and the victims.
And if there is no connection, then there is no motive, no obvious motive anyway.
And without a motive, the random brutal killing of four college students by a grad student from a nearby university sure is an enigma.
Why?
Why would he do it?
It doesn't make sense.
But there's still another puzzler at the beating heart of this case, namely the eight hour gap between one of the surviving roommates, Dylan Mortensen, First, heard disquieting noises in the house and spotted a masked, black dressed intruder.
Police were finally summoned eight hours later.
There have been a lot of agile, emphatic offerings to explain away this remarkable delay, and none so far, the defense believes, has been satisfactory, or they believe, has the ring of truth.
Meanwhile, these simmering doubts have only intensified now that the defense has been able to read the roommate's grand jury testimony.
A person familiar with the grand jury findings that led to Kohlberger's indictment told Howard Bloom with undisguised bafflement and frustration that Dylan Mortensen's testimony, quote, raised more questions than it answered.
Then the defense, along with virtually everyone else with access to the internet, watched a newly released video that showed a pickup truck leaving the neighborhood of the murder scene just minutes after the white Hyundai Elantra.
Was this some neighbor heading off at a pre dawn hour to his early morning job?
A Romeo who didn't want to stay for breakfast?
Or was it something else a whole lot more significant?
Perhaps it was another piece in a complex puzzle that, despite the state's confident assurances, has not yet been satisfactorily pieced together.
So the defense has gone on offense.
The accumulated doubts have worked to liberate them from poking holes in the prosecution's case.
And with this freedom, They have begun to explore new narratives, alternative versions of what might have happened on that fateful night in November on King Road.
And if Kohlberger was not the killer, or if he was an accomplice rather than the sole perp, then they realized they had to go back to what had been previously brushed over.
They had to work their way to an explanation that made sense.
And the farther they traveled, according to people familiar with what the defense team is exploring, the more the trail led inexorably to drugs.
We know about Kohlberger's past drug use.
We also know from a variety of reporting that the area where the murders took place was a hotbed of drug activity.
Then, last March, a former University of Idaho frat president, a 22 year old journalism major in his junior year, died.
Pool Party Drugs and Accomplices00:15:13
And in the aftermath of his sad and needless demise, new avenues of speculation multiplied, spreading out in previously unexplored and surprising directions.
It was spring break, and Caden Young was looking to score, and he succeeded, only to pay with his life.
That is a thumbnail history of the events as detailed in the initial news stories.
However, the voluminous police reports, as well as a conversation with one of the detectives who had led the investigation and with a legal aid lawyer who subsequently got involved, offer a more detailed account, one that introduces two new actors to Caden's story and perhaps to ours.
There are a couple who quickly caught the defense team's rapt attention and continue to hold it like a magnet.
It was all too common, another young life ravaged by fentanyl.
And within days, it might very well have become simply another tragic statistic in a national body count that is climbing toward pandemic proportions.
But then the police made two arrests in connection with Caden Young's death.
Hurrying to room 214 of the Holiday Inn, where Young had first overdosed, the police arrested Emma Bailey, 22, of Moscow.
And Demetrius Robinson, 36, of Tacoma, just as they were apparently preparing to leave.
They were each charged with one count of conspiracy to commit a violation of the Uniform Controlled Substances Act.
That is, they had allegedly supplied the student with a lethal fentanyl laced cocaine.
They were held on $100,000 bail.
Pleading not guilty but unable to post bail, they were shuffled off to the Lewis County Jail where they were to await their May 30th trial date.
The pair spent two months and five days behind bars.
And during that time, law enforcement investigators and the press kept digging.
And what they unearthed grabbed the attention of the preternaturally curious Kohlberger defense team.
Demetrius Robinson, or D, as he was widely known in the college towns of both Moscow, Idaho, and Pullman, Washington, had quite a rap sheet.
Extensive was the adjective the local paper used to describe it.
Violent was the modifier, though, that leaped up in many people's minds.
Among the eyebrow raising highlights, A 15 month prison sentence for a second degree assault in Pullman back in 2018, a second degree rape investigation two years later, and then in 2021, an arrest in Pullman for suspicion of possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver, and for allegedly assaulting a companion when their alleged partnership went south.
While the drug case had fallen apart because of legal concerns over an overly gung ho search of a hotel room, the fourth degree assault and harassment charges stuck, and Robinson served 151 days in jail.
Also scattered about Robinson's sheet were five charges for driving with a suspended license, one of which landed him in jail for five days.
There was an outstanding arrest warrant for another.
As for Emma Bailey, her record was more banal.
A DUI arrest this past February after she breezed through a red light in Pullman around 2 a.m.
When the cops dug deeper, they grew to suspect that the couple were very possibly dealing drugs they had scored in Seattle to the local colleges in Pullman and Moscow.
In fact, they discovered, and the detective's incident report flatly stated, there were investigations in other jurisdictions for Emma and Demetrius for narcotics trafficking.
