Idaho student murders: University investigated suspect’s behaviour around time of killings

Bryan Kohberger, left, with his attorney at Latah County District Court in Moscow, Idaho. Photo / AP

The doctoral student charged with murdering four University of Idaho undergraduates displayed such troubling behaviour in the weeks around the killings that the university investigated his conduct around women, counselled him over a verbal altercation with a professor and ultimately fired him from his job as a teaching assistant, according to interviews and a university record.

Less than two weeks before the killings in November, the doctoral student, Bryan Kohberger, was called to a meeting with faculty members to discuss growing concerns about his behaviour, according to the record, a timeline the university prepared in justifying its decision to terminate him. The meeting was part of a series of discussions over Kohberger’s conduct during his criminology studies at Washington State University, which lies about seven miles (11.2km) west of the University of Idaho.

The faculty’s concerns with Kohberger grew in the weeks after the November 13 killings, though he had not yet been identified as a suspect. They culminated in the criminal justice department’s unusual decision to terminate Kohberger from his teaching assistant role in December, shortly before his arrest, according to three people familiar with his time at the university and a formal letter to Kohberger informing him that he had failed to meet the conditions required to maintain his funding under the programme.

The faculty made the decision at the department’s end-of-year meeting in December, during which professors were also told that some female students reported that Kohberger had made them feel uncomfortable. In one of those instances, Kohberger was accused of following a female student to her car, according to two people familiar with the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to discuss the case.

In the case of the female students, the university’s investigation did not find Kohberger guilty of any wrongdoing, two people said, and it was other matters that prompted the decision to eliminate his funding and remove him from the teaching assistant job. That decision, they said, was based on his unsatisfactory performance as a teaching assistant, including his failure to meet the “norms of professional behaviour” in his interactions with the faculty.

The house where four students were killed near the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho. Photo / Rajah Bose, The New York Times

Kohberger began having troubles about a month into the fall semester, his first at Washington State. He had an “altercation” on September 23 with John Snyder, the WSU professor he was assisting, according to the termination letter, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times.

Then, on November 2, department leaders met with Kohberger to discuss an improvement plan, the letter recounts. Eleven days later, the four University of Idaho students were stabbed to death overnight in a home just off campus in Moscow, Idaho.

In the termination document, officials described a second “altercation” that Kohberger had with the professor after the killings, on December 9. Later that month, the department decided to remove him from his position as a teaching assistant, cutting off his pay and saying that he “had not made progress regarding professionalism”.

Phil Weiler, a vice president and spokesperson for WSU, said a federal student privacy law prohibited him from commenting in detail on Kohberger’s history with the university. He said only that Kohberger was no longer enrolled at the university. Kohberger’s lawyer did not respond to a message seeking comment.

Kohberger is being held in jail after being charged with four counts of murder; he has said through a lawyer that he looks forward to being exonerated.

The Times previously reported that students had complained about Kohberger’s harsh grading in his teaching assistant role, resulting in a classroom discussion in which he sought to defend the feedback he provided the students.

Kohberger had entered the programme at WSU after earning a master’s degree in June at DeSales University, in Center Valley, Pennsylvania, not far from where he had spent his teenage years struggling with emotional problems and drug addiction.

From left: Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Ethan Chapin and Xana Kernodle. Photos / Instagram

Records show that after the initial altercation with the professor on September 23, Kohberger met with a university official to “discuss norms of professional behaviour”. By October 21, a professor emailed him about “the ways in which you had failed to meet your expectations as a T.A. thus far in the semester”. Some of the details of Kohberger’s troubles and eventual firing were first posted online by an Arkansas woman who has closely followed the case.

The Idaho students were found stabbed to death in two bedrooms of their home on November 13. Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves, both 21, were found in one room, while Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin, both 20, were found in another, according to a police affidavit. The three women all lived in the home, the police have said, and Chapin was visiting Kernodle, his girlfriend. The police said that the killings took place around 4am.

For weeks after the killings, investigators did not identify a suspect. Records show that Kohberger was still working in his teaching assistant job at the time and was continuing to grade undergraduate students’ papers.

About a week after his second altercation with the professor, as the semester was drawing to a close in mid-December, Kohberger began driving across the country with his father to the family’s home in Pennsylvania.

Officials notified Kohberger of his termination on December 19, according to the university timeline. He was arrested at the end of the month. Authorities cited DNA that appeared to link him to a knife sheath found at the crime scene, video showing a white car in the neighbourhood of the crime scene that resembled Kohberger’s car, and phone records indicating that Kohberger’s phone disconnected from the cell network during those key early-morning hours.

A judge has scheduled a June preliminary hearing, where prosecutors are set to lay out more of their evidence.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Mike Baker and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs

Photographs by: Rajah Bose and AP

©2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES