Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Bryan Kohberger: The Progression to Murder

Episode Date: May 31, 2023

Nancy Grace talks with Dr. Bethany Marshall for an explanation of Bryan Kohberger's graduation from 'Peeping Tom' to full-blown accused mass killer. When did Bryan Kohberger first begin exhibiting signs of sexual predation? What power move was Kohberger making when he used his co-worker's fear, a product of his own making,  for his own gratification? Was his fantasy world rocked when he learned Kaylee Goncalves was moving away? Join us to hear Dr. Marshall's thoughts. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Brian Koberger, now charged in the slate of four University of Idaho students. The big question right now is, how did he turn into the monster prosecutors say he is? Looking at a string of alleged incidents, All the way back to stalking, allegedly stalking some of the Idaho 4 via digital, via social in months leading up to their murders. Seeking them out online, at least one if not more of the girls on King Road. How did he find them? Did he somehow run into them when he was there finding an apartment or touring campus there at WSU Washington State University? Is that when their paths collided? Did they know they were being

watched? Did they ever read his emails he sent introducing himself or trying to hook up with them? Or did it go into a spam folder? Then we have the incident where he allegedly went into a female colleague's home there at Washington State University and moved things around in her apartment. No, manipulating her into coming to him and saying, oh, my stars, guess what happened? Some freak's been in my apartment. And then he swoops in like the savior and sets up her Wi-Fi, finding out the password and security system so he can spy on her remote, you know, even from his phone whenever he felt like it. I mean, what kind of a kick do you get from watching somebody else watching TV or doing the dishes or doing her hair? Or the Lord only knows what else he watched.

Did he install more cameras than what she knows about? Then we have another alleged incident where a neighbor of the King Road victims, the four victims, Maddie, Zanna, Kelly, and Ethan, that has items taken out of a suitcase, which was in her car, and the underwear shoved into the door, the car door, around the time of the murders, leading up to the murders. What else is there? Is there more? Joining me right now is a renowned psychoanalyst joining us out on Beverly Hills. It's Dr. Bethany Marshall, and you can find her at drbethanymarshall.com. Dr. Bethany, thank you for being with us.

First of all, I'm happy to be here. I don't know that this evidence will ever make its way to the jury, these alleged similar transactions, because I know you're a psychoanalyst, Dr. Bethany, but we have discussed similar transactions many times in the past, you and I. Fingerprint crimes or crimes that tend to prove motive, scheme, frame of mind, course of conduct, and this would definitely fall into motive. Typically in our jurisprudence system, which we brought over from Great Britain, past acts, bad acts cannot come in. So let's just say Jackie is accused of shooting Sidney down one day here in the studio. Well, the prosecutor

could not bring the whole list of Jackie's shopliftings. Sorry, Jackie, because they have no bearing on the murder. That's why bad acts are typically not brought into evidence. You don't want a jury rendering a verdict based on a popularity contest. Oh, she's a bad person. She's a shoplifter. Let's convict her on murder. No. That's why many bad acts don't ever come within the GRR's purview. They never know about them. That said, if a prior bad act, be it a conviction or no, it doesn't have to be a conviction. If a prior act shows modus operandi, method of operation, course of conduct, scheme, frame of mind, then it can come in. But I don't want to talk to you about the law, whether these will ever come in before a jury.

I want to talk to you about the why. And remember, the prosecution doesn't have to prove why. Doesn't matter why. So let me ask you, Dr. Bethany, why? Let's just start at the beginning. Let's start with the case in chief. Well, I think the question of why is so important, perhaps not from a legal perspective, but I think from a psychological perspective for your listeners and for us in society to understand what motivates the Bryan co-workers of this world. So when a patient comes into my office,

I try to identify what's called an organizing principle for their personality. Once I know what the organizing principle is, then all of the other behaviors begin to make sense. I would say that Brian Koberger's organizing principle is that he is a sex predator, right? That's fairly obvious at this point. And that there is a pattern to the predation that's beginning to play out in all these various incidences that you're describing, which I think will be fascinating to unpack.

But we see spying on an unsuspecting victim. That tells me that he has something called scoptophilia. Let me write that down. And what are you saying? Scoptophilia, S-C-O-P-T-O-P-H-I-L-I-A. It's a fancy word for a peeping Tom. It's the least of everything that's going on with Tom. Okay, okay. Hold on.

