Murder In Moscow: The Authorities Continue To Try To Tie Kohberger To The Victims

In the days after Bryan Kohberger’s arrest, one of the biggest unanswered questions was whether he had any prior connection to Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle or Ethan Chapin. Shanon Gray, an attorney representing the Goncalves family, said the family had found no evidence that any of the victims knew Kohberger before the murders, telling reporters that nobody familiar with Kaylee appeared to recognize him. That absence of an obvious relationship made the motive even more difficult to understand, especially because Kohberger lived only a short drive away in Pullman and was studying criminal justice at Washington State University. Investigators had not publicly established that he had communicated with the victims, attended social events with them or otherwise crossed paths with them before November 13, 2022.

At the same time, the probable-cause affidavit suggested that Kohberger may have been familiar with the King Road residence even if he was not personally known to the people living there. Cellphone records placed his phone in the area of the house at least 12 times before the murders, with nearly all of those occasions occurring late at night or early in the morning, and investigators believed his white Hyundai Elantra had been near the residence around the time of the killings. His DNA was also linked to a knife sheath recovered beside Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves. The combination created a disturbing contradiction at that stage of the investigation: authorities were assembling evidence that Kohberger had repeatedly been near the victims’ home, yet neither the families nor the publicly released records could explain why he might have been interested in the house or the people inside it.


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