RedHanded - Episode 280 - The Idaho Student Murders

Episode Date: January 12, 2023

On 13 November 2022, four University of Idaho students were found stabbed to death in their beds. Six weeks later, the police (under the glare of immense public scrutiny) arrested a PhD student, Bryan Christopher Kohberger, 2,500 miles away in Pennsylvania. Last week, the probable cause affidavit was released, revealing jaw-dropping evidence against the 28 year old. In this episode Suruthi and Hannah work their way through the timeline of events, how the investigation unfolded and what we know so far about Kohberger… Sources: redhandedpodcast.com See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Red Handed early and ad-free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. So, get this. The Ontario Liberals elected Bonnie Crombie as their new leader. Bonnie who? I just sent you her profile. Her first act as leader, asking donors for a million bucks for her salary. That's excessive. She's a big carbon tax supporter. Oh yeah. Check out her record as mayor. Oh, get out of here. She even increased taxes carbon tax supporter. Oh, yeah. Check out her record as mayor. Oh, get out of here.

She even increased taxes in this economy. Yeah, higher taxes, carbon taxes. She sounds expensive. Bonnie Crombie and the Ontario Liberals. They just don't get it. That'll cost you. A message from the Ontario PC Party. Get ready for Las Vegas-style action at BetMGM,

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Hello. You know what we're going to say. North America. Specifically. Good morning, North America. Minus Mexico. hello you know what we're gonna say north america specifically good morning north america minus mexico guys we are coming on tour to the us and canada this year this year now it is this year it is in a few short no no couple of short months no no no because a couple of long months no now my insides are on the outside. Well, I'm sorry about that. But if you want to come see an inside out Hannah,

then you should probably get some tickets to our North American tour. And you should do it absolutely right now, this second. But if you wanted to come to Seattle, Portland or Washington, you are too late. They're gone. They're gone. Minneapolis, Denver, Dallas and Philly are coming dangerously close. Also, we're talking a handful of tickets. And then San Francisco, LA, Houston, Dallas, Chicago, Royal Oak, Toronto, Boston and New York.

They're all about the three quarters mark. So time is running out. Time is running out. So if you want to come to one of our shows, then please go over right now to redhoundedpodcast.com don't go anywhere else go straight to our website and get your tickets right now right this minute right this second because it will be March before we know it. Don't tell Hannah. I'm Suriti. I'm Hannah. And welcome to Roundhanded. And this is the first episode we are recording in January 2023. So they tell me. I'm pretty turned about. I'm not really sure what my name is or where I am.

No. Good news is I've spoken to my mic so many times now that it's probably mine. It's probably fine. But Happy New Year, guys. Happy New Year. Welcome to 2023. Hopefully, they'll be better than the two that preceded it. So let's see. Fingers crossed. Fingers crossed. So this year has already started with somewhat of a crimey bang. Over the past eight weeks, the shocking case of the Idaho student murders has completely taken over the headlines.

It was a pretty unbelievable story when it first happened back in November. But as time has gone on and more and more evidence has been revealed, it is beyond shocking. And I say that as somebody who spends literally all of her time knee deep in true crime. So this episode has undergone a pretty frantic rewrite. I'm feeling a little bit frazzled sat here right now because these frantic rewrites seem to be becoming quite a speciality over here at Red Handed. Because the plan had been to get you guys like a timely shorthand this week

on the Idaho student murders after the police arrested a suspect on the 30th of December 2022. I knew that we were waiting for the suspect to be extradited to Idaho to get the full probable cause affidavit unsealed, but I didn't think that it would contain, you know, like any major surprises.

They don't usually. But I was wrong. Very, very, very wrong. Oh, so wrong. And the probable cause affidavit, which is, of course, the document that outlines just enough of the police's evidence against an individual to secure an arrest warrant from a judge was in this case pretty bloody detailed. So fast forward to a few

stressful days getting this rewritten and here we are with not a shorthand but a full length episode on this case. So part one of our Epstein series that most of you were probably expecting today will be out next week. And don't worry if you have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about with regards to Idaho, because you haven't been following the case for some reason, we are going to explain it all. So let's get into it. The night of the 12th of November 2022 in Moscow, Idaho, was like any other Saturday night in a student town. Everyone was out and having a good time. And 21-year-old students Maddy Mogan and Kaylee Gonzales, who'd been best friends since they were kids, were out for the

night at what we now understand to be a Moscow institution, the Corner Club. Apparently it's the place to go if you're in Moscow, Idaho. Well, if I ever am, I won't. At around 1.30 in the morning, they left the bar and headed to a local food truck. There they were caught on the Burger Van's live Twitch stream. Why, on God's green earth, does a Burger Van have a Twitch stream? We are too old to be asking questions like that, Hannah.

You know what, I think you are correct. Just accept it and move on. I think any answer I will be given will be satisfactory to me anyway. We in our early 30s it doesn't matter anymore it's true i'm over the hill send me to a convent so these two girls are caught on this mystery twitch stream that nobody can understand or explain if they're over 30 and they're caught on camera ordering food and looking like two people who just had a good night out. And then they got a private taxi home, arriving at 1.56am at 11.22 King Road, the three-storey off-campus house that they lived in with three other housemates.

One of those housemates was 20-year-old Zana Kanodal. Zana was out that night too with her boyfriend, 20-year-old Ethan Chapin. The two had been at a fraternity party just a few minutes walk from Zana's house. They were there between at least 9pm and 1.40am and they arrived back at 1122 King Road together at around 1.45am. Now Ethan didn't live in this house but he slept over with Zana, meaning that there were six people in the house that night. The two other female students who lived at the house on King Road,

who we're going to call BF and DM, had also been out that night. But they were home by 1am. By 4am, everyone in the house had gone to bed. DM and BF went to their rooms. BF was on the first floor, DM was in her room on the second floor. Zana and Ethan went to Zana's room, also on the second floor, and Kayleigh and Maddy went to bed in Maddy's room on the third and top floor. Kayleigh had her own room on that floor,

but the two girls shared a bed that night, like you do when you're drunk and at uni. The next morning, so the 13th of November, DM and BF called 911 at 11.58am. They were apparently reporting an unconscious person. During this call, the emergency operator actually spoke with multiple people at the house, including people who didn't live there. These were friends of the housemates. But to this point, the police have not named them, and they also have not released the 911 call. So there's not much we can say about this part of the case. When the police arrived, they discovered that Zana, Ethan, Kayleigh and Maddy had all been stabbed to death.

Kayleigh and Maddy's bodies were both found in Maddy's bed. Zana's body was on the floor of her room. Ethan's body was also in her room. But as yet, we don't know where. Now, there have been pictures shared online of the outside of the house, specifically the part that is connected to Zana's room. And you can see in these pictures what appears to be blood seeping out of the walls. So while we do not know the specifics of the scene,

I think when you see an image like that and know that four people were stabbed to death in that house, I don't think it's a huge leap to say that it was probably a bloodbath. We know that this is a point of contention for some people, so it is worth mentioning. Why did the 911 call from the house report an unconscious person if there was enough blood that it was seeping through the walls? Surely the fact that they were all dead would have been obvious if there was really that much blood everywhere. Also, people question how could both girls who survived, DM and BF, how could they have slept through such a vicious series of attacks? A lot of things aren't clear still and a lot of things have changed since the probable cause affidavit was released. And we will get back to all of these points and questions about the timing of the emergency call later on.

But please just bear in mind that we still do not have all of the facts, all of the information, all of the story at this stage. And I also know that if you have read the probable cause, you are likely screaming that I am missing out so much information here. I know. But we are going to follow this story chronologically as it became public, because it's already confusing enough.

And we will come back to the new information we have learned shortly. But for now, let's stick with the timeline as it happened. Over the following few days, after the bodies were discovered, more information was released. We were told that there was no sign of forced entry into the house, and that the four victims likely died between 3am and 4am,

and that the murder weapon was some sort of fixed blade military-style knife. And while this weapon has still not been recovered, to this point, at the point that we're recording this on Monday 9th January, put a big old pin in this for now, because that probable cause document delivered a lot on this. The post-mortems at the time also revealed that there was no sign of sexual assault and that all four victims had died of multiple stab wounds. Though it was soon disclosed that Kayleigh's injuries were, quote,

significantly more brutal. We were also told that some of the victims had been asleep when they were killed, but that some of them had defensive wounds. We don't know who was awake and who may have been asleep, and we also don't know in which order the victims were attacked. We can infer some things regarding this from the probable cause affidavit, but it's still not totally clear. And it would be really enlightening for us to understand the order, because knowing the order of the deaths might give us a few more clues as to who, if any one of the victims was the intended target.

