Clarification on how the police nabbed Kohberger
I see a lot continuing speculation on how Kohberger was traced and caught. That leads me to believe that many of you haven’t seen the affidavit that explains it fairly well. Here’s a link to the document.
The gist of it is that there were plenty of surveillance cameras that recorded a car driving around the neighborhood both before and after the murders occurred. And there were almost no other cars driving in the neighborhood at the time, so it was relatively easy to narrow it down to that car and then to its owner. They then were able to access the suspect’s cellphone records, which implicated him although he thought to evade detection by turning the phone off as he approached the crime scene.
As far as matching his DNA goes, there had been speculation about police using public DNA databases. But that turns out to have been erroneous. Actually, they found someone’s DNA on the knife sheath left behind (on the bed of one of the victims), and since they had the identity of the suspect from the camera and phone records they didn’t need to use a database because they used the old tried and true garbage technique. In other words, they went to the family home in Pennsylvania and got something out of the garbage (once you discard something that way it’s perfectly legal to take it and test it):
On December 27, 2022, Pennsylvania Agents recovered the trash from the Kohberger family residence located in Albrightsville, PA. That evidence was sent to the Idaho State Lab for testing. On December 28,2022, the Idaho State Lab reported that a DNA profile obtained from the trash and the DNA profile obtained from the sheath, identified a male as not being excluded as the biological father of Suspect Profile. At least 99.9998% of the male population would be expected to be excluded from the possibility of being the suspect’s biological father.
That enabled them to arrest Kohberger.
One of the curious elements of this terrible story is that the sister of the suspect (almost without doubt guilty of the heinous act) appeared in a low-budget “slasher film” more than a decade ago; another is that, like the pudgy and unkempt SBF, Kohberger is, apparently, a fanatical vegan. What is more distressing is that lost in all the coverage of the terrible murders in Idaho and of the tiresome drama unfolding on Capitol Hill is the recent firing, by the governor of the USVI, of the AG (Denise George) who had recently filed suit against J P Morgan for its enabling of the multitudinous financial misdeeds of the non-suicidal Epstein; this action just happened to occur (purely by coincidence, of course) at the time of Biden’s visit to the home of rich donors on Saint Croix.
We live in an age where the raw information used to compile news stories is often readily accessible (things like the actual affidavit in this case), but for complicated reasons it’s not always obvious where to look, what phrases to Google/DuckDuckGo/Bing. And unfortunately often the news stories themselves can be misleading, confusing and just generally poorly written and lead you to bad conclusions. And ultimately you have to go out of your way and take time out of your day to do some research if you want to be certain of anything. And even then you can find some bad information. It’s both amazing and annoying.
j e:
In the photos I’ve seen of SBF he doesn’t look especially pudgy. See also this. Perhaps you’ve seen some older photos, and he was pudgy back then? Perhaps since he became a vegan he lost weight? Also, he has a slightly pudgy face; perhaps that’s what you’re perceiving?
Or perhaps you have different standards for pudge than I do. But he seems non-pudgy to me.
Nonapod:
So true.
Sometimes I get very frustrated correcting persistent misconceptions of many people, which are usually based on the original erroneous reportage or rumors.
What I am most curious about is the roommate who heard a noise, looked out her bedroom door and saw a masked man in black leave the house. I’m assuming HE didn’t see HER? Anyway, this was nearing 5 o’clock in the morning. Right after the murders. Said roommate went back in her room and locked her door.
And the police weren’t called until after 11:00? More than five hours later. WTH!?!?
Interesting. News reports had it that the surveillance video identifying the Elantra was proffered by a retail manager five weeks after the killings. It appears they had several sources of video footage, though they do not say in the account precisely when they collected each one. They reveal here they were able to identify the vehicle’s route out of town, though they do not reveal when they made that determination. It appears they were putting some prizes in the media to throw people off (e.g. the reports of an abandoned Hyundai in Eugene Oregon) while their actual line of inquiry was to examine the registry of parking stickers at Washington State University in Pullman as the route taken was on the way to that campus. What the FBI supplied was a review of the security camera footage to assemble a set of markers which allowed them to identify the make and model of the vehicle and a range of years in which it might have been manufactured. Most impressive.
Molly Brown:
With all the young people living in the house, there were probably people coming and going all the time, even in the wee hours of the morning. And masks are commonplace these days. The roommate felt uneasy and locked her door but didn’t necessarily know anyone had been harmed until much later. That’s my guess, anyway.
He has two older sisters. Evidently, both are employed in the mental health trade, one licensed in Pennsylvania and one in New Jersey.
I was pleasantly surprised to learn how tight-lipped law enforcement was about these murders. They really played a lot of things close to the chest. Hopefully, there is still much more than was not used for the affidavit.
I, like Molly Brown, wonder about the roommate not calling 911 until several hours later. She was nervous enough to close the door. Thinking back to my early twenties in college, I might’ve felt too stupid to call 911, but I think I’d’ve called my dad. Even though my parents were two hours away, and there wasn’t exactly anything that they could do, if I thought something was weird that made me nervous, I’d’ve called them.
