Bryan Kohberger was arrested in connection with the Idaho Four murders on December 30, 2022 – but less than two weeks after he was taken into custody, police wondered if he could be linked to another crime with creepy similarities.
On October 10, 2021, a 20-year-old student from Washington State University woke up around 3:30 a.m. to see a figure in her bedroom wearing a ski mask and holding a knife. According to police reports obtained by People, she was living with other female roommates just off campus at the time – similar to the Idaho murder victims’ living arrangements.
Seemingly not realizing that she was awake, the intruder stood at the foot of her bed. The young woman then kicked the person in the stomach and the perpetrator fled the scene.
The student reported the terrifying incident to local authorities, but Kohberger was not looked into as a potential suspect until after his arrest.
While the now-convicted murderer was not a student at Washington State University at the time of the break-in – he would go on to enroll the following year – it did occur on the weekend that the university’s Criminal Justice and Criminology Department scheduled an event for potential students.
However, police ended their investigation into the 30-year-old when the school’s Graduate Program Coordinator claimed there was no record of Kohberger attending any of the college’s events that weekend.
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Nearly one year after the incident, Ethan Chapin, 20, Xana Kernodle, 20, Madison Mogen, 21, and Kaylee Goncalves, 21, were found dead at their own shared off-campus home in Moscow, Idaho – less than 10 miles from where the WSU student lived.
The attacks on Goncalves and Kernodle in particular were reported to be so violent – both suffered dozens of stab wounds – that one of their surviving roommates misidentified their bodies to police.
“I was unable to comprehend exactly what I was looking at while trying to discern the nature of the injuries,” an officer said of the murder scene, according to the Idaho Statesman.
As the National Enquirer previously reported, Kohberger was arrested in December 2022 and pleaded not guilty to all charges. More than two years later, he changed his plea to “guilty” as part of a plea agreement to avoid the potential of facing the death penalty if the case went to trial.
On July 23, he was ordered to serve four consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole. He is currently housed at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution in Kuna, Idaho.