DEEPLY DISTURBING: Twisted Glimpse Inside Kohberger's Life Before & After Idaho Student Murders - Drop Dead Serious With Ashleigh Banfield

Podcast Summary

Podcast: Drop Dead Serious With Ashleigh Banfield

Episode: DEEPLY DISTURBING: Twisted Glimpse Inside Kohberger's Life Before & After Idaho Student Murders
Date: September 10, 2025
Host: Ashleigh Banfield
Primary Topic: Deep dive into never-before-seen photos from the phone of Bryan Kohberger, accused in the Idaho student murders, and insights into his psyche before and after the crimes.

Overview

In this episode, Ashleigh Banfield provides a raw, emotional, and deeply personal analysis of dozens of previously unseen photos obtained from Bryan Kohberger’s phone. These images, unearthed by forensic experts and never before made public, span the time before and after the University of Idaho student murders. Banfield scrutinizes each, searching for clues to Kohberger’s psyche, vanity, and possible motives, and reflecting on the chilling sense of evil that permeates his self-portraits. The episode aims to humanize the victims, explore red flags in criminal behavior, and reflect on the true crime genre’s compulsion to understand and recognize “monsters” before they strike.

Key Discussion Points

1. The Photo Dump: What Was Found ([00:05]–[12:14])

Banfield describes her visceral reaction:
- “Some of the faces he makes and some of these pictures, it’s just the face of a monster.” (A, [01:31])
- Photos are largely selfies, most never posted or sent—kept just for Kohberger himself.
Context of the photos:
- Dozens found on his phone; many taken before and after the murders; settings include bathrooms, hiking trails, restaurants, his apartment, and his parents' home.
Search for red flags:
- Banfield frames her analysis as a quest for understanding such individuals—how to recognize them:
  - “How can we recognize them? What pieces to the puzzle can we put together to just get a little bit smarter…?” (A, [05:30])

2. Vanity, Narcissism & Chilling Details

(Bathroom Selfies, Wounds, and the Timeline) ([01:00],[10:00],[19:09],[20:10],[28:39])

The infamous ‘thumbs-up’ selfie & injury:
- After the murders, Kohberger photographed himself, with a bandaged ring finger, likely reflecting a cut sustained during the crime.
- Weeks later, subsequent selfies show the same wound in healing stages:
  - “The wound on that finger, on that knuckle is still there.” (A, [03:14])
  - “Two and a half weeks later, it’s still healing, but the bandage isn’t on it.” (A, [20:58])
Obsessive vanity:
- Shirtless photos flexing, checking himself out in new jeans with tags on, multiple sequences showing him admiring his physique.
  - “He’s so vain. And he, for some reason, thinks his physique is fabulous, it seems in these pictures.” (A, [02:19])
  - “There’s a whole series of him checking out his butt in these new jeans that he bought.” (A, [12:18])
Disturbing affectations:
- Photos where he intentionally or unintentionally looks menacing, including references to horror icons:
  - “It’s just Michael Myers, you know, just so incredibly freaky.” (A, [04:28])
- The “clown face” photo is highlighted as especially chilling.

3. Pre-Murder Behavior: Outdoor Life, Notes, and Codes ([10:00]–[19:09])

Outdoor images:
- Multiple selfies hiking, at landmarks, in front of state capitals, and at sporting events.
- Presence of bear spray and frequent outdoor activity.
Encoded notes and possible airline codes:
- Repeated selfies holding papers with his name, date, and cryptic codes.
  - “He tries to write them backwards and forwards because he knows that the camera or the mirror is going to reverse them.” (A, [11:08])
- The meaning remains unclear but may document travels or other fixations.
Shopping photos:
- Mirror selfies in stores like Ross and TJ Maxx, sometimes trying on black clothing, which Banfield speculates might be connected to clothing worn during the murders.

