Will we ever know why Bryan Kohberger murdered the Idaho Four?

When Bryan Kohberger entered a guilty plea on July 2 in the case of four murdered Idaho students, it brought an abrupt conclusion to one of the biggest true crime sagas in decades, but it has arguably left the public with more questions than answers. Soon, a new wave of true crime content, including two documentaries and a major book co-written by James Patterson, will attempt to answer those questions. 

Kohberger’s trial, previously scheduled to begin in August, would likely have surfaced much more information regarding the killings of Ethan Chapin, Kaylee Goncalves, Madison “Maddie” Mogen, and Xana Kernodle — students at the University of Idaho in small-town Moscow, Idaho, slaughtered in a late-night off-campus home invasion so horrific that it instantly became global news.

Years of delays in the journey to trial, paired with strict ongoing gag orders in the case, have meant that even three years later, most of what we know about the crime still comes from the initial probable cause affidavit filed against Kohberger prior to his arrest in December 2022, about six weeks after the murders took place on November 13. (He was charged, and eventually pleaded guilty, to four counts of first-degree murder and one count of burglary.) Since then, other pieces to the puzzle have been filled in primarily from anecdotal reports shared by friends and family of the Idaho Four and Kohberger, as well as clues gleaned unofficially from social media accounts and occasional investigation leaks.

The end result is that while the public can play connect-the-dots with much of the information surrounding the Moscow murders, the biggest question of all — why? — remains unanswered.

Here’s a look at what we know so far, what we’re likely to learn from upcoming media in the case, and what’s next for the players in this awful saga.

Why Kohberger pleaded guilty: He was out of moves

Given that Kohberger staunchly maintained his innocence for nearly three years, his sudden reversal might have come as a surprise to anyone not following the court proceedings closely. In fact, it may have been inevitable. 

After stalling the judicial process for years, Kohberger’s defense team had swiftly been running out of plays following a series of judicial rulings favoring the prosecution and limiting the defense’s strategies. These included the court rejecting a potential alibi defense — with Judge Steven Hippler ruling that Kohberger’s claim to have been driving around looking at the stars during the time of the murders was not actually an alibi — and rejecting a potential alternate suspect defense, with Hippler dismissing the defense’s coterie of alternate perpetrators as “rank speculation.” With few other moves left, Kohberger faced a mountain of overwhelming evidence, including his DNA on the knife sheath left at the crime scene, phone records tracking him at the location and across town the night of the crime, and a recently revealed second eyewitness, a Door Dash driver who delivered a meal to Xana Kernodle and claims to have seen Kohberger at the 1122 King Road address just before the murders.

Kohberger’s guilty plea — which prosecutors shared directly with the victims’ families before the news broke on June 30 — allows him to avoid the death penalty. His sentencing hearing is scheduled for July 23, where, per the terms of the agreement, he will receive four consecutive life sentences on the murder counts and the maximum penalty of 10 years on the burglary count. But while avoiding a trial means avoiding trauma for witnesses and victims’ families, not everyone is happy about this outcome. The family of Kaylee Goncalves, in particular, has been vocal in their displeasure that Kohberger will not have to stand trial or face the death penalty, though other victims’ families, including that of Goncalves’s lifelong best friend Mogen, have stated their support for the plea deal.

Onlookers hoping that Kohberger’s plea deal might yield some new insight were left disappointed when his plea hearing included no additional admissions from Kohberger about why he committed the crime, whether he premeditated any or all of the acts, or why he apparently chose to leave the two remaining housemates, Bethany Funke and Dylan Mortensen, alive. 

In the absence of any official answers, and without a trial to provide them, the public will instead be getting a deluge of new media about the case, most of it releasing in mid-July, originally intended to drop just before Kohberger’s trial. Instead, what we have left is a fairly broad spectrum of journalism around the case, ranging from investigative reporting via Dateline to interview-heavy streaming documentaries from Amazon and Peacock to classic true crime narrative nonfiction via mega-bestseller Patterson and his co-writer, British journalist Vicky Ward. Additionally, media outlets have asked the judge to lift the remaining gag orders in the case, so that witnesses and authorities who have been banned from speaking until the trial might finally have a chance to do so. 

The lack of a trial “makes it all the more consequential,” Patterson’s publicist told me in an email. “The book now is the only chance people will get to delve into what happened that night.”

What did happen that night? Here’s what we know so far, and what we’re likely to learn from July’s new onslaught of updates.

What’s new: Perspectives from the victims’ families and friends — and chilling insight into Kohberger

During the six-week national manhunt for the perpetrator, the roommates, friends, boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, and family members of the Idaho Four were put through the ringer in terms of public scrutiny and speculation. The new cache of media puts this community front and center and allows them to talk about their experiences. Among them is One Night in Idaho: The College Murders, a new Amazon Prime docuseries released on July 11,  co-directed by documentarian Liz Garbus, who more recently helmed a documentary about the Gilgo Beach killer for Netflix. 

