Loading summary
Transcript258 lines
- [00:02]
A
Hey, Cluminati, it's Morgan and Kalen. If you're loving clues, you need to check out Crimes of, the newest show from Crime House.
- [00:08]
B
Crimes of is a weekly series that explores a new theme each season from Crimes of the paranormal, unsolved murders, mysterious disappearances, and more. Their first season is Crimes of Infamy, the true stories behind Hollywood's most iconic horror villains.
- [00:23]
A
Crimes of is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or find them on YouTube at Crime House Studios. New episodes out every Tuesday. This is Crime House.
- [00:48]
B
Today we're going to talk about a recent case that has drawn a huge amount of interest. The Idaho student murders. A horrific quadruple homicide with seemingly no known motive and no direct connections that we know of yet between the victims and the perpetrator.
- [01:03]
A
It wasn't before long that evidence left behind by the killer is what led investigators directly to him. But now that gag orders are lifted, new information is coming out about the case, the victims and the killer almost every single day. Which is why today we'll be telling you the story with up to date details and new revelations you may not have heard yet and corrections to information that some of the victim's family want to ensure. Get out there. Hi guys. Welcome back to Clues, where we sneak past the crime scene tape to explore the key evidence behind some of the most gripping true crime cases.
- [01:48]
B
I'm Kayla Moore and I'm going to be the one diving deeper into the timelines, the backstories and the court files released on these cases.
- [01:54]
A
And, and I'm your Internet sleuth, Morgan Absher. I'm the one who's diving into all the Reddit forums and anything obscure online that I can find to see what is and isn't adding up at Crime House.
- [02:05]
B
We value your support. So please share your thoughts on social media and remember to rate, review and follow clues to help others discover the show. For bonus episodes, early access and ad free listening, join our Crime House plus community on Apple podcasts.
- [02:17]
A
More on the case and the clues that defined it after this quick break. I remember this case breaking on Tick Tock. I think social media took this one like wildfire very quickly.
- [02:32]
B
Yeah, definitely. I, I still remember the first thing I ever heard about it was when they put out that report that four people were murdered, but it looked like a crime of passion and there was no greater threat to the community and so everyone just started thinking it was a jealous partner or a roommate issue. No one had any idea how out of control this whole thing would spiral.
- [02:53]
A
No. No idea. And the things that have been said on social media about some of the victims themselves and just everything we're gonna get into today, it is a wild case and I'm ready to get into it. Yeah, I'm ready to get into it.
- [03:09]
B
So a quick reminder for anyone who's watching this episode on YouTube, you're gonna see some photos, some maps, some images that'll help you kind of piece the story together as we're telling it. And if you're listening, you can find those same exact photos on our social media channels, Clues podcast on Instagram, and.
- [03:23]
A
A quick content warning. This episode does contain detailed descriptions of the victim's injuries and other potentially disturbing details. So please listen with care and out of respect for the family that has come forward pretty recently and doesn't want to get additional crime scene photos leaked, we might not be showing as much because that is what the family wants. So if you don't see it, that is probably why.
- [03:47]
B
So at 11:56am on November 13, 2022, 911 dispatcher Carolina Calvin gets a call from Moscow, Idaho. It's from a group of students over at the nearby University of Idaho who live off campus, reporting that one of their friends is, quote, not waking up after a night of drinking. Calvin dispatches first responders to the address, 1122 King Road. The Moscow Police department arrives so fast the callers are still on the phone with Calvin. When they get there, more than five students outside the home greet the cops. 19 year old Dylan Mortenson and 19 year old Bethany Funk, both of whom live at the address, as well as their friends, 22 year old Hunter Johnson, his girlfriend, 21 year old Emily Allant, and 20 year old Josie Loderan, who all live down the street. Among the first officers on the scene is 22 year old officer Mitch Nunez, who's been on the force for only about a year. Officer Nunez asks Hunter where the person that needs help is and he's expecting to see someone passed out, possibly in need of CPR or a defibrillator. Remember, he is an officer near a college campus. He's kind of thinking he's going to see something that he's seen before. Hunter takes Officer Nunez up to the second floor of the house, to the bedroom where 20 year old Zanna Kernodel is lying on her back on the floor. And Nunez can tell right away that this is not just an overdose, it's not just a medical event because there's a lot of blood on the scene. He can tell just from looking at her that Zanna has been stabbed repeatedly. And he can also tell that there is a second body in the room. Her boyfriend, 20 year old Ethan Chapin, is lying on her bed, still partially covered by a blanket. But he seems to be also stabbed to death, potentially while he was still sleeping. Officer Nunez realizes that this is beyond anything he's ever seen before. It is way beyond his level of experience. So he radios back to the station with news of a suspected homicide. And then he goes up one more flight of stairs to the third floor. And that's when he finds that there's two more bodies in the house. Madison Mogan and Kaylee Gonsalves, both 21 years old, are laying in bed together, covered in a pink blanket. And they've also been stabbed to death. Madison has a large gash on the right side of her face, invisible knife wounds on her forearms and her hands. The damage done to Kaylee's face does make her unrecognizable. And not only has Officer Nunez truly never seen anything like this, but he's pretty sure that nothing like this has ever happened in the town of Moscow before. But before we get into exactly how this investigation played out, let's talk a little bit about the kids that were involved. The university students. So Kaylee Gonzalez and Madison Mogan were both seniors and 21 years old. They had been inseparable ever since the sixth grade. I remember watching the documentary that just came out on Apple about them. Like I had no idea how close they were. Sisters, really sweet. I. I have never had a best friend that close just throughout my entire life. It's so special to watch. They both grew up in the Coeur d' Alene area of Idaho, about 85 miles away from Moscow. And like you said, Morgan, they were basically sisters. It was only natural that they not only decided to go to the same university and continue their friendship and stay together for four more years, but also move in together and be roommates too. Kaylee majored in general studies. She was a member of the Alpha Fee sorority. She was set to graduate early. Actually, she was going to graduate in December of 2022. And after graduation, she planned to move to Texas because she already had an IT job lined up. Meanwhile, Madison, or Maddie, as her friends called her, was a marketing major and a member of the PI Beta Phi sorority. She was on the Dean's list. She was set to graduate next spring with plans to move to Boise. But for now, she worked as a part time server in The Mad Greek restaurant in downtown Moscow, while she also managed the restaurant. Social media pages. By that November, though, the girls knew that life was going to take them in separate directions. They were going to go different places. After they graduated, Kaylee had already moved out of the house at 1122 King Road and she was staying somewhere else at the time. In fact, during the weekend of the 13th, Kaylee was just visiting the shared house to attend a party that weekend and show her friends her new car. She figured that she would just crash in Madison's bed with her like she so often did. As for 20 year old Zanna Kernodle, she also shared the home at 1122 King Road and her boyfriend, 20 year old Ethan Chapen, slept over a lot. Zanna's housemate Bethany, said at the victim's memorial service that Zanna and Ethan's relationship actually, quote, made her believe in love. That's really cute, which is so sweet. Zanna, a junior, also majored in marketing and was also in the PI Beta 5 sorority with Madison. She had allegedly overcome a tough childhood and she was raised by her aunt and her uncle. But Zanna didn't let any of those tough circumstances keep her down for very long. She was known by her friends and her family as an uplifting, positive thinker who took any bad situation and turned it into a good one. She became a multi sport athlete and a competitive gymnast in middle and high school. In college, she focused on making progress towards her professional goals. Like Madison, she also worked part time at this mad Greek restaurant in Moscow. And after graduation she planned to start a marketing company with her older sister Jasmine, who was now a senior at Washington State University, which was only 15 minutes away from Moscow. But at least for while she was in school, one of the things that she really focused on was her boyfriend Ethan. Ethan was the same age, but he was only a freshman. He majored in sports management after playing basketball in high school where his coach remembered him as a student who just lit up. Dark days. He was the firstborn in a set of triplets. He had a brother and a sister who all attended the University of Idaho together. Ethan was Zanna's first ever boyfriend and he had already brought her home to meet his entire family By November. The two had been dating for around six months. They seemed like they were very much in love and they spent their last evening alive together at a party thrown by Ithan's fraternity, Sigma Chi before going back to Zanna's house. Ithan that night seems to have just fallen asleep. Zanna, we know stayed up to order door dash and scroll TikTok a little bit longer. Her door dash order arrived at around 4 in the morning. But then her TikTok activity abruptly stopped at 4:12 in the morning. And the next person to use her phone was a police officer that was investigating the crime scene. So back at the crime scene the day that the crime happened, one of the first things that the detectives do is they speak with the surviving witnesses. Which brings us really to our first clue that we have in this entire thing. What their surviving roommate, Dylan Mortensen, saw and heard.
- [10:43]
A
So this brings us to our first clue in this case. Dylan's statement now there were six people in the house that night and you're going to need to check out the floor plan to kind of really understand how this house is laid out because there's actually three different levels.
- [10:57]
B
Yeah, it was, it was hard to visualize when I was just reading about it. I had to look at an actual 3D model to understand where everyone was.
