Arrest of Bryan Kohberger: As Idaho police faced growing criticism, investigators worked meticulously behind the scenes

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In the weeks since four University of Idaho students were found stabbed to death in a home near campus, police have come under increasing public criticism as the investigation appears to the point of death.

In fact, court documents show that a team of local and state law enforcement officers, along with a slew of FBI agents, worked meticulously over the holiday season to catch the suspected killer.

Weeks before making a Dec. 30 arrest, investigators began targeting Bryan Kohberger, a 28-year-old criminology doctoral student at a nearby university who has been charged with four counts of first-degree murder and one count of heist.

I bristled in the days after the arrest when people wondered if the police had the right man because a doctoral candidate in criminal justice would be too smart for this crime, said John Miller, analyst of the law enforcement at CNN and former Deputy Commissioner of the New York Police Department. You can teach a master class how to conduct a complex criminal investigation based on this case.

The brutal nature of the Nov. 13 killings sparked a wave of fear and anxiety in Moscow, a small college town on the Idaho-Washington border that hadn’t reported a murder in seven years.

Police found the door to the off-campus residence hall open and the bodies of Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Madison Mogen, 21, Xana Kernodle, 20, and Ethan Chapin, 20, in rooms on the second and third floors. Two other young women were in the three-story, six-bedroom rental at the time but were not injured, police said.

Latah County Coroner Cathy Mabbutt told CNN she saw a lot of blood on the wall when she arrived at the scene. She said there were multiple stab wounds on each body, likely from the same weapon. One victim had what appeared to be defensive stab wounds to the hands.

Moscow police initially told the public that the attack was targeted and there was no threat to the community. A few days later, however, Police Chief Jason Fry backtracked: We can’t say there’s no threat to the community, he said. Many students began to leave the city.

Authorities remained tight-lipped, withholding details of the crime and some of the leads they were looking for. For weeks, law enforcement officials said they had not identified a suspect or located the murder weapon.

Jim Chapin, Ethan Chapin’s father, said in a Nov. 16 statement that the lack of information from the university and local police is further compounding our family’s agony after our son’s murder.

For Ethan and his three dear friends killed in Moscow, Idaho, and all of our families, I urge those responsible to speak the truth, share what they know, find the perpetrator, and protect the community in as a whole, the statement said.

As frustrations continued to mount, experts and relatives of the victims became even more critical of the apparent lack of progress in the case.

It takes a while to piece together and piece together this whole timeline of events and the picture of what really happened, Idaho State Police spokesman Aaron Snell said on 22 November, nine days after the murders. Much of this is not seen by the public because it is a criminal investigation. But I guarantee you that behind the scenes there is so much work going on.

A day later, Steve Goncalves, Kaylees’ father, told CNN he was focused on getting justice for his daughter, despite the lack of information.

We all want to play a role in helping, and we can’t play a role if we don’t have real, substantive information to work on, he said.

When asked what he had heard from the local police, Goncalves replied that they didn’t share much with me. He suggested Moscow police might be limited in what they can share.

A piece of information not initially shared publicly was that a review of surveillance footage of the area around the home drew investigators’ attention to a white sedan, later identified as a Hyundai Elantra, according to a probable cause affidavit released Thursday. in the case against Kohberger.

By November 25, law enforcement in the area had been notified to be on the lookout for such a vehicle, according to the affidavit.

And a few days later, officers from nearby Washington State University, where the suspect was a graduate student in the criminal justice program, identified a white Elantra and later discovered it was registered with Kohberger.

It was just part of the behind-the-scenes work in a complex quadruple homicide investigation where any clue to the public about a suspect or the various leads police are following can bring him down, experts say.

We don’t want to warn suspects or scare them into running away. We don’t want them trying to get rid of evidence or destroy things, said Joe Giacalone, an assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a retired NYPD sergeant who ran the department’s homicide school and Bronx Cold Case Team.

