I totally respect your input here and learn so much, thank you.
However, with regard to BK (if guilty) writing or being interviewed... in the long term, I wonder if he's more likely to be one of the people who will enjoy interfacing with interviewers and forensic analysts even if only for the sake of game playing?
IMO we can surmise that BK had a difficult youth plagued with being different, being alone, and probably unhappily so. I think there's enough evidence to suggest this due to his being an overweight child, addiction history, account of ex neighbour who said he wanted to avoid getting in conversation with BK, issues at his university etc, that he was 'troubled', unhappy, friendless, and probably trying to deal with all this in a very private way and it wasn't working.
If so, his case resonates with two killers who did 'tell all' = Elliot Rodger and Jeffrey Dahmer, as well as Dennis Nilsen (UK) who was allegedly very helpful to detectives and spoke as to his motivations. I wonder if in this long term, once he's firmly convicted and beyond the appeals processes, BK will want to express his list of perceived grievances and injustices perpetrated against him by society? Also speaking gives him agency and control as well as attention. From his POV, I mean to say. JMO MOO
And I totally respect your opinion! I've actually gone back and forth on this one. There's something about his various court appearances and the way his facial settings have changed that make me think he's the type that can keep very quiet, and that's a main tool of his. And I did say "facial settings," because I think his TapATalk and other information make it clear that he has had to practice "normal" (normative?) behavior.
OTOH, when all is said and done (let's say he's on Death Row), then...maybe. I think he convinced Prof B at DeSales of his brilliance by never meeting her and only interacting in text. He was going to do "virtual interviews" on reddit for his master's (?! many questions there - I know my own grad advisors would never have allowed that, many reasons - but then, there was a whole university wide committee that had to approve every scrap of human subjects research for any student research). He certainly has been troubled, perhaps unhappy (he says in the TapATalk posts that he feels blank; that reality seems unreal to him, as if he's in a movie and while he understands he physically hurt his dad, he kinda sorta doesn't care - and he KNOWS that's unusual) .
Elliot Rodger didn't exactly tell all, IMO. He wrote an autobiography justifying what he was about to do - but never faced a court. Or, apparently, an inpatient unit or jail. I guess I could see BK doing something similar (a manifesto kind of thing). Jesperson is another one that was helpful to add to your list. He definitely "told all" to the guy who wrote/ghost wrote his biography - in the traditional fashion, where the author pushes him to tell the details we all want to hear - it's not a monologue like Elliot's. I don't want a monologue from Kohberger, either. I feel it's easy to predict what he is going to say in such a document. It will be very similar to Elliot's.
I don't care about his personal grievances, either. Instead, what I want is for him to sit down with someone (as Kemper and many others did with Dr. Donald Lunde - a mentor of mine and the reason I went into similar research). I could never come to close to Lunde in terms of technique (he was a legal psychiatrist and beyond brilliant). But I have interviewed quite a few criminals and I'm a good listener. I would never agree to just one long blurt-out of grievances, would never publish it. I want to know the psyche, the inner motivations that might help us understand how a person gets from a grievance collector - to a crime like this one. In every case (including Jesperson and Kemper and all the men I've interviewed), there *is* a psychosexual component (and family issues) that need to at least be aired out and not swept under the rug.
If he does do that thing where he's required to tell the court the answers to certain questions (I have a long list I think they'll want to ask him), then I'll consider that a full confession. But if he does the self-serving "I'm a grievance collector and all of you should see that my life made me do it!" that's not, to me, a confession or a tell all. Opposite. I want to know how many houses he thought about entering and how many he had actually entered. Truthfully. I want to know where he bought his knife/knives and what his intentions were when he bought them. I want to know whether he trained with those knives - and where he did that. And many more. These are the things that a jury wants to know - NOT that he had a Big Mad and "lost it" one night. Nope. Not a confession.
The older I get, the more persnickety I get. I've also seen that in jurors (esp older ones) and Judges. If BK can be "helpful" to detectives and tell all truthfully, then I will be pleased (as long as his sentence reflects his crime).
(I've been asked recently to think about and maybe write about how long I think it'll be until trial - and frankly, at the pace this is going, I'm thinking it will be 2-3 years more - and maybe longer if there are pre-trial appeals; rare as those are, that could happen here; I have opinions and theories about why that benefits the Defense - which is why I think it will happen; the parents meanwhile get older, live with not knowing - in this case knowing *almost* nothing about the circumstances and that irritates the heck out of me).
You and I may be dancing around on the head of a pin, of course - but I truly appreciate the dialogue.
IMO.
A good post.
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