But just five days before the trial for supplying the lethal cocaine was to begin, a judge dismissed the case.
Their legal aid lawyer had zeroed in on a technicality, but it was clearly a very consequential one the question of prosecutorial jurisdiction.
Apparently, they had been scheduled to be tried in the county where the death had occurred rather than where the cocaine had been ingested.
But their good fortune might be short lived.
The judge dismissed that case without prejudice, which means it can be refiled.
In the same court of law, if the authorities draft a new and more carefully drawn indictment, is one in the works?
All a fuming Centralia detective who'd been involved in the case from the morning he'd found Young's inert body would say is, We are not going to let this case disappear.
And he's not alone.
The case hasn't disappeared from the thoughts of the Kohlberger defense team either.
Why?
What does this have to do with him?
It is a touchstone, according to people familiar with their inquiries.
That has the team digging deep into the possibility of narcotics trafficking along Greek Row in Moscow and wondering whether these furtive activities might have somehow played a part in the quadruple murders.
What, if anything, they have uncovered is wrapped up tight by the iron bands of the gag order.
The overview offered by the Seattle DEA field office is a tale of cutthroat international intrigue, a pipeline that runs from China, where the fentanyl precursor chemicals are produced.
To the sinister Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels in Mexico, which manufacture the drugs and then smuggle the too often lethal product to their distribution networks in northwestern urban hubs such as Seattle and Spokane.
Then, with the eager help of a freelance army of small time distributors, the tentacles of the octopus reach into the seemingly wholesome all American counties and college towns stretching across the great outdoors.
That's the view from a thousand feet.
But Sheriff Brett Myers.
Head of the Quad City Drug Task Force, a multi jurisdictional team propped up in part by federal money, whose territory includes the university towns of Moscow and Pullman, offers a ground level account.
And it is enough to give anyone whose kid is heading off to college in the area the willies.
Matter of factly, the sheriff shares that his task force is working with college kids in the local schools whom they've caught dealing MDMA and cocaine, flipping them, and then using the students.
To go after the big local dealers.
And once the scared, witless college kids have helped his team ID the foot soldiers, we go up the ladder to get the people tied to the cartels in the cities.
There are a lot of unanswered questions, he acknowledges.
Pressed further about the quadruple murder of the Idaho students, he candidly goes on Could it have been a drug related case?
I can't rule it out.
It's not improbable, he says, adding, From what I know, That would answer a lot of questions.
But did any of the victims know these two accused drug dealers, Bailey and Robinson?
Maybe.
Maybe.
Ashlyn Couch, then a University of Idaho senior, was an original signer of the lease, stay with me here, on the King Road house with the others, but she never actually moved in.
Nonetheless, she remained a friend as well as a sorority sister of several of the residents.
And according to some reports, she would visit from time to time.
Couch also follows Emma Bailey, one of our arrestees, on Instagram, which could mean something or nothing.
But so we have the person who is the lessor on the King Road house following one of these accused drug dealers on Instagram.
It all does lead to another question Did Emma Bailey, accused drug dealer, know Brian Kohlberger?
We know he had a drug past.
This question has persuaded investigators associated with the defense to revisit Brian Kohlberger's first day in Moscow.
That was three months before the murders.
When he met, His next door neighbor, Christian Martinez.
It was then that Martinez invited his new neighbor, Brian Kohlberger, to a pool party.
This is back on July 9th at the Grove, a clappered complex of buildings filled with college kids, mostly University of Idaho students, just a 15 minute or so drive across the state line in Moscow.
Recall, Brian lived in Washington state.
Thanks.
I have to run and get trunks, Kohlberger texted back to Martinez.
And so, while Zach DJ Grape Vinyl Cartwright A muscular Ph.D. in food science with the countenance of an Aztec chieftain and a jet black man bun manned the turntables at this party.
Kohlberger, in his new trunks, perched at the shallow end of the large pool.
Bad bunny wailed from the speakers, reports Bloom, imploring party, party.
Chicken and steak were being grilled to make tacos.
There was beer, wine, tequila.
The sun was blinding.
There must have been a hundred or more college kids on the deck surrounding the two large ovals that formed the pristine blue pool.
And just down the hill from the housing complex, close enough for bad bunny to come rattling through its windows, was the Moscow police headquarters.
Taking a seat next to Kohlberger that day was Beseth Salamjan, a laid back, darkly handsome, off and on WSU undergraduate who was friends with Kohlberger's new neighbor, Martinez, who had invited Kohlberger to the party, as well as DJ Cartwright.
Salamjan and Kohlberger got to talking.
And while the details of their conversation have long been forgotten, Salamjan vividly remembers how, quote, the dude would talk chin up straight to my face.
We were just shooting shit, he says, but he was definitely one serious dude.
Nice enough, though.
Then Salamanjan stood up and went off to dance.
