After pleading guilty to the murders of four college students, Idaho killer Bryan Kohberger will spend the rest of his days in prison, but the question remains why he did it.
Kohberger had maintained his innocence throughout a highly publicized pre-trial battle before suddenly pleading guilty to avoid facing the death penalty.
The stunning reversal came weeks before Kohberger was scheduled to face trial for the brutal quadruple murders of Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin in November 2022.
While a motive is not necessary for a conviction, prosecutors often use motives to persuade the jury. In this case, they had none.
“We will not represent that he intended to commit all of the murders that he did that night, but we know that that is what resulted,” Latah County Prosecutor Bill Thompson said following Kohberger's plea.
The motive will likely never be known, a painful reality for the families of the victims, who are already divided over the guilty plea that ensures he won't face the death penalty.
Jack Baylis, a childhood friend of Kohberger's, said the criminology student may have developed a morbid fascination that led him to kill.
"I think he did it to see what it felt like, to experience it. If he wanted to write a paper about what killers feel and why they kill, to be accurate, you have to experience it yourself to truly understand it," Baylis told the Idaho Statesman. "To get into the mind of a killer, you have to be a killer, would be my guess."
Kohberger - chillingly - continued to attend classes at Washington State University after the killings, as if nothing ever happened.
"I just can’t even begin to get inside the head of somebody who could do something like that, and then attend class like it’s business as usual," Ben Roberts, 33, a former criminology student at Washington State University said. "That’s just completely alien to me."
At the time of the murders, Kohberger was living in Pullman, Washington, only minutes from the crime scene in Moscow, Idaho. According to prosecutors, in the early morning of November 13, 2022, Kohberger entered the off-campus home through a glass sliding door around and proceeded to kill the four victims, three of whom were sleeping. He left two survivors, one of whom saw a man with "bushy eyebrows."
Investigators found DNA on a knife sheath near one of the victims' bodies. The DNA was later identified as Kohberger's after it was linked to a Q-tip discarded outside of his family home in Pennsylvania, but the murder weapon was never found.
His cellphone pinged cell towers near the victims' home 23 times between the hours of 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. in the months before the killings - and surveillance footage also showed Kohberger's white car speeding away from the neighborhood after the murders.
Prosecutors said Kohberger's background as a student in criminology likely played a role in the methodic planning that went into the murders. In the days after the killings, he meticulously cleaned his car and apartment, leaving nothing for investigators.
"The defendant has studied crime," Thompson told the court. "In fact, he did a detailed paper on crime scene processing when he was working on his Ph.D., and he had that knowledge skill set."
Kohberger will be sentenced on July 23 to four life sentences without parole.
