Crime Fix with Angenette Levy - UNSEALED Bryan Kohberger Docs Reveal Disgusting New Details

Starting point is 00:00:00 Wondery Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of this Law and Crimes series ad-free right now. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. We're learning more about some of the evidence that prosecutors had hoped to present against Brian Koberger at his trial that didn't end up happening, along with more details about who would have testified in another possible tie between Brian Koberger and his fixation with Ted Bundy. plus the latest on what's going on with him in prison. Welcome to Crime Fix. I'm Janette Levy. Brian Coburger, he's been in prison now for nearly three months, and he's at the very, very beginning of serving four consecutive life sentences behind bars, a trove of documents related to the heinous murders of Maddie Mogan,

Starting point is 00:00:55 Kili Gonzalez, Zana Kornodal, and Ethan Schapen, We're sealed for months and in some cases years, and now that Coburger has admitted to the crimes, those documents are slowly being unsealed. And they're telling more of the horrific and sad story of what happened in the house on King Road that night. We're also learning more about who prosecutors and the defense team plan to call as witnesses at the trial. And some of that is pretty revealing given what Bill Thompson told me last month about how they were going to present the case at trial. What is your working theory, Bill, about this, about this crime and why he did this? I mean, you have to have some type of working theory. I mean, juries like to hear stories.

Starting point is 00:01:41 You have to tell the jury of stories. So what was your working theory here about why Brian Koberger went to King Road that night? And who specifically he was targeting? engine at going into trial we really weren't going to be proposing a working theory like you just discussed our focus was on the evidence showing that we have these horribly murdered young people and the evidence that proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant is the one who was responsible for it the lack of the backstory is something that we have to factor in it's not an element of the crime. It's not something the jury will be asked to decide on, but human nature

Starting point is 00:02:31 is such that if they get distracted by that, they could start creating questions in their own mind that had nothing to do with whether or not the defendant was guilty. So our approach at trial really was going to be much like what we did when we were in court on July 2nd when the guilty we entered and the factual summary of our evidence, that was going to be the trial and focus the jury on the elements under the law and what the proof was of those elements. So very clinical, circumstantial evidence. We have the DNA. We have the cell phone stuff. We have the white elantra. Exactly. Okay. So first off, the prosecutors, they had no intention of calling Brian Coburger's parents as witnesses. That came up in pretrial. He said,

Starting point is 00:03:21 hearings, but their names were not on the witness list. But Brian Coburger's sister, Amanda Coburger, she was the only family member on the witness list. And prosecutors did not imply that she had any knowledge of the murders. I want to be clear on that. Prosecutors wrote in their trial brief, the state intends to call family members of defendant for the purpose of establishing certain facts before defendant moved to Pullman in late summer 2022, as well as facts about defendant's conduct when he returned home in Pennsylvania in December 2022. The nature of this testimony has been disclosed through reports of interviews. Now, there had been endless speculation about Coburger's parents knowing or suspecting

Starting point is 00:04:03 their son committed the crimes because he called his parents that morning. But I've told you in the past that experts were celebrate said he did that every day anyway. He talked to his parents a lot throughout the day. So it was no big deal. Prosecutors would have potentially presented hundreds and hundreds of exhibits, including photos, audio and video interviews and other visual aids. And they collected DNA samples from a lot of people to either include them or exclude them as suspects. Those would have been exhibits at trial as well. The defense, meanwhile, was going to call 16 experts to attack evidence presented by the prosecution.

Starting point is 00:04:42 Those included cell phone experts like Cy Ray, who I've told you about, before, a crime scene expert who would have told jurors he believed two weapons and two people committed the crimes and a computer forensics expert and a DNA analyst along with several others. Brian Coburger didn't have an alibi that was out the window. He had conceded he was out driving around that night. So attacking the evidence was really all they had. The defense also revealed in discovery that a forensic psychiatrist interviewed Brian Coburger's family. Her name is Dr. Eileen Ryan and she works at the Ohio State University. She specializes an adult and child psychiatry and obsessive compulsive disorder. Documents reveal that she conducted a family

Starting point is 00:05:24 evaluation of Brian Koberger's parents and his sister Amanda in late 2024 and then in-person individual evaluations of his mother and two older sisters the following day. Dr. Ryan interviewed other people too and looked at other materials. Washington State University professor Emilie Pedno could have been called to testify about Brian Coburger. She had told investigators she felt like Coburger wanted to work with her but never asked. She was also concerned about the way he treated female students. Coburger had read a paper that she had written about Ted Bundy. A female student from Washington State University was also on the witness list. And so was John Snyder, the professor for whom Coburger worked as a teaching assistant. Snyder didn't have anything positive to say about