- [11:03]
A
It's really complicated. So be sure to look at the YouTube and the Instagram to see kind of the floor plan. But I'll try to explain it best I can. So you have the ground floor. It's also the parking level where you drive in. That's where Bethany lives. There's also another vacant room on this floor. From the ground floor you go upstairs to the second floor. This is the kitchen area. There's also another entrance off the kitchen, a sliding patio door. That's the floor where Dylan and Zanna's rooms are. Then on the third floor you have Maddie and Kaylee's rooms. Since Kaylee had already moved out, she was sleeping in Maddie's bed. Her room was currently vacant. It hadn't been filled with another student or person yet. Knowing that, let me share you what an in shock. Dylan told Officer Nunez about the night before. She said that she was woken up by a noise at around 4am which she initially thought was Kaylee playing with her Golden Doodle Murphy upstairs. Now, I'm not sure if Murphy came back with Kaylee for the night or if he was still living with the roommates when she moved out. But I do know that everyone was super familiar with the dog. After a few moments, Dylan said she heard a scream which she believed to be Kaylee, followed by a voice she identified as Kaylee's saying, quote, someone's here. Dylan opened her door and looked out, but she didn't see anything. Then she heard crying coming from Zanna's room, followed by a Male voice saying, quote, it's okay. I'm going to help you. A few minutes after 4am, Dylan peeks out of her bedroom door again and sees a slim figure, about 6ft tall, dressed in all black, which one would assume is our suspect. Dylan says they were wearing something like a black ski mask, holding what she thought at the time was maybe a handheld vacuum cleaner. And they were headed in the direction of the sliding glass door off the kitchen, seemingly trying to go out that way. Something she specifically remembered, though, were his bushy eyebrows peeking out under the mask. Afterwards, Dylan too afraid to move. I mean, she thought this person could have seen her. And she didn't know if they were in the house. So she ends up staying in her room.
- [13:15]
B
Yeah, it seems like shortly after this sighting, Dylan calls Bethany, who is downstairs on the first level, and she tells her what was happening. Bethany then calls Zanna, Ethan, and Madison, all between 4:21 and 4:22 in the morning, but they don't get any answer. Between 4:22 and 4:26, Dylan called and texted with Bethany again. And she mentioned the man with something covering his head. And Dylan wondered if this was maybe one of Ethan's frat brothers playing a prank on him. But still, they were pretty scared. But it also just goes to show how much they were second guessing themselves. Yeah, talking themselves out of it. Because at the end of the day, when you're a college kid and you're in a big house that a lot of people come in and out of, the last thing on your mind is that something like this is gonna happen.
- [14:01]
A
Never in a million years.
- [14:02]
B
Never in a million years.
- [14:04]
A
No. And these, they were also out all day. They were, you know, partying. Exactly what state of mind they could have been in. It's.
- [14:11]
B
It.
- [14:11]
A
Yeah, it's just. It's insane. Like, you would never go here.
- [14:15]
B
I know. Eventually, Bethany did tell Dylan to run down to her room so they could at least be together because they were pretty freaked out. But while running past Zanna's room, Dylan saw that Zanna was lying on the floor on her back. And Zanna and Ethan, again, it goes back to the. You're second guessing yourself. You're not thinking that this is in the realm of possibilities at all. Because they had all been partying the night before, so Dylan thought that Zanna was just passed out. And once they were in the same room, Dylan and Bethany tried again to contact their roommates from Bethany's phone. They called Madison at 4:30. They called Kaylee at 4:31. And again they don't get any answers. So they just fall asleep together in Bethany's bed that night, hoping that they'll wake up in the morning and maybe this will all make sense. Instead, we know that it got a lot worse the next morning. Dylan and Bethany Woke up around 11am at which point they try again to contact their roommates. They tried texting Kaylee and Madison. They also checked Zanna and Ethan's locations using Snapchat's Snap map feature. Except Zanna's location was off, which was weird to them, I guess usually her location would have been on. And that's when they start getting this really bad feeling. It's like everything kind of starts coming together for them here. No one else was awake. No one was answering their phones. They were too scared to even go check their rooms. So they ended up rushing outside. And Dylan called their friends Hunter and Emily and asked them to come over. Hunter, Emily, and their friend Josie walked over to the house and the woman just explained what's been going on and, like, the weird feelings they're having about the whole situation. Hunter went in with Dylan and Bethany to go check on Zanna and Ethan first. And as soon as he saw the door ajar and he got a glimpse inside, he told the girls that they had to leave right away. I can't even imagine being the person to go in there first.
- [16:17]
A
He protected them in that moment. Absolutely did. And just. He knew what he saw and wanted to make sure he could prevent them from any more trauma.
- [16:26]
B
I know when I first read this, my mom, when she was probably a little bit older than these girls, also experienced, like, a really gruesome tragedy, I would say, at her friend's house. Her friend believed that something happened to her husband down in the basement. And that was the first thing they did, was they called one of their male friends to be like, we're too scared to go look. Can you please check for us? Like, they're all. It seems like there's just like one person that's. They think is brave enough to go do it. And it's just.
- [16:51]
A
And I totally understand that when you're scared, especially as women, like, we've been trained to be more cautious and vigilant and scared. Like, yeah, it really is conditioned into us. Like, I. I understand why they waited and called a friend over.
- [17:05]
B
I. Absolutely, absolutely. Even though Hunter tells them that they have to get away. Dylan and Bethany get a brief glance at Zanna's body. And from what we've read in court documents, Dylan said that she quote Saw Zanna again for a split second and I just started bawling because I thought she had just like, I don't even know. I thought maybe she was just drunk and asleep on the floor. Hunter though, appeared pale white and shaken as he exited the house moments later. And to spare the girls from the realization of how bad the situation was inside, he told them to call 911. For an unconscious person, like even in this moment he didn't really want to scare them that bad. Yeah, but Hunter pretty much knew what was going on at that point. And he stayed there long enough to check Zanna and Ethan's pulses during his time that he was alone in the house. And that's how he basically confirmed that they were already dead. Around 12:22pm on November 13, about a half hour after the initial 911 call, Sergeant John Lawrence of the Moscow Police Department contacts the Idaho State Police for help. And just to make things easier for everyone listening, we're going to use the abbreviations MPD and IS to refer to those agencies moving forward. Isp, Idaho State Police, mpd, Moscow Police Department. Both the ISP and MPD recently released hundreds of records related to the case. I'm sure those of you who are interested in the case have probably been reading those. So with all the information we have now, we can tell a little bit more of a complete story about what happened next within the investigation. But when this initially happened we had almost no information on what was going on. Yeah, it was radio silence.
- [18:50]
A
They were very, very, very tight lipped and people really criticized them heavily for this. I mean there were gag orders basically for everyone involved. But now in hindsight it was probably a pretty good decision.
- [19:03]
B
So one of the first things that Sergeant John Lawrence with the MPD did was he rounded up all of the witnesses as well as a couple of the friends who had been with the victims the night before. And he starts interviewing all of them. Sergeant Lawrence then had other officers notify the four victims families, although Kaylee's family had already heard the news from an unofficial source, which is the worst thing in the world I can imagine.
- [19:26]
A
It is so, so, so sad hearing that. But even the girls outside didn't really know what was happening officially until an alert from the school went out. So the police like apparently like in a lot of the sources I saw, like the police hadn't confirmed yet what was going on in there. Obviously no ambulances are showing up so they're kind assuming the worst.
- [19:46]
B
Well, I know you can't, you can't say anything Publicly until the next of kin have been notified that their loved one's deceased.
- [19:51]
A
Yeah.
- [19:52]
B
So I don't even know how her family would have heard from an unofficial source.
- [19:56]
A
So one thing that I saw is that the school actually sent out an alert. They called them, like a vandal alert. And so the school, at about 1pm reported a homicide near Kings Road. And for everyone to shelter in place. So then everyone starts, like, speculating. They all know what's going on. They. They've heard, you know, through the grapevine, this is what's happening. And then there's a lot of rumors that another alert went out about four homicides. So the school is sending out all these alerts. And then there's another one that comes from 5:17 that police continue to investigate the death of four people near campus. So it's kind of coming out to these school alerts, which, like, isn't necessarily how this maybe should be coming out.
- [20:38]
B
The. The 5:17 text alert, they indicate there is no ongoing threat, which is really audacious to say at that point, because.
- [20:48]
A
You have no idea.
- [20:49]
B
You have no idea.
- [20:50]
A
You don't know who this is.
- [20:51]
B
And now that we know that they were targeted potentially at random, it was not someone they were close to. This was not a crime of passion. That happened during an argument.
- [20:57]
A
Yeah.
- [20:58]
B
It was not just a. You know, so to tell all of the other students, like, hey, I know four of you just got murdered, but don't worry, it's not gonna happen to anyone else. They just had no idea.
- [21:08]
A
So you have no idea.
- [21:10]
B
That is so scary to get that. So meanwhile, other investigators are tasked with canvassing the neighborhood. They knock on doors and question neighbors. They start gathering footage from all of the security cameras in the neighborhood. And back at the crime scene, Sergeant Shane Gunderson with the MPD starts taking charge. He quickly evaluated the victims. He begins cordoning off the area, establishing a crime scene log. And he sets security at every entry point. They don't want the scene to be contaminated any more than it already had been.
- [21:40]
A
They were on it.
- [21:41]
B
He confirmed EMS had not tampered with the scene prior to their arrival. And noticing that the patio door was a jar, he starts questioning if any arriving officers had opened it, but all of them say that they had not. And then he took a moment to deal with a potential source of crime scene contamination, and that is Kaylee's goldendoodle Murphy. Murphy was not injured, which is very important to know. It's really sad hearing about Murphy being at the scene, but police were worried that he could move or damage evidence or contaminate something. So an MPD officer ends up taking Murphy to the local humane society just temporarily before he ends up getting handed over to his second owner, which is Kaylee's ex boyfriend, J.D. and with that, Sergeant Gunderson and his team just really go to town on assessing victims and the crime scene more closely.