There are a lot of people in the audience who need to apologize to the police department, Giacalone said. This Moscow, Idaho police chief took a beating and he kept on going.

Miller agreed: They were willing to take it on the chin, from the public, from the press, from local critics, in order to keep the case clean and continue the investigation.

A crucial clue not shared by police is that one of the two roommates who survived told investigators she saw a masked man dressed in black in the house the morning of the attack, according to the probable cause affidavit.

The roommate, identified in the document as DM, said she heard crying in the house that morning and a male voice saying: It’s okay, I’ll help you. DM said she then saw a figure dressed in black clothing and a mask that covered the person’s mouth and nose walking towards her, according to the document.

DM described the character as 5 10 or more, male, not very muscular, but athletic with bushy eyebrows, according to the affidavit. The man walked past DM as she stood in frozen shock.

Kohbergers driver’s license information, which was reviewed by investigators in late November, was found to match the description provided by the surviving roommate, the affidavit states, specifically noting his height and bushy eyebrows.

Armed with the driver’s license and plate information, investigators were able to obtain phone records indicating that Kohberger’s phone was near the victims’ residence at least 12 times between June 2022 and present, according to the report. affidavit.

Those recordings also showed that Kohberger’s phone was near the crime scene again after the murders, between 9:12 a.m. and 9:21 a.m., according to the document.

For weeks before the arrest, so-called experts, pundits and some members of the press criticized Moscow police for not being up to the task and failing to make an arrest, Miller said. . It’s not like Law & Order, Blue Bloods or CSI.

From the morning the murders were discovered, Miller said, Moscow police knew they needed help and brought in the state police homicide squad and the FBI.

What the Moscow police had that the FBI and state police could never have was that they knew the area, Miller said. They knew the community and they knew the people and they had a very engaged community. But the FBI contributed its technical prowess and expertise. And what the state police brought was experience in homicide investigations and a state-of-the-art lab.

In mid-December, public criticism of the police department continued to grow as few details of the investigation were made public.

But court documents show investigators worked over the holidays to put together their case, which included DNA found at the scene of the murders and at the Kohbergers family’s Pennsylvania home.

The general public tends to think this all happens overnight, said retired FBI profiler Mary Ellen OToole. You have a group of investigators from different agencies meeting and working together. It’s very difficult.

Investigators learned that Kohberger received a new license plate for his Elantra five days after the murders, according to the affidavit, citing records from the Washington State Licensing Department.

At the scene of the murders, investigators found a beige leather knife sheath on the bed next to one of the victims, according to the affidavit. On his snap, the Idaho State Lab would later find a single source of male DNA.

Late last month, Pennsylvania law enforcement recovered trash from the Kohbergers’ family home in Albrightsville, according to the affidavit. This evidence was also sent to the Idaho State Laboratory.

The DNA in the trash is believed to belong to the biological father of the person whose DNA was found on the sheath, the document says.

On Dec. 29, authorities requested an arrest warrant for Kohberger on four counts of first-degree murder and burglary, according to the affidavit.

The next day, a Pennsylvania State Police SWAT team moved into the Kohberger family home. They broke down the door and drilled through the windows in what’s called a dynamic entry, a rare tactic used to arrest high-risk suspects, a law enforcement source told CNN.

Kohberger was incarcerated in Latah County Jail last week after being extradited from Pennsylvania. The affidavit, containing many previously unknown details of the case, was released Thursday as the suspect made his first appearance in court in Idaho.

Kohberger has not pleaded guilty and is due back in court Thursday. A court order bars the prosecution and defense from commenting beyond the public records of the case.

Moscow police have come under heavy criticism and heat in the seven weeks since the incident, University of Idaho Vice President and Executive Vice President Torrey Lawrence told CNN. And I’m so grateful that they stuck with this case and only shared what they could share so as not to disrupt the investigation. If they had shared more, we might wonder if Mr. Kohberger could have escaped them.

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