Exactly.
I would expect much more from anyone with Kohberger’s training.
I can easily imagine mistakes during the crime. Adrenaline is pumping and it’s a bloody scene. Criminals will make dumb mistakes. Like leaving a knife sheath behind.
It’s an issue the procesution needs to expect and explain in trial.
If he’d been more clever, he’d never have tried to commit these crimes to begin with. That’s been my take away from watching shows like Forensic Files and The FBI Files. One day you stumble into the perfect crime and get away Scot free, thirty years later the police are going through the contents of a vacuum cleaner bag that a police detective serendipitously took into evidence on the off chance that maybe one day it would be found to contain useful evidence, and in the meantime DNA evidence (which wasn’t even a thing at the time) has developed to the point that the killer’s DNA can be found and traced to the actual killer.
Or maybe there’s already some surveillance technology available (eg: cellphone location tracking from cell signals) that you just never knew about because it’s new or classified, but a few months later the police are able to make use of it to trace your whereabouts.
Or, as in this case, you think you’re so damn smart because you thought to turn off your cellphone, but didn’t consider (1) all the cameras that are all over the place these days and could catch your make, model, and color of car or even license place coming and going at odd hours and (2) how awfully big a coincide it would seem that during those exact same hours your cellphone—which is normally on and tracking your location—would be off.
Or, you had a great (well, terrible in light of the aim) plan, but you screwed up AND LEFT THE SHEATH TO THE MURDER WEAPON WITH YOUR DNA ON IT AT THE CRIME SCENE.
All great reasons to—if basic human empathy isn’t enough for you—refrain from deliberately murdering people. Unless you’re really not as smart as you think you are.
Anyway, nothing about being a PhD candidate requires practical sense, much less the empathy to just innately wanna not go around murdering people just because you think you can get away with it.
Well I wouldn’t. This (what Koberger did) is classic incel shit. They think because they read about something in school or on the internet they’re a master, when really they’re just some (murdering) twit who lacks the empathy to keep from engaging in the sort of anti-social behavior that a truly intelligent sociopath would at least have the sense to refrain from for fear of the consequences.
I’ve been watching too much CSI and other crime shows.
I agree trying to commit the perfect crime is stupid and impossible.
I’m thinking about how a defense attorney will present the case. Especially if the prosecution presents Kohberger as knowledgeable of police procedures.
Maybe it won’t come up in trial. The DA may realize this crime was clumsily executed by someone who thought they could outsmart the police
Nope. The DA knows that “this crime was clumsily executed by someone who thought they could outsmart the police.”
They’ve got all the evidence that a goofball thought he was a criminal genius. Until he tried it for real and did stupid shit up one side and down the other.
Killing people up close and personal is a lot more confusing and distracting than it looks on TV. Messier too. Vastly messier. Whole lotta veterans can vouch for that. Going on to do it three more times doesn’t smell to me like a cool-headed ninja assassin. More like somebody wacked out on his own adrenaline. Which among other things makes folks careless. And maybe, just maybe some pharmaceutical courage. Which also makes folks careless.
I joked upthread about the defense trying the “My client is too good a murderer to have done these murders” defense. IMO it’s right up there with the Chewbacca Defense as something that fails the laugh test.
Yes, you watch waaaay to much crime TV if you’re falling for this idea.
I don’t know how many PhD students you’ve met. “Clever” describes a large subset of such people, but certainly not the totality.
I’ve taught some very unintelligent doctoral students.
While the average IQ score of PhD students and academics, according to some studies, falls in the ‘superior’ range of around 125…
IQ PhD: Average IQ Score & Intelligence of PhD Students? - Academia Insider
That’s an average, so 50% fall below it.
Maybe PHD stands for post hole digger after all. 
Do Graduate students and Doctorial candidates usually serve internships?
I haven’t seen anything reported. It would make sense for Students to work in a lab. Cleaning up, preparing slides etc. and other work that wouldn’t jeopardize a case.
It doesn’t apply to the 4 students crime scene. I’ve just wondered what Graduate Students do besides teach. I had a Grad student teach my Intro to Criminal Justice course. It was in a large lecture hall and not very interesting.
Refresh my memory - what was his motive supposed to be?
A grad student should be doing research, writing a thesis (and taking classes) in order to get their degree - teaching is what they do to eat (and sleep inside).
(Citation: my time as a grad student 35 years ago)
Thanks Andy_L
This case is so sad and perplexing. Four lives with bright futures snuffed out. It’s even worse they didn’t have any connection to the suspect.
I hope they allow cameras in the courtroom. I want to follow the trial and watch key testimony. I’m trying to keep an open mind. But it certainly appears convincing that the right person is on trial. There’s always the possibility that things will change after all the testimony.
He was. I know how to kill people. I’ve shot real guns before. I’ve shot non-lethal (paintball) guns at people before. I have not shot a real gun at or stabbed a person, though. If I did, would I get a rush, as I’ve heard some serial killers do or would I be repulsed at what I had done? I can’t tell you until if & when I am ever in that situation. He allegedly knows firsthand. See, it was just research for his thesis. 
Wouldn’t a PhD candidate in behavioral medicine be more clever about killing one baby and injuring another?