4. Post-Murder Mood Shift: Transformation & Psychological Observations ([21:28],[22:31],[28:46])

Demeanor shift after the murders:
- Banfield and producer Lindsay note an apparent rise in Kohberger’s confidence post-crime, particularly in more frequent flexing and shirtless photos.
  - “He looks like he’s exuding more confidence.” (B, [28:46])
  - “All the flexing is late. It’s after the murders.” (A, [28:59])
Possible drug use:
- Banfield speculates whether Kohberger might have returned to drug use during or after the events:
  - “I wonder if any of it is possible, if he got back into drugs during any of this, during the murders.” (A, [21:32])
Comparisons to notorious killers:
- Kobherger’s obsession with checking his appearance likened to infamous true crime figures (Dahmer, BTK, Bundy).
Watching Bundy videos:
- Right before his arrest, he was watching Ted Bundy YouTube videos; Banfield suggests possible emulation:
  - “Maybe he’s trying to look like it because the thumbnail is of Ted Bundy on the YouTube videos, right?” (A, [26:01])

5. The Final Days: Road Trip, Return Home & The Arrest ([22:29],[23:55],[24:51],[25:14],[25:38],[26:01],[26:53])

Driving across country:
- Documented transition from Washington to his parents' home in Pennsylvania via selfies in the white Elantra—vehicle believed to be central to the crime.
- Banfield imagines these photos as parallels to his movements the night of the murders.
Home with parents:
- In Pennsylvania, Bryan is seen taking selfies, including with a dog (possibly the family pet), and in the kitchen with plastic baggies—mirroring the notorious detail at his arrest:
  - “There’s a box of baggies on the floor… Who does this in the kitchen of your parents house? Ew.” (A, [26:55])
Arrest context:
- The last photos show Kohberger dressed in black, the color he was found wearing when police arrested him.

6. Reflections and The ‘Papa Roger’ Theory ([29:15]–[30:43])

Banfield revisits the internet rumor that Kohberger was “Papa Roger,” a suspicious online commentator on the case, noting investigators’ inability to confirm the link:
- “Just the fact that they didn’t make the connection doesn’t mean he didn’t erase the connection. And they did admit that he was good at wiping these devices.” (A, [29:15])
Continued calls for awareness:
- Banfield articulates the underlying mission of her podcast:
  - “I am starving for those facts. I’m starving to find out what makes certain people in our flock turn that way. And I’m starving for red flags.” (A, [31:19])

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

“Some of the faces he makes... it’s just the face of a monster.” (A, [01:31])
“The wound on that finger, on that knuckle is still there.” (A, [03:14])
“How can we recognize them? What pieces to the puzzle can we put together to just get a little bit smarter…?” (A, [05:30])
“He really does want to check out his physique. He really likes to see himself flex.” (A, [24:14])
“It’s just Michael Myers, you know, just so incredibly freaky.” (A, [04:28])
“[These] are forensic evidence… this man is an enigma. We don’t know why he did this. We still don’t know what his motivation was.” (A, [26:55])
“He looks like he’s exuding more confidence.” (B, [28:46])
“All the topless pictures. This is all… after the murders.” (A, [28:59])
“I just feel like the more we know, the more maybe we can see the flags, protect ourselves.” (A, [31:28])

Timeline of Important Segments & Timestamps

Introduction & Purpose – [00:05]
Discovery and analysis of Kohberger’s selfies – [01:00]–[05:30]
Discussion of injury and wound timeline – [03:14]–[20:10]
Vanity and bathroom selfies discussion – [02:19]–[12:18]
“Clown face” & sinister expressions – [04:28], [12:18]
Outdoor activities & encoded notations – [10:00]–[19:09]
Shift in photos after murders; confidence, flexing – [20:10]–[28:59]
Driving home, final selfies, the arrest – [22:29]–[26:53]
The “Papa Roger” theory revisited – [29:15]–[30:43]
Host’s reflection on red flags, how to recognize evil – [31:19]–End

Tone

Ashleigh Banfield adopts a personal, irreverent, and often blunt tone—frequently inserting her feelings (“makes me sick,” “I want to shove it,” “God help anybody out there if he returned them”), her outrage at Kohberger’s self-absorption post-murders, and her relentless quest for understanding what makes killers tick. Her delivery moves between macabre humor, direct address to the audience, and moments of empathy for the victims.

Conclusion

This episode offers a haunting, detailed psychological snapshot of Bryan Kohberger through his own lens, as analyzed by an experienced crime reporter. It raises difficult questions about recognition, motivation, and evil, while humanizing the case’s victims and underscoring the ever-present challenge of identifying dangerous individuals before tragedy strikes.

Transcript

A (0:05)

Hey, everyone, I'm Ashley Banfield, and this is Drop Dead Serious. And this is an episode that is going to be kind of by the seat of my pants. If you're listening on the podcast, I'm going to highly recommend that you go and you watch this on the YouTube version of Drop Dead Serious because I'm about to fly through dozens and dozens of photos that I just got my hands on. And to my knowledge, most of these have never been seen before of Brian Kohberger. These are photos that were pulled from his phone by forensics experts Heather and Jared Barnard. They were hired by the investigators in Moscow to pull all of the data from Brian Kohberger's electronics, his laptop, his phone, whatever they could find. And they told me about this a while back, but now I'm seeing it firsthand. They told me on my News Nation show, Banfield, that he took so many selfies and never sent them to anyone, never shared them. They were just for him. Didn't post them, didn't do anything. They were just for him. And I got a weird feeling when they told me that. But it compares nothing to the sickness I feel when I see many of these selfies. And when you see them, you're gonna understand why I said that. Some of the faces he makes and some of these pictures, it's just the face of a monster. And some of the ways he admires himself is just so appalling. And also his physique, the way he just, I don't know, he's so vain. And he, for some reason thinks his physique is fabulous, it seems in these pictures. And really knowing what we know about him, it is so shameful and sick to see him. Let me just start right away by the one picture that stopped me in my tracks today. It's literally the face of Bryan Coburger as the monster we all know him to be behind those dead eyes. But now he actually shows himself that way. I have no idea why he took this picture, no clue why, but there's a couple of different angles of it. Very bizarre. I mean, I guess we've all made funny faces, but knowing who he is is not funny. Nothing about him is funny anymore, especially knowing he's always alone when he's showing these pictures. Many of the pictures are taken in his bathroom, as we've already known from some we've seen before. Especially the infamous selfie that was taken right after the murders where he gave the thumbs up and we saw the band aid on his ring finger. Imagining that may have been because he cut himself during the murders. Well, in one of these new pictures, he's actually shirtless in his bathroom and he's saluting himself. But what's interesting is that it's taken in December of 2022. That's either four to six weeks after. You know, actually it could be anywhere from two to six weeks after the murders. And when he is saluting, you can see his ring finger again weeks later. The band aid's gone, but the wound is still there. The wound on that finger, on that knuckle is still there. And I don't know if this happened during the murders. All I can tell you is that wound was bandaged the morning of the murders when he took that self righteous and self important selfie in his bathroom all showered up. So proud that band aid was visible on that same ring finger. I'm just gonna venture a guess he didn't go off and do all those stabbings with a band aid. Maybe he did, I don't know. But these pictures are so telling. There's one picture in particular that is an affectation of some kind, but it just looks like something out of a horror movie. He looks like he's got the face from a Halloween mask. It's an affectation, like I said, a blur. It's a lighting issue. But it's just so scary when you see it again. I don't know if he was trying to look scary, if this was an accidental picture, but I mean, it's just Michael Myers, you know, just so incredibly freaky. There's so many other pictures that again, knowing who he is now speak volumes. And I show you these pictures not just for the prurience of seeing someone I believe is a freak. He's just not one of us. He's in the category of Dahmer and btk, right? I show these because I'm still interested in Dahmer. I'm still interested in btk. I'm still interested in John Wayne Gacy. I want to know a how they tick, why they did these things, what are they like, how are they so different from us? And maybe most importantly, how can I recognize it in the people who are yet to come? Because we know there are more of these monsters out there probably right now among us. The wolves in sheep's clothing walking among you. How can we recognize them? What pieces to the puzzle can we put together to just get a little bit smarter, to just know a little bit more about who these animals are that do these horrific things to us? Because otherwise, if we did Nothing. We'd be lambs to slaughter. And we may just be anyway. But I'm gonna do my damnedest to try to figure out every motherfucking thing about people like this. So the photos are all we have to go on. So let's keep going through the pictures. And what's fascinating is that so many are taken after the murders and they're so self important. He's flexing, he's shirtless, he's admiring his ass in front of the mirror in so many of the pictures. Originally I thought it was just one. I thought it was just one picture with a new pair of jeans where he had the tag on it and he was admiring his butt, or at least looking if his ass looked fat in those jeans. And the truth was his love handles were hanging out the. The hem, right, the waistband. There's a bunch more of those pictures too, those dark jeans. And I don't know, I have no clue if he was ever photographing