Dr. Bethany, being just a JD, not a psychoanalyst like you, helping all those poor, pitiful people on Rodeo Drive with all their problems. I know this, and again, it's anecdotal. It is not a statistical deduction. But so many times in rape, sodomy, not as much in child molestations, but in sodomy murders burglaries i'd look through the defendant's file and this is based on a fingerprint i'd see all the different aliases and names and there would almost always be a peeping tom in there or a loitering or a criminal trespass which the moment i saw it i would know that's peeping tom and or a criminal trespass, which the moment I saw it, I would know that's peeping Tom.

And they charged with trespass. He's like standing outside some lady's window looking in. But they would almost always, you know, be there somewhere hidden in all the record. That's right, Nancy. So a couple of things about that. And this is going to sound so freaky and unlikely, but I do believe it to be true. So think about the earliest form of relating. It sounds like criminal sexual deviant behavior pre-K. You start with the peeping Tom. Okay, pre the earliest form of relating we have as human beings is looking back and forth into our mother's eyes, staring, loving, you know, gazing.

It's a very early form of relating. And often these perpetrators are caught at that earliest level of relating where they just want to stare. They want to look. But they want to look in such a way that the other person doesn't look back. They want to have all the power in the gazing aspect of attachment. Also, these guys are obsessed with sex. They have very prolific fantasy lives. They're probably masturbating as they're looking at the other person. So all the gazing and looking allows them to engage their sexual proclivities without the

consent of a partner, without that other person saying, hey, I've had enough. Oh, we've had a wonderful romantic night. We've had a glass of wine. We had dinner. We had sex, time to go to bed. That's a normal sexual relationship. But Brian Koberger does not want a normal sexual relationship. He wants a sexual relationship in which it's endless. It goes on and on, and his fantasy life is in charge, and he can do whatever he wants to the victim. So it's a very dominant type of sexual relationship with the other. And I think this is why this is sort of at the beginning of these offending patterns. Remember the scoptophilia or the peeping Tom activities were there from the very beginning. It's like being a peeping Tom is like putting on the training wheels.

That's where it all starts. How early does it manifest? In puberty? I would say before puberty. And the reason for that is that, you know, the wish to have power predates sexual interest. So it could be that he was staring and sort of taking in a lot of information about his playmates before he was aware of himself as a sexual being. Okay, how would you spot that on the playground? Well, here's the interesting thing. There was one interesting study that came when hormones began to kick in. That was the beginning of puberty.

But there was no way to measure it because they're just little kids at that point. So they're not like looking at pornography. They're not breaking into people's houses, they're just on the playground. So, you know, this is why these discussions are important, because a 13-year-old can be at the beginning of an offending pattern. And prior to the sexual aspect of the predating pattern, the power aspect begins. So you have like six, seven, eight-year-olds who want to hit other kids over the head and have all the power. There's an article in the New York Times about four or five years ago called,

Can a Nine-Year-Old Be a Sociopath? And they were looking at a study where nine-year-olds were exhibiting sociopathic behavior. So being the sociopath becomes first, sexuality being a major instrument of the sociopathy or a symptom of it becomes second. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. So how, fast forward to now, what, I don't understand how murdering these three young women and boyfriend Ethan Chapin happened to be there. How does that fit in as a sexual component to giving Brian Koberger any sort of sex gratification? Well, so remember the predating pattern with those four did not start the night of the murder. It started months in advance where he started hitting them up online, looking at pictures, developing fantasies about them. So his first trophy, I would say, would probably be pictures that he downloaded onto his computer.

Probably those pictures became a part of a fantasy life. And then he graduated towards the night of the murder. So, you know, first you hit the other person up, you DM them. Then he downloads the pictures. Then he masturbates a lot looking at the pictures. Then that's not enough. Then he has to, like, drive to the house and look through the pictures. Then that's not enough. Then he has to drive to the house and look through the windows. Then that's not enough. Pretty soon, he's working himself up into a sadistic fantasy. And this is where we graduate from being a peeping Tom to a sexually sadistic murderer. So that's a progression because there are a lot of peeping toms who don't go on to brutally murder people. So in order to understand how one led to the other, the peeping tom led to

brutally stabbing them multiple times, we have to understand how the mind of the sociopath works. And I've said this too many times, but I'll break it down for the audience in a very simple way. Sociopaths are very empty people. They don't have pleasure from normal things like you and I do, like maybe watching their child hit a home run or balloons being released into the sky after graduation. They have no pleasure. They're dead inside. And so because of that, they cannot experience sexual gratification in normal ways.