But at the moment, we just don't know for sure. We can speculate, and don't you worry, we will. But speculation is all we have at this stage. After this, a couple more weeks went by without much more new information coming from law enforcement. And as always happens, in an information vacuum, the internet went absolutely fucking mental. Stories about a 12-year-old dog, a mini Australian shepherd named Buddy, who had been killed, skinned and dismembered in the local area just weeks before the massacre suddenly surfaced.

And if possible, this freaked an already terrified community out even more. What the fuck? I don't know. I don't know what is going on. Because it is true about the dog. When I first heard it, I actually didn't think it was true. But it is true. But there is no evidence that this dog murder was related in any way to the King Road Massacre. And the police have actually since seemingly ruled it out. For reasons that will become obvious, I think we can't trust everything the police say to us

with regards to this case. But there is another reason that we will again come on to later, which is the reason why I don't think it's connected. But what is going on, Moscow? I don't know. And then, after the dog, things got weirder again. It was time for the first round of internet accusations to start. We learned that Kayleigh and Maddy had taken it in turns

to call Kayleigh's ex-boyfriend seven times between 2.26am and 2.44am on the night they died. We are not going to name this person because the internet tore his life apart, especially when the interwebs discovered that Kayleigh and this poor guy shared a dog, a golden labradoodle called Murphy, who was in the house during the murders, but survived the attack completely unharmed. And since Murphy was with Kayleigh the night she was killed,

people speculated, well, if the dog didn't bark, and if he wasn't hurt that night, it must have been because Murphy the dog knew the killer. Therefore insinuating that the killer was obviously Kayleigh's ex-boyfriend. But pretty sharpish, the police cleared Kayleigh's ex-boyfriend as a suspect. And as for Murphy and his lack of barking, which was an assumption based on the fact that we were told that the two surviving housemates slept through the whole attack. Well, we will come back to it later. By mid-November 2022, there didn't seem to have been much movement on the case. And the police were starting to face serious backlash from the community and from some of the families of the victims. People were apparently shocked at how quickly authorities seemed to be ruling suspects out. It also seemed like the investigating

team's messaging to the public was confusing. At first, a person told everybody that it was a crime of passion. Then a few days later, somebody from the police department told everybody that it was a calculated and targeted attack. Then they weren't being clear if the target was likely the house or if it had been the victims themselves. But we have to understand that these kind of killings are absolutely the hardest to solve. It wasn't a domestic incident. It wasn't a killer who left a manifesto.

There was seemingly no motive and no connection. But of course, people, especially the families, were getting frustrated with the lack of information. Especially, I think, when the police were telling people not to worry and that there was no imminent risk to anyone else in the community. Because that just begged the question, if they had no leads and no answers like they were saying, how could they possibly know that?

And Kayleigh's family, who at one point called the police cowards, were furious that authorities hadn't clearly stated to the public that Kayleigh's injuries were much more brutal than the rest. They also told police that Kayleigh had complained to them about a stalker in the weeks leading up to her death. So had she been the target? And were the police wasting time by not pursuing that line of inquiry seriously enough? And although at first the police said that there wasn't any evidence to substantiate the Kayleigh stalker theory, they did later discover an incident in a local shop

in Moscow that had occurred in mid-October 2022. Two men had followed Kayleigh around the shop and then out to her car. They didn't speak to her or make contact, but they obviously freaked the 21-year-old out. But the police, yet again, found these men and ruled them out very quickly. Although they didn't really clarify how they did that, so Kayleigh's family was still pretty angry. And as to whether Kayleigh was the intended victim, it's hard to say definitively.

We just don't have enough evidence to confirm whether this is true or not. And as for her injuries being worse, that could just be because she fought back the most. But once more, take out your pincushion. We will discuss motive towards the end. Yeah, you're all going to have like a little pinhead pincushion going on by the end of this episode, I know.

But we just have to go in this order. Otherwise, we're all just going to be as confused as I was about 48 hours ago. For now let's stick with the facts. By this point so we're sort of getting into early December you had the media screaming has this case gone cold? I like looked back at all of like the news reports and this is basically the resounding headline at the time and I'm just like are you fucking kidding it's been three or four weeks since the murders again it is the kind of murder in which there is no obvious connection no obvious motive no obvious person for them to look at no manifesto nothing leading them to a potential perpetrator so for

the media they're just screaming about this because they have nothing else to go on at this point. But it was now that the police had an announcement. On Wednesday, the 7th of December, authorities said that they wanted to speak to the driver of a white 2011-2013 Hyundai Elantra.

And I know everybody says Hyundai differently. I always say Hyundai. What do you say? Hyundai. Hyundai is Hyundai, is how the Koreans say it. And it is a Korean car, but I can't say that. There's Hyundai Beach in Busan, which is the same and everyone says Hyundai. Let's say Hyundai then. Hyundai. Okay, we'll say Hyundai then. So looking for a 2011-2013 Hyundai Alantra that was seen, quote, in the immediate area of the victim's house early on the 13th of November, which is, of course, the night slash morning of the murders. After this, again, everything went quiet. And to be honest, at this point, I really didn't have much faith

that this case would ever be solved. When you look at sort of the area itself, for example, the town of Moscow hadn't had a murder in seven years before this happened. Yeah, I know I was like saying about the dog being skinned. But again, that does seem to just be like a random anomalous thing that happened. No one had been killed in this town in a murder in seven years. So I wasn't holding my breath. I figured that we'd have another sort of like Delphi situation and this would just go on for years and years with nothing.

But then, on Friday the 30th of December, out of nowhere, just over six weeks after the murder, the police arrested someone. That someone was 28-year-old PhD student Brian Christopher Koberger. Koberger was studying criminal justice and criminology at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. He lived about eight miles from the King Road house, where the four victims were massacred.

But Pullman, Washington was not where the FBI arrested Brian Christopher Koberger. Koberger was actually about 2,500 miles away at his parents' house in Albrightville, Pennsylvania, up in the Poconos Mountains. A month after the murders, on the 15th of December, Koberger and his dad, who had flown from Pennsylvania to Washington State to meet his son, had embarked on the massive cross-country drive together. The plan was to spend three days driving back to the family home for Christmas. In Coburger's white Hyundai Elantra. Yeah. Strike one.

To a lot of people, this looks like Coburger was fleeing, and maybe. But it was weeks after the killings. So maybe it had been his dad's idea. Like the family say, it was something they had planned to do long before. But since this father-son duo drove there in Brian's car, that means Brian would have to drive it back, presumably on his own. So that's a three-day drive on your own in the new year, which doesn't prove anything, but does seem like a hell of a faff. Yeah, like if the dad had, like, come there and driven there in his car, but Brian was going to fly back, like maybe, you know,

I don't want to get too caught up in this. It is a weird thing, but then maybe a father-son cross-country trip isn't that strange. Yeah, I definitely know people who've driven cross-country. And yeah, this is another one of those infinite moments where we're just going to get told off for not understanding how the US works. But I know people who've driven cross-country, but doing it on your own for no reason seems a lot. Exactly. Especially when you've got a PhD to get back to. But anyway, that is all very much assuming Brian Koberger didn't do it. But what if Brian Koberger is the killer?

Did he make this trip because he knew that there was a bolo out for a white Hyundai Elantra in the area he was in? And he knew that it would be far too suspicious for him to dump it or sell it in Pullman, Washington, just a few miles from the killings. So, had he wanted to get the car to the other side of the country? And did he just use his dad as a ruse? Who knows? We're just speculating. And of course, until he is proven guilty, Brian Coburger is presumed innocent. What is fascinating though, about the the whole situation is that the entire time Coburger was making this trip across the US, law enforcement were already on his tail. And Coburger and his dad were actually pulled over twice by Indiana State Police during this journey, apparently for getting too close to the car in front. You can watch the body cam footage from one of these stops on YouTube, but the other is being held back for now. There have been a lot of questions about, if Coburger did it, whether or not Coburger's dad knew anything. And in our opinion, watching his dad in the body cam footage, I just don't think so. Brian Coburger looks very shifty. And again, you know, we're looking at that through

the lens of him being a suspect in this case. He looks shifty, but people look shifty. And again, you know, we're looking at that through the lens of him being a suspect in this case. He looks shifty, but people look shifty when they get pulled over by the police, right? But the dad doesn't seem nervous. So I don't know. Kerberger's dad even talks to the police officer about a mass shooting that occurred a few weeks before in Pullman, Washington. And would you bring that up if you knew your son, who was sitting right next to you, was being looked at for the Idaho student murders? Just, you know, the case that everyone is talking about all the time. This is the thing. Would you like bring up another sort of mass murder situation? If you knew, if Brian had called you and been like, Dad, I fucked up, come get me.