So Kohlberger, perhaps not wanting to be a wallflower as the party was gathering steam, went over to talk to the DJ.
He was asking me about my speakers.
All kind of technical stuff, Cartwright remembers.
But he had this way about him.
You know, those people who don't understand personal space?
He was one of them.
He'd get real close.
It was off putting.
Says Cartwright.
Finally, Cartwright told his new acquaintance, I'm deejaying, man.
I'll catch you later.
With that, Kohlberger returned to the shallow end of the pool.
And before too long, Salam John returned too.
And he witnessed two events that, in their pregnant way, are provocative footnotes to all that would happen in Moscow just a few months later.
He watched as Kohlberger abruptly jumped up without warning and approached a girl in a black thong bikini with pink hair and a complex tattoo design on her left thigh.
Then Kohlberger, after only a brief conversation, asked her for her phone number, and he got it.
Next, as if a man on a mission, he turned to the pink haired woman's friend, also in a black two piece, and asked for her number, too, and he succeeded once again.
Only after that, perhaps feeling he had accomplished all he'd set out to do, more, in fact, Bryan quietly shuffled off while the party was just hitting a groove.
He said no goodbyes.
Did he ever call the two women?
They insist he did not, at least not long enough to speak to them.
As it happens, both women received several hang-up calls in the aftermath of the party, but neither of them ever had any thoughts about who the culprit might have been until Kohlberger's arrest.
And by then, the FBI was inquiring into what went on at that pool party.
The agents commandeered a room at the red brick Lightly Student Services building adjacent to the main WSU campus, and with a professional politeness that impressed the students, began interviewing anyone who knew Brian Kohlberger.
In the process, they inquired if anyone had any photos or even a video from the July 9th pool party.
A few were produced.
It was not an extensive record of the festivities, more a haphazard collection.
Of snapshots and at least one brief, somewhat random video.
The agents were searching for Consalves, Mogan, Kernodal, or Chapin.
They could not find them, which means they weren't at the pool party, or they simply did not appear in the photos or the video that were taken that day.
Or maybe they just weren't in the handful of photos and videos that were shared with the Bureau.
But what if the FBI's review done last November in the early stages of this investigation was too narrow?
What if they had scrutinized the pictures in the video and had ignored the possible presence of another guest whose appearance could put a whole new spin on what happened at the house on King Road?
What if accused drug dealer Emma Bailey had been at the pool party?
If she had been, then she might very well have also been approached by Kohlberger on the make.
And if, as the police allege, she was in the habit of dealing recreational drugs, It might have been a connection a one time heroin addict like Kohlberger would have relished.
This is all speculation, but the defense is looking into it.
It might have been a connection that, unlike his approaches to the two other female partygoers, could have had some longevity.
In fact, he might have even visited Bailey from time to time at her home in Moscow, which, as it happens, was tucked into the very end of a cul de sac a minute or so away from the murder house by car.
Which would put it very much within the same incriminating cell tower radius as the scene of the crime on King Road.
So, was Emma at this party?
Howard Bloom talked to seven people who had been there, and the responses he received, all shared after a good deal of thought, ran the gamut from, I think she was, to, she might have been.
But no one said she definitely was there, and no one said she definitely was not.
In short, there remains something for the defense to seek its teeth into a hypothetical alternative to the version of the case presented by the prosecution.
Now, this theory, as laid out by Bloom, is just that a theory.
But the defense will surely try to suggest to the jury that there were other reasons for Kohlberger to have been out driving that night, perhaps tapping into an old habit on a night he would later wish he had spent at home.
Keep in mind, the defense does not need to prove anything here.
It just needs to muddy the waters enough to create.
Reasonable doubt.
Unanswered Questions Swirl Around00:15:06
In our next and final episode, we dig into the as yet unanswered questions that may affect the jury's determination on that score.
We'll see you then.
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the Megyn Kelly Show.
I'm Megyn Kelly.
All week we've been bringing you a special edition of the show where we take you inside the murder case that has captivated the country for the better part of a year.
The story of the quadruple murder in Moscow, Idaho, and of suspect Brian Kohlberger.
Today, we conclude our series.
We brought you the details of the murder, the arrest, the potential paths for the prosecution and defense when the trial begins next year, and we examined the dark side of Kohlberger and his past.
And now, some of the unanswered questions that are still swirling about this unfathomable crime.
As this concludes, I would love to hear your thoughts on all of it.
What stands out to you about this case?
Have you made up your mind about Kohlberger's guilt?
And if not, why not?
What lingering questions do you still have?
This case will be front and center in 2024.
We'll be covering the trial as it happens.
Remember, cameras will be in the courtroom for this one, which will be absolutely fascinating.
Email me your thoughts on this program on the Kohlberger case at Megan, M E G Y N, at MeganKelly.com.
All right, Megan.
At MeganKelly.com.
And if you go to MeganKelly.com and sign up there for our weekly email, we'll provide you with behind the scenes details on the reporting of this case.
