I’d sooner expect he had no fixed idea of how many people where in the house to begin with. He may well have known how many people resided there, but that’s not the same thing, not at all.
College kids are famous for sleeping over at other’s residences. And also for more than 1 person assigned to a bedroom. As well, roommate type-housing often has people sleeping with all the bedroom doors closed. Doubly so if they have wildly varying schedules.
So while walking down the hallway and encountering a closed bedroom door I posit that an intruder would have no idea whether the room was unoccupied, held two couples shagging, two coeds sleeping soundly, or darn near anything in between. Just need to open the easter egg and see what kind of soon-to-be-grisly delight you find.
Trouble is, those are also very common traits of non-criminals. Who then become tarred with the same brush by those sorts of comparisons. It’s like a number of serial killers whose neighbours later described them as “quiet and reserved, and kept to themselves”. Should we be going around in mortal fear of quiet people who keep to themselves? Such associations serve no purpose, and are actively harmful.
Those traits also lead in the direction of incel, whether or not the guy had joined that online “community” / hate group or had even ever heard of it.
Gosh knows there are plenty of angry frustrated simmering young men wanting to take out their frustrations on random women. Which is another example of potential motive as to the crime, if not as to the specific victim by name.
The evidence seems scanty. Even if the evidence shows he was once in the home, and that his car was there, apparently there was DNA evidence everywhere, and from quite a few people. Showing that a young student had once been in a house populated by young students… what does that prove?
We’re going to have one of our rare moments of friendly disagreement. Those traits, in my view, don’t lead to anything. However, the behaviours described in the New York Post suggest a possibly unhealthy and obsessive relationship with women. Now that, if true, is indeed relevant and may suggest a possible motive for randomly targeting young women. But even that, at this point, is pure speculation.
The evidence we, the general public have is scanty. We don’t know what else the police have. Maybe the nature of the DNA evidence is more incriminating (like, being found under the victims’ fingernails, or semen from very close to the time of death). Maybe there are threatening texts from him. Maybe the victims’ friends have told police that he was making a nuisance of himself even after the victims told him to get lost. Maybe the police have found blood from the victims somewhere associated him, like on the clothes he was caught on camera wearing that day.
Or maybe the police don’t know any more than we do, and they’re just seizing wholeheartedly on the best suspect they have. We don’t know.
The trip home for Christmas isn’t unusual. Seems like the reporters are trying to imply Kohberger was fleeing.
It would be interesting to know if Kohberger had registered for Spring classes. He may have planned to return to school and act like nothing unusual had happened.
He was still in class after the murders. I can’t find the cite but his classmates said he didn’t participate in discussions of the murders. I don’t know if that adds to the conversation but it does place him at school after the murders and not immediately going home for the holidays.
Excellent point. I was sloppy. Thanks for fixing that.
Traits might lead to behaviors like these at some increased rate vs the background norm. Behaviors like these might indicate some tendency towards “unheathy obsession” as you properly put it. Again at some (probably unknown) rate above the background norm, whatever the is.
But all of that is about statistics about people in bulk, while we’re dealing here with specific instance(s) of specific individual(s). Increased likelihood, even greatly increased likelihood, is never the kind of A implies B implies C logic we see on TV.
And all of this is 100% speculation on fuzzy “facts” that may prove to be far from actually factual.
It will be interesting to watch this thing play out. Heck, we may end up with a replay akin to the JonBenet Ramsey situation where the cops flubbed the investigation, Kohberger gets his life turned inside-out but is eventually acquitted 5 years later, and the mystery remains fodder for CTers and Discover Channel “Its a Mystery!” garbage shows for decades to come.
At some point one has to ask how (and why) a 28-year old graduate student from one university winds up in the proximity of four undergraduate, under-21 students from a different university in another town.
The schools are only a few miles apart. Grad students aren’t supposed to date undergrads in their own departments or taking classes they TA. I’m not standing up for the guy, but neither the different school nor the grad/undergrad difference seems unusual to me.
Also, all the hoopla and suspicion around his Reddit survey feels a little bit misguided; the motivations and feelings of criminals about their crimes seems exactly the sort of thing a criminology Ph.D student would want to know.
This seems normal to me also. We would really need to know what is meant by being in the same area at the same time. Where I am now, a state university is right next to the downtown business offices and shopping area. Fraternity/sorority row is right on a main north/south road that many thousands of people use each day. My house, located far south of this area, has a satellite campus just four blocks away. I’d hate to think how many students my phone was in the same area with.
One thing I wonder is if he was identified as the stalker that one of the women was reported to have had at the beginning of the investigation. If police had his name way back then, their investigation into him specifically could be much more thorough than has been released.
They keep calling what he’s wearing in this photo a suicide vest. What does that mean? Is it like a straight jacket? The only suicide vest I know of has explosives on it and blows up people and the wearer.
Do you know this for sure? Because I can see a rather simple way to hang myself with that, unless you are saying once it’s on the prisoner can’t remove it. And that doesn’t account for whatever they give him to wear for pants.
