Ep. 4: Who is Bryan Kohberger?

0:03I met Brian when I was in 11th grade. He was two years behind me, but he was friends with my brother. I kind of got implemented into their friend group because we always hung out at my parents' house. That's Casey Arntz, who went to Pleasant Valley High School in eastern Pennsylvania. During her time there, she and her little brother hung out with a kid named Brian Koberger. There was a bit of an age gap, two grades between them, but she described an easy friendship. He didn't ever strike me as weird. I mean, I was a weird kid in high school, so I felt like he's the same as me. We would laugh, we would talk, take walks around the neighborhood, play some games.

0:45Like, he was just another normal kid to me. There was nothing that really stood out about him. People on Facebook that went to Pleasant Valley, they have come out and said that he was very quiet, very withdrawn. I never saw that side of him. Sure, maybe Brian was a little awkward. Casey says he was picked on because he was overweight and that it took him a bit longer to warm up to people he didn't know very well. But she also says he was a happy kid who was fun to be around. Around me and around my other friends, he was outgoing. I felt like he was safe with us, maybe in his eyes. He just felt like he could be himself.

1:23Casey says she and the rest of Brian's friend group were incredibly important to him and were probably among the people who knew him best at the time. The two stayed friends throughout high school, but lost touch when Casey moved out of state. One of the last things he said to me is, I love you guys, meaning our friend group, and I will always love you guys even if we stop talking one day. So at the time, it was really endearing. Now it's kind of creepy.

2:00on december 30th 2022 brian koberger a 28 year old phd student in criminology was arrested and charged with the murders of madison mogin ethan chapin zanna kurnodel and kaylee gonzalves the four university of idaho students who were found stabbed to death inside their King Road home. Prosecutors announced this week they intend to seek the death penalty.

2:33I'm Kena Whitworth. I'm a correspondent with ABC News, and I've been covering this case since the day after their bodies were discovered. In our previous episodes, we've learned about the victims, discussed the fallout from the crime, and traced the investigation conducted by authorities as they hunted for the killer. In this episode, we're turning our attention to the suspect, Brian Koberger, who maintains his innocence. We will do our best to move beyond images of Koberger, the inmate in an orange jumpsuit, and try and get to know who he was before he was charged with these murders. Despite numerous interview requests, We haven't been able to speak with Brian Koberger or his family, but we will hear from people who knew him in his teenage years, in college, and right before he was arrested last December.

3:27There's the Koberger who helps save a colleague's life, and the Koberger who makes coworkers feel uncomfortable, even fearful. There's the Koberger who succeeds in school, is passionate about his classes, and impresses his professors. Then there's the Koberger, who clashes with people in his graduate program and loses his teaching job.

3:54This is The King Road Killings, Episode 4. Who is Brian Koberger?

4:05Let's start at the beginning. Brian was born on November 21, 1994, to Marianne and Michael Koberger. Brian was the baby of the family with two older sisters, Amanda and Melissa. They spent their childhoods in the Pocono region of eastern Pennsylvania. It's a rural, outdoorsy place about two hours from New York City, known for its mountains and rivers, people ski in the winter, and fish, raft, or hike in the summer. The family wasn't well off financially. In fact, records show that the couple filed for bankruptcy twice. Once in 1995, when Brian was a baby. And again in 2010, during his teenage years.

4:52Both Michael and Marianne worked for the local Pleasant Valley School District. Michael spent over a decade as a maintenance worker, while Marianne was an educator. A substitute teacher who also worked with special needs students. Here's Casey again. She was the sweetest woman ever. I still remember distinctly what she wore. She had these high-waist belts, poofy hair. It's funny because I guess when Brian had mentioned me to his mom at one point, she still remembered me years later. And that says a lot for someone who's a substitute teacher and can remember her kids. So she was just, she's a lovely woman, and my heart really feels for her in this situation.

5:30Marianne frequently wrote letters to the editor of the local paper on a range of social and political issues. She was opposed to war, abortion, and the death penalty, and in favor of gun regulation.

5:45In his teenage years, we start to see Brian expressing himself online, too. The earliest writings we could find deal with a medical condition he says he developed around the age of 14, something called visual snow. It's a rare medical condition that causes people to see flickering dots. For about 60 % of patients, the disorder comes on suddenly and can have huge implications for quality of life. Imagine your field of vision suddenly crowded with static, like a bad TV picture. Visual snow can also be linked to other symptoms like ringing in the ears, anxiety, depression, trouble sleeping, and even dissociative episodes.