As with our previous episodes, today's features the writing and the reporting of legendary crime journalist and author Howard Bloom.
Bloom has been reporting on this case for nearly a year.
He's written compellingly about it for airmail news.
His forthcoming book on the case will be published in the spring by HarperCollins.
Keep that on your radar.
But for now, big questions include the following One, assuming it was Kohlberger, as the police allege, why?
Why did he do it?
What could his motive have been?
Was he targeting a specific victim and then the crime spun out of control?
Two, if it was Kohlberger, is it possible he had help?
Could there be an accomplice in the picture here?
And three, what about the two surviving roommates, Dylan Mortensen and Bethany Funk?
What did they see?
Why didn't they call the police right away?
And what are they up to now?
As we tackle those questions, one name in particular stands out as a person who has been at the forefront of asking questions.
And pushing for answers.
It's not a podcaster or a crime reporter, although there have been plenty of those too.
It's a dad, a father with a deep and tragic connection to this story.
The four victims in the case Ethan Chapin, Kaylee Gonsalves, Zanna Kernodal, and Maddie Mogan all their parents have spoken out on behalf of their children, but one father in particular seems to have led the push for answers, and that is Steve Gonsalves, Kaylee's dad.
Within weeks, He was out on all the national news channels.
You can't imagine sending your girl to college and then they come back in a, you know, in an iron.
It was fast.
And nobody suffered and nobody felt like that kind of pain.
Every day that goes by and you don't hear anything, what does that do?
Just tells me statistically, I'm going to have to do more work myself.
I'm not going to sit here and just be a crybaby dad.
It's going to be a cold case if we don't do something within the next week or two.
He stayed on it.
Talking after Kohlberger's arrest and arraignment.
I'm just like everyone else.
I want to know exactly what's going on.
I want to see all the evidence.
Information will come out, but it doesn't have to come out in multiple times and multiple ways.
And continuing to push for the facts to get out to the public and to his family.
He and his wife, Christy, spoke to a local news outlet.
It's been almost a year.
I mean, it's hard to believe, right?
How are you guys doing?
I think people would love to know that.
I think we're doing the best we can.
And I think that that is to be thankful to all the people that are wondering about us.
They really get us through.
You know, co workers, friends, they're like family now.
And I think it'd be much harder without all the love and support.
Yeah, we've got a page where we're able to talk to people all across the world that this has made an impact and change in their life.
So that helps.
Behind the scenes, Steve has been active too, doing his own detective work before and after Kohlberger's arrest.
He says he needed to know if all the facts were uncovered.
He needed to keep pushing.
As Howard Bloom writes, among those Steve tracked down early in the case was Hunter Johnson, Ethan Chapin's frat brother and best friend.
Just before noon on November 13th, Hunter Johnson had been summoned by the two distraught survivors to the King Roadhouse, where he had discovered Ethan's body.
Days later, he gave his eyewitness account to Caley's dad, Steve, as a soldier might.
Straightforward, factual, and without either embellishment or emotion.
It was only when he finished that the two men, both overwhelmed, at last convulsed into tears.
Steve also made a point of knocking on the doors of the houses adjacent to the murder scene and interrogating the neighbors.
He was going where he felt he had to go, but his mission had not produced the desired result.
Over a month had passed since the murders, and there had been no arrests.
Only vague statements about a missing Hyundai Elantra that had been spotted near the King Roadhouse the night of the murders.
The authorities had yet to name a suspect.
It was infuriating.
The prospect of his daughter's murder becoming one more cold case was torture.
But as much as he needed to see a perp being let off in handcuffs, Steve Gonsalvez was also chasing after something else.
He needed to know why.
Why these kids?
Why this house?
Why had this nightmare enveloped his family's life?
For his own peace of mind, he required a motive.
And without this knowledge, nothing in his life from November 13th onward would ever make sense.
He did posit to Court TV in June that perhaps jealousy was a factor.
They're just two girls that were always happy, always filming.
So I think maybe he just seen that happiness and there's something in him that was jealous of the fact that two people could love each other and be like the best friends.
And I think that really rubbed him wrong and got him thinking about why do they have this great life and I don't.
And I think that's whoever he picked, that'll be the backstory is just a jealousy of their lifestyle.
Steve remains open to the possibility that others might also have been involved here, according to texts provided to Bloom.
It seems to Steve quite possible that there were more perpetrators in the house on King Road on the night his daughter and her friends were killed.
And if there were, they must still be at large.
He is furious that Kohlberger's trial, which had been scheduled to start on October 2nd, has been postponed indefinitely.
He fears, he's complained, according to Bloom, that the trial will not occur for many months or even years.
And he's particularly incensed by the no nonsense gag order that severely limits what the law enforcement authorities, the lawyers, and even the families of the victims can publicly say about the case.
It is not just that he deems this a violation of his fundamental constitutional rights.