- [22:35]
A
Which brings us to our second clue, the victim's injuries. Again, this next part is going to be pretty graphic, so if you feel that you cannot handle it today, please check for markers in the description and just skip ahead.
- [22:46]
B
And this is all stuff that we've only learned recently, correct?
- [22:50]
A
Yeah, yeah. I actually ended up downloading quite a few of the MPD reports and there are so many supplemental documents and the official, like official autopsies don't seem to be released. But there is this summary that is in some of these documents that's provided, and that's where we're, we're getting a lot of our information from. So when Sergeant Gunderson went through the house, he went to Zanna first, who was in her bedroom on the northwest side of that second floor. And this is a quote from his initial report. Quote, zanna was on her back on the floor in the center of the room with her head towards the west. Zanna was in her underwear and a long sleeved gray T shirt. Both her shirt and underwear were covered in blood. Zanna's face and body was covered in dried blood. I could see what appeared to be defensive wounds on Zanna's hands. There was a deep gash on Zanna's left hand between her pointer finger and thumb. The medical examiner later determined that Zanna had over 50 stab wounds, mostly defensive wounds to her hands, arms and face, with the fatal blow being two lacerations to her heart and one to her right lung. Ethan, her boyfriend, was found in bed in the same room. He was lying on the bed with his midsection covered and initially his face was out of sight. He had been stabbed under his left clavicle, severing the subclavian vein. His jugular vein was also severed. According to the medical examiner's report, Ethan's wounds were so severe, and there's pictures of it that again, his family is like, openly, like, don't, don't like, search the pictures out. Like some, some things you don't need to see.
- [24:27]
B
Yeah, but you can see like evidence of the crime scene from outside of the house.
- [24:30]
A
You can see evidence of the crime scene from outside, and it seems like.
- [24:32]
B
It was coming from Zanna's room.
- [24:34]
A
Yeah.
- [24:34]
B
The blood loss was horrible.
- [24:36]
A
I mean, it's. It's horrendous. After viewing Ethan and Zanna's bodies, Sergeant Gunderson went up to the third floor where the other two victims were found in bed together. He wrote that, quote, Madison appeared to be lying up against Kaylee and had wounds to her forearm and hands, as well as a gash from her right eye to her nose. The medical examiner later determined that Madison's fatal injuries were lacerations to her left lung and her liver. Kaylee's injuries are probably the worst and most disturbing. Sergeant Gunderson describes her as, quote, unrecognizable, as her facial structure was extremely damaged. Her fatal wounds included lacerations to her liver and left lung and a stab behind the clavicle. She also had two subdural bleeds. In other words, she had bleeding on her brain. But you don't get these subdural bleeds from being stabbed. While Kaylee had over 20 stab wounds, she was the only victim that was injured through blunt force trauma. And she was the only victim to also show signs of strangulation. I know her family has come out and talked quite a bit about her injuries and about the fact that she likely fought back and was just really going at this person. We still don't know, however, like, how these injuries were caused, these blunt force trauma injuries, and whether they were from the killer's fists or a secondary weapon. But what the medical examiner did determine from the sharp force injuries was that the weapon was, quote, not serrated, single edged, very sharp, and said a lot of force was used by the suspect. So everyone's, like, trying to gather these injuries. I mean, everyone assumes crime of passion, but this person seemingly has no connection. They can't figure out who would do this. So a lot of criminologists kind of just look to stabbing being a method that indicates a sexually motivated killer. And this is something that is kind of new for me is this thing called pickerism.
- [26:36]
B
Yeah.
- [26:37]
A
Which has been brought up in a couple cases. Yeah. And it's noted here that none of these victims were sexually assaulted. But picarism can be a sexual fetish where someone is aroused by penetrating the skin with a long, sharp object, such as a knife. And it's often in place of someone committing sexual assault. According to criminology professor Dr. Mark Pettigrew, it's really this. It's. I don't know, it's this interesting thing. Yeah.
- [27:05]
B
I sometimes I wonder if that's going to be one of the things we look back on in 50 years and think like the same way we used to think phrenology was real. Feeling people's skulls, if, if it's just going to be kind of like bunk, I wonder psychology or if there like really is something to it? Because it does come up a lot.
- [27:20]
A
I know it has come up a lot. And this is just something I, I'm just. I don't know. It really disturbs me because I'm like. In a lot of these cases, they speculate that the perpetrator looks at the knife as their own sexual organ and it replaces it Freudian. It's really. I don't know how I feel about this one. But back on the scene, we end up getting clue number three pretty soon. At around 2pm that day, MPD Corporal Brett Payne arrives and he sees something that nobody has spotted yet. And that brings us to clue number three. In the third floor bedroom where Kaylee and Madison were killed, there's a leather knife sheath on the bed. The sheath belonged to a special type of knife called a Ka Bar knife. And this is pretty synonymous with World War II. It was kind of like the official fighting knife of the US Marine Corps. Very specific knife, Very specific knife. And there are various versions of this, but the sheath found at the scene with was actually a Marine Corps version, which has a stamped USMC emblem on the leather sheaths outside. As it happened. ISP Lieutenant Darren Gilbertson, who was among the first ISP officers to arrive, is a U.S. marine Corps veteran.
- [28:34]
B
Oh, my God. So he's going to recognize it right away.
- [28:36]
A
He's super familiar with the knife and, you know, knows exactly what he's looking at. He also knew that Ka Bar knives had this reputation for breaking at the tip during combat, so he's even hopeful that there might be some piece of it left behind, maybe in the house, maybe buried in one of the victim's injuries.
- [28:57]
B
Right.
- [28:58]
A
And that could maybe tell them more like what specific model the knife was. However, the tip was not found in any of the wounds after the medical examiner finished their analysis. So their next plan is to track down all the Ka Bar knives that have been purchased in the area. And he kind of knows that even though the sheath belonged to a Marine Corps model, you don't necessarily have to be a Marine to get one. And based on the appearance of the sheath, the officers on the scene thought it was more likely to have been recently purchased than issued to an actual Marine. It just looked fresh, it looked new. Almost like a novelty purchase.
- [29:37]
B
Yeah.
- [29:37]
A
So like A military issued. Which, like, item is.
- [29:40]
B
So it's just amazing that the. Yeah, the officer on the scene just knew that immediately. Like, that is too new. That was not, like, issued to a Marine. Someone probably bought that.
- [29:50]
A
So they go and they visit basically every business in town that would sell these knives. Unfortunately, not a single one of them sold K bar knives, which means the murder weapon was bought somewhere else, most likely online, which makes that lead kind of a dead end for them now. But there's still the sheath. So they tested for fingerprints and DNA. Seven days later, the Idaho State crime lab says that they obtained a male DNA profile from the button of the sheath. Unfortunately, when investigators run that profile through the law enforcement genetic database that we're all familiar with at this point called codis, there are no matches. They're not giving up that easily, though, which I really credit them for, because this is a point in this case where it could have gone cold. But they are vigilant and they have already worked with a private forensic lab in Texas called Othram on other cases requiring genetic genealogy. So on November 22nd, MPD Sergeant Dustin Blaker travels to the Othram labs in Texas to hand deliver the evidence.
- [31:00]
B
Othram's awesome, by the way. We talked about it on Heart's Earth Pounding before. But they do a lot of volunteer work as well. Just kind of going state by state saying, hey, if you have a cold case you think we should look at, you can send it to us.
- [31:10]
A
I really want to talk about this organization in our. In our wrap up for this case today, because I think we are going to be hearing a lot more about them in cases very soon.
- [31:18]
B
I agree. I definitely agree.
- [31:20]
A
So while detectives wait for the results, they start focusing on other details that they can. Now, I do just want to chime in here with a little bit of a side note. There is an aspect of the case that Ethan's mom, Stacy is a little frustrated by, and this is partly because of rumors and how social media ran away with this. But there were a lot of rumors online that there was only trace DNA found on this knife sheath. They found a lot of DNA on this. A lot. Enough for DNA tests to be ran several times over, actually. So I just wanted to clear the air for Stacy here.
- [31:54]
B
I like that she cleared up that rumor, though, because I remember hearing that too. Like, because if there was only a little bit of DNA on the sheath, it kind of makes it sound like this was some genius who only slipped up a little bit. And there was just happened to be A trace, like. No, this person left a lot of.
- [32:09]
A
DNA on this knife. Yeah. And I will say, you know, Kaylee's family has openly talked about how, like, they think that those girls were fighting and that they were able to get that sheath off him too. Like, they speculate that, like, that whole.
- [32:24]
B
Thing, I mean, it was found on the bed where they were fighting him.
- [32:27]
A
I know. So, like, one aspect of this case is like, they. It's just tragic, but they appreciate that their daughters, like, they, you know, they were so close, kind of helped lead them to their killer.
- [32:39]
B
Absolutely. Yeah. If that's what happened, then, yeah, it was really them that got the big piece of evidence. And, Doug, here we have the limu emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
- [33:08]
A
Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty, Liberty Savings. Very unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.
