A chilling new detail has emerged in the Idaho college murders case — court documents reveal the suspect allegedly returned to the scene just hours after the killings and may have been casing the home for months.
Bryan Kohberger’s cell phone reportedly pinged near the students’ residence on King Street in Moscow around 9 a. m. on November 13, according to a probable cause affidavit filed Thursday.
That was only five hours after authorities say he broke into the house and fatally stabbed four University of Idaho students.
The 28-year-old criminology student left his Pullman, Washington apartment around 9 a. m. that day, with phone data placing him near the home between 9:12 and 9:21 a.
m. , court records claim.
Investigators have also alleged that Kohberger powered off his phone during the early morning hours when the murders took place. According to the affidavit, having no cell signal reported between 2:47 a. m.
and 4:48 a. m. is consistent with someone trying to hide their location during a crime.
But that wasn’t the only suspicious pattern. The same phone data reportedly shows Kohberger’s device was tracked near the house at least a dozen times in the months leading up to the attack. All but one of those visits happened late at night or in the early morning hours, according to the document.
The victims — Ethan Chapin, 20, Xana Kernodle, 20, Madison Mogen, 21, and Kaylee Goncalves, 21 — were all killed as they slept on two different floors of the off-campus rental. Kohberger was arrested December 30 after a weeks-long manhunt.
Inside the home, authorities found a tan leather Ka-Bar knife sheath bearing a Marine Corps logo lying on the bed next to Mogen and Goncalves, per the affidavit. A surviving roommate, Dylan Mortensen, told investigators she woke around 4 a. m.
to sounds she thought were Goncalves playing with her dog, followed by crying and a male voice saying something like “It’s OK, I’m going to help you.”
Mortensen said she then saw a man about 5-foot-10 with bushy eyebrows, dressed in black and wearing a mask, walking toward her. She froze, then locked herself in her room as the intruder headed to a rear sliding glass door and apparently fled.
Investigators also found a shoe print with a diamond pattern near the roommate’s bedroom. The case eventually led to a cross-country drive from Idaho to Pennsylvania, where police allegedly recovered a DNA sample from Kohberger’s family trash that matched his father’s DNA to the knife sheath evidence.
As the legal process unfolds, one big question remains: what exactly was happening in those early morning visits before the tragedy?