Rather, the paucity of specific intelligence has created a vacuum that is being filled by rumors, half truths, and crackpot lies.
And once these malignant seeds are planted, they grow tall and wild on the internet.
Steve needs answers, not rumors.
And so, despite the arrest of a suspect, he has not abandoned his quest.
He has a clear mission, as he told News Nation in May.
I feel like we have a mission, we have a job to do, we have things that have to happen.
And when I see those things happening, that helps me understand that we're going in the right direction.
And that's always better than just sitting and waiting for who knows what's going to happen.
And it's not simply vanity, the belief that one middle aged guy with only a background in IT can get to the bottom of things in a special way.
It's fear that propels him, the fear that if he waits passively for the cops finally to share what little they have managed to uncover, it might be too late.
The remaining unidentified perpetrators will have gone to ground and justice will not be secured.
Nor will he ever get the terrible satisfaction of knowing the whole story.
He will never achieve the state of grace that comes he wants to believe.
With understanding a motive, he will never know the answer to the question at the beating heart of this case.
Why?
And so, for the past year, he has plowed on.
It has not been easygoing or always fruitful.
For one cruel example, early on, an enticing tip came his way, according to the texts from a source he described as a jailhouse snitch.
That's who gave him the tip.
It was a tale that offered to tie up all the loose ends of the case, and spurred on by that promise, both Steve and the private detective he had hired.
Fanned out with their inquiries into several states, energized by the intoxicating possibility that he was on the verge of accomplishing what the professionals had failed to do.
But in the bitter end, it was nothing more than an elaborate con, a malicious scheme to squeeze some money out of a grieving family's misery.
The experience was demoralizing.
As for the rumors of a drug deal gone bad being the underlying motive, Steve had been told by the authorities that the toxicity reports on all four of the victims established that they had no drugs.
In their system.
Besides, if they wanted to score some pot, there was no need to get involved with a street dealer.
The kids, he pointed out, could go down a street and in eight miles, there was a store where they could easily make a buy, despite the fact that marijuana remained illegal in Idaho.
Christy, his wife, went with them once to check it out.
He texted the friend, reports Bloom.
News Nation's Brian Enton asked prosecutor Bill Thompson in November 2022 if drugs were involved in the case.
And the veteran DA made no bones about the answer.
Could drugs be involved in all of this?
I have not heard that there's any suspicion that drugs played a role in the killings.
So, not like a drug deal gone bad or something like that?
I am not aware of anything like that, no.
What else did Steve learn as he did his own investigation into his daughter's murder?
Kohlberger had purchased a dark blue Dickie's long sleeve work uniform at the Walmart in Pullman, Washington, not long before the murders, was one thing he learned.
The authorities had a copy of the $49.99 receipt, and they also now had a theory to explain how Kohlberger had managed to escape from the crime scene without a scratch and without leaving an incriminating drop of blood in his getaway car or his apartment.
Perhaps he had worn the work uniform during the murders and then had disrobed before he got behind the wheel of his Hyundai Elantra for his circuitous drive back to his apartment.
Perhaps the authorities hypothesized he had stuffed the work suit into a plastic garbage bag and then shoved it into his trunk.
Only authorities could find no sign of the Dickie's outfit.
The police had looked high and low, but they could not find it, just as they could not locate the murder weapon.
They had a receipt for a K bar knife.
He had purchased Brian online months before the killings, but this too had seemingly vanished.
And as long as these two crucial pieces of evidence remained unavailable, what the killer wore and what the killer used, Steve feared the building case against Kohlberger would remain more open than shut.
Even more troubling, if true, was what Steve had learned from people who had spoken to members of the grand jury who had been presented with the prosecution's case.
It centered on the alleged behavior.
Of the two roommates who had miraculously survived the night unscathed.
We made a reference to it earlier.
How, he wondered, could they have been so blissfully unaware, sleeping through the savage pre dawn stabbing murders of four people in a narrow house with paper thin walls?
Steve had been told that the two survivors allegedly had not only been awake while the killings had taken place, but that they had heard everything.
More astonishingly, His grand jury sources alleged that the two girls had been texting one another as the murderer methodically went from one room to the next.
Of course, if that's true, police will have seen the records.
All of those texts will have been recorded.
The possibility that two people had a sense of the horror while it occurred and had not acted calling neither friends nor 911 left Steve floored.
Survivors Text During the Killings00:12:43
Again, this is according to Bloom.
And no less confounding they had.
If his sources were as knowledgeable as he believed, then let hour after hour tick away before they finally decided to summon friends.
It added an entirely new band of mystery to a crime that was already bound by so many unanswered questions.
Wracked by frustration and despair, all Steve could do was send a disheartened text to one of his fellow internet detectives There is so much more to this story than is in the media.
The time gap between when at least one roommate heard and possibly saw the intruder and when 911 was called remains one of the strangest things about this case.
Why neither Dylan nor Bethany, who was also home that night, called 911 until more than seven hours after the murders remains unclear.