Yeah. I don't know. But then again, also him bringing up the mass shooting does indicate that all the way across in Pennsylvania, he is aware of the news that's happening on the West Coast because his son is obviously there. So did he not know about the Idaho student murders? Couldn't possibly be the case because it was all over the headlines. Could he not know about the White High and Elantra that they were looking for? Again, it seems unlikely because this was nationwide news. And again, we don't know if that conversation happened. Did his dad get there and be like, hey, Brian, have you been to the police because you're driving a car that's a lot like

the one the police are looking for? We don't know that that conversation didn't happen. You know, his dad may have said it and Brian may have been like, yeah dad it's fine they've cleared me they know it's not me or i wasn't there do you know what i mean like we don't know if he knew he was a part of this ruse to get the car across the country allegedly i mean it's one hell of a double bluff isn't it um i just can't imagine sitting in the car for three days knowing you've murdered four people next to your dad yeah allegedly saying anything allegedly allegedly yeah i know i mean and there is one bit that people are obviously making a huge thing off on the internet because people have watched this body cam footage again

and again and again and like clipped out certain bits but there's one bit where the police officer goes where are you guys coming from and they say washington Washington, Washington State. They go, where are you headed? And the dad just goes, oh, to the Poconos Mountains. We're going home for Christmas. And you just see Brian just look at his dad like, shut the fuck up. And again, like, you're reading into it because you know he's been arrested. But yeah, we'll have to wait and see. So anyway, I suspected that the stops by the Indiana State Police were done on purpose.

I really don't know what is the likelihood if you were driving 2,500 miles that you would get pulled over twice in the same day for the same minor offence. I don't know. I think people get pulled over a lot more in the States than they do here. That's what I figured. But I also felt like it's a huge coincidence that this guy who is driving around in a car that looks like the car that they are looking for gets pulled over twice and nobody mentions, as far as we can see, because we haven't seen the second stop, the fact that he's driving a white high-end Elantra. So was it done on purpose to try and gauge Coburg's behaviour? Was it done to keep tabs on him? Also, I've seen people saying things like possibly they stopped him to take a closer

look at his hands to see if he had recent scars. Because it would have been, you know, it would have been a few weeks after the murders. But if you stabbed four people to death, it's very unlikely you got away with nothing happening to your hands. But Indiana State Police officers who stopped him said that they didn't know he was a suspect. Do I believe them? I'm not sure. But in any case, Brian Coburger and his dad were let go both times just with warnings. So father and son got home to the Poconos on the 17th of December and Christmas came and went without much incident. Though we know now, thanks to that probable cause affidavit, that the police and the FBI were still secretly hammering away at that case against Koberger the entire time.

Pin here for now. Then, on Friday the 30th of December at three in the morning, the FBI and a full SWAT team, complete with flash grenades, stormed the Coburger home and arrested Brian Coburger. I know this is small fry, right? But there is some small satisfaction I take, not in the family, because I don't think they did know anything. But in Brian Coburger, his house being stormed at 3am, which was roughly about the time that he was doing what he did. Yeah, that's true. To the victims. Merry Christmas.

Coburger was charged with four counts of first-degree murder and felony burglary, and the police seized that white Hyundai Elantra. And the police searched the family house in Pennsylvania, in the small town in which Coburger had grown up, much to the absolute horror of the roughly 200 residents who lived there. Can you imagine? Can you even imagine? The Poconos Mountains, the area in which they live, it's very rural, it's very beautiful,

it's very much like the kind of place that people go on holiday, right? It's like the Cotswolds or something in the UK. It's a tiny town where he grew up. Everyone knows him. Everyone knows his family. I googled three times just to check that the town only has 200 people living there can you imagine this case has been blowing up all over the news and they fucking arrest somebody in your tiny town it's mad i can't i can't even get my head around it the police in that town because like i said he grew up there he was a teenager there i learned to drive, etc. They were like the only thing that's ever brought Brian Koberger across

our radar was he got stopped once for not wearing a seatbelt when he was a teenager. Police also simultaneously tore apart Koberger's flat in Pullman, Washington, where he was at uni and also the office he had within the university itself. Because yes, as a PhD student, Coburger was also working as a teaching assistant for undergrad students, many of whom have since his arrest said that after the murders, Coburger was stressed, unkempt, and constantly turning up late to class.

If it is true that Coburger is the killer, then it seems that he's definitely chilled out considerably since his arrest. Because according to the police, despite the fact that he has been on constant suicide watch and strapped into what I can only describe as some sort of anti-suicide smock, it's like a mini dress. And you're apparently not even allowed pants. And by pants, I mean underwear, Americans,

because obviously you could take them off and choke yourself to death. Yeah, it's impossible to rip. Yes. The whole vibe. So presumably it's very uncomfortable and a very vulnerable feeling to be wearing one of those because you're not even wearing pants.

Exactly. But despite all of this, Koberger apparently just sleeps for hours at a time in his cell. And again, it's going to take a lot more than this sort of thing to secure a guilty verdict. And I'm going to say allegedly, allegedly, allegedly. But they do say, after an arrest, the innocent ones pace and the guilty ones sleep. Because on some level, they're relieved to have been caught. Although Koberger's defence attorney simply stated that,

quote, although his client was a little surprised to have been arrested, he's eager to be exonerated of these charges. I fucking bet he is. Following his arrest, it took two days to get Brian Koberger from Pennsylvania back to Idaho. And thanks to an interesting little quirk of Idaho law, of which there are many, for those two days, the probable cause affidavit was kept sealed. And not just from us, the plebs and the public, but even Brian Koberger himself and his defense team weren't allowed to see it.

Yes. So when he was arrested, he was obviously arrested in Pennsylvania and he was kept in the Monroe County jail there. And he had to go to like an extradition hearing this hearing was like all sorts of drama it was the first time you see him in like his bright red um prison overalls like being escorted into the building everybody's like all the media's there they're all screaming Brian why did you do it why did you do it it's like a fucking shush be quiet and it's so so so, obviously for the victims, like, it goes without saying. But his mum and his two sisters are there. And you can see them going in.

They look absolutely destroyed. And apparently, because there was no cameras in the hearing, his mum was sat in there and she was crying and screaming so loudly that, like, a deputy sheriff had to, like, bring her tissues because she was so hysterical. And, like like there was nothing his sisters could do to calm them down and apparently he didn't look at anybody apart from at them at one point make eye contact and mouth i love you to them but like i just again we don't know but it was a horrifying situation to put everybody through but he had to be extradited from pennsylvania to idaho is my point and he didn't fight the extradition at all he waived his right to fight it went straight there and obviously an extradition from Pennsylvania to Idaho hearing is just a formality it's not like

Pennsylvania is not going to extradite Brian Koberger to Idaho but the reason he didn't fight it to like you know use that time to like prepare his defense more or anything like that will get a story straight. It was because unless he got to Idaho, he wasn't going to get presented with the evidence that they had against him to make that arrest, which, on Idaho's part, is very smart. So, yeah, not Brian, not his defence team, neither would have known the evidence against him

until he set foot back in Idaho, which he did on Thursday, the 5th of January. And that meant his team got to see the evidence, he got to see the evidence, and so did we. And fuck me, Janet, it is quite a shocker. Yep. Harvard is the oldest and richest university in America. Yep. gone. We've exposed the DEI regime, and there's much more to come. This is The Harvard Plan, a special series from the Boston Globe and WNYC's On the Media. To listen,

subscribe to On the Media wherever you get your podcasts. lie some of the biggest controversies in U.S. history. Presidential lies, environmental disasters, corporate fraud. In our latest series, NASA embarks on an ambitious program to reinvent space exploration with the launch of its first reusable vehicle, the Space Shuttle. And in 1985, they announced they're sending teacher Krista McAuliffe into space aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, along with six other astronauts. But less than two minutes after liftoff, the Challenger explodes. And in the tragedy's aftermath, investigators uncover a series of preventable failures by NASA and its contractors that led to the disaster. Follow American Scandal on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Experience all episodes ad-free and be the first to binge the newest season only on Wondery Plus. You can join

Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial today. So let's now, at long last, look at the probable cause affidavit and see how this investigation and the arrest fell together. Now we're not going to read the whole document. It's like 18 pages long. We'd be here forever. But we will summarise bits and we will read some bits out verbatim but mainly we're going to focus on the new information that

we learned we will however leave a link in the sources so you can go read the whole thing for yourselves if you want to i would highly recommend doing so because it is very very eye-opening so this probable cause affidavit before we begin just to be clear was written and submitted by Corporal Brett Payne of the Moscow Police Department. So in the first two and a half pages it doesn't really tell us anything that we didn't already know. It explains the location of the bodies. The Zana and Ethan were both found on the floor of Zana's room and Kaylee and Maddy were found in Maddy's bed And it also explains that they all died of sharp force injuries. Now the entire second page of the probable cause affidavit is redacted and it presumably included information about the 911 call. But that is just a guess. I do not know.