There first time I ever called 911, I felt nervous. I was 45! (I was calling about a car driving extremely fast on the interstate, and weaving back and forth. It was four am and very few cars were on the road, so it wasn’t weaving in and out of traffic. This car was nuts.)
Maybe she called a friend who just told her, “It’s probably nothing. Just go n back to sleep.” And that what she did.
I still find the whole “unconscious person” thing strange — there had to have been a great deal of blood.
I hope they have a precisely document chain of custody on that knife sheath.
Lee Also:
It’s possible the perp covered the victim and blood effectively with a blanket or something like that. The roommate wouldn’t be expecting a murder and probably thought the victim had passed out, perhaps from drinking too much alcohol. Just a guess on my part.
Criminology’s investigatory system can be quite effective when competently followed and allowed to be… Vince Foster, Seth Rich?
Vince Foster, Seth Rich?
Vincent Foster committed suicide.
Can’t believe if he had already committed the crimes, there would have been blood all over him. Hard to think she didn’t see this.
According to a retired NY detective turned attorney on FoxNews, there was both the use of genealogical databases and the use of the trash DNA. But the latter is considered better from an arrest and prosecutorial standpoint.
The cell phone pings on the night of the murder were on a highway at a point that was closer to Blaine than Moscow, ID.
The original video identification of the vehicle was dated from 2011 to 2013, but later was expanded to include through 2016. Kohberger’s car was a 2015. The report doesn’t say when they expanded the date range to 2016.
I don’t think it is a stretch to at least consider the possibility that the genealogical search was a key element in the case, in spite of the partial narrative contained in the affidavit.
_______
In the case of the Paul Pelosi assault, there is some reason to suspect that the early erroneous reports may have actually been the accurate ones.
Dark clothes, dark hall. The blood may not have been apparent. In the morning, when someone did call police, she said a roommate was unconscious. The idea that he had thrown a blanket over the bodies is possible.
She might have thought it was a fraternity prank; or anyhow, the guy left so she just locked her door against the dark.
Fox News has an interview with a woman whose roommate was raped and beaten to death a couple of decades ago. She didn’t realize there was a problem, and when she went into the room in the morning, she thought the girl had been drunk and swallowed some vomit. Instead, she was near death.
TommyJay:
Or that the retired NY detective is wrong about his facts.
Neo notes that the detectives “went to the family home in Pennsylvania and got something out of the garbage”– it looks like the alleged perp knew about the garbage technique and “tried to evade police by putting garbage from his parents’ house into neighbors’ trash cans, the arrest affidavit revealed. . . . At one point during the four days he was surveilled by the FBI prior to his arrest, Kohberger was observed putting trash from his family’s house into neighbors’ garbage bins around 4 a.m.”
https://nypost.com/2023/01/06/bryan-kohberger-tried-to-evade-cops-by-putting-trash-in-neighbors-cans-source/
Kohberger also had his Elantra detailed and changed the car’s license plates from Pennsylvania tags to Washington plates after registering the car in Washington on November 18 (the Washington plates arrived on December 5).
https://news.yahoo.com/idaho-murders-bryan-kohberger-changed-233339809.html
I have a question for Neo and the other lawyers who comment here: assuming news reports are accurate (yes, I know that’s a large assumption), Kohberger’s father flew to Spokane before Christmas in order to help his son bring the Elantra back to Pennsylvania. If he did indeed take a plane that far to help move the car on the return trip, does that in itself make him an accessory after the fact to the crimes committed, or would he have had to have some knowledge of his son’s crimes in order to be charged as an accessory? I can’t help wondering how Kohberger induced his dad to make a long trip by air and then drive 2500 miles back to Pennsylvania.
A casual watcher of any true crime or fictional crime dramas would know that there are tons of surveillance cameras. Yet, this criminal justice PhD student drove his car around the victim’s neighborhoods multiple times. He also did not turn off his phone multiple times while doing so. Like Leopold and Loeb, he was relatively easy to catch, despite his and their high IQs.
The Bling Ring in Hollywood were more cautious.
jvermeer:
I believe he did turn off his phone the night of the crime for that part of the journey. But he had his phone on when he cased the joint quite a while earlier on a different day. The combination of the two was considered suspicious.
Kate,
You idea of her thinking it might be a fraternity prank has some merit. Two of the victims had been at a fraternity party that night. I just can’t see any other rationale for her behavior. Otherwise, a masked man in black leaving your house in the small hours requires a call to 911. I would hate to think that any of the victims may have been saved had there been a fast response.
Neo, bear in mind there were two bedrooms where the occupants didn’t get up that morning. IMO, there were just too many odd circumstances for her not to press the panic button way earlier.
I’m not judging, just intensely curious. DM also said she heard Goncalves playing with her dog about 4am. What happened to the dog?