In the end, while we do not know precisely who made the 911 call, we know it was not ultimately one of those roommates who called the police at all.
It was a friend calling from Dylan Mortensen's phone.
Murders around 4 a.m. and no phone call until almost noon.
Sure, it was a weekend.
College kids, they sleep late and tend to sleep soundly.
But we have to go back to the affidavit where we learned that while roommate Bethany Funk was sleeping through the entire ordeal, at least according to what she told police, Dylan Mortensen was awake.
A reminder here's what we learned.
And the initials DM are for Dylan Mortensen.
DM stated this is from the police affidavit.
She originally went to sleep in her bedroom on the southeast side of the second floor.
DM stated she was awoken at approximately 4 a.m. by what she stated sounded like Gonsalves playing with her dog in one of the upstairs bedrooms, which were located on the third floor.
A short time later, DM said she heard who she thought was Gonsalves say something to the effect of, There's someone here.
A review of records obtained from a forensic download of Xana Kernodal's phone shows this could also have been Kernodal, as her cellular phone indicated she was likely awake and using TikTok.
At approximately 4 12 a.m., DM stated she looked out of her bedroom but did not see anything when she heard the comment about someone being in the house.
DM stated she opened her door for a second time when she heard what she thought was crying coming from Kernodal's room.
DM then said she heard a male voice say something to the effect of, It's okay.
I'm going to help you.
At approximately 4 17 a.m., a security camera located at 11 12 King Road, a residence immediately to the northwest, Of 1122 King Road, picked up distorted audio of what sounded like voices or a whimper followed by a loud thud.
A dog can also be heard barking numerous times starting at 4 17 a.m.
The security camera is less than 50 feet from the west wall of Kernodal's bedroom.
DM stated she opened her door for the third time after she heard the crying and saw a figure clad in black clothing and a mask that covered the person's mouth and nose walking toward her.
DM described the figure as 5'10 or taller, male, not very muscular, but athletically built with bushy eyebrows.
The male walked past DM as she stood in a quote frozen shock phase, end quote.
The male walked toward the backsliding glass door.
DM locked herself in her room after seeing the male.
DM did not state that she recognized the male.
This leads investigators to believe that the murderer left the scene.
So a frozen shock phase, that appears to be the phrase given by Dylan to police as outlined in that affidavit.
But what else do we know?
First, very early on, questions about Dylan's actions that night became a public conversation, even among those closest to the victims.
Initially, the attorney representing the Gonzalez family, Shannon Gray, defended Dylan's actions, saying that Dylan must have been scared to death and was still a victim in this case when he called into Fox News in January.
No, no, 911 calls.
I mean, that raises a great many issues.
How are you kind of sorting that together?
Well, you remember, she's a victim in this case.
She is, everybody kind of forgets that.
She is still a victim in this case.
And the fact that she was able to give some additional identification, I think, is beneficial to the case.
She was able to give kind of hype and build and what they looked like a little bit, bushy eyebrows, things along those lines.
And in regards to going back into her room, and she was scared.
She was scared to death, and rightly so.
But according to the Daily Mail, Ethan Chapin's sister in law posted on Reddit that Dee, which we understand to mean Dylan Mortensen, quote, supposedly called all the girls in the house after crying and screaming stopped, and no one answered.
And she still didn't call the police.
She goes on, quote, she needs to explain herself and her actions that night.
We don't have anything more from the sister in law on that, but you can bet if she knows something along these lines, she may be a witness.
The reason Dylan and Bethany did not call 911 remains a mystery to this day, one of the biggest of the case.
Perhaps it is what Dylan told police the next day that she was just paralyzed with fear for seven hours.
Multiple reports suggest that we expect a trial.
We will hear from both roommates in their own words, as both women would likely testify.
How helpful their testimony will be for the prosecution or the defense remains to be seen.
Koberger's defense team tried to subpoena roommate Bethany Funk in April.
To testify at Kohlberger's scheduled preliminary hearing.
After fighting this subpoena, she eventually agreed to be interviewed at home in Nevada.
The Kohlberger defense initially alleged that Bethany Funk had information that is, quote, exculpatory to the defendant, meaning potentially supportive of his innocence.
We don't know why they might believe that or whether they really do, but what we do know is that if either roommate talks at trial, we will see it.
Cameras will be there.
The televised nature of this trial is something I discussed with former prosecutor Marsha Clark earlier this year.
She brought her O.J. Simpson trial experience into her answer.
The downsides are huge.
The problem that you face, of course, is that it turns into a circus.
Now, in fairness, if you have a judge who knows how to keep the guardrails on, it can be fine.
But if he doesn't and he just lets the cameras be turned on 24 7, it's a nightmare.
And you wind up having people come forward who just want the limelight and really have nothing to say.
Or you have people that are afraid of the limelight and have something to say and don't want to come forward.
