The Idaho student killer must be condemned, but the mysteries of the case remain

A few weeks before having to be tried, after years of profession his innocence, Bryan Kohberger made a shocking decision – he pleaded guilty.

The 30 -year -old man faced the death penalty for the horrible murders of four students, Kaylee Goncalves, Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle and Madison Mogen in their house in Moscow, Idaho, in November 2022.

The advocacy agreement spares her his life – but the abrupt end leaves the parents of the victims with conflicting feelings and many unanswered questions.

The conviction of Kohberger is scheduled for Wednesday in the city of Boisse.

The state has concluded an “agreement with the devil,” Kaylee Goncalves, Steve, told journalists. Like others, he had persistent questions about the mysteries surrounding the case, including a reason.

Kohberger can speak during the conviction on Wednesday – or not – and the families of the victims will have the opportunity to describe the impact of his crimes.

For Ben Mogen, Madison’s father, the agreement marks a moment of closure for a family who had feared an exhausting trial after years having been put under national spotlights.

“It’s this nightmare approaching in our heads,” Mogen told New York Times.

It was a typical Saturday evening for four young students near the University of Idaho campus, dubbed with trees, weeks before the Thanksgiving break.

Xana Kernodle, 20, and her boyfriend, Ethan Chapin, went to a party in his brotherhood. Meanwhile, the best friends, Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves, both aged 21, went to a bar and finished night with a visit to catering trucks, before they all go home just at the Campus road around 2:00 am at the local time.

A few hours later, early on the morning of November 13, 2022, an attacker hidden his car behind their house on King Road and entered a sliding glass door. He climbed the stairs to the third floor, itinerant from one room to another, stabbing the four young students, while leaving two others in the unscathed house.

The killer left a macabre scene, splashing the walls with blood before being spotted in a ski mask by one of the two surviving roommates by leaving through the glass doors.

For more than a month, the public did not know who had committed such a horrible and violent crime. The mystery – and the national attention it attracted – left the small town of Idaho in shock while the obsessive amateur internet detectives tried to fill the whites.

Finally, on December 30, after weeks of unanswered questions, the police announced that they had arrested a suspect, Kohberger, in his family home hundreds of kilometers in the Pocono mountains in Pennsylvania.

Almost three years later, there is no public explanation why Kohberger murdered the four students, to whom he had no known link.

Kohberger himself did not give any reasons, only entering a guilty plea in court to plan and make the stab wounds.

Journalists and public members have sought answers, dug in the Kohberger past and find old online writings on struggles with depression, its lack of remorse and an old dependence on the heroine.

He had a fascination with criminals, a student under a real writer and medical-legal psychologist Katherine Ramsland, who expressed a shock that a man she considered polite and respectful could have filled such crimes.

“I thought:” They must have evil “,” she told New York Times. “It is not the Bryan Kohberger that I know.”

Kohberger would eventually continue a doctorate in criminology at the Washington State University, where he was dismissed from his work as an educational assistant for the evaluation of students too severely.

Recently published documentaries and books – including one from the novelist Thriller James Patterson – speculated on his motif, suggesting that he was angry with romantic refusals, or even that he was trying to imitate the Misogyne Kilot Elliot Rodger.

A tag prescription in the case prevented people close to the survey from expressing themselves. But last week, an Idaho judge raised the order, claiming that the right of the public to information was “essential given a plea was seized”.

“The media frenzy, as described, will continue despite everything,” said judge Steven Hippler.

In the weeks following the murders, the students of the Idaho University were in advance, awaiting answers and an arrest in the death of their four peers.

With a killer still in freedom, many fled the leafy city of 25,000 inhabitants, who had not seen a murder for five years.

While the police spent weeks without naming a suspect or even a weapon of murder, an online community – frustrated for answers – trained and began to investigate.

Thousands of amateur crime detectives went to Tiktok and other social media sites to pass through clues. A private Facebook group on the case has won more than 30,000 members.

The parents and friends of the victims were bombed with messages, some accusing – without any evidence – mourning roommates and others who were close to the victims of being involved in the murders.

Some came down to the small university town, trying to access the lined house, surrounded by adhesive tape. The frenzy has frustrated the local police.

“There are speculation, without factual support, stirring in the fears of the community and spreading false facts,” said the Moscow police service at the time.

Behind the scenes, the investigators led through thousands of public advice, mobile phone recordings and video surveillance.

Several evidence helped them possibly develop the puzzle.

A white car Hyundai Elantra captured in images near the scene of the Kohberger vehicle corresponding to the crime. The mobile phones recordings placed the 30 -year -old near the house outside the Moscow campus at the time of the murders, and suggested that he was crossing the house leading several times, then a few hours after the crime, before the roommates learned the horrible scene.

Perhaps the most important proof came from a key element left behind: a knife sheath with DNA which corresponded to a sample taken from the waste at the family home of Kohberger in Pennsylvania, where the authorities would finally find him during his vacation.

In 1122, King Road, a few streets from the center of the Idaho University campus, the three-story Gray-Fermée house is no longer on a slope.

A year after the murders, the school decided to demolish the house outside campus where the four students were killed, calling a “dark recall”.

“”[I]It is time for its withdrawal and to allow the collective healing of our community to continue, “said the university at the time, causing mixed reactions to those close to the victims.

With a guilty plea for Kohberger now secure, Mogen’s family agrees that it is time to go from “tragedy and mourning” to “the light of the future”.

His father said that the marketing student was “known for her ability to make others smile and laugh”.

Goncalves, Mogen’s good friend, was a “defender and protector” of his family who “absolutely did everything they decided,” said relatives.

Chapin’s mother said her son, who was a triplet, was “Party life” and “the nicest”.

Kernodle was a volunteer student who was with her friends “all the time,” said her father.

To honor their memories, university students built a circular steel structure engraved with the names of the four students, where visitors came to lay bouquets of flowers, stones, candles and notes remembering their lost friends.

Lying in a grassy commemorative garden, the top of the structure lights up at night, one of the only remaining signs of a tragedy that shook the small town of Idaho.