- [33:18]
B
So detectives start searching high and low for a suspect. And they get plenty of tips from the public, mostly related to people who went to University of Idaho with the victims. At first, it kind of seemed like the murders maybe had something to do with Greek life. That's where a lot of the tips were pointing them towards. Given that, I mean, the victims were all in sororities or fraternities. And interestingly, at the time of the murders, the victims to sororities were the only chapters at the University of Idaho that were currently suspended. So police were kind of considering that because both of them were suspended for, quote, violations or concerns regarding risk management, alcohol, sl, drugs or hazing. The police end up spending a decent amount of time looking into the possibility that the murders might be alcohol or drug related. But ultimately, all of those leads come up empty and they stop looking at Greek life entirely. Everyone seemed to like the victims. Like, I cannot stress that enough. Everyone. The police, you know, because they have to do their due diligence and be like, do they have any enemies? And, like, you listen to the kids at the school talk about these four. Everyone has the nicest things to say about them. Like, they made everyone feel welcome. Everyone was, like, in love with Ithan because he was beautiful. Like, just everyone loved all these kids. And so there's not any specific lead within the university that they can really chase. And I know at this point, too, a lot of people were online. There were some TikTok mediums that thought it was a professor at the school that was maybe in a relationship with one of the students. I didn't even want to give it that much credit to talk about it. But, like, other people who were not familiar with the case were starting to suspect people at the school and look through the security footage and try to blame other students. Absolutely.
- [35:00]
A
I mean, tick tock went insane. Yeah.
- [35:03]
B
Tick tock really thought that they were going to solve it, and they just kind of ended up hindering.
- [35:06]
A
They did.
- [35:07]
B
Yeah.
- [35:07]
A
Like, social media really stifled the investigation. We might get into it a little bit more, but, like, the way that social media terrorized the two surviving roommates is horrendous. The documentary, they did it. I mean, these girls, people were showing up on their front steps, putting cameras in their faces, YouTubers, TikTokers marching around after, like, I mean, this was insane.
- [35:32]
B
Cyber sleuths on I think it's peacock or paramount plus is a good documentary that kind of breaks down specifically with the Idaho case. The cyber sleuths, the tiktokers that kind of thought that they could solve it.
- [35:44]
A
Yeah.
- [35:45]
B
The point being that the police department pretty much immediately start looking away from anyone involved at the university. So the next thing that they're doing is going through all of the security footage that they collected in the entire neighborhood. And that's when they find something that's kind of interesting.
- [35:58]
A
That brings us to our fourth clue in this case. A suspicious vehicle. There was actually a white sedan with no front license plate on it that was seen on multiple security videos taken from a few sources in the neighborhood. And it appeared to be circling the house at 1122 King Road on the night of the murders. It actually passed by the house three times before showing up a fourth time at 4:04am right around when Dylan was awakened by noises from the third floor. Then it was seen fleeing the area at an insane high speed at 4:20am right after Dylan reported seeing an intruder leaving their house. It sped off so fast that the lead prosecutor in the case says the driver almost lost control of the vehicle. And we're gonna play that video for you guys. Like, this is. This car is flying.
- [36:48]
B
Yeah. Imagine seeing this on the security footage from that night.
- [36:51]
A
Flying. So there's no video footage of exactly where the car went, but investigators were able to come up with a working theory using the process of elimination based on where the car didn't show up on security camera footage in the. And so their theory was that the sedan left Idaho state entirely. It was heading in the direction of Pullman, Washington, another college town about 10 miles away from Moscow, which is right on the Washington, Idaho border. An FBI agent with special training in identifying vehicles gave MPD his best guess on what the car was. And he thought it was a 2011-2013 Hyundai Elantra. So MPD got in touch with the Pullman Washington PD who did a little video canvassing of their own. And the Pullman PD found security footage of what appeared to be a 2014-2016 white Hyundai Elantra with no front license plate driving around Pullman, including on the Washington State University campus there at around 5.25am on November 13, just an hour after the murders. On November 29, 16 days after the murders, two separate Washington State University campus police officers told MPD they spotted a car that seemed similar to what they might be looking for. A 2015 white Hyundai Elantra with a Pennsylvania license plate LFZ8649. Pennsylvania by the way, does not require a front license plate. Both Washington and Idaho do though. So the car being registered in Pennsylvania was the reason it didn't have that front plate. Now that they had the plate, they also had the name of the driver. A 28 year old white male student studying for a PhD in criminology at WSU. His name was Brian Kohberger. He was 6ft tall and 185 pounds. They also got his photo from his driver's license. And this was a huge deal because Brian clearly had bushy eyebrows just like Dylan had described.
- [39:16]
B
And to reiterate, this was what, 16.
- [39:19]
A
Days after the murder, 16 days, just.
- [39:22]
B
Over two weeks later, they had this guy's name and all this information on him. In hindsight, this feels like a huge moment in the case and it happened so quickly. Except when MPD received this tip, their department initially dismissed it. And that was for a couple of reasons. First, they still thought that the vehicle on their security footage from Moscow was a 2011-2013 Elantra. I don't. The one that they found was 2015. I don't know why they were so hung up on the fact that it, I know was a two year earlier model.
- [39:59]
A
The models, models year to year look so similar anyways.
- [40:02]
B
Like it's just on the grainy footage.
- [40:03]
A
Grainy.
- [40:04]
B
The fact that it didn't have the front license plate is like so obvious to me.
- [40:06]
A
I mean that's bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. That easily could have been a mark on our botchboard here.
- [40:10]
B
I know. Well, later on, the FBI expert reviewed the same footage Again and decided that the car's model could be anywhere from 2011 to 2016.
- [40:20]
A
So then it falls into that boat.
- [40:22]
B
So then it falls into. Into that. Exactly. Plus, Brian had no known connection to any of the victims, which made him seem like this really long shot suspect.
- [40:31]
A
I feel like officers at this point were probably in their heads, like, this is too good to be true. Like, there's no way we catch this horrific guy so fast. 16 days after he.
- [40:40]
B
I know as a suspect, he kind of fell into their lap a little bit. Because we see the car, we know that he has bushy eyebrows. From the roommate that lines up. It. Maybe it's too good to be true.
- [40:51]
A
That's what I'm like. They're probably convincing themselves, like, there's no way he's also a criminology student.
- [40:56]
B
Exactly. So actually, let's talk a little bit more about who Brian is. So before he was a PhD criminology student, he grew up in Pennsylvania. As a teenager, he was, from at least the research we've done, severely depressed. Apparently, at one point, he was addicted to heroin. In high school, he expressed an interest in law enforcement work, and he entered a vocational training program for law enforcement careers. But he got kicked out due to a complaint from a group of female students. The details on this are unclear, but just interesting to make a note of.
- [41:30]
A
Yeah.
- [41:31]
B
In 2011, at age 16, Brian wrote a post on an online forum saying he felt like a, quote, organic sack of meat with no self worth. And this is coming from an online forum that sources were able to authenticate as being from him because they were able to check the email address that was used, birth date, and some other identifying details about it. He posted that he constantly considered taking his own life. He felt guilty for treating his father, quote, like dirt. On the same forum, he said he felt no remorse and could do whatever he wanted. And there's another quote that we found too, that he wrote. He said, quote, I am blank. I have no opinion. I have no emotion. I have nothing. Can you relate?
- [42:12]
A
Yeah. There's a lot on these forums and there's some that have been able to be authenticated, some others that people think are really him. And like, the Reddit detectives have gone down that rabbit hole. But, like, Brian potentially has this thing called visual snow.
- [42:28]
B
Yes. Oh, yeah. And we know that because he was potentially posting on the subreddit for visual snow.
- [42:34]
A
Yes. And he was trying to, like, sort, you know, what this was and how to get help and how to feel better and like, all this stuff, like some of the quotes I pulled out on the visual snow are like, they're really honestly kind of hard to read.
- [42:47]
B
I'm curious if anyone watching has visual snow. I told you about the time I had it for two weeks and thought that I was just gonna have it forever.
- [42:53]
A
Yeah.
- [42:54]
B
I ended up having a migraine that really affected my vision and I didn't know what was going on at the time, but I couldn't see straight and I had all these spots in my vision.
- [43:01]
A
Yeah.
- [43:01]
B
And I found the visual snow subreddit and it is a dark place.
- [43:06]
A
Like really dark.
- [43:07]
B
When your vision is that messed up, it. It kind of messes with your will to live at times it seems just from the posts that I read, but absolutely it's. Yeah.
- [43:18]
A
For those that don't know what visual snow is, it's a super uncommon neurological condition in which the primary symptom is persistent flickering white, black, transparent or colored like dots. And it goes across your whole visual field. So we'll put some pictures up on the YouTube video of like normal vision versus what someone sees with visual snow.
- [43:38]
B
Is they don't know what causes it and there's no cure.
- [43:41]
A
No cure. And a lot of people, like they describe it as. It feels like they're in a video game where nothing looks real. Like everything looks fake and intangible and just. It's really. The way people describe it is really interesting. So there is a quote coming from January 2011 that Brian allegedly wrote saying, quote, I have had visual snow since September 21st of 2009. Since then I've changed mainly from the anxiety and sense of derealization and hopelessness. He allegedly wrote this. I've had this terrible, horrible depersonalization go on in my life for almost two years. I often find myself faking simple human interactions. But it is as if I am playing a role playing game. As I hug my family, I look it in their faces. I see nothing. It is like I am looking at a video game, but less. I am blank. I have no opinion. I have no emotion. I have nothing. So he is dark. Very really dark. Really dark place.
- [44:42]
B
But honestly, on a subreddit like that, I could see how that post would blend in because a lot of the posts are kind of similar to that. It's really sad.
- [44:48]
A
It's a really tough thing to do in.
- [44:50]
B
It also seems like at one point Brian developed an eating disorder that was really severe. He had to be hospitalized. According to a couple sources. He also was arrested for theft in 2014. Apparently he stole his sister's iPhone but by 2018, at least on paper, from what we know in our research, it seems like he's kind of cleaned up his act. Didn't have to go to DeSales University in Pennsylvania, and there he studied psychology and talking about Reddit usage. There's some Reddit posts during his time at DeSales that have people on the Internet a little bit shocked. So under the username Criminology underscore student, he surveyed criminals about topics like how they prepared for their crimes and what their emotions were while they left their homes with the intent to go commit a crime. And he was posting on Reddit asking people to take this survey, which, for a criminology student, is not that strange, but in hindsight, it's very strange. And some people suspect that he was using this information for his own personal gain.
- [45:53]
A
Yeah, a lot of people speculate that his whole reason for even pursuing psychology and criminology was to, like, understand himself and how, like, twisted he felt or.
- [46:05]
B
How to commit the perfect crime. I've seen that. But, yeah, also just to understand yourself. I know if you don't know what's.
- [46:10]
A
Going on, that's another one of our crime House shows that you'll see an episode on him, I'm sure.
- [46:14]
B
Oh, absolutely. Either way, Brian stayed at that university long enough to earn his master's degree, and he graduated in 2022. And that same fall, at 28 years old, he started at the Washington State University PhD criminology program, and he even landed a job as a teaching assistant. But in just a couple of months on campus, he had already gotten a reputation for being rude, sexist, lazy, and arrogant. And what's even more interesting, the Pullman police knew who he was already at that point, but not because he had committed any crime and landed on their radar that way. It was because he applied for an internship doing research with them, which someone else just said this to me recently, but we were talking about the Golden State Killer. Like, the best job to have if you want to commit a lot of crimes is probably a police officer.
- [47:09]
A
I know. It's like, it's almost. It reminds me of the saying, keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer. It's like if you can get a job, like, on the inside so you.
- [47:18]
B
Can get ahead of it and you can know where they look and know their.
- [47:21]
A
You could tamper with things.
- [47:24]
B
But get this, the police department actually turned him down because they felt like he was awkward. He'd also been pulled over in Moscow, Idaho, just a month before the murders. That was in October. Of 2022. Detectives were able to find body cam footage of the stop. And Brian tries pretty hard to talk his way out of a ticket, but he doesn't act in any way that stands out to detectives during that confrontation. So within a few months, Brian's life starts looking a lot different than it had looked when he had that Moscow traffic stop around mid December. He ends up getting fired from his TA position and his funding for his PhD was pulled. And I have some of the termination letter that he was given. So part of it reads, On September 23, 2022, you had an altercation with the faculty you Support as a TA, Professor Snyder, I met with you on October 3rd to discuss norms of professional behavior. On October 21st, Professor Snyder emailed you about the ways in which you had failed to meet your expectations as a TA thus far in the semester. As a result, on November 2, the Graduate Director and I met with you to discuss an improvement plan, which you agreed to and I shared with you in an email dated November 3rd. And then we met again on December 7th, this time with Professor Snyder as well as the graduate director and I, to discuss your progress on the improvement plan. And while not perfect, we agreed that there was Progress. But on December 9, there was another altercation with Professor Snyder in which it became apparent that you had not made progress regarding professionalism, and about which I wrote to you on December 11th requesting a meeting. We met on December 19th when I informed you of your termination as a TA for the spring semester. Wow, altercations.
- [49:07]
A
Yeah, I mean, to start the school year around end of August, early September, and have a first altercation. September already, like, very, very concerning behavior.
- [49:18]
B
Absolutely. So at that point, his dad has to fly out to Washington to help his son move back to Pennsylvania. They end up driving cross country together in the same white Hyundai Elantra. And they happened to get pulled over twice in Indiana, just 10 minutes apart. I kind of say happened in quotes, because we know that those were probably a little bit more planned than just happenstance. And Brian officially arrived home in Pennsylvania on December 16th. And maybe, just maybe, he thought that he had fully gotten away from what he had done. He was back in Pennsylvania with his parents. He was no longer near the crime scene. Maybe there was part of him that kind of exhaled and thought that this was all over for him and he was going to be able to live the rest of his life doing whatever he wanted. But then on December 19th, just three days later, the FBI sends an alert to MPD, and it includes Brian Kohberger's name.
- [50:11]
A
So just as police were kind of considering dismissing Kohberger as a suspect, clue number five comes around. DNA. Remember that DNA profile that was hand delivered to Othram in Texas? The one that came from the knife sheath? Well, thanks to the police's careful collection of the DNA, it allowed Othram's investigators to hone in on Coburger's family tree almost immediately. Using the same forensic DNA evidence that had previously been used to generate the STR profile, Othram scientists applied forensic grade genome sequencing to develop a high resolution SNP profile in just a matter of days. And just because DNA is so complicated, just like an easy way to explain this is, you can think of STRs as a precise snapshot of one person, while SNPs are a panoramic view of their entire family history. So given the DNA from the knife sheath, like they don't know who it is, but they have a complete profile. But they're almost reverse engineering the family tree from that because of this technology.
- [51:15]
B
Yeah. Wow.
- [51:16]
A
To then be able to go to the family tree and hunt down to get the exact match.
- [51:19]
B
Crazy.
- [51:21]
A
So the DNA showed that the sample came from a, quote, multi generational American family mixed with Italian ancestry. The genetic genealogy pointed to a multi generational Pennsylvanian family that intersected with Italian heritage only twice. Like, it gave them a very specific family tree.
- [51:41]
B
Very specific.
- [51:42]
A
And the fact. Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania car license plate. He's from Pennsylvania, went back to Pennsylvania. We got him. So on December 19, the FBI said that they had DNA results and a possible suspect they could tie to the murders. Brian Kohberger. But to the public, the FBI can only really say, quote, this is a name of a person who, based on their heritage, cannot be excluded as a match for the DNA found at the crime scene. Which is not by itself enough to get an arrest warrant for that. They're going to need that direct match. On December 20, five weeks after the murders, FBI agents arrived in the gated Pocono Mountains community where Brian's family lived. They placed his house under 24. Seven surveillance to make sure he couldn't get away or commit another crime. And meanwhile, back in Idaho, police were requesting search warrants for even more evidence. Which brings us to our sixth clue. Cell phone data. On December 23rd, they get a search warrant for Brian's cell phone records from November 12th to the 14th, the period just before, during and right after the murders. Those records include which cell towers Brian's phone connected to during this time. And to investigators, it was pretty damning at 2:47am on the night of the murders, the phone connected to a tower that would have provided service to Pullman, Washington, where Brian lived. But then there's a Gap until 4:48am where the phone doesn't connect to any towers. According to digital forensic experts, that meant that Brian physically turned his phone off. And upon further forensic analysis, they were able to determine that the phone was manually powered off by the button and the battery was at 100%.
- [53:37]
B
I just don't understand how you're a criminology student Getting a PhD like you've been a criminology student for a long time and you didn't know that when you drive your cell phone to the crime scene with it on, they can see that. And just because you turned it off once you got there doesn't absolve you of anything. Every time I read that piece, it's so shocking to me.
- [53:58]
A
I mean, it's baffling. But he turns his phone back on, and at 4:48am it connected to a series of towers consistent with driving south from Moscow, Idaho, on this highway, Highway 95, and then across the state border to the area of Uniontown, Washington, and then north to Pullman, Washington, which is a little bit of a mystery in this case because this route isn't the most direct way to get from Moscow, where the murders were, to Pullman, where he lives. The towns are only about 10 miles apart. Taking this path that he did basically quadruples both the distance and the time. It also doesn't really make sense as an attempt to evade law enforcement unless.
- [54:43]
B
You'Re dumping stuff along the way.
- [54:45]
A
I mean, that's what a lot of Redditors speculate, which I wouldn't be surprised if, like the sleuths out there, start putting search parties together to evaluate this path and find potentially what he disposed of if he did.
- [54:58]
B
There's a river by there. Maybe don't quote me on that, but I believe there's a river around there. So I don't know. It feels sus.
- [55:06]
A
It's very Susan. Which is enough for police to get another warrant, this time for historical cell phone data going back to June of 2022, five months before the murders, when Brian moved to Pullman. This leads to another chilling revelation. There were at least 12 different occasions when Brian's cell phone connected to towers that covered 1122 King Road between June 22 and November 13. And practically all of them were in the early morning or evening, which means he was likely watching the house for a long time, starting pretty Quickly after he moved to Pullman. Then looking at all the data, they see something they missed the first time they sifted through Brian's phone. Went back to Idaho on November 13th. And this is coming directly from a police report that I found less than five hours later between 9:12 and 9:21am Phone data shows Brian allegedly drove back to the scene at 1122 King Road and stayed for about 10 minutes.
- [56:21]
B
What do you think he was doing?
- [56:23]
A
Seeing if police were there yet?
- [56:25]
B
Yeah, I mean, we've talked about it a lot, but returning to the scene of the crime to watch the police figure things out, which we had known. I. I remember early on we figured out that or they had released that it seemed like he returned back to the crime scene. But the information about how much he was showing up to the house, that was very surprising. It was really surprising.
- [56:49]
A
And we're gonna.
- [56:50]
B
June. June of 2022, like, right as he moved there.
- [56:54]
A
Yeah. Which I'm like, how did he.