You have lawyers who are, you know, stumping for camera time and FaceTime and, you know, and extending things interminably with no real argument to make because they want to be famous.
You have prosecutors who probably do the same thing in some instances.
And, you know, you have a judge who sits down for a six part interview with the news anchor to talk about his life in his past.
So I don't know where I pulled that one from.
So, I do.
So, I mean, it causes these kinds of distortions and it does cause a circus.
So, you know, I understand the problem.
Fred Goldman said, and he changed my mind, but the world would never know what the evidence really was.
The world would never know and bother to read the newspapers after the fact about all of the evidence that we were able to produce.
Huge, a huge, overwhelming amount of evidence of guilt.
He was right.
You know, if you have these people moving around in the courtroom, people pay attention in a different way.
So, you know, I've come down on the side of having.
A certain kind of thing where you allow the cameras in the courtroom when the jury is in the courtroom so that what is disseminated to the public is what the jury sees.
But when the jury is not there and you're having hearings about the evidence that should and should not come in, et cetera, that kind of thing, then you should not have cameras in the courtroom.
You can have print reporters, that's fine, but having the cameras in the courtroom should be banned when the jury's not there.
And with that kind of caveat, I think it's a good thing.
In the one year since the murders, Bethany and Dylan have kept a low profile, they have not spoken publicly a single time.
We know Bethany lives in Nevada, while Dylan was recently seen in social media posts partying with friends at a University of Idaho sorority and at Halloween parties.
Now we turn to unanswered question number two.
How likely is it that Brian Kohlberger acted alone if he is indeed the perpetrator?
Is it possible he had an accomplice or more than one accomplice?
Much of this speculation stems from the fact that Kohlberger is someone with no known criminal history.
And yet in what appears to be his first serious crime ever, he brutally stabs four individuals to death, killing them without detection and commits this heinous act in less than 15 minutes?
Initially, one of the storylines that led some to believe there might be another person involved was when Kohlberger's defense team filed a motion early on in the case requesting, among other things, information about a potential, quote, co defendant in the case.
This seemed to connect to an early question from Kohlberger himself to police in Pennsylvania when he reportedly asked them after he'd been arrested if they had arrested anyone else.
We quickly learned, however, that there was no co defendant, and the prosecution was and appears to be working under the assumption.
That Kohlberger acted alone.
And now we look to unanswered question number three.
And it's really the big one.
Why?
What possibly could be the motive for this brutal and horrifying act?
And along those same lines, does any evidence point to any of the four victims as being the specific target of the murderer here?
On that question, here's what we know.
First, we know based on reporting from News Nation that Kaylee Gonsalves.
That her injuries were considered, quote, significantly more brutal than those of her roommate and best friend, Maddie Mogan.
We have just confirmed.
News Nation is learning that Kaylee Gonzalez's injuries were significantly more brutal than her best friend, Maddie's injuries, which may end up being a very, very important piece of evidence when it comes to determining who the target was in this attack.
Does that indicate a particular focus by the killer on Kaylee?
But then again, those murders occurred in Maddie's room, not Kaylee's.
In fact, Kaylee had recently moved out.
She was only visiting her best friend the night of the murders.
So if Kaylee was the main target, how could the killer have known that she was even in the house, never mind exactly where?
In September, Kaylee's family told CBS further details about what they have been told by authorities.
Kaylee's mom said it appeared Maddie was killed first and that perhaps Kaylee was awakened by that attack and tried to escape.
The bed was up against the wall.
The headboard was touching the wall and the left side of the bed was touching the wall.
And we believe that Maddie was on the outside and Kaylee was on the inside.
According to Coroner Mabbitt, the killer's first victim.
Was Maddie, says Steve.
And then from Maddie, he moved on to your daughter.
You believe she had awakened at that point?
Yes.
Yeah, there's evidence to show that she awakened and tried to get out of that situation.
The way the bed was set up is what?
She was trapped.
She was trapped.
There are reports of defensive wounds found on Kaylee's body, on Xana Kernodal's too, reportedly.
No such reports about Ethan or Maddie.
Final Thoughts on Victim DNA00:07:57
But what does any of that mean for motive or targeting?
Kaylee's parents told CBS News they believe an Instagram account belonging to Brian Kohlberger was following Kaylee and Maddie.
They believed they had found a possible connection through Instagram and immediately took these screenshots.
From our investigation of the account, it appeared to be the real Brian Kohlberger account.
Among the people this account was following were Maddie Mogan and Kaylee Gonzalez, in addition to several people with the name Kohlberger.
However, that has not been corroborated and others have disputed it.
In court, they'll have to prove it.
But whether there was a connection or not still does not explain the motive.
If it was Kohlberger, why did he do it?
As we told you in episode three, Kohlberger was a criminology student.
His past several years had been spent studying crimes in detail.
While at DeSales getting his master's degree, he posted a questionnaire to Reddit, which we went over.