6:30That's when the world around you doesn't feel real. There's no known cure for visual snow, so many people with the condition are constantly on the hunt for new ways to keep symptoms at bay, sometimes communicating on online message boards to swap tips on what treatments work for them. Brian has been linked to an account on one such forum called Tapatok, where he made dozens of posts recounting his battle with visual snow. In a post from January of 2011, 16-year-old Brian writes, I have had VS since September 21st of 2009. Since then, I have changed, mainly from the anxiety and sense of derealization and hopelessness.

7:18The derealization, he describes, is the sensation of feeling detached from your surroundings, like you're in a dream or a fog. In another post, he writes, being me is this horrible disease that I was given. I think of this as I succumb to sleep, but I see a large intensity of black, yellow, white fuzz. It makes my mind fizzle, and I can barely keep in the bounds of reality. It is as if the ringing in my ears and the fuzz in my vision is simply all of the demons in my head mocking me. I fall asleep, but I wake up quickly to bloody screams. Is any of this here? Am I brain damaged? No? Then why am I like this?

8:08We found another online account that ABC has confirmed to be Brian's. A SoundCloud account. Where in September of 2011, he posted a single track. An angsty rap song called Rise Up. Always the same thing that disrupts my life. Wonder when I'll change it. I guess when the time is right. Procrastinating my deranged to change would be a fight. So I'm passing this, like I'm afraid to get a bloody fist. Look at this, my mind is pissed, and I keep running. Why is this when I do this? Eventually, Brian seemed to find a solution that helped deal with his visual snow. A very specific diet that involved cutting out grains, sugars, and yeast.

8:47He followed this diet to the letter, and excitedly shared his progress on Tapatok in the hopes of helping others curb their own symptoms. Around this time, those who knew Brian noticed a dramatic change in his appearance. Here's Casey again. In Brian's senior year, he did lose all the weight. He came back and he looked really thin, a lot different. It was kind of surprising for a lot of people. His rapid weight loss could be linked to several things. His new diet or a change in his workout regimen. He did kickboxing. I found out he was doing night runs with an old friend of mine. ABC News spoke with his old boxing coach who remembered a teenage Koberger coming into the gym nearly every day in high school.

9:31According to the coach, Koberger's dad brought him in to, quote, get Brian out, get him more social, and get involved with other people. The coach added, Brian's dad was worried his son didn't have a lot of other opportunities to socialize or build self-esteem and strength. Over time, the coach said he saw Koberger gain confidence. He said he worked hard to achieve his goals and seemed to feel more accepted at the gym. But around this time, friends of his tell us that Brian also started using heroin. Casey says he would ask her for rides that she later found out were to buy drugs. Brian used me to, you know, drive him around and get heroin, and I didn't know.

10:18he then told me he was in rehab a lot of people are like well why were you still friends with him after that and i'm like because you gotta forgive him i mean you can't fault him for being so sucked down this hole and i did i did forgive him we talked after that this was like i think when he used me was in 2013 and we still talked for a good year after that the drug use coincided with a major shift in personality that really affected Koberger's relationships. I reported on some of this when I was out in Pennsylvania, talking with anyone I could find who knew him. Tonight, Brian Koberger's childhood friend Thomas speaking to ABC News, describing the Idaho murder suspect as mean in high school, saying Brian was eager to be seen as dominant.

11:04He would just, like, put me in—he would, like, grapple me and put me in headlocks and arm bars and stuff like that. Thomas Arntz is Casey's brother, and he was Brian Koberger's classmate. Brian would gaslight my brother a lot when they argued. He would put my brother into headlocks to the point where my brother just got so tired and fed up with it that he stopped being friends with him in 2015, I think he said he was. He just had to cut him out. Brian Koberger and Thomas Arntz graduated from high school in the spring of 2013, and their friendship ended two years later. By this time, Brian and Casey had already lost touch.

11:42Dominic Scheld is just a few years older than Koberger. Although the two were never close friends, for a while they ran in the same circles, attending many of the same parties in high school. You ran into him in some of these drug circles when he would have been about 17? Yep. And what kind of drugs were you using? Hey, everyone. Dom, as he likes to be called, is also in recovery. and has been sober for many years now. And is that what he would have been using also? Most likely. If he was in that scene with us, then yeah. And how do you remember him at those parties? Withdrawn, kept to himself.

12:17He would, you know, interact with whoever he was sitting on the couch with or sitting on the sidelines with. So you wouldn't describe him as a loner at that point? No, not a loner. He did have friends. He was at these parties with people. He didn't come alone. He normally came with other people. But he was very just like on the outside, wasn't involved in the social playing pool, listening to music, dancing, talking. He was more just quiet and kept to himself.

