A Washington State University professor had warned co-workers Bryan Kohberger could potentially stalk and sexually abuse future students if he ever became a teacher — just weeks before he ended up slaughtering his four University of Idaho victims, newly released police reports show.
The professor voiced her fears to coworkers after grad students started complaining in 2022 that Kohberger, who at the time was part of WSU’s doctoral criminology program, was being sexist and creepy.
“He is smart enough that in four years we will have to give him a Ph.D.,” the woman told her colleagues, according to one police report.
“Mark my word, I work with predators, if we give him a Ph.D., that’s the guy that in those many years when he is a professor, we will hear is harassing, stalking, and sexually abusing … his students at whatever university.”
The grim warning was laid bare in a trove of investigative files made public by Idaho State Police last week, soon after the deranged killer was sentenced to life in prison without parole for stabbing the four Idaho students to death in November 2022.
The WSU faculty member, who had urged co-workers to cut Kohberger’s funding to remove him from the criminal justice program, told investigators he would sometimes go into an office where several female grad students worked and would physically block the door.
On one occasion, she heard one of the female students say, “I really need to get out of here,” according to the report.
The professors also told cops she believed he’d been stalking people and detailed an instance where someone had broken into a female grad student’s apartment in September or October — stealing perfume and underwear.
Fellow grad students and other professors also filed complaints — 13 formal ones in total — about Kohberger’s behavior in the months before the slayings, the investigative files show.
One Ph.D. student who was in the same program told police that Kohberger enjoyed conflict and liked to talk about sexual burglary, his field of study.
The student added that some in the department had predicted he would be a rapist and that he could be an “incel.”
Just three weeks after he killed his four victims — Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin — Kohberger told that same student that whoever had committed the crimes “must have been pretty good,” according to the police report.
Kohberger also eerily told the woman the murders might have been a “one and done type thing,” the report states.
An instructor, who told cops she was assigned to work with Kohberger on his doctoral program, recalled receiving complaints about him from students and staff in the criminal justice program as early as August 2022.
She spent “a lot of time” speaking about Kohberger during disciplinary meetings, one police report noted.
“The meetings focused around Kohberger’s interactions with fellow post-graduate students, in and out of the classroom, along with his behavior around some of the criminal justice professors,” the investigator’s report stated.
In response to the flurry of complaints, the school held a mandatory training class for all grad students about behavior expectations.
The WSU students and instructors who spoke to cops in the wake of the Idaho killings did not suspect Kohberger was involved in the crime, according to the police reports.
At least one fellow student, though, noticed the killer appeared more disheveled and abruptly stopped bringing his phone to class after the stabbings.
The student also told police she thought it was strange Kohberger never openly participated in conversations about the Idaho deaths.
With Post wires
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