- [56:55]
B
Like, he targeted it right away.
- [56:57]
A
How did he find them? Like, was it dating? So Tinder. Like, is that how he saw and then, like, targeted someone in the house?
- [57:04]
B
I know you just at the time of this recording, we don't know. I know a lot more stuff has been coming out, but that's like the big piece that's missing.
- [57:11]
A
Yeah. And in a lot of the documents I've gone through, like, I know they did obtain warrants for his TikToks and dating app profiles. So, you know, they. They haven't had a lot of time to sift through. There's a lot of data I'm sure they're getting. So I think we will find out eventually. But at 12:49, almost exactly an hour after the surviving roommate's 911 call, Brian and his Elantra both appear on security footage at an Albertsons in Clarkston, Washington, which is right by the Idaho border and very close to the route that the phone traveled earlier that morning. So it's. It's very likely he returned to the crime scene. Then his phone goes dark again from 5:36 until 8:30pm that day in the area of Johnson, Washington, which is about 25 minutes north of his house. We may never know what he was doing during this time, but obviously with all of these holes and phones shutting off in his timeline, like disposing of evidence, nothing normal and good is what I'm thinking. And something to note going through all of this data, a lot of these Co Burger investigation documents, as they're called, are public now. You can actually find them on the city of Moscow, Idaho's website. And, I mean, there are report after report after report. So people are really starting to sleuth through all of these. And something that a lot of Redditors point out is that allegedly after November 13, after these final pings in the area, Brian's phone doesn't ping at all near Moscow. So seemingly showing up a lot in this area to after the murders, nothing. Yeah, they find that really irregular, of course, and it's just something to note in this case. Now, police in Idaho are filing search warrants for everything related to Brian. But on December 27, they get good news from Pennsylvania. Agents waited for the Coburger family to put their trash out, and then they swooped in and grabbed it, hoping to get some of Brian's DNA. Which brings us to our seventh clue, the Q tip. The Pennsylvania agents immediately put the evidence on a plane back to the Idaho State Crime Lab a day after it was found. On December 28, 2022, they had a match. The DNA from the knife sheath was not an exact match for the DNA on the discarded Q tip, but the Q tip DNA was a strong potential match for the biological father of the person whose DNA is on the knife sheath. Corporal Payne, who actually discovered the sheath, wrote in his probable cause affidavit that 99.99998% of the male population could be excluded as the suspect's biological father based on DNA.
- [60:04]
B
And that is finally enough for them to get an arrest warrant. On December 29th at 1:00am on December 30th, a little more than six weeks after the murders, the FBI and Pennsylvania State Police raided the Coburger family home and arrested Brian. And Brian did not seem to put up a fight. But he did ask a weird question. He asked them, who else did you arrest? And that has sparked some theories on the Internet that he either had an accomplice or maybe he was trying to psych the police out. Like, he wanted them to think that he had an accomplice, which I could see. Maybe he had learned something in criminology that was like, sometimes they arrest a bunch of people just to ask them more questions about the crime. Who knows? But the minute the police brought up the Idaho murders, though, he told them that he had the, quote, utmost respect for law enforcement. And then he invoked his right to counsel. While preparing for a trial, Brian Coburger was held without bail. This gave the prosecution a chance to test his own DNA against the DNA on the knife sheath. And it was a match. They Also got a warrant to search his Amazon purchase records for any activity related to knives or knife accessories. And they discovered that Brian had bought a K bar knife and a sharpener in March of 2022, eight months before the murders. Not a good look for Amazon. On the same day that Brian was arrested, police also searched his apartment in Pullman, Washington, and it had been cleared out almost completely. The trash was empty, even the shower curtain was removed. I mean, that makes sense. He was leaving school permanently. They did, though, find two small stains that were tested for and found to be possibly blood. And that was on a pillowcase and a mattress.
- [61:54]
A
But.
- [61:54]
B
But we don't know whose blood they were. Either DNA tests weren't done on this or the results haven't been released as of this recording. His car, that white Hyundai Elantra, was also found to be spotless. It was cleaned so thoroughly that, at least according to lead prosecutor Bill Thompson, it was, quote, like it had been disassembled inside.
- [62:14]
A
I could see that. I could see him taking all those seats out and just scrubbing it.
- [62:18]
B
Well, think about it. I mean, with the descriptions we've heard of the crime scene, it would be impossible to leave without a lot of blood on you. So he must have been bringing blood other places.
- [62:28]
A
Yeah, I've gone through some of the documents and hearing the ways in which, like, the blood spatter evidence was all about, like, there's. There's no way.
- [62:38]
B
Absolutely. So. So he would have had to clean his car thoroughly. In theory. At his first arraignment, Brian refused to verbally enter a plea, which is allowed in the state of Idaho. But because of that, the judge entered a formal not guilty plea on his behalf. Meanwhile, the defense would go on to spend two and a half years trying to get prosecution evidence excluded while they built their case. For example, like, one of the things this looks like is there was unidentified male blood on a handrail outside of the crime scene, which the defense hoped would point to an alternate suspect. The team also points to a three person mixture of DNA that was found under Madison Mogan's left fingernail. As for an alibi, though, the defense claimed Brian was just out for a drive between Pullman and Moscow on the night of the murders, at the exact time of the murders. As one does, Brian never answered any of the police's questions about the murders. And in all of his recorded conversations with family members, he never said anything about the crimes, the murders, nothing. And even with all of this, we're never really going to know what would have been presented in the courtroom, because, as everyone knows, at this point, this case is not going to trial. On June 30, 2025, just weeks before jury selection would begin, Brian changed his plea to guilty on all four murders. And it really seems like it was to avoid the death penalty. On July 23, he was sentenced to four consecutive life sentences without parole. He was then transferred to a maximum security prison in kuna, Idaho, which is about 20 minutes south of Boise, where he's been in solitary confinement ever since. Kaylee and Zanna's families did object to this plea deal. They wanted to see Brian tried in court. They wanted him to face the death penalty, which would have been on the table for a crime like this. Maddie and Ethan's families, however, did say that they were okay with the deal and accepting the deal. Brian was not forced to offer up a motive or really any other details on this crime. And that has been, honestly, for a lot of the people involved, one of the hardest parts in all of this. After Brian's plea agreement was announced on July 18, 2025, the judge, though, did lift a gag order, One that had previously restricted how much information could be shared with the public. And because of that, ISP and mpd has since released hundreds of pages of files each. They also released hundreds of crime scene photos. They've released more body cam footage. And this is important to note here. Like, we wanted to look at what the families were saying a lot in all of this and just keep them in mind as to just what they thought as all of this information was coming out. And Ethan and Maddie's families have sued, Seeking to prevent any more images of the victim's bedrooms. So we're not gonna share any of those images that came out.
- [65:43]
A
Yeah, the families are very split on this, I would say, and even, you know, sharing details. You have Kaylee's family, who is kind of openly been like, no, like, people need to know what this monster did. And, like, they've shared quite a bit, but everyone is handling this so differently, and that's really up to each family how they want to proceed forward.
- [66:02]
B
Absolutely, absolutely. But I understand wanting your kids to be remembered by all, like, the beautiful, fun photos they took in college and not ultimately what this crime scene looked like.
- [66:11]
A
Yeah.
- [66:11]
B
But on top of these files, a lot of witnesses have also made public statements that do include a lot of new details about. About Brian. So we kind of wanted to take this moment to go over some of the most telling new reveals that have come out after Brian was sentenced, Starting with, honestly, some really shocking details about his abnormal behavior that led up to the murders.
- [66:35]
A
Yeah, cuz there's a lot.
- [66:37]
B
There's a lot. Let's start with the secret phone files.
- [66:42]
A
Get into them.
- [66:43]
B
This always is such a weird fact for me, but by the time he appeared in court, Brian had actually groomed his eyebrows so they didn't look as bushy. I guess as everyone was saying, like.
- [66:54]
A
That'S going to help you. Your DNA is on what I know.
- [66:59]
B
Well, the prosecution got a hold of a selfie that he took, and it's particularly disturbing because it was taken at 10:31am in his apartment bathroom. And that would have been just six hours after the murders. In that picture, his eyebrows are definitely very bushy. And he's also giving this thumbs up and smiling.
- [67:22]
A
Smiling thumbs up. What the.
- [67:24]
B
Like, he's maybe proud of himself in that moment or I don't know why that is exactly what he wanted to capture. His hands are really red. Like he was recently scrubbing his hands. But that selfie was not the only thing that was found on his phone when they were going through it. According to forensics expert Heather Barnhart, he was searching for information on serial killers and he was downloading entire case files, which by itself could have been. Obviously he was studying for a PhD in criminology. But when you combine it with all of the other evidence that we've been finding in this case, it seems like he was looking for information on how to carry out these crimes or inspiration or something. Just he was reading a lot about serial killers. On top of that, he apparently listened to a Pullman police department scanner to hear radio calls in the hours leading up to the murders. And after hearing the news that the police were looking for a white Hyundai Elantra just like his, he began frantically searching on his devices for a new vehicle to buy. Very incriminating. We're talking 10 minutes after he saw a news article on December 29, 2022, just a day before he was arrested. He also somehow got access to a PDF of all the car makes and models on campus so that he could see how many others there were like his.
- [68:42]
A
That's terrifying.
- [68:42]
B
I know, I know.
- [68:44]
A
How did he get access to that?
- [68:46]
B
Yeah, I, I don't even know why they have that. I guess, whatever. For parking purposes.