‘The dog that didn’t bark in the night.’?
I suppose all this will come out at trial. Such a terrible thing. I keep invoking the prayer to St. Michael and I’m not even Catholic.
Molly Brown:
I don’t know what sort of college experience and living situation you had, but I lived in several apartments while in college (long long ago), and people were often coming and going, sometimes in the middle of the night, and especially on weekends.
In Idaho, the killings happened early Sunday morning at 4 AM. All the residents had been out having fun on Saturday night and came back late, and several were apparently still awake close to the time of the murders. So a bit of walking around, a few voices, and even a stranger with a mask (remember, masks are commonplace these days because of COVID) would not have aroused terrible suspicion although seeing the masked guy made that one roommate uneasy enough to look her door. But I am pretty sure there was no way she thought anything like a murder was going on, and why would she?
Also, given the late hours they’d been up the night before, one would hardly have expected the residents to get up early in the morning, and it was Sunday so there were no classes. Therefore why would anyone wonder why no one was up early in those bedrooms on Sunday morning? I see no reason why they would wonder.
When they did discover the people were in bed – perhaps they were covered with a blanket and perhaps the lights were off – I think the roommates got scared but apparently still didn’t think the people had been murdered. My guess is they thought they’d had too much alcohol and wouldn’t wake up for that reason. Here’s what happened then:
That no one called 911 until 11:58 am, & all 4 victims were pronounced dead at noon is really odd. Where do police arrive that quickly??
Marv:
In a small town with not much crime, on an otherwise sleepy Sunday.
I thought Kate gave an excellent short summary on the open thread, in case someone needs to bring a friend up to date in a brief statement.
https://www.thenewneo.com/2023/01/06/open-thread-brahms-intermezzo/#comment-2660712
Kate on January 6, 2023 at 2:51 pm said:
“It’s been a day, and I can’t find offhand the summary of the police investigation of the Idaho case I read. …”
I read at least 6 posts from the Daily Mail after the charges were released that said the same thing (repeatedly), but they did have pictures and maps.
Here’s one; you can get the others from the links there.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11603641/How-Idaho-cops-linked-Bryan-Kohberger-crime-scene-four-students-murdered.html
There are lots of good suggestions in the thread for why the roommate who may have seen the alleged* perp (gotta keep up appearances, but it’s hard not to believe he’s guilty).
The dog IIRC was in a totally separate room from the location of the murders. It’s in one of the Daily Mail posts.
What I don’t understand, is how the perp could knife one person in a bed, multiple times, and the other one not wake up and start screaming (surely they weren’t THAT drunk?) — and then do it again with another pair!
Have I missed some snippet of information somewhere?
*An exercise for aspiring playwrights or novelists: write a plot that incorporates all the clues now revealed by the police and explain how they are red herrings that make Kohberger look guilty, but all have innocent explanations.
That got a lot harder after seeing the alleged** evidence in the charges, but I still think it can be done. Charter Member of the Perry Mason Fan Club.
**So far we only have the charging officer’s word for the clues; that’s why we have adversarial trials, expert witnesses, and the entire majesty of the law.
Because, these days, we really don’t trust police and prosecutors not to lie (if we ever did).
Ummm… Is it just me, or does Kohberger not look like Jake Gyllenhaal’s brother?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jake_Gyllenhaal
https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/01/inmate-threatens-bryan-kohberger-monroe-jail-feat-image.jpg
Another example of how, if you want real news about US events, read the UK newspapers online. US newspapers are too full of propaganda and nothing else.
Because, these days, we really don’t trust police and prosecutors not to lie (if we ever did).
It’s the local police, not the FBI. As for prosecutors, yeah, be very wary.
“US newspapers are too full of propaganda and nothing else.”
How true! Every time I see one of the sob-story editorials about the need for more government funding for local news, I nearly lose my temper!
Firstly, government already has too much input into newspapers, and more such funding would simply make it worse, if that’s even possible.
Secondly, there must be new models that could be tried for the roles formerly served by newspapers, but I don’t recall hearing about any (non-internet) innovative efforts. How about trying something like original reporting, instead of Party-line propaganda?
Finally, perhaps the concept of a sheaf of paper physically delivered to the home just doesn’t make business sense any more?!
“It’s the local police, not the FBI.”
Not exactly sure what the above statement means, but every time I read about the FBI being involved in a case, I cringe! My trust in that department has cratered, and I don’t see it recovering for a long time – if ever.
The prosecution is going to present evidence which the jury must take on faith. There’s no way the jury can itself tour the crime scene seconds after the crime and thus…got to take somebody’s word for it.
That’s the way it works.
I recall one juror–possibly the chairman–in the trial of the Orlando nightclub shooter’s wife saying that, even back then, they were skeptical of evidence provided by the fed prosecutor from the FBI. She was accused of a couple of varieties of accessory crimes, which take a lot of work on who said what to whom on which date and at which time and drove from where to where, ending up where at which time…..