So they use statism to enhance their sexual arousal. It puts them into sexual overdrive, a sexual frenzy that they experience as normal sexuality. So first for Kohlberger, it's looking through windows and it's masturbating a lot to the pictures. Then it's probably being angry that he can't get them to respond to him. Then it's looking through the windows and seeing that they're having a good time and he's not invited then it's then it's fantasies of maybe strangulation or rape and then then by the time he murders them you know the heightened sexual frenzy is very satisfying to him so sadism like plunging a knife into them and sexual arousal and ejaculation all get fused together now well are you saying okay because i'm trying to take it all in so first it starts with the trophy photos that he downloads we think

second he starts to try to communicate he starts a fantasy life. Then he starts trying to communicate with them. Then he begins to drive. This is your theory. Then he begins to drive to their home to look in their windows when they're not communicating back to him. And we don't know if they even ever got the emails. Because it was with a social platform. Like on Facebook, which many people understand, you accept someone that tries to friend you. And if you don't, then they're not privy to all your communications. So trophy photos

he downloads, starts fantasy life, tries to communicate with them, drives to their home, starts looking in the windows. I added in a fifth one, begins stalking. In other words, finding where they work and where they go to school, watching them. Five, masturbating to the photos as part of his fantasy life. Six, anger as he's watching them living life, befriending other people, going to parties, having dates with other guys and not responding to him. The anger. That's where you lost me. Okay. So what happens at that point is that he cannot experience sexual arousal in the normal ways anymore.

Just masturbating to their photos or masturbating while looking through their windows is no longer enough to feel sexually satisfied. He has to graduate to atheism. That is the important link that he cannot, maybe perhaps he can't even ejaculate anymore without the thought of hurting someone. Is it because of the anger that they are not responding to him? No. Anger is sort of like, sort of, I think, the middle phase. I think towards the end, it's sadism. Knowing that he's hurting them enhances the sexual arousal.

So, you know, I don't know. Or anger in this case that one of them was moving away. I don't know if he realized that. But they're not responding to him. And I've seen so many cases, Dr. Bethany, where the perpetrator, typically a male, the anger is fused and ignites when the woman won't go out with them, won't respond to them, rejects them. Now, it's my belief as a complete nonprofprofessional in mental health care that that is an excuse that they're full of anger anyway. And when the woman says, no, I don't want to go out or I don't want to dance or no,

I don't want to drink. I think that that's an excuse to attack because with a regular person if somebody says no then you're like okay thanks anyway next well i think we want to attribute normal human psychology to these people like oh you know a lot of domestic homicide is when the woman's about to leave or divorce the man and so oh, oh, it must follow that pattern. But to speak to your line of thinking, which I think is more accurate, the victim is about to move away. So they have to escalate the offending pattern. So think about a cat with a mouse.

It's so simple that the mouse runs away, the cat delightedly runs after, pounces, and brings the mouse back. And there's ultimate predatory control and delight in bringing the mouse back. Maybe the cat presents the half-dead mouse to the owner with delight. And in this case, you know, if you have put so much time and energy into planning a crime and now your victim's moving out of the state? Uh-oh, you better escalate it. Now, remember what some of his classmates said, that before the crime, this was in graduate school, he would show up exhausted every day. He would always walk into class with a cup of coffee like he hadn't had enough sleep. That tells me he was up all night planning this, thinking about it. And so me he was up all night planning this, thinking about it. And so when the victims are about to move away, he's losing control. So,

you know, if they were all going to stay there, maybe the crime would have been three months later or six months later. After the crime, you remember he proctored tests. He started handing out hundreds, A pluses to everyone. So we can also think of this as a compulsion that was, it was occupying more and more and more energy until he did it. And then afterwards he was very satisfied and, you know, it's like drinks all around, right? Giving everyone champagne, you know, giving one, everyone, you know, a hundred marks on their test. So I think that's one more bit of evidence. It won't come into court, of course, but it's interesting for what we're talking about this morning. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace.

So, Dr. Bethany, it's still unclear in my mind how you go from writing someone, emailing them, contacting them on social to killing them. But I hear the fantasy life was no longer satisfying him and he had to go another step in your scenario. So I've got two incidents. I want to find out what you think about them. One, where he is accused of breaking into a female colleague's home, rearranging, moving, or taking something. We don't know what. It could have been a vase. It could have been a frying pan. I don't know what. It could have been her clothing. She gets very upset that somebody has clearly been in her home, tells him about it as he knew she would, and he offers to set up her Wi-Fi security cams, getting all of her passwords.