Starting point is 00:06:10 Brian Coburger, although he did tell investigators he didn't notice bias in his grading when it came to female students. We're also going to talk a little bit more about some of Brian Coburger's selfies. We found some from Mount Rainier National Park near Seattle. One appears to have the word sluts in the background. We look that up. The stones commemorate the first climb of Mount Reneer. It actually states, sluskin Indian guide waited here for the climbers to return, but the framing is interesting. The foothill of Mount Rainier is also where Ted Bundy may have dumped the remains of a woman he confessed to killing in 1974. Her name was Gail Manson, and investigators believe her remains were found

Starting point is 00:06:53 there in the 1970s, but those remains were later lost and never tested. I cover a lot of really terrifying cases here on crime fix, and if it's taught me anything, it's that privacy and personal safety absolutely cannot be compromised, especially when it comes to your personal data online. You would be shocked at how much of your information, like your name, your phone number, and even your home address is just floating around the internet for data brokers to find and sell. Ever wonder why you get so many of those annoying spam calls and emails? That's why. Our sponsor Incogni is a critical tool that helps you take back control by automatically identifying which data brokers have your info and then demanding that they remove it. Incogni actually found more than 50 brokers with my information and within day.

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Starting point is 00:08:49 the injuries to the victims. Some things I think we didn't really quite know before. We're now learning that Zana had skull fractures. We knew she had been stabbed more than 50 times. Now we're reading in some of these exhibits that she actually had skull fractures. We knew that Keeley had been badly. injured. And now we're learning that Maddie had wounds on her face around her ear, some imprint from the weapon on her chest. I mean, it's really, it gets more and more graphic the more

Starting point is 00:09:26 that we learn. Yeah. And this gives us an idea, Anjanet, of how the intensity that Brian Koberger was displaying inside of that room. I mean, if we think about just that one, wound, you know, the imprint of the weapon on her chest, is that a full, you know, uh, hilt, stab, stab wound? I've had many cases where the weapon has gone completely into the victim and it's left a mark of the hilt of the knife, uh, on their body. Or is it the opposite? Is it the handle where there has the, you know, the square end of it where he's using it as an item you know to bludgeon them to death the fact that both of them have you know skull injuries just tells us his target of attack you know it's or facial injuries the perpetrator is focused on

Starting point is 00:10:25 you know personalization for lack of a better term and or disruption in zana's case and he has transferred that aggression into his ferocity Yeah, it certainly shows. I think this whole thing spun out of control. I've said it many times before. It doesn't mean that I'm right. I, you know, I think he went in there for possibly one person and then it just went not according to his sick plan, but I could be totally wrong about that. But the more we're learning, we knew that this was a vicious, awful, you know, they called it, you know, heinous and cruel, you know, with it. what the statute calls it when you want to pursue the death penalty, but this is, I mean, it's so sick and demented. It just seems very chaotic. I guess like in your field of work and people who analyze crime scenes kind of disorganized, would you say that that's accurate? Yeah, I think it's spun into a disorganized crime scene to your point. But I believe he went in there as an organized defender initially. And then as things started to, you know, get disrupted, you know,

Starting point is 00:11:46 i.e. two people in the, you know, the first room, you know, Maddie and Kaylee. And now, you know, that situation's going down, which was potentially, you know, unexpected. And now you have Zana coming in and interrupting that first fantasy play. Okay. Remember everything that Brian Korberger did, restarted first in his mind months and months ago, if not even maybe a year prior to the homicide. And then, you know, he built his target set and his fantasy built off of that target set. And then he started to prepare and he executed. And that was, you know, all part of an organized offender. But to your point, I agree with you. Once he got in there, that fantasy went, you know, to heck. And now it becomes disorganized. What do I do? How do I do it?

