Vicky Ward has investigated the dark, intricate Bryan Kohberger case since his arrest in December 2023. She conducted over 300 interviews in Idaho, Washington State, and the Poconos in Pennsylvania, where he grew up, for her new book with James Patterson, “The Idaho Four: An American Tragedy,” to be published by Little, Brown on July 14.
Here she previews the clearest profile yet of the twisted quadruple killer and his motives:
There were two words Bryan Kohberger repeated calmly and coolly in the Ada County courthouse in Boise on Tuesday. They were “yes” – he understood what he was admitting to – and “guilty,” of five counts, including four murders and burglary.
Tantalizingly, Kohberger offered no explanation of what had driven him to stalk a house at 1122 King Road in Moscow and murder four University of Idaho murder students: Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle, and Ethan Chapin in their bedrooms.
I report in “The Idaho Four” that the people closest to the victims believe, for all sorts of reasons, he targeted just one, Maddie Mogen.
It was her room he went straight to. And it’s her room you could see from the road if you parked your car at the cul-de-sac behind the King Road house, which the police believe he did multiple times.
And Kohberger’s actions before the murders bear eerily striking resemblances to another rampage killer, Elliot Rodger.
Rodger inspired the incel world Kohberger was deeply immersed in by the time he got to Washington State University to do his PhD in Criminal Justice.
Incels, for the uninitiated, are members of a “movement” of frustrated men, all virgins, that sprang up on 4chan in 2014 just hours after Elliot Rodger, a privileged student at Santa Barbara City College, committed mass murder and then suicide.
The idea of the movement, started in Rodger’s honor, is that one day the incels will succeed in their “Beta Revolution” and overthrow women.
When Rodger lost his only childhood male friend – and after a female friend called “Maddy” had started ignoring him – he was triggered and began to plan the diabolical end.
He intended his final act to be so performative that it would catapult him to global fame. The last words he wrote in his journal were “Finally, I can show the world my true worth.”
Here’s some of what Elliot Rodger had to say about his Maddy in “My Twisted World,” his 137-page manifesto: “The first real friend I made in the United States was a girl named Maddy Humphreys… Maddy would eventually come to represent everything I hate and despise; everything that is against me; and everything that I am against.
“I stalked her Facebook for a bit, and I saw that she was the exact image of everything I hated in women. She was a popular, spoiled USC girl who partied with her hot, beautiful blonde-haired clique of friends … my hatred for them all grew from each picture I saw on her profile…
“They represented everything that was wrong with this world … I would take great delight in torturing and flaying her and every single one of her spoiled, obnoxious, evil friends.”
Is it just a coincidence that Maddie Mogen was also a beautiful blonde sorority sister?
Bryan Kohberger, of course, had long exhibited many incel characteristics. His father, Michael Kohberger, recently told a former neighbor, Connie Saba, that Bryan “wasn’t the same person after the drugs.”
Both Bryan and Connie’s son, Jeremy Saba, a popular, athletic kid whom the young loner Bryan hero-worshipped, had become a heroin addict.
Both had gone to rehab. But Jeremy had died in March 2021 of an overdose. That was the year before Bryan moved to Washington State. And nine months before, he bought a Ka-bar knife on Amazon.
Bryan’s first turn to the dark side was in his mid-teens, when he stole from Connie to pay for his heroin habit. Actually, it was worse than that.
He phoned her up when Jeremy had been arrested for the first time for a DUI and drug possession.
“I’d like to go visit Jeremy in jail; when are you going?” he asked her.
She told him the time and was surprised when he didn’t show up. But when she got home and discovered that someone had broken into her house and stolen her iPad, she was less surprised. She knew who the culprit was.
A year or so later, he showed up, suddenly, in her kitchen to admit to stealing from her, and she understood immediately what was going on. He was in rehab. Atonement is a key part of the process.
It seemed as if he had made a full recovery from addiction. But appearances can be deceptive.
The interviews I did revealed that no one person had full visibility into Kohberger during his years getting bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychology.
His fellow students at De Sales University referred to him as The Ghost because he’d show just before class started, coffee cup in hand, and vanish immediately after, muttering about all the jobs he was working.
They knew nothing about him, other than he was intense and had a strangeness to him. His eyes looked as if they were “bugging out,” one classmate said. He was obviously on the Autism Spectrum.
Students who hung at the Seven Sirens brewing company in the nearby town of Bethlehem saw a very different side of him. He was a nuisance, especially to women.
I met a recent De Sales graduate who told me Kohberger had come and sat down with him and his girlfriend, uninvited, said nothing, and then followed the girlfriend around all night.
It was creepy. Kohberger did this sort of thing often. The bar’s owner, Jordan Seruleck, told him to leave and not come back.
But Kohberger, as Connie Saba, knew firsthand, was manipulative. He took his last year of his master’s remotely because of COVID-19. Via Zoom, he impressed one of the professors, Michele Bolger, who recommended him as a PhD student.
When Kohberger got to Washington State University, for the first time, people got a glimpse into a mind that was full-blown misogynistic. In class, he interrupted the women students, mansplained, eye-rolled them, winking at the guys as if they must be in on his joke.
And in the classes he taught, there were also problems. One time, he followed a female student out the door to her car. Other women complained he was discriminating against them, grading them worse than the men.
The WSU administration noticed and the school began to issue him warnings about his teaching position, which was funding his time there. It began to look fragile…
Finally, one evening, when Ben Roberts, a classmate, reluctantly accepted a ride from Kohberger, the guy laid out what he really felt.
Here’s the latest coverage on Bryan Kohberger:
He told Roberts in a conversation that went on for hours that women belonged in the kitchen and bedroom. Not the classroom. AND he told Robert, they were easy.
He could walk into any social gathering and have any of them he wanted sexually. Roberts told me he just wanted this conversation to stop.
Kohberger had studied Elliot Rodger long before that tirade. When he was a psychology student at De Sales University, he was part of a course about serial killers taught by leading criminologist Dr Katherine Ramsland.
And, like Kohberger — who lived in Pullman in Washington State, but drove ten minutes to Moscow, Idaho, where the campus of the University of Idaho was more buzzy — Rodger also went back and forth between two college towns.
As he wrote in his manifesto: “In all the times I went out by myself to Isla Vista, none of the beautiful blonde girls showed any interest in having sex with me.
“For a while, I had been deciding on whether I would exact my retribution in Isla Vista or at Santa Barbara City College.”
When Kohberger was arrested, the police took a book from him with underlinings on page 118.
“Do you think it was Elliot Rodger’s manifesto?” Steve Goncalves, Kaylee’s dad, asked me the other night. Steve has read my book.
Of course, I don’t know for sure. But you do have to wonder.
On that page, Rodger wrote of how he came to select the date of his “day of retribution.”
After ruling out Halloween because of the heavy law enforcement presence, he decided it “would have to be on a normal party weekend, so I set it for some time during November.”
Elliot Rodger got what he wanted – infamy – from his horrendous acts.
It’s an awful irony and striking parallel – that now that he’s pleaded guilty, so too has Bryan Kohberger.
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