But it does feel like that's where it would fit in the timeline. Page three is where we see our first kind of absolute what the fuck moment. So we are going to read that bit to you directly. As I entered Maddy Mogan's bedroom, I could see two females in the single bed in the room. González and Mogan were deceased with visible stab wounds. I also later noticed what appeared to be a tan leather knife sheath laying on the bed next to Mogan's right side when viewed from the door. The sheath was later processed and had K-bar-U-S-M-C

and the United States Marine Corps Eagle, Globe and Anchor insignia stamped on the outside of it. The Idaho State Lab later located a single source of male DNA, suspect profile left on the button snap of the knife sheath. A fucking knife sheath. They found a fucking knife sheath in Maddie's bed. And not only is there a knife sheath, it's got DNA on it.

There's just so much to this. The fact that it is also a single source male DNA is very interesting. Obviously, if it's a mixed DNA sample, that makes it less sort of, it can make it less conclusive. So very, very shocking to see that. Like it's on basically the clasp that you would open the knife sheath with to get the knife out.

Some people have said it seems a bit weird that they only say it's got single source male DNA on it if it was found in the bed with Maddy Mogan. Why isn't it covered in their blood? It doesn't say that it's not. It just says that they found one single source of male DNA on it. So yeah, it's pretty unbelievable. If this is the sheath of the knife that was used in the killings, so a military K-bar knife,

this knife, and I've seen images of it, I've seen it in people's hand, it is a massive seven-inch sharpened steel knife that is made for combat. It is heavy duty. It is so thick because one end of it is made so you can like fucking fell trees or something if you're lost in the woods. It is huge. So it's not like you're picking horses hooves with it or anything? It's absolutely a beast. It's a beast. And it's also not a knife that is readily available like to the public. I'm not saying you couldn't get your hands on it. Way, way back in like the pasto times, it seems to have been issued to military personnel.

Then that stopped. And now my understanding is, and I might be wrong, my understanding is that people in the Marines buy it, but purely out of tradition. And it's more like an heirloom that you buy your son or you buy yourself when you join the Marines. And actually a lot of Marines said, I would never use this because it's not fit for purpose for that kind of thing. But it's very interesting that that's what was used. And so if this was the knife that was used, and we have to wait for more information to be revealed about that, because it isn't readily available, depending on how the killer got his hands on one, if he hasn't like immediately got a family member who was in the Marines,

it could possibly lead right back to him because he's not done the sort of typical thing that you would think to do if you were going to be a murderer, which is use a very, very everyday knife that's like from fucking, you know, Target that's not going to be traced back to you because there are so many of them that have been sold.

So let's now skip ahead to page four of the affidavit because the rest is just outlines of the movements of each of the victims and the two survivors on the night of the killings, all stuff that we know already. And then we have this. DM and BF both made statements during interviews that indicated the occupants of King Road residence were all home by 2am

and asleep or at least in their rooms by approximately 4am. We already knew that, but this is the interesting bit. This is with the exception of Canodal, and that's obviously Zana Canodal, who received a doorDash order at the residence at approximately 4am. Law enforcement identified the DoorDash delivery driver who reported this information. So what that means is that the murders took place a lot later than we originally thought. We used to think between 2 and 3am. But Zana got food delivered at 4am,

so that just cannot possibly be true. It completely changes the timeline of everything. Let's continue with the document. DM stated she originally went to sleep in her bedroom on the south-east side of the second floor. DM stated that she was awoken at approximately 4am by what she stated sounded like Gonzalves,

that's Kaylee, playing with her dog in one of the upstairs bedrooms, which were located on the third floor. A short time later, Diem said she heard what she thought was Gonzalves

saying something to the effect of there's someone here a review of records obtained from a forensic download of canodal's phone showed that this statement could also have been made by canodal as her cellular phone indicated that she was likely awake and using the tiktok app at approximately 4.12am. Oh, I'm upset. Jesus, Mary and Joseph. And the tiny donkey. And the tiny donkey.

I haven't slept in, like, properly since I read this probable cause affidavit, and it is that sentence. There's another sentence that's also coming, but that sentence. There's someone here. Ugh. coming but that sentence there's someone here so another thing that we had been told by police originally just cannot be true we had all been told from the start by police that dm and bf the two surviving girls had slept through the entire attack and not heard a thing but we know that just

can't be true no because because DM is saying that she heard somebody playing with the dog upstairs and then somebody, and we don't know who it could have been Zana, it could have been Kayleigh, saying there's someone in there, there's someone here, there's someone in the house. And again, we now know that Zana was still alive and on TikTok probably eating her DoorDash delivery at 4.12am. So it's just making that window for when the murders happened more, pushing it further and further and also making it more and more narrow. So again, now let's go back to the document.

DM stated that she looked out of her bedroom but did not see anything when she heard the comment about someone being in the house. DM stated that she opened her door a second time when she heard the comment about someone being in the house. DM stated that she opened her door a second time when she heard what she thought was crying coming from Knodel's room. DM then said she heard a male voice say something to the effect of, It's OK, I'm going to help you. Yep. help you yep and it's so hard to know because we don't know who's crying but it's coming from zana's room so it's probably her and we don't know who said it's okay i'm going to help you

we don't know if it was the killer or if it was her boyfriend or if it was zana's boyfriend ethan because we don't know the tone in which it was said. Presumably, DM would have been particularly familiar with Ethan's voice because she lived with his girlfriend and it seems like he was there quite a lot. So would she not have recognised his voice? And if it was the killer, what was going on in that house and who was he talking to?

I don't know. But yeah, let's carry on. At approximately 4.17am, a security camera located at 1112 King Road, a residence immediately to the northwest of 1122 King Road, picked up a distorted audio of what sounded like voices or a whimper, followed by a loud thud. A dog can also be heard barking numerous times,

starting at 4.17am. The security camera is less than 50 feet from the west wall of Conodal's bedroom. So this tells us a few things. It firstly tells us that the house isn't completely isolated, right? This isn't a house in the middle of nowhere. It's on a quiet residential street. There is another house 50 feet away. Close enough that i think it's like a ring doorbell or something

that picks this up close enough that a security camera attached to the house next door can hear whimpering and a thud and murphy barking and so the fact that we now know Murphy was barking, again, is very contrary to what we were led to believe before. We now know that the surviving girls, or at least DM, and the victims themselves did not all sleep through the attack. I think one of the things that people were taking some solace with with this case was everybody thought that the victims had kind of all been stabbed in their sleep. And that was in some way a small mercy but I think now it's clear to see that everyone in that house with the possible exception of BF seems to have been horrifyingly or too aware of what was going on and the very real danger that they were in and the only way it makes sense that BF didn't hear this is because her room is the only one that's on the first floor and directly above her is the kitchen. There's no bedroom directly above her. What can I say? It's absolutely nightmarish. And

I think one of the things that really has probably made me lose the most sleep is that imagine you're at home in a small safe town, a student town where you probably know a lot of the people you know that there are five other people in the house that night and all of the victims so zana ethan kaylee and maddie were all in bed with somebody else i like literally can't think of a scenario in which you would feel more safe they're like zana's getting door dash delivered at four in the morning they were completely not a career in the world. They were completely at ease. And you still end up getting brutally murdered in your own room or your own bed.

It's just like unbelievable. And for the families as well. Imagine your kids are like, I want to go to uni in New York or L.A. or some other city where it's like a big city who knows what's going to happen. They're like, I want to go to uni in Idaho and I'm going to be living in Moscow with my best friend who you've known since we were kids in Kaylee and Maddie's case. And Ethan's actually a tripler. All three of him and his siblings all went to the same uni. And Zana is like with this guy.

And like Ethan's a big guy. Like it's almost like the shattering of any kind of peace of mind any of us could have about feeling safe. And I think that's what has captured so many people's, I don't want to say imagination. That sounds horrible. Almost like the shattering of any kind of peace of mind any of us could have about feeling safe. And I think that's what has captured so many people's, I don't want to say imagination, that sounds horrible, captured so many people's nightmares with this case. And I'm afraid it's only going to get worse. opened her door for the third time after she heard the crying coming from Zana's room and saw a figure clad in black clothing and a mask that covered the person's mouth and nose walking towards her. DM described the figure as 5 foot 10 or taller, male, not very muscular, but athletically built with bushy eyebrows. The male walked past DM as she stood in a, quote, frozen shock phase.

