Last November 13, four American students were found dead, stabbed, in Moscow, a small town in Idaho located in the American West. After several weeks of investigation, the authorities arrest Bryan Kohberger, 28, at his parents’ home in Pennsylvania, several thousand miles from the crime scene. 20 minutes looks back on this quadruple murder widely followed by the American media and whose main suspect, a doctoral student in criminology, was giving lessons on the same subject at Washington State University.
When and how were the four students killed?
Moscow, a small town of 25,000 inhabitants in the American West. On November 13, Kaylee Goncalves and Madison Mogen, 20, students at the University of Idaho, returned to bed around 2 a.m. after an evening in a bar in the city located 470 kilometers from Seattle. For their part, Ethan Chapin and Xana Kernodle, both 20, return after midnight from an evening at a fraternity. The four students sleep in the three-story house they share with two other roommates. A residence located outside the university campus.
In the middle of the night, one of the two other roommates in the house, who was sleeping on the ground floor, would then have come face to face with a man. She will say that she remained “petrified, in shock”. She will decide to lock herself in her room in the middle of the night. It was not until late morning, around 11:58 a.m., that she called the police. On the spot, the authorities will discover the body of the four victims on the second and third floor, as related by the washington post. The four students were savagely attacked with knives.
The two surviving roommates were quickly cleared. The investigation began without a concrete lead, especially since no trace of break-in was found by the authorities in the house.
Who is Bryan Kohberger, the prime suspect?
Nearly three weeks after the murder, on December 30, Bryan Kohberger was arrested at his parents’ home in Pennsylvania, more than 4,000 kilometers from the crime scene. The 28-year-old is a doctoral student in criminology at Washington State University. The campus where he resided is about ten minutes by car from the victims’ house in Moscow.
According to Daily Beast, the suspect had embarked on “a research project to map the way inmates had committed their crimes”. Also according to the American news site, a former comrade of the suspect described him as “very intelligent but emotionally detached”. The doctoral student also earned a degree in criminal justice at DeSales Catholic University in Pennsylvania. One of his former teachers described him to DailyMail as “one of his best students in criminology” and pushed him to pursue studies in this direction.
Where is the investigation?
According to the first elements of the investigation, these uneventful students were killed in their sleep, without waking up their two other roommates in this three-storey white house with small windows. The time of the crime ? Between 2:52 a.m., the time of the last calls on Kaylee Goncalves’ phone, and the call for help at the end of the morning.
Two elements noted by the investigators led to the arrest of the suspect. The murder weapon cannot be found, but a knife scabbard was left on the bed of one of the victims. An analyzed DNA trace corresponds to a sample taken from waste at the suspect’s home. Bryan Kohberger, who still refuses to answer questions from investigators, had turned off his phone the night of the quadruple murder, but phone records show he had been in the neighborhood a dozen times in the previous weeks. And according to CCTV footage, his car, a white Hyundai Elantra, was near the student house between 3:29 a.m. and 4:20 a.m.
The suspect’s car, a white Hyundai Elantra, was also spotted near the student house on the night of November 13. After buying new license plates, the suspect traveled across the country with his father to spend the holidays with the family. On the evening of the murder, Bryan Kohberger would also have returned to give his lessons as if nothing had happened.
Despite the strong media coverage of the case which moved the whole country, a hundred investigators from the local police, that of the State and the FBI have communicated little on the progress of their investigations. We just know that 113 seals, 4,000 photographs and more than 5,000 pieces of evidence were collected. The suspect was, however, very quickly charged with “murder”, on December 30. From Pennsylvania, Kohberger accepted his transfer to Idaho, the state in which the crimes were committed. The court has ten days to transfer the suspect. In the meantime, the judicial file remains under seal, specifies the justice. For this reason, as AFP reports, a possible motive for the crime was not mentioned either by the courts or by the investigators.