Inside the hunt for the Idaho killer

In the weeks after four University of Idaho students were found slaughtered in a home near campus last November, a growing number of detectives desperate for answers have yet to identify a suspect or even find the murder weapon.

Publicly, authorities assured concerned residents of the small college town that they were making progress. Privately, they exhaust their prospects, tracing the backgrounds of those with the thinnest possible connections to the case.

During the first two weeks of December, investigators turned some of their attention to classmates of the victims; they also broadened the search to investigate a man in another state who was known to send harassing messages to women, but who had only visited Idaho twice in his life. They looked at a woman who had previously been charged with assault in the region. They looked at a man who was once accused of wielding a knife. They looked at sex offenders. They were looking at a white supremacist. Each turned out to be a dead end.

Then, after weeks of sifting through a string of evidence that seemed to go nowhere, investigators announced an arrest across the country in late December: Bryan Kohberger, a Ph.D. student from a nearby university. He was only identified after investigators turned to a sophisticated method of DNA analysis that had rarely been used in active murder investigations.

The story of how dozens of agents from local, state and federal agencies took the quadruple homicide investigation into extraordinary territory is only now becoming clearer, through recently obtained data and interviews with people familiar with the investigation who discussed important details that have come to the fore. came before the issuance of a gag order in the case.

The case has shown the extent to which law enforcement has come to rely on the digital footprints that ordinary Americans leave in almost every facet of their lives. Online shopping, car sales, carrying a cell phone, driving through the city streets, and amateur genealogy all played a part in an investigation that was eventually solved through technology as well as traditional sleuthing.

Mr Kohberger, now charged with four counts of murder, has declined to enter a plea but has previously argued through his lawyer that he would be acquitted. Investigators do not yet have details about a possible motive: to this day, relatives of the victims are unaware of any previous connections the accused killer had with the four young people who were murdered.

The process of identifying and arresting a suspect took more than six weeks — weeks of mounting frustration and scrutiny of evidence as the community pressed for answers.

The first 911 call came in around noon, about seven hours after the murders. Madison May, 21; Kaylee Goncalves, 21; Xana Kernodle, 20; and Ethan Chapin, 20, had been stabbed to death in their bedrooms at night. Initially, Moscow police described the attack as “targeted” and assured residents there was no risk to the public. But with no indication of who committed the attack or why, authorities eventually backtracked.

“We can’t say there isn’t a threat to the community,” Police Chief James Fry said at a press conference on Nov. 16, three days after the killings.

The department, which had only a few dozen officers, enlisted the Idaho State Police and the FBI to help, bringing in dozens of additional investigators. Forensic teams processed evidence from the bedrooms, took photos around the back door of the house and hunted for footprints; others searched for surveillance video from around the city.

A week after the murders, the records show, detectives were looking for a particular type of vehicle: Nissan Sentras from model years 2019 to 2023. They quietly gathered details about thousands of such vehicles, including owners’ addresses, plate numbers and the color of each sedan.

But further examination of the video footage brought more clarity, and on November 25, Moscow police asked law enforcement agencies to search for another type of car with a similar shape: white Hyundai Elantras of model years 2011 to 2013.

Just across the state line, at Washington State University, campus police officers began searching their records for Elantras registered there. Among those they found was one registered to Mr. Kohberger, who moved to the area earlier in 2022 to pursue a Ph.D. in criminology.

They checked Mr Kohberger’s car more closely, according to a court statement, which included a visit to the parking lot near his apartment in the early morning hours of Nov. 29. But the vehicle was a 2015 model, not the earlier ones searched for in Moscow.

The next day, the records show, Moscow detectives also looked closely at another vehicle: Ms. Goncalves’ car. She had bought a 2015 Range Rover in the days before her death. Detectives collected information about the registration, history and legal owners, clearly interested in the history of the car’s owner. But again, the information yielded few answers.

With students at the University of Idaho preparing for finals, there was a permanent sense of dread in the air as people began to lock their doors, buy pepper spray, and ask on social media how such a brutal killer could have survived so long. could go unnoticed in a city that hadn’t seen a murder in seven years.

The hunt expanded as researchers soaked up more records and data. They had already sought cell phone records for all phones pinging cell towers within half a mile of the victim’s home from 3 a.m. to 5 a.m., according to the search warrants. They collected banking information, email correspondence, and social media account information from victims.