The male walked towards the back sliding glass door and DM locked herself in her room after seeing the male. DM did not state that she recognised the male and this leads investigators to believe that the murderer left the scene. The combination of DM statements to law enforcement, reviews of forensic downloads of records from BF and DM's phones and video of a suspect as described below leads investigators to believe the homicides occurred between 4am and 4.25am. During the processing of the crime scene, investigators found a latent shoe print. This was located during the second processing of the crime scene by the ISP forensic team

by first using a presumptive blood test and then amino black, a protein stain that detects the presence of cellular material. The detected shoe print showed a diamond-shaped pattern similar to the pattern of a Vans-type shoe sole just outside the door of DM's bedroom, located on the second floor. And this is consistent with DM's statement regarding the suspect's path of travel. I hate it. I'm upset. Yeah, no words really. Apart from these words that I'm up for her. Yeah. No words, really. Apart from these words that I'm about to say with my mouth. There are some people, completely and utterly vile,

who have been bullying DM because she went back into her bedroom and locked her door. I, honestly, when I was doing the research on this, I felt felt scared at times i felt uneasy being in my own bed at night i'll be honest i felt like that for the past few days and the one thing i would tell myself to make myself feel better is people like this killer they are not common this kind of psychopathic level is not an usual occurrence in human behavior what are the chances but then i read these fucking comments to dm on the internet and this is not a few people trolling it was trending number one right a few days ago and i would say 90 of the comments were aimed at 20 year old d, a fucking trauma survivor of a scale I can't even imagine, saying the most vile, horrific, disgusting things. And that really made me think, oh, maybe it's not that rare that people are this fucking psychopathic then. Like, I have no idea how you could or why you would feel it was necessary

for you to go onto the internet and bully this person. We do not even have all of the information. Can I just reiterate that a probable cause affidavit is not an indictment. No police force on the planet would release all of the information that they have against a potential suspect at this point. In fact, one of the reasons that they probably use this guy, Corporal Brett Payne, to do it is because he's like a rookie on the force. And so they can get him to write it and then later on say, well, he didn't have all of the information. So these people, it's beyond disgusting. These people also ask why DM didn't call the police instantly. Why did she wait until

almost noon to do it? Because they're saying if she looked out and she saw all of this, she saw the killer leaving at about, you know, 4.26am or whatever we just said, why did she wait until 11.58 the next day to call 911? I think I'd probably think it was some sort of horrible sleep paralysis situation. I mean, obviously you can't speculate. And this is the thing, there's absolutely no way on this earth that we all inhabit,

whether we like it or not, there is no way anybody can say what they would have done in that situation. Fuck right off if you think that you would know how you would handle this situation. I haven't been anywhere near this case apart from reading about it. And I haven't slept properly for days. Imagine the fear. Imagine the fear of opening your door and seeing what she saw. And the reaction to extreme fear isn't always fight or flight. A very important one that we often miss is freeze. If DM realised the gravity of the situation and could completely understand

why she hid, her body would have been overwhelmed with physiological responses, driving her to self-preservation. She could have completely shut down in traumatic stress, hiding in that room, fearing for her life. She possibly could have passed out even, we just don't know. It's also entirely possible that she was intoxicated. She didn't realise what was going on. This house often had people coming and going, dogs barking, music on, food being delivered at 4am and all the rest. It was a student house. She may have been in a state of inebriation, thought it was some guy someone had hooked up with,

and then she didn't know what happened until the next day. And before you bring up the frozen shock phase comment from the document, you have to remember that these probable cause affidavits are written to get an arrest warrant. Exactly. And I think obviously in the probable cause affidavit, it also says that the way they sort of timeline when the murders happened is through messages between BF and DM. I wonder if she sees him, she's terrified. She goes back into her room. They have been drinking. They have been drinking. They've been drinking.

There was a football game that day. They were out all night. Like, this is no judgment. They were probably all a little bit drunk. She sees what she sees. She's absolutely fucking terrified. Frozen, maybe even passes out. Comes back to and texts the other people in the house.

And maybe only gets a response from Bf who we know if anyone did sleep through the entire attack it was only really have been her because she was on the first floor and i do not think it is at all beyond reasonable thinking that she waited until bf replied to her before she came out of her room she might have been like tell me when you're awake tell me when you're awake tell me when you're awake and she was too scared to come out and why didn't she call 9-1-1 because she doesn't know what the fuck is going on outside. And I'm saying this as an adult woman, calling 911 or calling 999,

it feels like a huge thing to do, right? So I just think before anybody judges her, before people go on the internet and fucking harass her, and I know I'm not talking to our listeners, but like, just fuck off. We also don't know anything about DM's past traumas. We don't know anything about what's happened to her in the past. Also, people have different levels of like resilience when it comes to things like this. Unless you're like in the military or in the police or something where

you've been trained to override your brain's natural impulses for self-preservation, I always think your lizard brain is going to win in a situation like that. And I listened to a really great explanation about this by a lady called Dr. Shiloh, who does the podcast LA Not So Confidential. And she explained that of the three responses to a fear stimuli, so fight, flight or freeze, our caveman selves or the ones who likely survived in order to procreate and pass on their genes to us would probably most often have actually gone for freeze. And she describes it like this. If you spotted a lion or something that was going to tear you apart,

you know you can't outrun it. You know that you can't kill it with your bare hands because you've already seen like fucking Dave from Cave down the road. Cave Dave. Cave Dave get eviscerated by a lion last week. But you know, if you freeze, you might just survive. Also, and this is so, so important, I want everybody to remember this. We do not know enough about that 911 call. We haven't heard it and it is not mentioned in the

probable cause affidavit. So noon on November the 13th, as we've been told, might not even be true. We were told up until now that the two other survivors had been asleep the entire time. We just don't know if they called before or not. There have been reports that are unsubstantiated that the girls did actually call 911 sooner, but that they were in such a state of shock, they were completely unintelligible, and that one of them had actually passed out. Again, that's not verified, I'm just saying. As for why the killer didn't kill Diem when she saw him, it's possible he didn't see her.

Other reasons could be that he was exhausted. Stabbing four people to death is not an easy task. Or maybe he had done what he came to do. Maybe he had a specific target in mind and he'd already killed them. Or his bloodlust that night was satisfied. Or he wanted to leave a witness and a survivor. Maybe he wanted to leave someone alive, to keep them around like a sort of living trophy. Knowing that there were two survivors who could spend the rest of their lives scarred by the trauma of his actions might have got him off. Or maybe he wanted to do it for the infamy. Look at Delphi. It was huge. And one of the reasons it was quite so massive was absolutely the video footage evidence.

In this case, we just don't know. And why didn't he kill Murphy, especially if the dog was barking, which we now know he was? Well. Oh, my God. I know, I know. Well. Oh, my God. I know.

I know. Brian Kobach, huh? Is a vegan. Yeah. Yeah. And the kind of vegan who apparently, and again, this is just like, we've heard this on the internet from people who knew him saying this since, and we do not know if he's the killer. Allegedly, allegedly allegedly allegedly but apparently he even like harangued his aunt and uncle who he stayed with for a while into buying brand new pots and pans because he refused to eat out of pans that had previously cooked meat and that is not a judgment on vegans that is a judgment on brian coberger so yeah allegedly allegedly allegedly

we don't know but it's quite convenient. Yeah, and that's why it also makes me think that he probably didn't skin Buddy, the dog. Good point. So all of this was brand new information. And like we said earlier, it can allow us to infer a few things about the order of the murders, which, like we said, is crucial if we want to speculate in any way as to who might have been the target. And like we said, this is just speculation,

and we need the police to investigate, like, commingling of DNA and blood, etc., to say for sure the order in which people were killed. So, for example, if you find, like, one person's blood and DNA in another room, you can figure out in which order people were killed. But we don't have that. But think given DM's testimony this is maybe what makes the most sense let's say that the killer gets into the house either through the front door which is on the first floor or the sliding patio doors on the second floor now I wish we had a