Over four 60-minute episodes, Garbus and her co-director Matthew Galkin focus on the stories of the victims’ friends and families, including heartbreaking details from family interviews, like Ethan Chapin’s siblings — now the remaining two triplets — spending their last night with him together at a sorority formal just hours before his death. A second documentary for Peacock, The Idaho Student Murders, premiered the day after Kohberger pleaded guilty. It similarly gathers friends and family together to remember Ethan, Kaylee, Maddie, and Xana while opening up about their own trauma and loss. 

Then there’s The Idaho Four: An American Tragedy, the book by Ward and Patterson, due out today. While Patterson co-authors the book, it’s Ward who has done the bulk of the investigation, conducting hundreds of interviews in and around Moscow, as well as Kohberger’s home back in the Poconos region of Pennsylvania. The book is a true deep-dive into the case and the context of the murders — as much as any book can be while still obeying the court gag order. Ward spends time early on laying out the complicated dynamics of the King Road friends group, and what a large, interconnected community the four were a part of — a community that was absolutely shattered in the wake of the crime. 

While all of this is an important piece of the story, it’s only half. One of the most striking things about the Idaho murders is that the motives of the suspect have, up until now, been largely opaque. What little we know about Kohberger has come mainly from his turbulent academic history. Once a star criminology student who studied under premier true crime writer and forensic psychologist Katherine Ramsland (who recently opened up about Kohberger for the very first time in the New York Times), Kohberger moved to Pullman, Washington, near Moscow, Idaho, in the fall of 2022 to do his doctorate at the Washington State University. After becoming a teaching assistant, however, he quickly bottomed out. Over the course of one semester, he was reprimanded, then fired for reportedly grading students too harshly and getting into an altercation with his supervising professor during a performance review. Just over a week after Kohberger was placed on a performance improvement plan, the murders took place. 

Still, apart from his academic spiral, up until very recently, there’s been little indication of what, if anything, could have prompted Kohberger’s actions. Even Ramsland, veteran author of books on serial killer psychology, told the New York Times that at first she doubted he could possibly be the culprit. 

Recent insight leaked from the investigation to Dateline for a May episode of the show, however, shows that Kohberger had an incriminating search history, including searches for pornography with the keywords “drugged” and “passed out.” He also searched for serial killers like Ted Bundy, though as a criminologist, that might be excusable. Less excusable, however: Dateline’s reveal that according to cell tower records, Kohberger had been in the vicinity of King Road no less than 23 times in four months.

The Idaho Four leans into the idea of Kohberger as an obsessive with dark tendencies. One source — the father of a childhood friend — alleges in the book that as a teen, Kohberger stalked him over a long period of time, frequently breaking into his house and stealing small items that belonged to him. Multiple sources recount Kohberger’s harsh and condescending treatment of female students and his difficulty interacting with women. 

Patterson and Ward also hammer home the many similarities between Kohberger and the 2014 Isla Vista mass shooter Elliot Rodger, the patron antihero of the misogynistic incel movement. There’s very little direct evidence that Kohberger was influenced by Rodger, but Ward (who has written about this theory elsewhere) and Patterson draw out every similarity they can, all but implying that Kohberger intentionally styled his murders after the notorious woman hater. There’s been no official confirmation or indication that Kohberger was consciously imitating Rodger.

What we may never really know: Why?

Even factoring in Kohberger’s alleged misogyny, though, none of that exactly answers the question: Why these four students? There’s no evidence that any of the students in the King Road circle knew Kohberger at all. Yet almost since the crimes unfolded, informal suspicion has fallen on Kohberger as being fixated on Maddie Mogen in particular. The most compelling reason for this is that, according to victims’ family and friends, an account believed to belong to Kohberger had allegedly previously liked and followed Mogen’s Instagram posts. Authorities reportedly confirmed that an Instagram account belonging to Kohberger followed the accounts of all three of the women he killed.

At the plea hearing, prosecutors confirmed that when Kohberger broke into the King Road house he went directly upstairs to Mogen’s room, where he also encountered Goncalves. While this still isn’t as satisfying as a confession with a motive coming from Kohberger himself, the implication is that Kohberger had his sights set on Mogen. Her room was easily visible from the street and adjacent parking lots. She was an exposed and vulnerable target. 

And so, Goncalves, who no longer even lived at the house but was visiting her best friend, and Chapin and Kernodle, who appear to have been awakened by the struggle upstairs in Mogen’s room, were likely all collateral damage. We may never know why Kohberger spared their roommate Dylan Mortensen, who exited her room and made eye contact with a masked man in a hoodie, with only his eyes and infamous “bushy eyebrows” visible as he walked past her out of the apartment, nor their downstairs roommate, Bethany Funke. 

The event — the cruel and seemingly random killing of young people near a college campus, as if ripped from a slasher movie — is almost impossible to comprehend as real life, which was also true as it was unfolding. Once Mortensen, in a panic, ran downstairs to join Funke, the two decided that she must have been exaggerating the whole event. (Mortensen told investigators she had been drunk at the time and unsure if what she’d seen had even been real.) Not even later, as the two of them gradually realized over the course of the next morning that something was very strange, did the two survivors understand what had happened in their house. Not even as they were calling 911, passing the phone around to their equally confused friends. 

Even three years later, it’s difficult to understand anything that happened that night in Moscow. The more we learn, the more it becomes clear that no answer will ever truly bring a satisfying end to a truly haunting case.