By RNZ
Newly discovered online posts written by the criminology student charged with stabbing four students to death in Idaho have shone a light on the suspect’s history and state of mind.
On November 13, four University of Idaho students - all aged 20 or 21 - were found stabbed to death in their beds in a rental home in the small college city of Moscow in northern Idaho.
A suspect was arrested and charged with the murders on December 30 - Bryan Kohberger, a 28-year-old PhD criminology student from nearby Washington State University in Pullman, Washington.
Kohberger was tracked to his family home in Pennsylvania and was extradited to Idaho to face charges on January 3.
While he has maintained his innocence, online forum posts obtained by the New York Times that Kohberger wrote as a teenager have offered a glimpse into his mental health struggles.
“I feel like an organic sack of meat with no self-worth,” he wrote in 2011, aged 16.
“As I hug my family, I look into their faces, I see nothing, it is like I am looking at a video game, but less.”
The posts were made on Tapatalk, a website for discussion forums, previously known as Yuku.
Kohberger participated in a forum for people struggling with the rare neurological condition known as visual snow, which causes vision obstructions made up of scattered dots.
While he did not use his name on the forum, the account’s username ‘Exarr’ was linked to an email address used by Kohberger and had its location listed as Effort, Pennsylvania, where he grew up.
He started posting on the forum in 2009 and talked about his struggles with anxiety, depression, depersonalisation, lack of emotion and suicidal thoughts.
A high school friend, Thomas Arntz, told the New York Times that he remembered Kohberger talking about his vision problems a lot.
“I know it was something that really bugged him. He was basically to the point where he was neurotic about it.”
The posts follow Kohberger’s attempts to manage his symptoms, including medication for migraines, visits to a neurologist and dietary changes.
“Nothing I do is enjoyable,” Kohberger wrote. “I am blank, I have no opinion, I have no emotion, I have nothing. Can you relate?”
By 2012 Kohberger seemed more optimistic about his condition, but he began to use heroin in 2013 after graduating high school, according to friends.
He would go on to study psychology at DeSales University in Eastern Pennsylvania, telling a friend in 2018 that he had stopped using drugs.
“I only used when I was in a deep suicidal state,” he wrote in Facebook messages to Jack Baylis, a childhood friend. “I have since really learned a lot. Not a person alive could convince me to use it.”
In another message, he told Baylis he was interested in studying criminals - in particular, “high-profile offenders”.
Baylis was now trying to understand how his friend could have been charged with such a brutal crime.
“Bryan himself would’ve been fascinated by it,” he told the New York Times.
Further details from a police affidavit released last week showed some of the evidence that led to Kohberger’s arrest, including DNA left on a knife sheath found at the scene, cellphone pings that linked him to the area a dozen times before the murders and surveillance footage of a white Hyundai Elantra like the one the suspect drove.
A motive is yet to be outlined by authorities.
The victims, Madison Mogen, 21; Kaylee Goncalves, 21; Xana Kernodle, 20; and Ethan Chapin, 20, were killed following a typical Saturday night for college students - two of the victims attending a party and the other two going to a local bar.
Police believed all four were killed shortly after 4am, while two other roommates were left unhurt.
According to the affidavit, one roommate told police she heard voices and crying in the house about 4am, before opening the door to see a man dressed in black and wearing a mask walk past her towards the back door of the house.
Shanon Gray, a lawyer for the Goncalves family, told the New York Times that family members had been searching for a connection between the victims and the suspect, but hadn’t found anything.
“They didn’t know him.”
- RNZ