YouTube channel at points like this because I would love to have a diagram of the house that I have stared at for fucking hours last night, but I don't. So I'm going to put a picture of it on our social media. Try look at it while I'm explaining it to you. Three story house, first floor, you have a front door, second floor, you've got some big patio doors that open into the kitchen. So he comes in either of those two ways and again there was no sign of forced entry because it's a fucking student house and there's no one's dad going around checking that all the doors and windows are shut before he goes to bed. I'm thinking everybody just thinks someone else will close it and they've all gone upstairs. Then once he's in my guess would be

that he goes straight upstairs to the third floor and kills both Maddie and Kaylee first. At some point during this trip upstairs he locks Murphy, the dog, in Kaylee's room because that's where the first attending officer on the scene found the dog. And it also just makes me feel really chilled because you know when DM says that she heard someone upstairs playing with the dog and she thought it was Kaylee. What if it was him? And after he's killed on the top floor, he would then have to come back downstairs to at least the second floor in order to get out of the house. At this point, Zana was awake at 4.12am and we know this because she was on TikTok and she got food delivered at 4am. We also know that the murders happened between 4 0 4 a.m and 4 20 a.m now the layout of the house is that maddie and kaylee are both upstairs directly above dm's bedroom because that's where maddie's room was

which we know they were both in and she hears the dog upstairs like i said was it the killer moving murphy into kaylee's room or just playing with him I don't fucking know she then hears someone say there's someone here now this could have been Kaylee above her or Maddie above her or it could have been Zana across the floor from her who we know was awake and maybe she was talking to Ethan if that was the case does the killer as he's coming downstairs to the second floor in order to get out of the house, hear Zana say this? And possibly even Zana and or Ethan are up and looking out of her room to see what's going on. So at this point, does the killer go for them? And this is when DM opened her door again and heard the crying coming from Zana's room and the male voice saying, I'm going to help you.

So did the killer stab Ethan first? And was he trying to stop Zana crying by telling her I'm going to help you before killing her too? And then we know they turns around, walks past DM's room because she sees him and that's where the footprint is and out of the patio doors on the second floor and leave the house. And I think it makes sense that Zana was probably the last to die, given DM's testimony, because that's who DM heard last, right before she saw the killer leave the house. He wouldn't have had time to go back upstairs and kill Kaylee and Maddie,

so it seems like it makes the most sense that he started up there, came down, killed Ethan, killed Zana, because DM hears her crying and then leaves the house immediately after. Let's get back to that probable cause affidavit and how the police actually got Coburger on their radar in the first place. Whilst reviewing cameras from houses, businesses and street CCTV around the King Road area, police discovered a white Hyundai Elantra driving around the house before the murders. It passed the house multiple times and it's a quiet street, so it did immediately stand out.

They also noted that this car was not seen moving on any cameras during the time of the killings. But it did reappear soon after, and it was seen driving back towards the direction of Pullman, Washington. So it's when police do this sort of video canvassing review, find this Hyundai Elantra that they put out the bolo. But this was all going on behind the scenes. Because they never say anything again after it. They're never like, oh, still no one's come forward about that white Hyundai. They just say it once, put out a bolo, and then never mention it again.

But where had this car come from? Well, police got their hands on CCTV from the Washington State University campus and they spotted a white sedan, which looked to be the same vehicle as the one spotted near the murder house, leaving at 2.53am, heading in the direction of Moscow, Idaho. So the police could now place a white Hyundai Elantra doing strange drive-bys on King Road in the early hours of the 13th of November. And a car consistent with this description could also be tracked coming from the Washington State University campus all the way to Moscow in time for the killings.

And after the killings, a matching car can be tracked all the way back to Pullman. I'd call that strike two. So, the police put out a bolo on a white Hyundai Elantra on the 25th of November 2022. Four days later, according to the probable cause affidavit, this happened. Yeah, this is, we're going to read this word for word from the document. So, on November 29th, 2022, at approximately 12.28am, Washington State University Police Officer Daniel Tiengo 2022 at approximately 12 28 a.m washington state university police officer daniel tiengo

queried white elantras registered at wsu as a result of that query he located a 2015 white elantra with a pennsylvania license plate this vehicle was registered to brian koberger to Brian Coburger, hereafter Coburger. And he resided at 1630 N.E. Valley Road, apartment 201 Pullman, Washington. And this address is approximately three-quarters of a mile from the intersection of Stadium Park and Cougar Way, which, you'll be interested to know, Hannah, is the last camera location that picked up the white Elantra after the murders.

So someone in a white Hyundai Elantra after the murders was heading home. To the home that Brian Koberger lived in. That same day, at approximately 12.58am, WSU officer Curtis Whitman was looking for a white Hyundai Elantra and located a 2015 white Hyundai Elantra at none other than 1630 Northeast Valley Road in Pullman in the parking lot. And like we said, this is the parking lot that one Brian Coburger lives in. And they actually ran the license plate of this particular car and found that it belonged to Brian Koberger. And this license indicates that Koberger was a white male with a height of about six foot, weighs 185 pounds. And additionally,

the photograph of Koberger in his driver's license shows that he has bushy eyebrows. Koberger's physical description is consistent with the description of the mail that DM saw inside the King Road residence on the 13th of November. So now they have the car and they have the fact that a car resembling this was in and making movements in the area at the time of the murders, leaving the Washington State campus, heading to Moscow and then heading back to Portman. And when they pull this guy's driver's license, he looks like the guy that DM describes. Strike three, you are out of there. Yeah. So when they have all of this information, the police looked a little bit harder at this Brian Koberger and discovered that he was a PhD in criminology and that he had an

undergraduate degree in psychology and cloud-based forensics. They also found a Reddit post that Koberger had made asking participants to provide information to quote, understand how emotions and psychological traits influence decision making when committing a crime. That post has since been deleted but it does seem to be confirmed that it was Brian Koberger who made it. Now, separately to the Koberger suspicions, police had got a warrant to determine all cellular devices that had pinged off the towers in close proximity to 1122 King Road on the 13th of November 2022 between 3am and 4am, which is when we know that person would have been heading

into that area to commit the crimes, possibly. And people might be like, how did they possibly get this? Isn't that illegal? Well, no, since it's within a very specific time and an area in which the police said there shouldn't be many people, apart from the people who live there, this warrant was granted. And when they reviewed it against Koberger's number, his number wasn't actually one of the ones that had pinged off that tower in that time frame. Now, of course, this wasn't much of a surprise. If he was the killer, what sort of killer would take their phone to the murders in this day and age? I mean, one who leaves a knife sheath in a bed, probably, but also not.

Possibly. But surely, Hannah, not one who has a cloud-based forensics degree yeah he just missed out the actual physical forensics bit yeah just focused on the cyber crime yeah and um also interestingly they discovered that he had actually applied for an internship with moscow police department i believe it was moscow police department or a local police department basically saying that he wanted to help rural police forces know how to use technology better. So anyway, I don't know if it's allegedly, allegedly, allegedly it's him, but you know. So he thinks he's Dexter, basically. Sure. So when the police now requested a search warrant for Koberger's phone records between midnight on the 12th of November until midnight on the 14th of November, so basically encapsulating the entire sort of 24 hours around

the murder, they now found something very interesting. They found that on the 13th of November, at 2.42am, Coburger's phone was in his apartment in Pullman, Washington. At 2.47am, the phone, presumably not having grown legs and walking around on its own, left Pullman, travelling south. And this movement of the phone is consistent with the movements of the white Hyundai Elantra that the police attract all over the place using CCTV and video cameras. Then soon after, so about an hour before the murders, because remember we know they happened about 4.04,

the phone stopped reporting to any network. And this can only mean one of three things. Either the phone is in a place with no signal, or it's been switched off, or it's been put into aeroplane mode. And this phone did not report to a network again until 4.48am. So from 3 until almost 5, the phone is off the grid. And 4.48am is, of course, about 20 minutes after the murders had taken place. And, dear listeners, would you like to take a guess as to where this phone was when it was turned back on. It was in Moscow, I know.

And at approximately 5.30am, the phone arrived back at Coburger's residence in Pullman, Washington. And again, all of these movements of the phone can be matched with the movements of the White High and D'Alantera. I've got no more strikes. It's not how baseball works. No, it's over. We's not how baseball works. No. It's over. We're at the fucking pizza party after. And then,

through his head as in her hands, on the 13th of November at 9am, the phone travelled from Coburger's flat to Moscow, picking off the tower that covers the King Road house between 9.12am and 9.21am. So, allegedly, Koberger went back to the scene of the crime about four and a half hours after the killings. And after this visit, the phone and the white Hyundai

went back to Koberger's residence at 9.32am. What the fuck? So he leaves at, like, 4.30 after the murders are done, and he comes back at 9.12am, allegedly. The phone and the fucking car, too. Why? Does he come back to see if the police are there? Does he come back to, like, see the chaos of his work?

Does he come back because he realised he fucking left the sheet there? And does he think he can get back into the house and get it out? Like, I don't know. I don't know. But he's there for 10 minutes and we know that the police weren't there yet because they didn't come until much later in the day. Because the 911 call hadn't been made yet. Presumably.

