The public may never know why Bryan Kohberger murdered four Idaho college students

It’s possible the burning question that has gnawed at the hearts and minds of people across the nation after Bryan Kohberger brutally and brazenly stabbed four young Idaho college students to death in their off-campus Moscow home will never be answered.

“What we may never know is why,” Fourth Judicial District Judge Steven Hippler said, right before he sentenced 30-year-old Bryan Kohberger to four life sentences in prison. “There is no reason for these crimes that could approach anything resembling rationality.”

Kohberger, who sat expressionless at his hearing Wednesday, merely blinked and fidgeted with his orange jail jumpsuit while staring back at the families of the victims as they begged him for an explanation.

He offered none when given an opportunity to speak. Instead, he “respectfully declined,” he told the court.

In the early-morning hours of Nov. 13, 2022, Kohberger took his large knife and drove the 20 minutes from his Pullman apartment, where he lived, to the rental home that sat at 1122 King Road in Moscow. There, he silently entered the house through a sliding door in the kitchen, and walked to a third-floor bedroom and killed two best friends and roommates as they slept, 21-year-olds Madison Mogen, of Coeur d’Alene, and Kaylee Goncalves of Rathdrum.

Clad in a black and wearing a mask, Kohberger then walked down the stairs where he encountered Xana Kernodle, 20, of Post Falls. She was awake and waiting for a DoorDash order.

She tried to fend off his attack, suffering defensive wounds to her hands. But he stabbed her more than 50 times. He then stabbed and killed Kernodle’s sleeping boyfriend, Ethan Chapin, 20, of Mount Vernon, Washington.

It’s unclear whether Kohberger had visited the house or met the victims. But Latah County Prosecutor Bill Thompson said Kohberger’s phone had connected to the cellphone tower service near the victims’ King Road home about 23 times in late-night and early-morning hours in the four months leading up to the murders.

In the hours leading up to the murders, Kohberger turned off his phone when he drove to Moscow. He turned it back on after the killings when he returned to Pullman.

Investigators have not found the clothing he was wearing at the time of the murders. Police records describe grisly murder scenes in the bedrooms of the home.

And they never found the Ka-Bar knife he used, but he left behind the knife’s sheath and investigators found it on the bed near Mogen’s body. It contained Kohberger’s DNA.

They also collected a neighbor’s surveillance footage that showed Kohberger’s white Hyundai Elantra speeding away about 15 minutes after it was parked.

Thompson said investigators determined Kohberger used back roads to return to Pullman. It took him more than an hour.

At 9 that morning, he returned to the area of King Road and then drove back home to Pullman. At 9:30 a.m. Kohberger took a photo of himself with a “thumbs up” in the bathroom of his apartment.

Family members who spoke at Kohberger’s sentencing wanted to know why – Alivea Goncalves, Kaylee Goncalves’ sister, did not mince words while staring down the killer from across the courtroom as she interrogated him. She tossed a number of rapid-fire questions about her sister’s last moments to Kohberger while he sat there in silence, blinking.

“Detail what you were thinking and feeling … Did you approach (Kaylee and Madison) before? Is there anything else you did?” she asked. “Where is the murder weapon, the clothes you wore that night? What did you bring into the house with you? … What were Kaylee’s last words? … Do you feel anything at all?”

Xana Kernodle’s aunt, Kim Kernodle, stood before Kohberger and pleaded with him to call her if he ever wanted to explain why he did what he did.

“Any time you want to talk and tell me what happened,” she said, “I’m here, no judgment.”

But the same questions the families, their friends and presumably, the rest of the nation has, are questions that prosecutors and investigators can’t answer.

For a period of time, people speculated Kohberger had targeted one student over another on the belief he had run into one of them at some point, became obsessed with one of the girls and was stalking them or had followed some of them on social media.

No evidence of that was found.

“We have never, to this day, seen a connection between him and any of the four victims,” Idaho FBI agent Brett Grover said in a news conference following the sentencing Wednesday.

As for why Kohberger picked that home – and drove back to it around 23 times in a four month period leading up to the murders, as cellphone data shows – could have more of an explanation.

“The evidence suggested that there was a reason that this particular house was chosen,” Moscow Police Cpl. Brett Payne told reporters. He went on to deliver another blow to inquiring minds: “What that reason is, we don’t know. We don’t know who the target was and we are not going to speculate.”

Payne did say they believe Kohberger’s education led him down a certain path, however. He was a criminology student at Washington State University at the time of his arrest.

“That was really what we focused on in his background — what led him down this path, how maybe he prepared for this. And I think that was a big component of that,” Payne said.

Kohberger never said anything after his arrest that would imply motive or a reason for the crime. Any statement he made after police arrested him at his family’s home in Pennsylvania was “surface-level,” police told reporters, and he maintained the same demeanor during his arrest that he has had in court for nearly three years – expressionless and quiet. When investigators questioned him further, he shut down and asked for a lawyer, Grover said.

Investigators grapple with the unknown in criminal cases fairly often, investigators said. And motive, under Idaho law, is not required to prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt in court.

Thompson said Wednesday a lack of clear motive is something prosecutors such as himself consider when moving to trial, because a jury naturally wants to know.

But they’ve also found that juries don’t need a motive to follow the law, even if they come into the courtroom with strong feelings.

“We set that aside as something that we weren’t going to dwell on, whether there was clear proof of a specific motive, because we knew it wasn’t legally required. Practically speaking, we knew it wasn’t something that we possessed, something that we could give to the jury without speculating,” Thompson said.

“And I’m sure as heck not going to stand in front of a bunch of 12 jurors and start speculating. We’re going to give them the evidence.”

Kohberger and his defense team were the ones that originally reached out to prosecutors and asked for a deal, Thompson told the media. Kohberger was prepared to plead guilty as charged to all five counts in the indictment, including felony burglary. The public also likely won’t know what Kohberger and his defense team said during plea negotiations, as such discussions are confidential.

“The evidence, the case that had been investigated and prepared … it became a reality,” Thompson said. As he read each charge and Kohberger’s plea out loud and verbatim to the court, his voice was noticeably quivering. Every time he said a victim’s name, he placed a printed photo of them underneath the projector.

Judge Hippler wiped his eyes.

“It is time for the judicial system to impose final judgment and close the door on this chapter of these tragedies,” Thompson said.

Former Moscow Police Chief James Fry, who attended Wednesday’s sentencing, doesn’t know if he’ll get an answer for the motive to the crime.

“I think that always does bug us a little bit,” Fry told The Spokesman-Review outside of the Ada County Courthouse. “We can’t grapple with that. What we do is we get the evidence that we need and then we move forward. Sometimes we don’t have those answers, and that’s difficult … But the reality is, we may never get them.”

This story was updated to clarify Kohberger’s previous education at WSU.