- [68:50]
A
When you buy a parking pass, I could see, you know, everyone, like the college keeping a record, but like the fact he was able to get access.
- [68:56]
B
To it and search through and be like, okay, does anyone else have a 2015 Hyundai Elantra that I can pin this on.
- [69:02]
A
Yeah.
- [69:02]
B
He also was searching that day phrases like wiretap and psychopaths paranoid, which. Yeah, take that for what you will. He also visited the Moscow Police Department websites for their latest press releases on the case to read more about them. Newly released information also suggests that he and his mother had. And this was a big one for us, Morgan, that we were talking about earlier.
- [69:24]
A
Yeah.
- [69:25]
B
It came out that he and his mother had phone conversations after the murders and like leading up to his arrest.
- [69:33]
A
And there were a lot of phone calls.
- [69:36]
B
There were so many phone calls. I'm just gonna break down some of the phone calls that he made because they were shocking to hear about. So cell phone records show that he called his mother at 6:13am the morning of the murders, but she did not answer. And remember, they're on the east coast, so it's 9:13. He then called his father. At 6:17 in the morning. His mother, Marianne Kohberger, returned his call and they spoke for 36 minutes. This was approximately two hours after he turned his phone back on after being powered off during the time of the murders. At 8.03am he called his mother again and they spoke for 54 minutes. At 9am, while he was on his way to revisit the crime scene in Moscow, Coburger spoke with his mother for an additional nine minutes. So it looks like 8:03am, he called his mom. They spoke for 54 minutes and then he calls her back just a few minutes later and they talk for another nine minutes. At 4:05pm, the two had another brief two minute conversation. At 5:53pm, coworker called his mother for a final 96 minute conversation. Hour and a half. So what's that? I.
- [70:46]
A
It's like half the day.
- [70:47]
B
Quick math. It's like well over. It's like two over, over three hours.
- [70:52]
A
I love my parents, but like I would nep. In one day, in one day, how many phone calls?
- [70:58]
B
According to some news outlets, his mom actually sent him an article about Zanna and the injuries that she sustained sometime later.
- [71:05]
A
That's absurd.
- [71:07]
B
It really makes me wonder what they were talking about.
- [71:10]
A
What were you talking about?
- [71:11]
B
First of all, if I called my parents and they KNEW it was 6 in the morning, their first thing is going to be like, are you okay?
- [71:17]
A
Yeah.
- [71:18]
B
Having a two minute conversation at four in the afternoon. Unless it's like, oh, I'm around at 6, call me then. And then he calls her later and they talk for 96 minutes. He talked to his mom so much that day, experts Said that the article that she sent him about Zanna came through via text while they were on a call together. And since there was no context surrounding the article, it implied that maybe the two of them were talking about the crimes on the phone. And then she was like, I saw this article and sent it. We don't know exactly what they were saying about the crimes, but they were talking about them, it seems.
- [71:49]
A
Yeah.
- [71:50]
B
However, there's nothing really that indicates Brian confessed anything to her or that she had any knowledge of his involvement during these phone calls.
- [71:57]
A
And I'm so curious, you guys out there listening. What is your take on these phone calls? Because I'm. This is a rabbit hole. I go down and to send that article. What do you think on it? You know, was she totally unaware and was sending the article as like, oh, this is in your area. Watch out. Like, I want to see your comments on this one, because I'm. I'm really hung up on this part of it.
- [72:19]
B
I know. I. I just wish I knew what they talked about. However, I would say you don't need to know anything about the contents of the phone calls to be severely creeped out by Brian Coburger because we have so many accounts of people having everyday interactions with him that were very concerning.
- [72:38]
A
So just three months into his time at WSU in November 2022, Brian. Brian had made a terrible impression. I mean, you kind of read his dismissal letter and how many altercations he had with professors and lack of professional behavior. And they were also saying that he.
- [72:53]
B
Was, like, sexist towards women and a whole bunch of bad stuff.
- [72:57]
A
Yeah. And that's what a lot of these people get into. WSU's TA assignment system was pretty random, which led Brian to be assigned to Professor John Snyder, who was teaching in WSU's Criminal justice and Criminology department.
- [73:11]
B
That's the one that he was having the altercations.
- [73:13]
A
Yes. And it's clear that from the very beginning, Professor Snyder thought Brian was kind of an asshole. He wouldn't show up to class to actually do his TA job, but he would show up later, once the professor had already done all of the work himself and would just follow his boss around asking what is described as annoying questions. Brian's behavior was irritating enough that Professor Snyder complained to all of his personal friends about this, quote, douche of a TA he had. Now, Professor Snyder never thought of Brian as a danger, but women on campus did. One female student emailed another after Professor Snyder's class to say, quote, my class's TA looks like A murderer.
- [73:59]
B
Oh, my God.
- [74:01]
A
Which, ugh. It's just like, insane that, like, people's instincts and like, I don't know, their fight or flight were just like, they were. They were pinging from this behavior. Yeah.
- [74:11]
B
Gut feeling.
- [74:12]
A
And apparently there were others who said Brian was rude and sexist to female students throughout all of his classes, which did eventually lead to him being fired. He asked people out in very inappropriate ways. He was seen mansplaining or talking over women constantly. Students complained that he appeared to be really biased against everyone who wasn't his same demographic. He even openly told a female student that he would require any romantic partner of his to be, quote, physically perfect and that she could not have a disability.
- [74:43]
B
Oh, my God.
- [74:44]
A
He also enjoyed talking to his professors about sexually motivated burglaries and the emotions suspects must feel when committing crimes, which is just super interesting in all of this because there was no sexual assault in this case. A bunch of the documents I read mentioned how much, like, money was left out, purses, things like that. So it wasn't a burglary.
- [75:06]
B
I think a lot of people felt like there was supposed to be a sexual nature of the crime and that his plans maybe changed and maybe we'll get into that a little bit later.
- [75:14]
A
Yeah. And again, like that Reddit survey he put out, trying to get criminals to respond about their emotions with committing crimes. Like, it's just so interesting how much it all came up. There's also one female student that went to a professor with her suspicions that Brian had stolen an intimate item from her apartment. A female faculty member issued a chilling warning once saying, quote, mark my word, I work with predators. If we give him a PhD, that's the guy that in that many years when he is a professor, we will hear is harassing, stalking and sexually abusing of his. I thought would be his, you know, his students at wherever university. He ended, end quote.
- [76:01]
B
It's a little incel y, don't you think?
- [76:05]
A
It's giving that.
- [76:06]
B
Yeah.
- [76:07]
A
Brian's behavior was apparently similar off campus too. An exotic dancer contacted MPD after the crimes to say Brian had been a customer of hers from 2018 to 2019. She claimed that on multiple occasions she heard him talking to himself about wanting to kill people. When asked who he wanted to kill, he allegedly replied, quote, anyone I want, causing the dancer to alert security. It was also just released that Brian had a run in with a female hotel clerk in Pullman, Washington back in June of 2022. Initially, he flipped out at the woman who was training for overcharging him. But when she corrected her mistake, she said Brian became super flirtatious and overly nice. The next day, he continued a conversation with her about, quote, sheaths and collecting knives, end quote. As well as, quote, self defense weapons and knife collections. There was another tip from a woman who said she matched with Brian on Tinder. He later asked her what she thought would be the worst way to die. When she replied that she thought it would be a knife, Brian allegedly responded, quote, like a K bar. The truth was, Brian was a predator that showed a lot of warning signs long before committing this horrendous, horrendous quadruple murder. In fact, when Professor Snyder drove to Moscow for an interview, the police told him that they had actually found a list of women's names in Brian's possession. One of them was a woman Professor Snyder knew through the WSU criminology department.
- [77:49]
B
Well, we also learned only after Brian's plea deal about some of the other terrifying things that happened around 1122 King Road in the weeks and months leading up to the murders. So in the month before her death, Kaylee told her roommate Dylan that she felt like someone was following her and watching her. It began one night when she went out to walk her dog, Murphy. She thought she saw someone staring at her from the apartments near the house. Then a week or two later, a man followed her around a local grocery store all the way out to her car. And around the same time, about two weeks before the murders, the roommates made a Starbucks run together during this winter storm. And they returned to find that their front door was wide open and the washing machine inside the house was running, even though none of them could remember turning it on. They were so concerned with this, they went and armed themselves with Ethan's golf clubs before they went inside. And it was notable enough that they had Zanna's father stop by later to tighten the hinges on the front door. It really freaked them all out. A former unnamed roommate moved out of the house in part because she got a, quote, uneasy, weird feeling there. She later told police that the doors in the house were often left unlocked or had been broken in ways that made them really easy to unlock, which, I mean, is so common in a lot of these college houses. Plus, there were other creepy details that suggested Brian had been targeting some of the girls in the house. Kaylee, Madison, maybe even Zanna. Brian's phone had been in the area of the WI FI network belonging to the Mad Greek. Remember, that's the restaurant where Madison and Zanna both worked and Dylan told police that during the murders, she thought she heard the intruder address Kaylee by name, saying, it's okay, Kaylee, I'm here for you. There was also evidence to suggest that he was following Kaylee and Maddie on Instagram. He had liked several of Maddie's photos. He actually maybe DM'd the victims repeatedly, saying, quote, hey, how are you? And, I mean, this is something we were talking about earlier, Morgan. But one of the really disturbing things that came out about the case is that there's some evidence that Brian befriended Kaylee's dog Murphy in the weeks, maybe the months leading up to the murder, all without her knowing about this. An unnamed friend of the roommate said that there were several times before the murders where Murphy would just disappear out into the bushes behind the house for long periods of time, and he would not come back to the house even when he was called. She told police that this happened at a Halloween party shortly before the murders, while the group was, quote, on the back patio once again, and Murphy began to run into the wood line behind the house and not come back. The group also, quote, heard noises, too that time, similar to what it would sound like if someone was moving through the woods on foot. That's all the things that this friend said in their interview. Another friend said that there was a time that Kaylee came home to find that the rear side door to the house was open and Murphy was missing. He eventually did return home, but the roommates did not know where he disappeared to during that entire time.
