Dylan Mortensen heard noises that woke her up early on the morning of Nov. 13, saw a man in black, and then encountered the horrific sight of her stabbed roommates.
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As for the identity of the gunman, officials have no doubt that Brian Koberger, a 28-year-old criminologist with a disturbing personality and, it turns out, a strange fascination with police forensics and serial killers, is the prime suspect.
His arrest on Dec. 30 at his parents’ home, about 4,000 kilometers away in Pennsylvania, brought relief to a city that had been on edge for seven weeks as police apparently struggled to find either a suspect or a motive in the gruesome quadruple murder.
Koberger, who was arrested after a SWAT team broke through the front door and windows of the family’s home in a “dynamic entryway,” faces four counts of first-degree murder and burglary.
Photo: Nicholas K. Geranios, Jazzmin Kernodle, Stacy Chapin / Ringier
He has yet to enter a plea, although his lawyer has said he expects to be “exonerated”.
Police say leads led them to Koberger, a doctoral student, after they identified his car near the victims’ home on the night of the murder.
The case continues to intrigue the US as it confronts the possibility that, not for the first time, someone trained to probe the criminal mind and conduct criminal investigations has decided to kill himself. If Koberger is the killer, it seems unlikely that his studies in criminology are a mere coincidence given his decision to slaughter four young people he probably did not know.
He was, according to the general opinion, a “brilliant” student who liked to brag to his colleagues and teachers that he knew better than them when it came to crime. Except apparently he wasn’t brilliant enough. Despite allegedly going to great lengths to cover his tracks, he left plenty of them.
Just as in the pages of crime stories and Hollywood screenplays, the annals of American crime are not short of examples of killers who have studied subjects such as criminal behavior and forensic science.
Photo: Zach Wilkinson / Tanjug/AP
Two of America’s most notorious serial killers, Dennis Rader, known as the “BTK Killer,” and Joseph DeAngelo, the “Golden State Killer,” had degrees in criminal justice.
Between 1974 and 1991, Rader killed ten people in Wichita and Park City, Kansas, and sent mocking letters to police and the media detailing his crimes. “BTK” was an abbreviation he gave himself as a nickname — it meant “bind, torture, kill”. DeAngelo had at least 13 murders, 51 rapes and 120 burglaries across California between 1974 and 1986.
Perhaps Koberger thought he could emulate them — or perhaps Richard Speck, the American mass murderer who stabbed and strangled eight college students in their Chicago home one night in 1966 and whose case is cited by some experts who seek parallels with Koberger. He has a bachelor’s degree in criminology from DeSales University and moved to Washington state to pursue a doctorate in criminal justice and criminology at Washington State University. Experts told the Daily Mail that Koberger may have known enough about forensics to believe he could get away with murder, to commit the so-called perfect crime, but he turned out to be wrong.
Bullied at a young age
Brian Koberger has had problems in the past. He was bullied in high school for being overweight, and later struggled with heroin addiction. Intriguingly, while he was in rehab, one of his two older sisters appeared in a low-budget “slash movie” called “Two Days Back,” about a group of college students who were murdered by a serial killer. But he seemed to turn his life around in college. He studied at Desailles with Catherine Ramsland, a celebrated forensic psychologist whose books include The Mind of a Killer and How to Catch a Killer.
Michelle Bolger, a teacher at Desailles who helped him with his master’s thesis — a study of people’s thoughts and feelings as they commit crimes — described him as “one of my best students ever.”
Photo: Latah County / Tanjug/AP
His fellow students were less complimentary, noting that his obvious intelligence came with an intense arrogance and sometimes difficult personality.
He is said to have shown a particularly keen interest in crime scenes and serial killers.
“At the time, it seemed like he was just a curious student, so if his questions were strange, we didn’t think much of it because it fit into our curriculum,” said Brittany Slaven, who took classes with Koberger at DeSales. .
Terrible attitude towards women
At Washington State University, he was studying DNA evidence and forensics just weeks before the murders, and was described as a “contrash,” who often got into arguments with other students, especially women.
Indeed, he seemed to have a problem with women in general. The owner of a bar near his parents’ home in Albrightsville, Pennsylvania, said Koberger was a regular – until he began harassing the women who worked there. According to bar owner Jordan Serulnek, while Koberger usually sat alone at the bar and watched other patrons, after a few drinks he would start making “creepy comments.”
