In the years investigators spent scouring through what might have motivated Bryan Kohberger to murder four University of Idaho students, they found no sign that he had connected with his victims on social media. There was no evidence he had visited their home. There was nothing to suggest that he had ever met them.
It is even possible that he did not select the house as his target until just before he entered it around 4 a.m. one night in November 2022, the lead prosecutor in the case said in an interview on Thursday.
After Mr. Kohberger’s sentencing to life in prison for the crimes on Wednesday, and the end of a court-ordered prohibition on discussing the case, prosecutors and investigators have started dispelling the many rumors surrounding the case — theories and suspicions that have long served as the basis for erroneous news coverage and endless social media debates.
Bill Thompson, the lead prosecutor in Latah County, where the killings happened, said investigators had hunted extensively to establish a prior connection between Mr. Kohberger and the four students — something to suggest why they were targeted. But if there was a connection, it remains a mystery, he said. It is possible that Mr. Kohberger’s attack was one of opportunity, he said, with the victims chosen at random.
“We simply don’t know the answer to that,” Mr. Thompson said. “And human nature is, we would like to know the answer, an explanation for everything. We want everything to make sense. But what we’re dealing with doesn’t make sense in and of itself.”
Mr. Kohberger himself did not detail his motives during his brief statements in court.
Prosecutors said Mr. Kohberger drove to the victims’ home in the city of Moscow near the University of Idaho campus early on Nov. 13, 2022. They said he sneaked inside and fatally stabbed two women in one bedroom before fatally stabbing another woman and her boyfriend on another floor.
Investigators had compiled an array of evidence to tie Mr. Kohberger to the crimes, which he admitted to when he pleaded guilty to all four murders on July 2. A knife sheath left at the scene was found to have his DNA on the button snap. Video surveillance showed a white car, like his, repeatedly driving near the victims’ home around the time of the killings. Mr. Kohberger’s cellphone appeared to have been turned off for several hours that night.
At the time Mr. Kohberger was arrested in December 2022, about seven weeks after the killings, investigators detailed cellphone data linking Mr. Kohberger to late-night visits he had made to areas around where the killings occurred. That suggested he had studied the scene of the murders before carrying them out.
But Mr. Thompson conceded on Thursday that those visits did not necessarily prove Mr. Kohberger had visited the home or surveilled it, as the area served by the cell tower infrastructure probably extended all the way to the main highway that brings people into town from Washington, where Mr. Kohberger lived. He said investigators were unable to find surveillance video that showed Mr. Kohberger’s car around the house in the months before the killings, though in some cases video of the area may already have been deleted.
In the end, Mr. Thompson said, it was “certainly possible” that Mr. Kohberger did not choose the location of his attack until moments before the crimes.
In the months when prosecutors and investigators were prevented from discussing the case, an array of theories and rumors arose, and it now appears that many of them were false. One theory, discussed in a recent book about the case, was that Mr. Kohberger had visited a restaurant where two of the victims worked. Other news organizations reported that he had followed some of the victims on Instagram. Investigators now say there is no evidence of either.
One widely held theory was that Mr. Kohberger had created a Facebook account under the name Pappa Rodger and joined online discussions about the case. But investigators said they determined that the user was not Mr. Kohberger.
Others have speculated that Mr. Kohberger, who at the time of the murders was a Ph.D. student in criminal justice and criminology at nearby Washington State University, had developed an affinity for certain high-profile killers such as Elliot Rodger or Ted Bundy. But Mr. Thompson said Mr. Kohberger learned about a variety of serial killers during his studies and did not know of anything to suggest that he had sought to emulate any of them.
“That certainly opened the door to say, ‘Well, maybe this is where he got the answer,’” Mr. Thompson said. “I don’t think we can definitively say that because it’s equally likely that this is just what people who are studying criminal justice are going to be reading.”
Mr. Thompson responded to other rumors: One documentary reported that there was evidence that Mr. Kohberger had sat down on a chair in the victims’ home at one point during the killings. Mr. Thompson said he was unaware of any evidence to suggest that.
Others have reported that investigators were following Mr. Kohberger in the weeks after the killings, when he drove at the beginning of winter break back to his family home in Pennsylvania with his father. Mr. Kohberger had not been publicly identified as a suspect at the time, yet police officers in Indiana had stopped his car twice along the way for traffic violations. But Mr. Thompson said the authorities had no notion that Mr. Kohberger was a potential suspect until after he was already back in Pennsylvania. The traffic stops, he said, were “totally coincidental.”
There has also been lingering speculation about the role Mr. Kohberger’s family played, including whether they had suspected Mr. Kohberger could be the killer or whether they had even helped investigators. Some noted that Mr. Kohberger had placed a phone call to his parents on the morning of the killings.
Mr. Thompson said Mr. Kohberger had a history of daily phone calls with his family, so the call that day was not out of the ordinary. He said there was no evidence that the family had provided tips to law enforcement, but he said they also did not interfere.
“There was nothing to indicate that the family knew that he had done this,” he said.
The speculation surrounding the case at times dragged innocent people into the spotlight. Online true crime sleuths had trained their sights on the surviving roommates, friends and acquaintances of the victims, and in some cases even people with the slimmest of connections to the victims.
Mr. Thompson said that harmful speculation put some innocent people through “hell,” and said it was “a poor commentary on that portion of our society right now.”
“I can understand people’s curiosity,” Mr. Thompson said. “I cannot countenance the way those young people were stalked and threatened and suffered — their families, as well as themselves. It’s outrageous.”
Mike Baker is a national reporter for The Times, based in Seattle.
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs reports on national stories across the United States with a focus on criminal justice. He is from upstate New York.
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