In retrospect, it appears ominous.
Hello, my name is Brian, and I'm inviting you to participate in a research project that seeks to understand how emotions and psychological traits influence decision making when committing a crime.
In particular, this study seeks to understand the story behind your most recent criminal offense with an emphasis on your thoughts and feelings throughout your experience.
To the average citizen, these questions may sound bizarre, but experts say it is not unusual for criminologists to want to better understand the criminals they study.
Or maybe it's just the reason many criminals commit a murder.
Maybe that's what was at issue here psychosis, rage, jealousy, untreated mental illness, or evil.
As Howard Bloom writes at the end of one of his many excellent pieces on this case, maybe it was a matter of deep-seated envy and resentment from a man whose life had been plagued with anger, disconnection, and an inability to feel human.
As Bloom writes, he yearned for the fun he saw at that house.
Can you imagine looking at that wild night, all the happy frivolity from some hideout in the shadows, and at the same time knowing deep in your dark heart that you would never be a part of anything that exuberant, that beautiful?
It would be hell, a hell of unsatisfied desire that could plunge someone deeper and deeper into a tormenting rage, an envy that would be an all consuming sickness.
And in the end, there would be no way out, just the deed.
There are other questions that remain in this case, like where the murder weapon is, as we've gone over, and the clothes he must have worn.
So far, we believe the police may not have any of that evidence.
Perhaps they were dumped.
Along the oddly circuitous wooded drive, Kohlberger allegedly took from the murders back home to WSU.
As we look back on this case and this week, I want to leave you with some final thoughts from past guests who have been on this show about this case, this suspect, and what is to come.
Couldn't imagine him not leaving DNA behind because it's such a violent crime scene.
He stabbed four people multiple times, and the chances of either the knife not slipping and cutting him, or one of those victims fighting back and potentially getting his DNA under their fingernails, or just dropping a single hair.
Seems highly unlikely to me.
The sheath, if I'm the defense lawyer, does not bother me because somebody, you can have an explanation for that.
There's an innocent explanation for that if it's on the button.
Somebody else had the knife, obviously, some other person.
The bushy eyebrows, that doesn't bother me.
If, in fact, as you posit, that there is victim's DNA in his apartment, that's a real problem.
I don't know that it's game over.
But that's a real, real problem.
When people hear DNA nowadays, they do get that largely it goes right.
And largely it doesn't tag somebody else.
It doesn't tag the wrong person.
And I'm sure they're going to be very careful in handling the samples.
I would imagine knowing that that's going to probably be the most significant evidence that they get, the kind you're talking about.
The defendant's DNA all over the room, the victim's DNA in his room, that sort of thing.
That kind of combination is, I think, a knockout punch if that's what they come up with.
When those handcuffs went on, Essentially, if he's the guy, his life is over.
Life as he knew it is gone.
Your level of confidence on a scale of one to 10 that they've got the right guy and he'll be convicted.
Let's go down the line.
Phil?
10, 10 plus.
Wow.
Bill?
10.
Mike?
10 plus, plus, plus.
And now, my final thoughts.
I believe Brian Kohlberger committed this crime.
A life of darkness, deep unhappiness, and of being mentally unwell likely all contributed to a sick fascination with death and what he may have seen as the power that comes from taking a life.
The phone, car, and touch DNA evidence may be enough, particularly when coupled with the fact that back home in Pennsylvania, Brian Kohlberger was disposing of his trash in the neighbor's garbage cans.
And when police affected the arrest raid, They allegedly caught him wearing gloves, stuffing his own garbage into little Ziploc baggies.
Who does that?
But this is not an easy case for prosecutors, notwithstanding those facts.
The killer was careful.
No murder weapon, no bloody clothes.
There are some indications that no additional DNA has been found to link Kohlberger to the crime scene, nor any link from the victims to anything found in Kohlberger's apartment.
The eyewitness here.
The roommate has only an amorphous description.
The killer's medium build and his bushy eyebrows, which will not be enough to qualify as a definitive ID.
The car and phone evidence will be mercilessly attacked and picked apart at trial, as will the one minuscule spot of touch DNA on the knife sheath.
The jury may wind up confused.
That's a defense attorney's goal.
In short, the prosecution likely needs more.
Maybe they have it.
They have held their cards.
Very close to the vest in this case, and certainly the defense would not be leaking the most incriminating evidence against their client Kohlberger.
In death penalty cases like this, however, jurors sometimes like to have zero doubts, even though the legal standard, of course, is beyond a reasonable doubt.
Does the prosecution have enough to meet this burden?
It's not yet clear.
For now, we must hope that the DA has more than the office has made public, in particular on the DNA front.
And as we wait, We keep the victims' families in our prayers.
Kaylee, Maddie, Ethan, and Zana.
Thank you all so much for joining me today and all week.
Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show.
No BS, no agenda, and no fear.
Prayers for Kaylee Maddie Ethan Zana00:00:48
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