In the months before the Moscow murders, Koberger applied for an internship with the local police force in Pullman, Washington, where he lived, some twenty kilometers from Moscow, and wrote an essay expressing his interest in helping rural police forces gather and analyze evidence. .
How the investigation went
As revealed in a prosecution statement released last Thursday, he first appeared on the radar of police and FBI investigators in Moscow because he had a white Hyundai Elantra — the same car that was caught on surveillance footage driving past the victims’ homes three times shortly before the crime. and finally stopped for about 15 minutes before speeding off at 4.20am.
By then, most of the residents had gone to bed, having returned home just before 2am from the usual Saturday student gathering.
However, at least one of them, Zana Kernodle, was still awake even two hours later, received a food delivery around 4 a.m., according to her phone records, and was on TikTok 15 minutes later. Although surveillance cameras did not capture the Elantra’s license plate, that is exactly the vehicle police spotted in the Washington State University campus parking lot and was found to be registered to Kochberger.
Dylan Mortensen couldn’t say much about the man in black she says she saw walking past her bedroom door, but she told police he was quite tall and had “shaggy eyebrows” — a detail investigators noted matched. with a photo of Koberger on his driver’s license.
Photo: AP/ Ted S. Warren / Tanjug/AP
By the last week of December, investigators had obtained Koberger’s cell phone records that showed he had visited the crime scene at least 12 times since June before the night of the murders. The victim, Kayleigh Gonsalves, complained about a “stalker” shortly before her death. Did she notice him?
On the night of the murders, Koberger’s phone was detected in Pullman, where he lived, at about 2:47 a.m., but was then turned off for two hours before being reconnected (at 4:48 a.m.) a few miles south of the University of Idaho and then back in Pullman. .
Turning off your phone is a common tactic for criminals who know their movements can be tracked via nearby cell phone transmitters. It would certainly be familiar to a student of police investigations.
Around 9:12 a.m. — several hours after the murders — Koberger’s phone was detected in Moscow, near the scene of the murders, nine minutes before he returned to the Pullman. He could see that the police had not yet been called to the scene.
The last but crucial piece of evidence investigators have come up with is that the DNA matches. They found it, they say, on the holster of the US Marines’ “combat knife” KA-BAR, which the killer, apparently by mistake, left on the bed near the bodies of two of his victims.
Koberger should know about the importance of DNA evidence and about Lockard’s exchange principle, the cherished rule of forensics that “every contact leaves a trace” and that DNA can be obtained from hair, skin cells and saliva.
The FBI’s discreet surveillance operation continued as Koberger drove home from college with his father in an Elantra for the holidays in mid-December.
In Pennsylvania, Koberger was being watched by an FBI team who reportedly saw further evidence of his cautious behavior when he repeatedly wore surgical gloves outside his home.
He changed his car’s license plate within days of the murders, but was also spotted on several occasions meticulously washing the car’s interior. He was also seen throwing his family’s trash into his neighbors’ trash cans, sources said.
The scam failed, according to investigators, who say they were able to retrieve a DNA sample from Koberger’s father, Michael, a former maintenance worker, from the family’s trash. The sample analysis showed that he was the biological father of the person who left the DNA on the knife sheath.
Photo: AP/ Ted S. Warren / Tanjug/AP
Followed the case closely
And yet, even as he allegedly did his best to avoid detection, Koberger is said to have been unable to resist displaying his criminal intelligence.
Notably, Koberger used the pseudonym – Pope Roger – to discuss the quadruple murder in social media crime discussion groups.
Back in November, he tweeted that he believed police had found the knife casing used in the murder and, according to the administrator of a Facebook discussion group about the murders, “he kept arguing with people and said some really creepy things.”
Based on his resemblance to the man in the crowd in the video posted online, some also believe Koberger attended a vigil for the victims at their university.
Photo: Sarah A. Miller / Tanjug/AP
Investigators admit questions remain. They are said to be “confused” as to why it took the victims’ surviving roommates nearly eight hours to call the police – after calling friends first – after Mortensen ran into the black-clad intruder.
They said the reaction may have been due to intoxication or fear, but appeared to rule out the possibility that Mortensen was connected to the killer.
The most pressing mystery is the motive. What prompted Koberger to kill four people with whom, according to the evidence, he had nothing to do with?
He is a few years older than them and doesn’t look like the kind of person who would come to any of their many parties. Their friends had never heard of him.