any of the pictures of the clothes that he wore for the murders. Likely the clothes that he discarded, buried or sank or did something, he did something to get rid of the clothes that he wore at 1122 King Road that night. But who knows if he bought some special or stole some special to have no evidence of purchase? Who knows? I did notice in a lot of these pictures, you zoom in, you see all these little details, right? Like the don't fuck with cats people always zoom in on the pictures. I love that. I noticed the bottles of Pure Life water. Pure Life, huh, Brian? Really Pure Life important to you? Really pure Life Life important to Bryan Coburger, right? He had a whole case of this shit in his apartment when they executed the warrant and took all those photos of his meager existence in Pullman, Washington. And again, these pictures are from his meager little existence in Pullman, Washington, before he left for Pennsylvania. But there will be some pictures. I will show you some pictures from his home in Pennsylvania that he shared with his parents. One really weird picture that shows him, and I'll get to it in a minute, but shows him with some plastic bags on the floor. And we know he was arrested in the middle of putting his garbage using plastic. Or using rubber gloves to put his garbage into little plastic bags to seal them. Okay, let me get you back now. Don't. To this incredible photo dump. Dozens and dozens of pictures we've never seen that Bryan Kohberger took of himself. I'm starting with a lot of the pictures that he took before the murders. Many of the hiking pictures Were taken in, you know, June and July and August. We don't know about pictures in September. This one is a strange one in a restaurant. I'm not sure which restaurant this one is in. I assume it's a restaurant. I think he set his phone up, say on the salt shaker, took himself a selfie there with these curtained walls. And you can just make. There's like a. You know, the bathrooms are behind him. So that's my assumption that is that he's in some restaurant maybe in Moscow, maybe in Pullman. This one I look at because I see a shower curtain. And when I see him taking pictures of himself in the bathroom and I see a shower curtain, it just makes me sad again, because we know that eventually he removed the shower curtain from his Pullman, Washington apartment. When they executed the warrant, there wasn't one. And that's why I assume he probably took a shower after the murders. And as a criminology student, knew that any trace blood that was on him that he was showering off may have gotten onto the shower curtain. So better to just get rid of it. So it's. It's always sad when you see the shower curtains that are still intact in the bathroom. Selfies that he takes, he takes a lot of pictures from different angles. So he'll be. There's this, you know, two in a row that are the same. It's just the same shirt, same location. Sometimes he tries smiling, sometimes he tries to brood and look tough. But he does take a bunch of pictures of the same scene and sometimes the same shirt. And now he's driving. I don't know if it's the same day or not, but here he is driving and here he is hiking in that same shirt as well, thumbs up. Boy, he sure likes that, doesn't he? Sure likes to, you know, be proud of himself with the thumbs up that just. Every time I see that fucking thumb, I want to shove it. Yeah. You know what I mean? This one is the upsetting one. I don't know what he was doing here. It's just so creepy. It's so Michael Myers. Knowing now what he did and seeing this. I think it's that thing you can't unsee. This is an interesting picture. He's very sweaty. He's all dressed in black. It's obviously nighttime. I'm wondering if he's out for one of his late night runs. And he has stopped and in front of the Cougars statue, because that's the mascot for Washington State University, the cougar. He even Has a sweatshirt that has the Cougars on it. You'll see that a little later on. But, you know, here he is, all proud of himself, sweaty and soaking wet. Okay, this is the weird stuff. I can't quite make it out, but he takes a lot of these pictures. He rips something out of a binder and he writes little codes, and he tries to write them backwards and forwards because he knows that the camera or the mirror is going to reverse them. But he has all these codes that almost look like airline codes, like airline tickets. We haven't been able to figure out what the codes are. But a lot of these pictures he'll snap of himself holding up a piece of paper like this with a date, his name, and one of these codes. And he snapped a whole bunch of these. See, there's one of them, right, with Brian Kohberger. 0, 7, 11, 20, 22. Right. July 11, 2022. And then there's that code. It looks like an airline ticket. Right? The strange thing is that when the investigators photographed these weird notebook notations with the large letters with Bryan Coburger, a date. And then they actually redacted. They put a black box over the codes. Maybe they didn't know what the codes were either, but now we do because we can see them in the photos. But there's a lot of those now. It kind of makes more sense, even though it doesn't make sense. What's he doing? What is he photographing? His name, a certain date and an airline ticket. Maybe he's documenting his travels yet again. Another bathroom selfie. Lindsay, is this the one? Are we zeroed in on this one? It's where he's checking his ass out in the new jeans. In the new dark jeans. Is this like a close up or is this a different shot?