Starting point is 00:12:44 Which was unanticipated. And that rage could be shown in the, in the rage towards the victims. For the longest time, obviously, he maintained his innocence. His attorneys were fighting this case. He was, I guess, demanding to go to trial. They were going to call a number of witnesses. They were mostly going to call experts in their case in chief to try to back down what the state was contending in this case, that Brian Coburger was the one person who committed these crimes. They were going to try to say it was two people and two weapons. They were going to say a number of different things. Obviously, they folded, they caved at the last minute. They went asking for a deal. We know what happened. The state, though, you know,

Starting point is 00:13:36 it was interesting to see their witness list because they were going to call people from Washington State University. I mean, they had kind of indicated at a pretrial hearing, at least this Jeff Nye did from the assistant or the attorney general's office. He said at one point, you know, we have much better aggravating evidence than people at WSU saying mean things about Brian Koberger. Brian Koberger's ears kind of perked up. But, you know, they had people from WSU who they were going to call to the stand. The state did. And it's case and chief. which I find very interesting. They were going to call John Snyder, the professor for whom Brian Koberger was working as a TA. John Snyder didn't have one nice thing to say about Brian Koberger. They were going to call Amelia Pedno, the professor who wrote her thesis on Ted Bundy. So we know that he was interested in Ted Bundy.

Starting point is 00:14:34 He had a lot of interest in Ted Bundy. So they were going to call her. They were going to call the chair of the department, potentially, to talk about how they were going to give Brian Koeberger the boot. His whole world was collapsing. They were going to call another student who was in the department. We know that he had clashes with women in the department. So do you think they were kind of trying to show, even though they've never come out and said it publicly? Do you think they were going to kind of highlight that this is somebody who had an animus toward which?

Starting point is 00:15:06 men that he was a misogynist? Yeah, absolutely. And I think where the state was going there was to kind of lay out, you know, what this guy really was like even before the murders. And then, you know, kind of, and the only way you can do that is do what we call pattern of life, right? We have to interview all kinds of witnesses and get the idiosyncrasies that they observed and or the anger.

Starting point is 00:15:35 You want to kind of go into a Q&A with witnesses like that. So tell me about how he would respond if pushed, for an example, or if you gave him a bad grade or anything like that. And that's where those professors come in. Because, you know, you want that, because the defense is going to play him off as, you know, well, you know, he's just a confused yada yada kind of guy, right? but the prosecution has to show beyond reasonable doubt that, no, this guy has all kinds of issues.

Starting point is 00:16:09 And by the way, they're correlated back to serial killers, primarily Ted Bundy. You kind of found something interesting in the selfies, and you pointed it out to me. Brian Koberger, his lawyer said, you know, this is a guy who liked to hike. He would go out hiking a lot. I mean, he had pictures in his phone where he would go out and take pictures at night. We don't see really any of the night pictures they talked about. You know, they talked about when he was out, you know, with his so-called alibi driving around at night that we now know was not an alibi.

Starting point is 00:16:47 And I think we knew it back then, but we had to talk more nicely about it then. But he, at least I did. But now I can say, I always said it was alibi-ish. but not really an alibi, not an alibi. But you pointed out to me that in all of these selfies, you think he was at Mount Rainier, and that's significant because of the Ted Bundy fascination. So talk to me about that.

Starting point is 00:17:15 So one of my theories has always been, you know, since I was on the ground on this thing. Why the house, right? Why that? Why 1122 King Road? What's the purpose of that? Because he had to know there were at least five women who are living in that house. And then if you overlay that in his obsession with Ted Bundy and, you know, the murders in the sorority in Florida. My thought process was that the house was a target and then he fixated on a particular woman within side of that house, i.e. either Kaylee or Maddie upstairs. Okay. And the reason I say that is my thought process was is he picking up where Ted Bundy left off. And he's going to one up Ted Bundy for lack of a better term. And so if you look at his selfies and you look in the background, that mountain range appears to be Mount Rainier. Well, that was Ted Bundy's playground when he was at WSU and hanging around the state of Washington. And there's also photograph. in there where it shows Brian Coburger's hatred towards women. He can't get away from the fact that he sees some writing on a rock, for an example. And then he takes a selfie with that particular rock,

Starting point is 00:18:39 and the verbiage on that rock is the word sluts. And you pointed out a great picture where he's at a baseball game, and in the background, there's a woman behind him. and but what's interesting about that photograph is he's making that menacing smile in that particular photograph the one that quite frankly that's what the victims would have seen heading up and wearing a mask wow um it's all it's like every time we look at stuff we learn a little bit more one thing that i found very interesting and i know this is probably just what psychiatrists do but forensic psychiatrists

Starting point is 00:19:21 Dr. Eileen Ryan, she evaluated Brian Koberger's mother and his sisters one-on-one. There was a family evaluation with Michael Koberger, mom, Marianne, and then the older sister, Melissa. But then there were one-on-one individual evaluations with mom, sister, and sister, Amanda, and Melissa. I find that to be fascinating. They didn't do a one-on-one individual evaluation with dad. They did it with the women in the family. I thought that was really interesting. Is that maybe, yeah, they want to see, okay, is he OCD, is he whatever?