So why didn't he go back in? And can I just say, if you're going back to the fucking scene of the crime, why would you take your mobile phone with you? You know the way. Oh my god, I have headache. On the 23rd of December, investigators applied for a warrant for Coburger's phone records from the 23rd of June 2022. And unbelievably, they found that Coburger was in the King Road area a total of 12 times prior to November the 13th. So between the end of June 2022 and mid-November 2022, he had gone to that area 12 times with his phone. We don't know how many times without his phone.

And every single one of those trips, bar one, were late at night or very early in the morning. And if he cannot show that he has a reason to be there, like a friend who happens to live like literally on that street, there is no need to be on that road. It's a quiet residential, I don't want to say cul-de-sac because I don't know if it is, but it's like an off-road. There's no reason to go there unless you're going to somebody's house. Yeah, it's not like a thoroughfare. No, not at all. Four days later, on the 27th of December,

police in Pennsylvania recovered rubbish from the Koberger family residence in Albrechtsville. And they compared the DNA found on the rubbish to that found on the sheath from the King Road house. And they identified that the DNA from the rubbish came from a man who could not be excluded as the biological father of the suspect profile. At least 99.9998% of the male population would be expected to be excluded from being the suspect's father. Let's move from sports to games.

Full house. Honestly, fucking bingo like they found the suspect's dna in moscow idaho and then they find the suspect's biological father's dna 2500 miles away in the bins that have been left outside brian coberger's house and he drives the same fucking car and was in the area 12 times blah Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's mind boggling. So now police have DNA, the car and the phone tower pings to place Coburger at the house the night all of those people died. So like we said, just to reiterate, we only have a fragment of what the police actually have. This is just the probable

cause affidavit. It is not the indictment. The probable cause affidavit basically just has to show like it's more likely it's him than it's somebody else at this point. So I heard people saying it's like 51%. Definitely not beyond a reasonable doubt needs to be proven at this point. That's for the trial. So the investigation is still very much ongoing and there are already more reports that in the time that the police were surveilling Koberger after the killings but before the arrest, that he did some very odd things, like clean his car intensively with surgical gloves on.

I just, I can't, you wouldn't, I feel like the police watching him probably couldn't believe what they were fucking seeing. This guy comes out of his house late at night in winter and is basically taking his car apart and cleaning it, quote, like he was going to sell it. And then they also saw him taking the rubbish out at 4 a.m. and put it all into a neighbor's bin. Because, yes, the police, the FBI taking the bins outside the parents house to test for DNA. You're more than allowed to do that because apparently once you put your rubbish out, it becomes public property and it's apparently called like

abandonment evidence. So this case, before we get any more information, is probably going to take the best part of a year to get to a trial. And that's if Koberger continues to plead not guilty. And we're just going to have to wait until then to hear everything, possibly even later because the judge in this case has actually put a gag order in place, which means that nobody's allowed to talk about anything to do with this case until there's a verdict. But I do have to say that investigators on this case have seemingly nailed it. This is amazing work. And credit where credit's due. I'm not saying, you know, this is a conviction. It's far from that. And we're going to have to wait for all the facts to be presented, including the defense's case.

But it does look to be great work. And I'm saying that because the police took a lot of shit on this case. There were pundits milking this for all it's worth in the media, screaming, why did it take so long? Blah, blah, blah. It's like, that's fucking nonsense. The police had Koberger on their radar two weeks after the murders and had him in cuffs four weeks later. For a case like this, and again, he's presumed innocent until proven guilty, but for a case like this, an arrest after six, seven weeks is remarkably fast.

And quite a lot of the way the media have been covering this case is, quite frankly, embarrassing. And I say that because quite a lot of the press have spent the last week or so glamorising the fuck out of Brian Koberger. Ever since the press found out that the suspect was a PhD student in criminology, they've been pissing themselves with excitement. And we're not saying that it's totally irrelevant that he's a criminology PhD student. But quite a lot of news outlets are describing him as, quote, a genius psycho

and an evil mastermind. Shut up. Have a fucking day off. Honestly, before the probable cause affidavit, people were genuinely calling him a genius psycho. I couldn't listen. It was painful. It was painful. I mean, not genius enough to leave his fucking phone. Yeah, they all shut up after that fucking came out. A PhD in criminology does not a genius make, I am afraid. And if Coburger did do it, he's not smart enough to take the knife sheath with him, is he?

Or not to leave his DNA all over it. And drive his own car. And he fucking switched his mobile phones off for the hour in which the murder happened. Like, no, no. So right now, he does not look like the sharpest pixie in the drawer. No. Or something.

No. The brightest knife in the forest. Anyone who said that this whole genius nonsense about Brian Koberger is giving him far, far too much credit. Studying the subjects he did, like psychology, criminology, cloud-based forensics, they would not give him a practical understanding of how to get away with murders, which is what, by the way, the media were saying. They were basically scare-mongering, being like, oh my god, are our universities

teaching people, like, criminology? And they weren't outright saying that, but that's what was heavily implied. And I was like, shut the fuck up. My God, shut up. This would not have given him a practical understanding of anything. I would be much more interested to say if he'd been a cop for years or like an FBI agent or something. But this academic understanding he had of criminology, which is basically sociology, but about crime.

No, this got nothing to do with anything. And it certainly wouldn't have told him all of the latest ways in which the police and the FBI investigate crime scenes, which he wouldn't even fucking have had to know because he left a fucking sheath behind, allegedly. So what else do we know about the not-a-genius psychopath Koberger? Well, for starters, he does seem to have been a pretty weird guy. I feel like, and this is, for starters, he does seem to have been a pretty weird guy. I feel like,

and this is, you know, my university experience, PhD teaching assistants are either the loves of your life or they are so fucking weird you don't want to be in a room with them. Or, from my experience watching girls that I did masters with, they're both. God. Oh man, I fancied so many tutors. It's such a problem. I was not alone. It has been reported that Koberger had been flagged to local bar for inappropriate behaviour towards women.

There's also video footage that's been leaked of him getting his diploma, his graduation, he's not smiling, nothing. Even as the provost smiles at him and hands him the scroll which is his degree and he seems to care quite a lot about it it's just weird watching it like i was saying to you when i was like doing the research for this like to have someone smile at you especially in a moment of celebration like a graduation where they are one-on-one handing you your scroll and smiling at you. It's very hard not to smile back, but he doesn't. And again, I'm not here to diagnose people, but it's very like we see it in other killers, like that shallow affect, the sort of like schizotypal style.

But again, allegedly, I'm just saying. It's an odd video. So we think it's pretty safe to assume that this is not a guy who's a cunning criminal mastermind, who was, you know, Ted Bundy style, outwardly charming and charismatic like in the films. No matter how much everyone seems to want that to be the case, it just isn't. No. Koberger was apparently bullied at school, mainly by girls and mainly because of his weight.

So he got into boxing and got fit, but still couldn't excel socially. So he became a bully instead and got into hard drugs, according to some of his classmates. According to his classmates, he went for like one of the hardest of all, into heroin. Straight to the heroin. Definitely on heroin at points in his life. Wow.

Yeah. I just went on holiday with my friends who just had a baby. And there are two rules for parenting. No gambling, no needle drugs. Top. He's only five months, so I'm sure it will be some time before they have to implicate either of those rules. One would hope. Man, I don't know. Burger vans, live streaming, twitches. I don't know. Kopecker also got a part-time security job at his high school after he graduated. Weird. Don't go back. Red flag, red flag. And again, we do know that

killers typically crave power control and they love a uniform. But it is unusual that he went all the way to PhD level, we will give you that. But he did only complete one semester. So would he have finished keeping all of his urges in check, being told what to do, why people he thought were way more stupid than him? I doubt it. There's just no way to know. There's no way to know. So motive.

Let's talk motive. As for that, what do we think? It's hard to say for sure because we do not have all of the information. do know is that whoever did this it was a highly organized but probably very inexperienced killer who wasn't expecting probably quite frankly the frenzy of the crime scene there's like a fucking food delivery man turning up there's a dog running around barking but also at the same time if it is coberger and he had made these multiple trips to the house did he not know that that could be the situation there i don't know and also these multiple visits to the house, did he not know that that could be the situation there? I don't know. And also these multiple visits to the area, if it was Coburger, in the months leading up to it, scream to me of that high organisation. They scream of reconnaissance missions and

pre-planning. A lot of people obviously do call this stalking behaviour. The fact that he was there, he seemingly was watching the victims there's also a place that you can park outside of the house that's protected by like a little hill and it looks directly up into those massive patio doors that look into the kitchen and on the first floor they have like an open plan kitchen living room which is presumably where they spent all of their time and this was a party house. Two months before the murders happened, the police actually got called out there for a noise complaint to turn the music down.