On December 5, detectives filed a new surveillance video request, seeking all footage recorded on UPS delivery trucks in the days before and after the murders.

The next day, after receiving data on Ms Goncalves’ account on the Tinder dating app, detectives asked for details on 19 specific account holders, including their locations, credit card details and any “private images, photos or videos” associated with the accounts.

The request allowed the investigation to go much broader than a simple search for information, using a single warrant to target 19 different people, said Orin Kerr, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

“You couldn’t get a warrant to search 19 homes,” he said.

Investigators also worked with a key piece of evidence: a Ka-Bar knife scabbard, branded with a US Marine Corps logo, found next to two of the victims. They initially looked for local stores that might have sold the gun, then fanned out.

A request to Amazon searched the order history of account holders who had purchased such knives. A follow-up request to eBay targeted a range of specific users, looking for their purchase history. Some had connections to the area — including one in Idaho and two in Washington State — while others came from afar, including an account in Japan. Due to redactions, it is unclear whether Mr. Kohberger’s name appears in those documents.

The overall data trail grew tremendously, demonstrating the vast amount of data on consumer platforms that can be made accessible to law enforcement when they’re looking for breadcrumbs.

“You could say this is unfamiliar territory,” Mr Kerr said. “It’s new legal questions when there are so many records.”

At the same time, DNA from the crime scene was processed. Forensic teams had examined the knife sheath and found DNA that did not belong to any of the home’s occupants. They ran the sample through the FBI’s database, which contains millions of DNA profiles from past criminal offenders, but they found no match, according to three people briefed on the case.

That’s when researchers decided to try genetic genealogy, a method hitherto mainly used to solve cold cases, not active murder investigations. Of the growing number of genealogy websites that help people trace their ancestors and relatives through their own DNA, some users can select an option that allows law enforcement to compare DNA samples from the crime scene with the websites’ data.

A distant cousin who has opted into the system can help researchers build a family tree based on crime scene DNA to triangulate and identify a potential perpetrator of a crime. In one of the best-known uses of genealogy in solving a cold case, in 2018 detectives were able to apprehend a suspect in a series of rapes and murders years earlier in California that had been attributed to the so-called Golden State Killer.

Once a suspect has been identified, a direct genetic comparison can be used as confirmation before an arrest is made.

With little formal regulation, the use of massive genealogy databases has raised concerns about privacy and whether limits should be placed on the use of the method. But authorities across the country say they have found capabilities in the system to produce clues unattainable through traditional investigative efforts.

Barbara Rae-Venter, a genealogy consultant who worked on the Golden State Killer case, said there is now a growing interest in using genealogical DNA not only in cold cases but also in active crime investigations.

“That’s why the Idaho case is so interesting,” she said.

To perform the genealogical analysis, the Idaho State Police contracted with a private company, Othram, in Texas, which had a lab capable of producing a more comprehensive DNA profile from the knife sheath than the state lab could. to research.

FBI personnel worked with the profile Othram produced, according to two people familiar with the investigation, spending days building a family tree that began with a distant relative.

By the morning of Dec. 19, the data shows, investigators had a name: Bryan Kohberger. He had a white Elantra. He was a student at a university eight miles from the murder scene.

Mr. Kohberger was already out of town, his semester was over. He had driven home to Pennsylvania with his father, where he had been pulled over twice by police for what the officers said was tailgating. Just as officers began to investigate his background more thoroughly, he was fired from his position as a teaching assistant after what were described as altercations with a professor.

On December 23, detectives sought and received Mr. Kohberger. The results bolstered their suspicions: His phone was moving in the early morning hours of Nov. 13, but disconnected from cellular networks—perhaps turned off—in the two hours around when the murders occurred.

Four days later, officers in Pennsylvania managed to retrieve some trash from the Kohberger family home and send the material to the Idaho State Police forensics lab. By comparing it to their original DNA profile, the lab came to a groundbreaking conclusion: The DNA in the waste belonged to a close relative of whoever left DNA on the knife sheath.

Mr. Kohberger was arrested on December 30.

“We have a person in custody who has committed these horrible crimes, and I truly believe our community is safe,” police chief Mr Fry announced. “But we still have to be vigilant, right?”