Starting point is 00:20:00 Is he not coordinated? Or is there something in there about like, wow, what's his day? What was his upbringing like with the women in his house? Yeah. And that's a great point because maybe there's also this idea of if we can separate him from this hatred of women by applying this idea to the women around. him while he was growing up, you know, they could start looking for and present to a jury that no, no, no, he was just a normal, you know, brother, a normal son, etc. And also you could separate this correlation idea of Ted Bundy because remember you have mom writing this

Starting point is 00:20:44 editorial piece about the death penalty in Ted Bundy. You know, you just wonder how much much influence he had from mom and her obsession, potentially with Ted Bundy. So the defense would have to separate that through those types of interviews and evaluations. Let's talk now about, you know, all this shitter chatter about, oh, my God, Brian Coburger pleaded guilty because his sister was on the witness list and she was going to spill the beans. Well, his sister, he would have known she was on the witness list since April. So I personally don't buy that that was the tipping point. I personally think they were out of time.

Starting point is 00:21:30 He wasn't getting a continuance. And he knew he was possibly looking at that long walk down the hall to the firing squad. And that's scary. So maybe reality hit. But Amanda Coburger was possibly going to be called to testify. the state said about his behavior before the homicides and when he came home from Christmas break. That might have been very interesting to hear about what she would have been asked about. Yeah, and I don't think that's over yet. I think at some point, Brian is going to continue to exercise,

Starting point is 00:22:10 you know, his ability to control the narrative and control the circumstances right now. And his, I think he'll utilize his sister, and I think his sister will go along with it at some point, not, you know, to get fame or fortune for herself, but try to get into a better understanding of what really pushed her brother over the edge. And I think Brian's going to utilize the tools available to him in the jail system, in the prison system, i.e. email, et cetera, and they're going to create this dialogue. look at other family members who have done that with their parents, for an example. They waited years and years and years, and then eventually they said, hey, I need to know what's going on in your head. And I think his sister's in the exact same spot. So it's going to be fascinating to see what she ever says.

Starting point is 00:23:04 But I think that's where the defense was going here, to your point. And finally, I want to know what the latest is that you're hearing about him in prison. You know, we got that document dump from the Idaho Department of Corrections a while ago. And then I put in another request and I got nothing. I got nothing that I requested except this is where he's housed. So I don't know if they weren't supposed to release the stuff that we initially were given. I just don't know. But I haven't been given anything else that I've been requested regarding grievances he's filed or anything like that. I can't imagine after that first release that He's just like, okay, I'll stop complaining.

Starting point is 00:23:45 Are you hearing? Is he still complaining? Is he still having a hard time? Yeah, he's still complaining and he's not making a lot of friends or influencing a lot of people. He's still segregated, you know, but everything about him, his personality, etc., is all about Brian Cobur. And he's constantly, you know, writing to the staff. correcting them, that kind of stuff. It's the same stuff he was doing in the past.

Starting point is 00:24:18 And I think the prison has kind of shut a little bit more or gotten a lot more tighter with the flow of information based on that leak of the video that came forward. So I think, you know, the hammer came down on staff saying, look, this isn't going to happen again. And so they're creating this one track out for the flow of information. he's still, yeah, he's still up to being Brian Coburger and controlling his own circumstances. Well, and they identified who leaked that video. They said the person is, had the person resigned when confronted, and they're not going to prosecute. But, yeah, it's interesting that we haven't been given through FOIA, the Freedom of Information Act, any additional materials as far as the grievances go and stuff like that.

Starting point is 00:25:11 but they haven't stopped according to what you're telling me. Yeah. No, he's still moving in terms of complaining about his environment, about everything around him, about the people around him, which is obviously not a good move because at some point they're going to have to figure out, we've got to put this guy into general population. And at that point, he could have a bigger target on himself. Very interesting.

Starting point is 00:25:35 Well, maybe he needs to read that Dale Carnegie book that you referenced earlier. Might want to check that out of the library. there at the prison if they have it. Chris McDonough, thank you so much. I appreciate your time. Thank you, Anjanet. I appreciate you. And that's it for this episode of Crime Fix. I'm Anjanet Levy. Thanks so much for being with me. I'll see you back here next time.

Crime Fix with Angenette Levy - UNSEALED Bryan Kohberger Docs Reveal Disgusting New Details

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