12:50We know from court documents that Koberger went through treatment for drug abuse and he seemed to turn a corner. He had big aspirations for himself professionally. He picked back up on an earlier interest in protecting his community and pursuing a career in law enforcement. Here's Casey again. I think he just kind of wanted to understand other people's minds. Maybe he wanted to find a way to get justice for people. A yearbook photo taken in his sophomore year of high school shows him doing push-ups with a group of other young men as part of a law enforcement prep class. The caption mentions that he wants to serve in the Army Rangers, a special operations branch of the U.S.

13:33military. Koberger graduated from Pleasant Valley High School in 2013, and after working at a couple of customer service jobs, he applied for a security guard position with the school district. According to Fox News, Koberger listed his year of law enforcement training on the application, adding, I boxed after school every day, and I'm still a runner. I believe dedication and perseverance are the most important skills learned from my activities. I lost 130 pounds at age 15 into 16 whilst attending school at PVHS. I believe this is proof that I have the required dedication to be successful. Koberger was hired by the school district in 2016, where he worked his way up from casual to part-time security guard.

14:19Koberger enrolled in Northampton Community College, where he earned an associate's degree in psychology in 2018. Koberger made the dean's list at one point and was a member of the Community College National Honor Society in psychology. In 2018, he transferred to DeSales University, a private Catholic university near his parents' house. According to the school, he initially studied psychology, then shifted his focus to criminal justice, one of the most popular programs for incoming students. A DeSales promotional video on YouTube describes the program. For example, we have a new track in digital forensics that allows students to prepare for working in a field that actually evaluates cell phones, computers, iPads, and other electronic devices that are used during the commission of a crime.

15:09While he was at DeSales, Koberger continued working his security job with the Pleasant Valley School District. In 2018, he was named in the local newspaper, the Pocono Record, for helping to save the life of a school monitor who suddenly had trouble breathing as she patrolled the hallways. The article credits Koberger with quickly running to retrieve the school's defibrillator while another security guard performed CPR. Koberger and his colleague were able to keep the woman alive until emergency responders arrived and took over.

15:47Although his friend Casey ultimately lost touch with Koberger after high school, the two ran into each other once as adults at a friend's wedding in 2017. Seeing him was surprising in a good way because he just looked so much cleaner. He looked good. I remember giving him a really big hug And I just told him how proud I was of him. And he was talking about how he was a security guard at a school, which I then found out was Pleasant Valley, where we went. And he was going to school for criminal justice. And he just seemed to just be really, really good. In 2020, Koberger was awarded his bachelor's degree from DeSales and began pursuing his master's in criminal justice through their online program.

16:33Koberger appears to have been a good student and was particularly well-liked by Professor Michelle Bolger, a criminology instructor at DeSales. ABC News reached out to Professor Bolger numerous times, but she declined to speak with us. She did speak to the Daily Mail about her interactions with Koberger, reportedly describing him as brilliant, a great writer, and one of my best students ever. In fact, Koberger is one of only two students she said she ever recommended to a PhD program. However, the professor also acknowledged she didn't know Koberger very well outside of their virtual classroom interactions.

17:13She said, he seemed normal to me, but then again, I only knew him from teaching him online. I didn't know anything personal about him. Professor Bolger also advised Koberger on his thesis. As part of his research, he created a survey seeking to understand the emotions and psychology involved in committing a crime. He posted a questionnaire on the social media platform Reddit that ABC News was able to verify. Participants were asked questions like, how was your life right before the crime occurred? Did you prepare for the crime before leaving your home? Why did you choose that victim or target over others?

17:56After committing the crime, what were you thinking and feeling? After his arrest, this survey got a lot of attention from media and online sleuths who tied it to a possible motive for the King Road killings, theorizing that his interest in understanding criminal motivation could reflect some desire of his own. But Professor Bolger says the survey is actually pretty standard. She told the Daily Mail, It looks weird. I understand from the public view. But in criminology, it's a normal theory on how and why criminals commit their crime. Koberger, now 27, graduated with his master's degree in June of 2022 and moved across the country to pursue his Ph.D.

18:45at Washington State University, right next door to Moscow, Idaho.

19:05This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the Name Your Price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law, not available in all states. Brian Koberger moved into a student apartment in Pullman, Washington, provided by the university in the fall of 2022. As part of our investigation into Koberger's past, my producer Timmy and I visited Pullman, hoping to learn more about him.

19:43We have arrived at what was Brian Koberger's apartment. His apartment building is this sort of tan, three-story building, has white panels on the windows. The building itself is utilitarian-looking and drab. It reminded us of temporary housing we've seen built for Alaskan oil-filled workers. It's made to be torn down when the season is over and workers depart. Koberger's apartment was later described by law enforcement as sparsely furnished and decorated. His bathroom didn't even have a shower curtain. Man, look how pretty all those trees are. They're like all those different colors. The view from the parking lot of his apartment building is gorgeous.