Wouldn’t a plastic surgeon find more subtle ways of trying to kill a colleague?
Shouldn’t a highway patrol officer be more skilled at committing and covering up a murder?
Smart and/or trained people often do dumb things.
I’ve heard it’s Piled Higher and Deeper.
To answer my own question, it looks like the prosecution has not come up with a possible motive for the killings yet?
It’s not obvious to me that you need (much of) a motive to get a conviction.
Let’s talk about spree or serial killers for a moment. Those folks pick their victims essentially at random, or for having the right color hair or whatever attribute trips the killer’s trigger. There is no specific animosity between the killer and the target. The killer’s motive is simply their desire to kill somebody / somebody of that description.
Plenty of those kinds of folks are convicted. I see Koberger as cut from the spree killer cloth. What he did was actually pretty darn close to the standard definition. Had he cleanly gotten away from this event, and enjoyed his first (four) tastes of murder, he may well have grown into being a serial killer.
Koberger having an “I want to because I want to” thought is all the motive he needs. And if he managed to keep that thought private in his head, not publish it on the internet, then the cops / prosecution will be pretty much stymied about finding any externally visible motivation for what really is a “senseless” set of killings of those specific four people. Despite the gross overuse of the word “senseless” in media reports about homicides.
The prosecution’s burden in a case is to prove that that particular defendant did these particular deeds. Everything as to why is TV narrative stuff, not strictly germane to the prosecution burden.
It certainly makes the prosecution case more persuasive to human amateur jurors if they can produce evidence that gives the jurors a reason to hang their own suspicions on. Of course the husband killed his wife’s lover. Of course the blackmailee killed the blackmailer. Truth is: of course not. That’s kind of thinking is nonsense. Above all, it’s not consistent with the jury instructions. As a juror you don’t care why whatever happened happened. You only care whether the prosecution has established that illegal act(s) occurred, and that the defendant did them.
But it does help bad jurors reach a conviction decision for the wrong reasons. Which is hardly something people interested in the honest operation of a justice system would should applaud.
Yes. Although if he wasn’t arrested, that alone would feed whatever motive he needs to do the next.
Berkowitz (“Son of Sam”) shot people with a “.44 Bull Gun” - a good gun for self-defence - no sharp corners and you can load if with fairly low recoil ammo. He shot people in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens which made him hard to catch. Though one night his car got a parking ticket and two people were shots by the “.44 killer” who the clever New York Press had dubbed “Son of San” (his own words in threatening letters to police and journalists(.
Before the detectives even interviewed the guy, they saw a handgun in his backseat. In those days (1977) in NYC it was not only legal to own such a gun yet to leave it in your backseat. They knew they had their guy, yet went for the warrant on the car and waited, and waited, till that nut-shit got into his car, and as he predicted, cops with .38’s had guns from the driver and passenger side on him.
The serial killers that are had to find are those who target prostitutes. The victims get in the car and suddenly are almost nowhere. On Long Island, that tended to be the beach, Joel Rifkin (only recall his nans as he was a classmate of my oldest brother) wasn’t even a suspect (cops tend not to follow-up on disappeared hookers) till his pickup was pulled over (on Ocean Parkway - the one that runs along the shoreline) without any plates. And a tarp-covered body in the bay. They nailed for a lot more, also dumped/buried on the barrier island between Long Island (proper) and the Atlantic Ocean.
Another guy, a professional, is known as the "Gilgo Beach Killer"who also buried his bodies so close to where Rikkin did that that cops thought - even asked him - if it was him. But some disspared much later and this guy was found (not gonna look it up) via his family being out of town and other oddities and good detective stuff.
For my Criminology PhD I would assert:
The victim(s) should have no connection to me which rules out crimes of passion (why was OJ the first guy the cops wanted to interview?)
I will purchase a regular Bowie knife for cash in some distant pawn shop. And a good set of workman’s gloves, plus hospital-type rubber-inner gloves. And a belt or maybe vest with lots of pockets.
I will acquire a baklava and enjoy eating it, then get a black balaclava and a bunny suit however one gets one discreetly for cash.
Rent a pickup 20+ miles away
Put whatever is good to ride inside it - a mountain bike, snowmobile.
Case the house (why - not sure)
Go in for the murder spree.
Lose the bunny suit off in some woods, maybe after a swim. Clean the Bowie. Return the pickup. House of Pancakes breakfast. Hours later, check out the evening news.
That’s my understanding as well. Juries like stories but there are random killings.
Without seeing all the evidence and case yet, the sheath with the DNA is going to be hard to overcome.
I can see the prosecutor saying something like “We may never know why he picked these particular victims but we know he was scouting them out and this is his sheath.”
Yeah. Emphasize that the killings were deliberate long-planned acts while the killees were picked more or less at random.
That makes sense. Along with it, the plot line of a criminology PhD student wanting to kill somebody is enough to satisfy any holdout jurist questioning why.
Loser Koberger has always reminded me of a line from an old Tom Lehrer skit that goes about like this
Jones was majoring in Animal Husbandry. … Until they caught him at it one day.
Jones, and later Koberger, both got a little too close to their majors. Oops.