In one bedroom, lying in a single bed, were two inert women, Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves. They might have been sisters, so similar were the 21-year-olds’ pretty Barbie dolls–like sculpted features, their long cascades of thick, streaked blond hair falling down to their narrow shoulders. Yet in death there was one gruesome difference: Kaylee, it would be reported, had been hacked with a particular ferocity. It was as if her wild assailant—or was it assailants?—had been intent on gouging out chunks of her flesh. “Large punctures” was how the lacerations had been described. Maddie’s wounds, while no less fatal, appeared less feral, more measured—at least in comparison.

Fact: There was no sign of forced entry, or of robbery.

Fact: A single weapon had been used—a long-bladed knife. And a tan leather knife sheath, stamped with the U.S. Marine Corps insignia was found lying next to Mogen’s bed.

Fact: There was no trail of blood outside the house.

Fact: The house was a repository for a large collection of forensic evidence—blood, saliva, hair, prints, DNA. But whether any of these belonged to the killer—after the autopsies, the general consensus held that it was a single assailant—still was undetermined.

There was so much blood, it had seeped through the wooden floors and run down the building’s gray concrete foundation in jagged red rivulets.

The entire country, or so it often seemed, was complaining that the case was dragging on and on without resolution.

Over the years, there had been some rough, combative times between the two of them; he’d even had to get Bryan into rehab to kick his teenage heroin habit. But now the young man seemed on a good path; studying for a Ph.D. in criminal justice offered a promising career trajectory for Bryan.

Unhappiness and alienation can often dominate his mood, says Kohberger, writing as a desperate teenager on the Web site Tapatalk. They are the raw, bedeviling forces that drove him, he explains, to contemplate suicide. They are the painful demons, he wails to a friend, that drove him to search for a sort of relief by mainlining heroin. And at the root of all his swirling emotions, he diagnoses in the online postings with an unwavering certainty, is “visual snow.” 

Visual snow is a rare but very real and chronic neurological condition. To those who suffer from it, the world is viewed through a glass darkly. It’s like looking at a television screen and the picture’s fluttering, the images obscured by amorphous grayish waves and scattered, flickering dots. But is it a disease? Or is it a psychological condition? Doctors, according to the sparse literature, throw up their hands in frustrated confusion. They just don’t know. And what can’t be diagnosed is even more difficult to treat.

” He denied being the murderer or having any specific knowledge of the crime.’’

Jason LaBar sternly lectured, “Mr. Kohberger has been accused of very serious crimes, but the American justice system cloaks him in a veil of innocence… He should be presumed innocent until proven otherwise—not tried in the court of public opinion.”

Item: The white Hyundai Elantra. While there are photos of the car zooming through the Moscow streets on the night of the murder, there’s no clear photo of Kohberger at the wheel that evening. Not a single one.

Item: The DNA on the knife-sheath snap. It’s apparently “touch” DNA. That is, it’s derived from a fingerprint rather than a drop of blood. And that’s pretty shaky evidence. Often more guesswork than science. The courtroom reality is that in case after case, touch DNA has been tarnished by a motley collection of false-positive results. A smart defense attorney might argue that there’s just as much likelihood of touch DNA’s being accurate as a juror’s winning the lottery. Who’d want to condemn someone to execution based on those odds?

Item: The eyewitness identification. Well, a lot of people have bushy eyebrows. And the testimony from a witness who was in “frozen shock phase,” as she put it, might be problematic. At best. And that’s without even getting into why she waited seven hours or so before making sure the police were notified. The poignant truth might very well be that Dylan Mortensen, although she was not physically attacked, was another victim that night. And that she’s in no shape to take the witness stand to face a rapid-firing, if not mean-spirited, defense counsel.

Item: The murder weapon. Where is it? The police have not found the long-bladed knife used in the killings. And they have so far not been able to establish that Kohberger owned such a weapon. (And I have to wonder how conscientiously they are trying. Just a week ago I walked into Dunkelberger’s on Main Street in Stroudsburg. It’s a sporting-goods store that might as well be an armory. There are walls mounted with racks of rifles and display cases lined with gleaming long-bladed knives. And it’s just about a half-hour drive from the Kohberger family home in Albrightsville. It’s the sort of local shop one might visit if one were looking to buy a knife. So I asked the man who identified himself as the manager if the police ever checked the store records to see if Bryan Kohberger had made a purchase. “Nope,” he answered. “Pretty surprising, too, now that you mention it.”)

But arguably the most perplexing question that the prosecutors will have to wrestle with if they hope to persuade a jury is “Why?” What was the motive for someone to kill four college students in cold blood?

Thursday night in late September, less than two months before the murders, three officers were responding to a noise complaint an annoyed neighbor had made.

The neighbor certainly had good cause. The house was jumping. There was a tumult of blasting music and high-spirited, attractive college kids wandering in and out of the three-story home. Six-packs and empty Truly cans were scattered about.

We are living through one of the first major crime stories of the Social-Media Age.

In the fall of 2022, during his first semester in the criminology doctorate program at Washington State University, he applied for an internship at the nearby Pullman Police Department. In the application essay, which the Idaho cops later shared, Kohberger, with apparent self-affirming pride, wrote that “he had an interest in assisting rural law enforcement agencies with how to better collect and analyze technological data in public safety operations.”

(Source: The Eyes of a Killer 1,2,3,4 - By author Howard Blum 2023)

[Personal note: In this documentary: 48 hours - The Night of the Idaho Student it is said that Howard Blum uncovered a possible motive in the killings concerning the drug trade. I have read all of his publishings and could not find it? I emailed him and never got a reply back?]