20:36Timmy and I went looking for someone, anyone, who was close with Koberger during the few short months he was there. We visited places Koberger might have frequented. Coffee shops near campus, the vegan restaurants in town. Koberger adheres to a strict vegan diet, and there aren't many places in town that cater to vegans, so we hoped one of their employees might remember him. No luck. And as for friends, people who knew him well, we mostly struck out. ABC did track down one of his former students, though. As a PhD student, Koberger taught undergrads. He worked as a teaching assistant, a TA. Hayden Stinchfield was in one of his classes.

21:22He was pretty distant, never was super engaged with us, which I can't super blame him for because being a TA doesn't seem super fun. He answered a lot of questions with sort of canned responses that he clearly thought of before. Or he'd look at the ground when he was up at the front of class and then he would be grading us pretty harshly and leaving a bunch of notes. So clearly he was passionate. It was just like when he was in front of us as a class, he just was never like super open. Most people just sort of got the vibe from him that he was grading us a little too harshly and he was a little bit weird when he was actually in class.

21:52Not like, you know, any serious red flags or anything, but just just a little off and and a harsh grader. After months of trying, we were finally able to get an exclusive interview with one of his fellow PhD students. We wanted to shed light on Koberger's time inside the program, a place where he only spent a few short months in the fall of 2022. The fellow PhD student agreed to speak with me on the record, but she didn't want me to include her name or voice in the podcast. It's a small program, and they felt under siege from public interest in the case since Koberger's arrest. Yet, she did have some things she wanted to tell me.

22:33From the beginning, she says, Koberger seemed to have a hard time fitting in. Where his master's professor at DeSales gave him high marks, this fellow PhD student at WSU described Koberger as difficult and unpleasant to work with. She said he was sometimes rude and condescending. She remembers a few times that he became angry over seemingly minor issues, like being docked a point or two in class. On these occasions, she said,

23:08I spoke with a second colleague from the PhD program who corroborated these descriptions of Koberger's behavior. The first PhD student told me that Koberger lacked respect for people's boundaries. In one instance, Koberger apparently developed a crush on another classmate, repeatedly asking her out and staring at her. This allegedly made her so uncomfortable that the other students made a point of never leaving the two of them alone together. According to the Ph.D. student I spoke to, Koberger's fellow Ph.D. students began tracking his behavior that bothered them, especially what they saw as disrespect toward female professors.

23:52They wrote down how many times he interrupted female professors or skipped their classes. They called it the Brian Talley. Koberger's classmate told me they thought something was off. As a group, they were raising red flags and telling higher-ups, the university can't speak due to privacy concerns, but we know Koberger would later face repercussions. In Koberger's job as a teaching assistant, the fellow PhD student we spoke with told us Koberger held his office hours at unusual times, sometimes late into the evening rather than the more typical daytime hours. She began sticking around after some of her students complained that he would make them feel uncomfortable during their meetings.

24:41Students alleged Koberger closed the door, which is against protocol, or placed himself between the student and the exit so they felt compelled to stay in his office. Koberger also developed a reputation for being a tough grader, sometimes to the point of frustrating his students. Hayden, the student we spoke to, recalls one incident that seemed to leave everyone involved, even Koberger himself, feeling uneasy. We had a midterm exam that a lot of people thought was graded unfairly. So we as a class had like a day where we went in and we were all essentially allowed to just like debate him about our grades and try and like earn points back.

25:23But, you know, it was a thing where he argued back. And so we were sort of in this weird like debate for the whole class. 50 of us against one of him, and he was having to field all these questions. But Brian didn't seem super comfortable, and honestly, none of us were super comfortable. It was a weird vibe. That was like a turning point, I think. For us, we felt like when we did that, our grades got better. In addition to pursuing his doctorate, Koberger seemed eager to gain on-the-job experience in criminal justice. Court documents show in the fall of 2022, he applied for an internship with the Pullman Police Department.

25:56In his application essay, he wrote that he wanted to assist rural law enforcement agencies with how to better collect and analyze technological data in public safety operations. We don't know if he got that internship, but we can hear his eagerness to discuss the law with a WSU officer when she pulled him over for a minor moving violation around the same time. I think you know why I stopped you. You're in the red light. What actually happened was I was stuck in the middle of the intersection. Yeah, I was behind you the whole time. Koberger didn't quite argue with the cop. It was almost like he was trying to explain his way out of a ticket or wear the officer down.