The Idaho Four summary

By summer 2022, Maddie’s plan was being fully realized. She’d secured the lease at 1122 King Road, and was finally sharing a roof again with Kaylee. Along with Xana, their lively house was also home to two younger Pi Phis, Dylan Mortensen and Bethany Funke. The young women became a tight-knit household.

Their many visitors included Ethan Chapin, a student who was in a steady relationship with the charming Xana. He was tall, easygoing, and Xana was soon spending long stretches at the Chapins’ home, where Ethan’s family welcomed her as one of their own.

The origins of that night, however, lay far from Idaho, in a different time. Nine years earlier, an 18-year-old named Bryan Kohberger was already in serious trouble. Everyone knew that his best friend, Jeremy Saba, was a junkie and a bad influence. But it was becoming apparent that Bryan was also breaking into homes – friends, family members, neighbors – and stealing anything he could get his hands on in order to keep his own heroin habit going. His first stint in rehab was just around the corner.

Around this same time, Bryan starts posting online about his neurological condition, known as visual snow, where occasionally your field of vision is impaired with static-like dots. He also writes and records rap songs, posting them on SoundCloud – signs of an angry, restless brain trying to explain itself.

To demonstrate the principles of the IS PATH WARM acronym, Professor Ramsland used the case study of Elliot Rodger, who killed six people in a violent 2014 attack near the University of California, Santa Barbara. The killing spree ended with Rodger committing suicide, but not before he left behind numerous videos and a 137-page manifesto detailing his motivations.

According to Rodger, the only thing he had to live for was getting revenge against the kinds of women who’d been constantly rejecting him. For this reason, Elliot Rodger went on to be seen as a “saint” to the “incel” community. The term, short for “involuntary celibate,” describes an online community of men who blame women and society for their lack of sexual relationships. 

As we know, Bryan liked to drive at night, and his wanderings frequently took him the short distance across the border over to Moscow, Idaho – home of the University of Idaho. Being a vegan, one of the places he’d read about online was the Mad Greek, a restaurant that serves vegan pizza. It’s also where Maddie Mogen, one of the young women living at 1122 King Road, worked as a waitress.

Cellphone data shows that in the weeks leading up to November 12th, 2022, Bryan would drive around, often in the hours after midnight, in the area of King Road, where Maddie and her friends lived. Friends also recalled how the large window of Maddie’s pink room made it clearly visible from the outside, particularly after dark. To a mind warped by the incel worldview that deified Elliot Rodger, young women enjoying a vibrant social life were the very embodiment of the incel’s grievances – symbols of a world from which he felt excluded and scorned.

As people were brought in for questioning, the cops secured the scene and collected evidence at 1122 King Road. Surprisingly, the county prosecutor found that the murderer seemingly made a big mistake. They left behind the sheath of a hunting knife, likely the one used to commit the murders. It was quickly sent to the labs with the hope they’d find DNA evidence.

By Monday, November 14th, the Moscow PD had called in the FBI and a full task force was set up: victimology mapped the lives of the four students; interview teams chased every possible clue; forensics and digital analysts sifted through the victims’ phones; and a tip line crew was set up to catch the flood already pouring in. Twice daily, they briefed one another in a cramped room.

It wasn’t until December that the DNA investigation began to bear fruit. They didn’t get any hits from the usual criminal database, but due to a loophole in the law, the FBI was able to access public genealogy sites like GEDMatch and MyHeritage and compare the sample taken from the knife sheath. Maybe the suspect hadn’t sent their DNA to one of these services, but maybe a relative had, which would allow the FBI to build a family tree that could point them in the right direction. Sure enough, the FBI sent the Moscow PD a name: Bryan Kohberger.

This was when the dominoes began to fall in quick succession. Kohberger had a car that matched the one seen in CCTV footage. Cell phone data put him near the scene of the crime, not only in the early morning hours of November 12, but also during many late nights in the preceding two weeks.

After Kohberger’s arrest, a blame game started. Washington State University was, of course, shocked. Phones lit up in the criminology building. The professors who taught the suspect were forced to wonder: how did a room full of people trained to spot red flags miss a killer in their own ranks? It happened in Pennsylvania, too, where former classmates scrolled through old emails and realized the quiet “Ghost” was now a headline suspect.

As those who knew him struggled to reconcile their memories with the monstrous allegations, Bryan Kohberger was processed and placed in a cell at the Latah County jail in Idaho. The small, under-capacity lockup suddenly became the center of a national story.