That and another incident not yet connected to him, but quite coincidental, where a neighbor has underwear taken out of a suitcase in her car and stuffed in her car door. Let's deal with the colleague first. What do you make of that? You know, when I first read of this, Nancy, I thought about a creepy story that happened in my Beverly Hills office years ago, where a guy came in and told me that he had this compulsion. He was married. He jumped out of bed in the middle of the night, rushed towards

the bed like he was an attacker. His wife woke up screaming. And then he excitedly comforted her as if someone else had broken into the house, not him. And I've always puzzled over that story. It was so strange to me. And the guy didn't stay in therapy long but um to me that speaks of inhabiting every character in the play i mean he so we think of brian kloberger he's the one who saves and rescues right he goes in he's he installs the surveillance system he's the one who predates who spies he's looking at her in a sexual way while she's unsuspecting he's the one who predates who spies he's looking at her in a sexual way while she's unsuspecting he's the one that kind of stirs her up by moving things around the house and gets her to be all worried and he sort of becomes everyone to her he it's like he swallows her up in fantasy to where

she has nothing going on but thinking about him. Of course, she doesn't know it's him, but in his mind, he thinks it's him. And that's one way to think of it. The other is, again, the prolific sexual energy that goes into these kinds of crimes. I don't know if you know this, Nancy, but one of the features or the symptoms of sex addicts is that they present as if they have attention deficit disorder. So they come to therapy and you're like, well, why can't you concentrate or focus? And they're distracted. And then you realize it's because they're thinking about sex all the time. So apply that to a sexual predator, not just a sex addict, he's thinking about sex 24-7. Now, remember, that's the organizing principle we talked about at the beginning of our conversation.

So if you think of that organizing principle, he's already picked her as a possible sexual fantasy object, right? So when he's moving things around her house, he's probably in a state of sexual excitement. When she approaches him about being worried about this, that the power is sexually exciting. And then when he installs a surveillance system, it's like he has, you know, it's like, I guess, like the every man's pornography. Not that every man watches pornography, that wasn't the point, but it's like a form of pornography for him, that he has her available now whenever he needs and wants masturbatory material. Also, it is a precursor to breaking into the King Road home. So we have him honing his skills

and I'm sure plotting it out very meticulously, breaking into the Colley's home when she's not there and the excitement he must have felt figuring out her schedule and finding out where she would be so he could go break in to move the items around. I'm very curious to find out what items he chose to move did he take all of her underwear out of her underwear drawer and put it somewhere else did he move the clothes around that she had hanging in the laundry area by the washer dryer

did he yeah i don't know what he did did he actually take something um i'm just thinking it reminds me do you remember the julie roberts movie sleeping with the enemy do you remember her husband she came home one day and opened up the cabinet and all the cans were arranged perfectly and like her socks were there were several things in the home that had been rearranged, not necessarily taken. And I find that very, very interesting. Now, again, it's not I could never go in depth with all this, like with a jury like I am with you right now, because it would be deemed irrelevant, objectionable and possibly, you know, an error on appeal.

But I'm curious about it. Like, what did he take? What did he move? How did he get in there? Did he get in there the same M.O. that he used at King Road? Is there a connection there? Am I beginning a similar transaction pattern regarding the burglary? So forth and so on.

And whatever he moved or took in her colleagues a place, did he take something similar out of King Road that we don't even know about? I would be tempted to bring this in as a similar transaction, but I wouldn't want to risk a conviction losing it on appeal. What were you going to say? Well, these are all great questions because we could look at it a few different ways. One would be it's a form of practicing, right? So we all practice, whether we practice in piano or when you're in high school, you practice being in a relationship and you graduate into levels of maturity, right? In terms of knowing how to make people.

You actually made me smile just then, Dr. Bethany, when you said practice in high school. Out of 16 girls, one girl got cut from the basketball team because they only had 15 uniforms. It was me. Hence my career in cheerleading. And I was constantly turning cartwheels in the backyard and roundoffs and jumps and flips. I mean, just all the time. Thinking about practice

still perfect. Go ahead. Well, think about what you just said. Constantly turning cartwheels you wanted to be on that team you wanted it so bad and you put the time and energy into it brian koberger wants this so badly but in a more perverse way now here's where i think we could really begin to dissect it if we knew more about him. What did he do with the underwear?