And there was a big party going on. I think he went there, parked up, and was watching them. And it almost looks like a TV screen, like this patio. And this, again, is actually back to Dr Shiloh from LA Not So Confidential, who made a very good point. And she said, I know this is splitting hairs, but actually it's not stalking because it's casing. It's casing, it's intelligence gathering.

Because stalkers, when it's a case of stalking, they want the victims to be scared. They want the victims to know that they're there, that they're being watched. Stalking, people who are being stalked know they're being stalked. And the Uber driver who dropped Maddie and Kaylee off that night, back at the house before they got murdered said they did not have a care in the world so it's not exactly stalking but you know

so when i first started the research on this i thought reading the things that his classmates had said about him that it felt like the crime of a man who thought he was smarter than everybody else right someone who with and we see this all the time with a very little amount of knowledge about something and i'm not saying a phd is no knowledge but with a little amount of knowledge decided that everyone else was a moron and that he could kill and get away with the perfect murders this was just my theory and of course complete speculation but coberger according to master's classmates, would often talk over his professors, including Dr Catherine Ramsland, the world-renowned serial killer expert

who spent five years interviewing, talking to, writing letters to, meeting, playing chess with BTK to write her book about him. And also, apparently, he would always take like a contrarian viewpoint and talk down to everyone, like he knew the most about murderers crime and the criminal mind and he knew more than anyone ever could so if it was Coburg I thought that

maybe he too knew all too well that the purely academic understanding of crimes that he was gaining even if he had gone as far as interviewing serial killers etc would only get his knowledge so far and maybe he thought to be the best to dominate to be an expert beyond anybody else he had to do it himself and get away with it I couldn't help but feel like he has this kind of desperate need to be an expert in something the kind of bullying of other people, the talking down to other people, it really seems like somebody who wanted to be the expert. And crime was just the topic he chose, right? And I think he picked it because he was probably interested in it. And I think he thought I could spend years researching and interviewing offenders like my professor, Dr. Catherine

Ramsland did, to become an expert in one crime or one killer. And Hannah, we know in this world of true crime, to become a sort of authoritative voice on one case or one criminal is sort of how you make your name. Right. Being a generalist will only get you so far. And I think he knew that. But I think he couldn't be fucking bothered with all the years of work that would take. And again, this is just a theory, but I thought, did he figure, I'll commit my own crime, one that will get maximum media coverage because I'll pick the victims that I know will get the headlines, and then I'll make sure I get away with it because I'm such a genius,

and then I'll get my PhD, and then I'll become the expert in the unsolved Idaho student murders case. Possibly he was thinking of even committing a series of killings. And then, you know, he can be the guy who's got all the interesting insights into this killer and he can make a name for himself. It's just a theory and like, I don't know. But my reasoning for why I thought this was why pick four victims? Did he pick four victims? We don't know. But my reasoning for why I thought this was why pick four victims? Did he pick four victims? We don't know. But why kill four people?

And even if it was only one person that was the target, he went into a full house. So he either wanted or was okay with the enormous risk of needing to commit multiple homicides in one night. And like I said, he went after victims whose death would cause the most public uproar. We know that the reason that sex workers all too often become the victims of first-time serial killers, or would-be serial killers, is because their deaths are less likely to be investigated, it's less likely to be a high-profile case. But he went after literally the highest-profile victims he could have. So I don't know, but I thought maybe he wanted sort of his own Delphi, one that,

this case that he could fully possess. He could carry on living in Washington Pullman while everybody was talking about it and be the expert. And also it would satisfy any violent fantasies that he also had, but it would also propel his career. I don't know. If this was the case, it would be a highly cynical and practical act. And maybe I am guilty of spending too much time with this case and overanalyzing this crime because something that does make me question this theory is why the overkill on Kaylee Gonzalvez if it was a cool calculated killing like let me commit the perfect crime Leopold and Loeb style thing it's odd that we would see such rage with one victim and we also know that Zanna fought back because she had a lot of defensive wounds.

She probably had the most defensive wounds, but we didn't see that kind of overkill in her. And also, if we're right in assuming Kayleigh was the first to die, then she was probably the target. Now, there could be other explanations for this overkill. We just don't have all of the facts yet. But one thing I would like to say is a lot of people on the internet, well, yes, on the internet, but also in media, mainstream media,

they all want to talk about incels now. They all want to talk about them. And now suddenly Brian Koberger is a poster child for incel killings. And I just want to say, yes, there are people in the incel community who have started like a fucking GoFundMe to get him out.

But like those people are severely troubled. And of course, they're going to fucking do that. But I do not think Brian Koberger, this is not an incel killing. I don't think so. I mean, unless there's a secret manifesto that we don't know about. Precisely. But it doesn't feel like that to me either. No, incel killings follow a very specific pattern. Firstly, we've talked about incels before, but they are not naturally prone to violence. When they commit violence, they end up in mass casualties. But that's not like a typical thing that happens and when it

does happen like Hannah said they leave a manifesto there would be a trail on the internet of him having engaged with that community because it's more akin to like a terror attack they want people to know why they did it who did this they want to die for the movement right they want people to know that these girls were bitches and they deserve to die yeah and it's in broad daylight it's never in the middle of the night and they also never plan to leave they always plan like many terrorists do to die at the scene either by killing themselves or by suicide by cop not sneaking out of the door and going back to their lives whether it's brian coberg or or not, the killer didn't die at the scene. But I'm not saying it's not perpetrated by rage against women or one particular woman.

I'm just saying it's not in cell. Of course, Koberger is, for now, presumed innocent and we will have to wait and see what happens next. But the death penalty is very much on the table and police in Pennsylvania, where Koberger grew up, lived and studied until his PhD, are looking into other crimes that may match his MO. And maybe they'll find something, maybe they won't. Let's just see. Yeah, I don't know. I guess people are saying it seems unlikely that a first time killer would go after a full house of victims. But we also know that people have psychopathic tendencies. We don't know if it's Koberger, but whoever did this certainly did have psychopathic tendencies are incredibly reckless. So it doesn't prove anything. But either way, fuck that guy, whether it's him or not. And let's end this episode by remembering

Kaylee Gonzalves, whose dad said, and this just made me really sad. He said that when Brian Koberger was caught, I always knew that whoever killed her wouldn't have been someone Kaylee knew Maddy Mogan, whose boyfriend Jake remembers her as the sweetest person he'd ever met and the person he loved the most in the world. And Ethan Chapin, who, like we said, was a triplet, with both of his siblings also at Idaho State. They'd all actually hung out the day before all this happened. And they say he'll always be remembered as the guy with the biggest smile. And Zana Canodo, who was described by her father

as being strong-willed and highly independent. Her dad said that he wasn't shocked to hear how hard she'd fought her killer. And he asks people to keep her memory alive by donating to the college scholarship program that her family have set up in her honor so yeah that's it guys that is um well a pretty fucking probably mammoth episode to kickstart red-handed what kickstart 2023 at red-handed i'm tired and sad it's just such a fucking senseless crime yeah that's the only thing i know we do this every week right we talk about some horrible fucking

person who's done something horrible or a series of horrible things but the only thing i could think during the whole of this research was what was the fucking point yeah he's 28 if it is him he's wrecked his life he's ruined his family's life he's killed four innocent people he's left two people completely scarred beyond. And I don't want to sound incredibly nihilistic about DM and BF. I really, really hope that they go on to lead happy lives. But the chances are they're never going to get over this or ever be the same again. And he's just wrecked everything, if it's him, allegedly.

But whatever. We'll have to wait and see we're probably not going to revisit this case now until after the trial because by all accounts there shouldn't be any more information

so we'll do that and you can go have a lie down now you have my permission and we will see you next time Epstein

is next it is and we'll see you then guys and happy new year happy new year. Happy new year. Don't have nightmares. I can't promise. Bye. Bye. You don't believe in ghosts? I get it. Lots of people don't. in ghosts? I get it.

Lots of people don't. I didn't either, until I came face to face with them. Ever since that moment, hauntings, spirits, and the unexplained have consumed my entire life. I'm Nadine Bailey. I've been a ghost tour guide for the past 20 years. I've taken people along with me into the shadows, uncovering the macabre tales that linger in the darkness, and inside some of the most haunted houses,

hospitals, prisons, and more. Join me every week on my podcast, Haunted Canada, as we journey through terrifying and bone-chilling stories of the unexplained. Search for Haunted Canada on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant.

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