Want to kill someone?
Hate will get the job done every time.
But then again, the heart has many resources.
And in a pinch, love is all you need.
All along, this has been the big question: Why? Why would someone furtively enter an off-campus home just before dawn and, armed with a hunting knife, savagely murder four University of Idaho students? Since the grim events of November 13, 2022, it has been a perplexity that has fueled considerable speculation.
And now, a despairingly long two and a half years later, with the trial of Bryan Kohberger, the 30-year-old criminal-justice graduate student charged with the killings poised to start in August, a potential motive is at last coming into focus.
It provides the prosecution with a narrative that, like many of the lingering mysteries surrounding the events of that tragic night, has no kinship with conventional reason. (Try, for example, wrapping your head around the disturbing fact that the two survivors were aware a black-masked intruder had entered their house, had heard the accompanying tumult, yet waited eight hours before calling 911, rising at about 7:30, and then frittering away the morning on social media, taking photos, and calling parents and friends.)
It is an explanation—a hypothesis, really—that becomes credible only when examined through a different manner of cognition: the inscrutable workings of Bryan Kohberger’s mind.
At its root, it is a love story—of a sort.
Apt Pupil
Once upon a time, the yarn the state is hoping to spin begins, Bryan Kohberger was incomplete. Oh, he had laboriously strived to re-invent his life by the time he had enrolled in the master’s program in criminal justice at DeSales University, in Pennsylvania. He’d kicked his heroin addiction; lost more than 100 pounds; turned his body into a fortress through exercise, a vegan diet, and boxing; and made his way out of a dismal community college. And yet something was still missing.
Then he found his calling: forensic psychology, the new science of exploring the dark caverns lurking in the recesses of criminal minds. And as luck would have it, he’d also found an unlikely friend and champion to guide him: Katherine Ramsland.
A recognized authority in the psychological study of serial killers, a prolific author of, at recent count, 59 books, and a familiar face on true-crime network and cable shows, where she reliably brings a measure of academic gravitas to the proceedings, the professor had done it all. And, as Newsweek first revealed at the time of Kohberger’s arrest, Ramsland was also his teacher. For a graduate class she taught at DeSales, he’d read her seminal works, Inside the Minds of Serial Killers: Why They Kill and Confession of a Serial Killer: The Untold Story of Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer.
Yet what the prosecution discovered, which has not been previously reported, is that Kohberger’s relationship and tutelage with Ramsland did not end when he traveled across the country to enroll in the Ph.D. criminal-justice program at Washington State University. He remained her acolyte. Kohberger was allegedly e-mailing his old professor in the days before the murders occurred and in the days immediately after.
What was discussed remains, for now at least, another mystery. Neither the state nor Ramsland has responded to requests for comment.
Nevertheless, Air Mail has learned that just hours after Kohberger’s arrest, Ramsland allegedly telephoned his mother to offer her wisdom and guidance to help her former student and his family through the looming ordeal. Her offer to act as the coolheaded broker for the Kohbergers was quickly accepted. The Kohbergers supposedly refused to meet with their son’s court-appointed Pennsylvania attorney until Ramsland signed off.
Over the two years that followed, the professor allegedly stayed in touch with the family as well as with Kohberger himself, offering, sources share, practical advice to help navigate the often overwhelming intricacies of a stern criminal-justice apparatus. She’s even reportedly conferred with one of Kohberger’s sisters, who is said to be writing an insider’s account of their wrenching family drama. In fact, the beleagured family has asked her to consider accompanying them to the Boise bed-and-breakfast that Anne Taylor, the head of their son’s defense team, has reserved for them during the course of the trial.
From these facts, the prosecution has embroidered a still-speculative account of what allegedly led Bryan Kohberger, armed with his seven-inch steel-bladed knife, into the house on King Road. It goes like this:
Kohberger wanted to prove that the pupil was ready to become the teacher. He was determined to demonstrate to the professor, who according to this theory was the idealized object of his respect and affection, that he’d learned all her lessons well. And while her journey into hell had been judicious, reaching out in letters and interviews to convicted killers, he would charge full speed into the belly of the beast. No passive, arm’s-length academic posturing for this researcher.
But even more: He’d kill and get away with it. He’d prove how smart he was. He would show how much he’d learned.
And, the hypothesis continued, with the raging, crackling anger that was unleashed, Kohberger would demonstrate to the object of his devotion the sacrifices he was prepared to make to win her comradeship. Like John Hinckley who had tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan to win the heart of the actress Jodie Foster, a woman he’d never met, Kohberger was driven by his own twisted erotomania. Kohberger, too, would let his demons run free, and in the end he’d triumph. His far vision would take him someplace where his mentor had never dared to journey. And in the proud aftermath, after all his struggles, he’d at last be complete.
What does Ramsland make of it? She’s apparently not talking; she’s never responded to my e-mails.
Nevertheless, she might find something in the theory. After all, in another episode in her remarkably accomplished life, she wrote her doctoral dissertation on Kierkegaard. It was that Danish philosopher who conceded that “my writing should be considered a monument” to Regine Olsen, a woman with whom he had a brief, youthful relationship. Is it too far a stretch to consider that a killer’s logic had made a similar heartfelt journey?
Howard Blum is the author of several best-selling books, including the Edgar Award–winning American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century. His latest, When the Night Comes Falling: A Requiem for the Idaho Student Murders, is available now