Four University of Idaho college students were murdered in a rented house in November 2022. After prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty, the defendant, 30-year-old suspect Bryan Kohberger, reached a plea agreement with prosecutors. Kohberger will face life imprisonment without parole.
Kohberger admitted to killing 21-year-old Kaylee Goncalves, 21-year-old Madison Mogen, 21-year-old Xana Kernodle, 21-year-old Ethan Chapin. Kohberger also admitted to prosecutors that he committed theft while killing.
Kohberger, a doctoral student in criminology, had always insisted that he was not guilty of the murder charge. When the news of the plea agreement came out, the victim’s family expressed anger at the media.
The family of Goncavicz said in a statement on Facebook: “We are extremely angry about what Idaho did.”
The statement read: “They let us down. This was a completely unexpected development.”
The police found a DNA sample collected from the scabbard at the murder scene at the rental house and found that Koberg was related to the murder. Six weeks after Goncavicz and the other four were found dead, Koberg was arrested at his parents’ home in Albrightsville, Pennsylvania, when Koberg went home to spend the holidays with his parents.
The police never announced Koberg’s motive for the murder. However, NBC’s news program “Dateline” reported that Koberg was studying at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, not far from the University of Idaho, and had dozens of photos of female students from both universities on his mobile phone. The photos were taken on July 9 of the same year when he was invited to a pool party in Moscow, Idaho.
According to the comparison of photos on social networking sites, some of the female students in Koberg’s collection of photos are good friends of Konold, Goncavicz and Morgan.
The report pointed out that after the pool party, Koberg secretly returned to the party venue at night. The cell phone tower signal positioning showed that Koberg appeared near the victim’s rental house a total of 23 times in the next four months. He searched online for pornographic images containing keywords such as “drugging” and “sleeping”, and searched for “antisocial personality traits of college students.”
