The news first came in a phone call. Dr. Katherine Ramsland, one of the nation’s most prominent experts on serial killers, got word from a colleague that her former student had been arrested in the stabbing deaths of four University of Idaho students.
It left her completely stunned, she said. And then she doubted it could possibly be true.
“I thought, ‘They have to have this wrong,’” Dr. Ramsland said in an interview. “This has to be wrong. It’s not the Bryan Kohberger that I know.”
At DeSales University, where Mr. Kohberger got a master’s degree in criminal justice in 2022, Dr. Ramsland is a professor of forensic psychology who has written extensively about high-profile murderers, including an examination of the serial killer known as B.T.K. Her books include “The Mind of a Murderer” and “How to Catch a Killer.”
Over the years, Dr. Ramsland said, she has always kept aware of the prospect that people might take her courses and learn the methods of serial killers in order to build on their own nefarious ideas. But she said in her time with Mr. Kohberger, she never had that concern.
“He was very polite, respectful, seemed genuinely engaged with the material as a potential researcher, teacher, somebody who was interested in a career,” she said.
After Mr. Kohberger’s arrest in December 2022, weeks after the murders in Moscow, Idaho, she expected he would clear his name. But then she found it odd that Mr. Kohberger was not offering an alibi. When one finally did emerge, more than a year after the case began, Mr. Kohberger said that he had been out driving around on the night of the killings.
“I thought, ‘That’s not an alibi and you know it’s not,’” Dr. Ramsland said. She has declined interviews until now because she was possibly going to be called as a witness in Mr. Kohberger’s case, although he is now set to avoid a trial as part of a plea deal. Dr. Ramsland still declined to discuss specifics about his academics because of student privacy laws.
Months before the killings, a Reddit user who identified himself as Bryan Kohberger asked people who had spent time in prison to take a survey about crimes they had committed. The survey listed Mr. Kohberger as a student investigator and asked respondents to describe their “thoughts, emotions and actions from the beginning to end of the crime commission process.”
Dr. Ramsland said that kind of survey might look suspicious in hindsight, now that Mr. Kohberger has been charged with a crime. But in a criminology department, that type of research has been common for decades.
Dr. Ramsland said that in the aftermath of Mr. Kohberger’s arrest, she reached out to his family to offer support. But she said they have not remained in touch. She has not corresponded with Mr. Kohberger since the spring of 2022, before the killings, but said she wanted to try to connect with him in the future to better understand him.
In the meantime, she said, it made sense to her that he had decided to enter a guilty plea, rather than go to trial.
“I wasn’t surprised by the plea once the judge took away every option — that he couldn’t use his alibi, he couldn’t use an alternate suspect, there’s nothing left,” Dr. Ramsland said. “And now he’s facing a lot of evidence piled up and the death penalty, so it did not surprise me.”
Mike Baker is a national reporter for The Times, based in Seattle.
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