Remember, BTK Killer wore the underwear and photographed himself. I had managed to blot that out of my mind until you brought it back up. Thanks, Dr. Bethany. Go ahead. Right. Remember those freaky pictures where he had high heels and stockings and, you know, he has fetishized bondage gear. And there was something about putting on woman's clothing that was sexually exciting to him. perversions or paraphilias is another word for them, is that putting on women's clothing is a part of their, I'm sorry to keep using this word, but their masturbatory fantasies is a part of their sex life.

This is different from, I'm not trying to say like cross-dressing or putting on clothing from the opposite sex or trying to inhabit being another sex. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about something very different. I'm talking about a perversion. And what did he do with the underwear? Did he smell it?

Did he put it on? Did he photograph himself in it? Did he take it and take it home as a part you know of a of a trophy was he grooming her to be the person that he was going to kill and then he aborted and then he went to the student housing instead so i think what he really did with the items is important as well what if he just moved them or he could have performed some act with them at the home before he left. But I'm just thinking about the meticulous planning it would have required, him staking out her apartment, knowing her schedule, breaking in,

like planning how is he going to break in. Maybe did he have a toolkit? Could he just break in with a driver's license or a credit card? You know how you slide it down between the door and the door jamb? Asking her questions like, wow, what kind of security do you have? Trying to find out, would the coast be clear for him to break in? The thrill he got when he went into her apartment and got in there for the first time alone probably looking through her clothing through her medicine cabinet through all

her lotions and potions can you just imagine that dr bethany and how that played into what what well i didn't mean to interrupt but but you're absolutely correct, because the next thing that could have been on his mind was, can I plunge a knife into her? Because that's how he killed the four students. Hey, Dr. Bethany, when you go on vacations, unless you're going on one of your Christian mission trips where you're probably staying in a hut somewhere. I know.

I've been on many a fellowship hall floor on mission trips. But when you go to a fancy hotel and you walk in and you go, wow, I wonder if that's the feeling he had when he walked into her place. Nancy, the thrill must have been extraordinary. Remember we have the term thrill kill, right? Where you just kill because it is thrilling to you. You know, Nancy, he's not just thinking about sex when he's there. He's thinking about how can he scare her? Can he see a scared look on her face

when he says, oh, wow, your underwear was moved around? Wow, that's kind of creepy. Because, you know, men who strangulate women, often they do that because they want to see the scared look in the woman's eyes so there's something about that that's sexually exciting to them that leads me to a question have you ever noticed a lot of uh male on female strangulations occur with the woman's stockings or her leotards or her underwear or her bra or some other lingerie item i don't know what that, but I know it must be significant because it happens so often. Well, that's a really, really interesting point. I mean, on the one hand, it might be what's most readily available, but men still strangle with stockings and women don't

even wear stockings that much anymore. So maybe what leads up to the crime is actually going through their underwear drawers and finding things but it's also using their femininity against themselves it's it's it's loving their femininity but being misogynistic and hateful and using their feminine instruments of femininity against them in a homicidal way, which we see on milder levels with misogyny, right? You know, punishing the woman for being a female. Dr. Bethany, just your knowledge regarding this is vast. And I'm just wondering, we have so many blanks to fill when it comes to Brian Koberger.

And much of what we're discussing will never come before a jury. It's not probative of who committed the murders. But I still want to know, I would like to know, when did he first present as a child of having some sort of a difference, something different about him, and what would that symptom have been? What was his first peeping Tom? How did he manifest in puberty in high school? Why did he go all the way across the country to WSU? I mean, when did he first begin stalking these victims, spying on them? And how many other victims are there out there? We didn't even get to touch on the highly coincidental case of another female neighbor in the King Road area

having her items taken from her car, which that doesn't necessarily connect to Koberger, but someone went into a suitcase, got out her underwear, did God only knows what with it, and then put it in the door of her car. Now, that's sounding like Koberger now. And you know, Dr. Bethany, when you do this for so long, you have a sixth sense about what's connected to someone

and what is not. I found the Smithers murder while I was interested in the fact that the Koberger parents were called to testify, I did not see that as connected to Koberger for many different reasons. I thought the grand jury was bringing them in to basically rule Koberger out as part of an investigation. And that did, in fact, turn out to be true. But I still

contend that moving the colleagues' items around in her home and the attacks on King Road are not his first. I don't know what they were, but there was at least one, if not many more, preceding incidents. Dr. Bethany, thank you for being with us. I've got so many other questions to ask you, but I want more facts before I can formulate the correct questions. Thank you, Dr. Bethany Marshall. This is an iHeart Podcast.