- [81:07]
A
And that, to me, sounds like it's that kitchen sliding door, that patio door that Brian used to get in and out.
- [81:13]
B
Yeah, the one that they believe he entered the house through.
- [81:16]
A
Clearly familiar with getting into that house.
- [81:18]
B
Knew his way around the house. Around the same time, a neighbor actually saw a person walking through their yard. And they said that they were specifically 92% certain that that was Brian Co Breaker. I mean, we've seen it before with dogs in crimes where people either, like, will bring something to befriend the dog to keep it quiet, but I've never heard of someone spending months befriending the dog so that they can go into the house. Just very scary.
- [81:47]
A
I mean, it could line up. I'd be interested to see if it lines up with when his phone was pinging around that area. Yeah, I mean, the way this house was set up, there was like another parking lot kind of up top that overlooked it. And there were woods then on the side. So it would have been easy for someone to go park up there and then coax the dog in the woods.
- [82:08]
B
Where they thought he parked to commit the crimes too. Right. Is up in the back and then came down through the woods. So let's talk a bit more about Brian's life in jail. After his plea deal, Brian's life within the jail system did change quite a bit. He was already behind bars, but he was in county lockup. So he had these privileges like hour long showers, vegan meals, frequent video calls to his mother. Now he's just going to spend the rest of his life in a maximum security prison where he's only going to get a shower every other day and one hour of recreation time per day.
- [82:42]
A
That's too much.
- [82:43]
B
In a recent leaked video from his maximum security prison cell, Brian doesn't look all that thrilled with his situation. Good. He also has been vocal about things that he doesn't like about prison. He has complained of harassment from fellow inmates. He submitted a handwritten request to transfer away from his current cell, block J2 to escape verbal threats that he claims to be receiving. I mean, you don't kill four innocent college students and get treated kindly in prison. I imagine.
- [83:14]
A
What the did you think was going to happen?
- [83:16]
B
His transfer ultimately was denied. It seems really like in all the time that he spent planning these crimes and casing the scene and whatever he was doing, he never actually stopped to think about the consequences of getting caught and what that might look like for him afterwards. And now he has four consecutive life sentences that he has to serve, most of which he's likely to spend in solitary confinement. And maybe, just maybe, he is going to end up wishing that the death penalty was still an option.
- [83:46]
A
I could see that. And that kind of takes us to today. I mean, there are a lot of loose ends and theories on this case. I mean, the Internet is still kind of running rampant. That, like, even after Brian's conviction, there's a lot of blame still being, being put on the surviving roommates, which I want to be clear. These women went through horrendous trauma. Like, you cannot imagine how you're going to respond in a circumstance like that. After a night of partying, some of them underage, maybe worried about getting in trouble. Previous circumstances where people were too drunk and everything worked out fine the next morning.
- [84:25]
B
I know. And you're really just not thinking that that's a possibility. You're also living in a house where people come in and out. I could see being freaked out, but not thinking anything to that degree had happened.
- [84:36]
A
Yeah. There is an interesting part of this case that I do want to point out and like, very kind of gingerly talk about it. But, you know, Dylan's testimony really did help with this case. She was an eyewitness. She saw Brian the bushy eyebrows. And she also describes hearing things. And in a couple of the reports I read, they mention watching Vampire Diaries earlier in the evening. And so this is something that is kind of an innocuous detail at this point. It doesn't really change the outcome, but a lot of people speculate that some of the things that might have been heard that night actually were coming from a Vampire Diary episode. And there's a post on Reddit, and it just says this, Dylan was watching Vampire Diaries with Bethany around 2am so it's just something that Reddit has kind of gone down a rabbit hole over and again. We'll never really. We'll never really know.
- [85:35]
B
And so as we're coming to the end of the story, I wanted to mention that this case has really been huge in the true crime community. There's some people that have not really handled it well. So law enforcement complained that rumors on social media were making their investigation more difficult and were costing officers time and resources. There were a lot of unsubstantiated attacks on the surviving roommates, especially before Brian was arrested, just like questioning how they handled the events of the day, which we talked about. And there's theories that are still floating around the Internet that are completely unfounded and ultimately not helpful for the investigation or the closure of the families. And so we always like to end with a call to action, to advocacy. In this case, the call to action, I think, is pretty simple. If you're a true crime fan, whether you choose to talk about the case online, just remember that there's always real people involved. I think this is a case where a lot of people were confronted with the fact that there are real people involved, especially when it comes to recent cases, survivors, even detectives working on the case. Maybe reading your comments. Yeah, I mean, we just got a. You sent me last night when we covered the Martin family disappearance, we heard from Archer Mayo, who was the diver that found them.
- [86:47]
A
Like, he's one of the top comments right now.
- [86:49]
B
People are going through the comments.
- [86:51]
A
Yeah.
- [86:51]
B
They're seeing what people are saying, and they're reading the Reddit threads. So a lot of times conspiracy theories can delay a case in being solved, and it can create a lot extra trauma for the surviving victims.
- [87:02]
A
Yeah.
- [87:04]
B
And I think probably a good rule of thumb is to comment on cases the way that you would want People to comment if it was your loved one that passed away. And that being said, we know that there's a ton of new information coming out on this case every single day. Basically, of course, we couldn't pack every detail into this episode. So if there's something that we missed that you find particularly interesting, let us know.
- [87:28]
A
Yeah, there's a lot. I mean, I, I could talk about the victim impact statements all day. I know the Gonzalez family, the sister, I'm. Oh my God.
- [87:38]
B
And like, was incredible.
- [87:39]
A
She went into his Reddit history, that survey he put. I mean, she really, and she just kept her composure and really just hammered it home. And I mean, those impact statements really, really are important to watch if you want to, you know, see how this really has impacted.
- [87:57]
B
Yeah.
- [87:57]
A
Because again, how would you respond if this was your loved one? And that's how you should be responding. That's how you should be treating everyone involved in this case. And so I recommend watching some of those because they are very, very impactful.
- [88:09]
B
Absolutely. And we also wanted to flag that if you wanted to do something tangible to help remember at least one of the victims in this case, you can buy tulip bulbs from the Ethan's Smile foundation, established by Ethan's parents to raise money for a scholarship in his name.
- [88:26]
A
I did see an interview from his mom that so far at the time of the interview, they had already helped provide scholarships of $105,000.
- [88:36]
B
Oh my gosh.
- [88:37]
A
So this foundation is doing amazing things and the stuff they sell is absolutely beautiful. So highly recommend checking it out, you guys.
- [88:44]
B
There's also the Made with Kindness foundation, honoring the mem of the victims in this case. And that can be found at www.madewithkindnessfoundation.com. and with that, we're going to transition into the missing person of the week. This week we wanted to highlight the case of Kevin Collins Jr. He was last seen on February 27, 2025 in Salem, New Jersey. He's described as 21 year old, black male, 5 foot 5, weighing around 115 pounds. He is brown eyes and black hair. Now, Kevin Collins Jr. Was last seen on February 27, 2025 at approximately 4pm when he left Inspira Medical center on State Highway 45 in Mannington Township, Salem County. He was last seen wearing a hospital gown, which was later found near the hospital on February 27th at approximately 4:57pm Surveillance footage captured Kevin walking unclothed in a wooded area near Griscom Drive in Mannington Township. If you have any information on this case, you can call NJSP Troop A in Woodstown Station at 856-769-0775, or the new Jersey State Police Missing persons unit at 609-882-2000. And that's extension 2554. And there's a note here that he's believed to be experiencing a mental health crisis at this time.
- [90:11]
A
That is all that we have for this episode of Clues. This was a really tough case. A lot of families impacted forever. And if there's anything you feel we didn't touch on, again, put it in the comments.
- [90:25]
B
And, you know, like we mentioned, there's new information coming out all the time. So if there's anything that's come out since. Since, you know, we recorded this episode a while before, it's gonna get posted. So if there's anything that's come out, like, let us know in the comments or let other people, you know, who are also watching this know in the comments.
- [90:42]
A
Yeah.
- [90:42]
B
What else has been shared?
- [90:43]
A
Absolutely. We. We go through the comments. We respond to a lot of you, so we really appreciate having those conversations and making this community really what it is. Coming together to help bring justice. That's, like, what I feel it is these days.
- [90:56]
B
Absolutely. Absolutely. And at Crime House, we value your support. So you can also share your thoughts on social media and remember to rate, review, and follow clues to help others discover the show. And we will be back next week with another episode for you guys.
- [91:11]
A
Till then, bye, guys.
- [91:12]
B
Bye.
- [91:18]
A
Crimes of is a weekly series that explores a new theme each season, starting with the crimes that inspired Hollywood's most iconic horror villains.
- [91:27]
B
Follow Crimes of wherever you get your podcasts or find them on YouTube at Crime House Studios. New episodes out every Tuesday.