4 Univ of Idaho Students Murdered - Bryan Kohberger Arrested - Moscow # 72

[Nova]

Looking at things as one large picture (in hindsight, of course), BK moving to Pullman and getting a new phone number, as a 28 year old student, might be telling. It has the feel of a "fresh start," which there isn't anything inherently wrong with, but seeing how things sort of spiraled for him from there, it makes me wonder why he needed the "fresh start" to begin with, especially with a new number. The confrontation with students and staff, the troubles with his TA job, etc., don't feel as much like triggers as they do yet another signal of how he was functioning. I can't call them triggers to the murders, even though the timing might appear so, because I think the PCA is suggesting that BK started possibly stalking the King RD residence as far back as August 2022, not too long after he arrived. I'm sure there was a compounding effect with it all, but I'm curious. Why did he need a new phone number?

I'm not "diagnosing" BK because (a) I'm not qualified to do so; and (b) nobody should assign a diagnosis from afar; but I think it's clear he was "decompensating" in a major way. Being so far away from home for the first time PLUS the general pressures of anyone's first year in a doctoral program PLUS his problems TAing with both the professor and the students PLUS his seeming inability to create a new group of friends are all stressors which can contribute to decompensation.

Oxford definition of "decompensation" in psychiatry (the part I deleted deals with schizophrenia and I don't think anybody has called BK that):

• PSYCHIATRY
  the failure to generate effective psychological coping mechanisms in response to stress, resulting in personality disturbance or disintegration....
  
  

 

[Nova]

I am reminded of something he stated in his essay application for a Pullman PD internship. Paraphrasing from the AA, he would be assisting rural agencies in how to better collect and analyze technological data. I may be nitpicking but it sounded to me as if he intended to teach them, not the other way around.

I am currently training someone who listens, and then does what they think best. And makes no apologies about it. Almost seems surprised when I point out errors in their work, does not seem the least bit affected. I think this might be a BK trait as well.

That bit about "rural agencies" may have been genuine, but it sure strikes my ear as "telling them what they want to hear", or at least what BK thought they wanted to hear.

IMHO, obviously. I wasn't there.

 

[Nova]

I might say something unpopular now, but I really blame the professor here.
He left tedious work of grading tests to a person who was completely not fit for this purpose.

The students were victims here - and they are the most important, they trust and pay for quality education.

Instead, they were subjected to twisted, unfair treatment by a person who should have never been given this job.
And it is professor's task to choose the best candidate.
JMO

Where I TAed and later supervised TAs, I never once got to choose my assistants. (This isn't a complaint; I worked with great people, really without exception!) TAs were assigned by the committee that governed each program. (As I said on a previous thread, TAships were treated more like financial aid than "jobs".)

I agree the professor shares the blame for the "group intervention"--which I still find appalling--but he may or may not have had any say in who assisted him. He probably was able to request BK's dismissal, given evidence of unsuitability, but I doubt he hired BK in the first place.

 

[Nova]

Regarding whether BK could have continued his doctoral program after being fired from his TA position:

While I agree with those who posted on the "technical merits" of him being able to continue, my limited experience with PhD students is that collegiality is a necessity for success & having your degree conferred.

BK was lacking the main thing he would need to be successful in this program at WSU.

He was toast. Even if he were not arrested for mass murderer, continuing would have been impossible.

You can scrape enough black off his toast to make it palatable! Who would agree to research, collaborate or study with him?

Maybe - maybe - he could have found another specialty or another PhD program somewhere to admit him.

Glad it's a moot point.

MY OPINION ONLY

No, not only your opinion. Mine, too.

What you write would have been true in my doctoral program. Student eligibility wasn't reviewed until after the first oral exams at the end of Year 1, but being fired from your TAship is so extreme, I highly doubt a student would be allowed to continue after the first year recapitulation.

 

[I'm Nobody]

He not only lacked people skills, he also had no experience or serious training in teaching. And given his tendency to flaunt his knowledge, he probably didn't have the disposition to be a good teacher. Teaching isn't just lecturing and marking papers. It requires a certain amount of humility; teachers have to understand what it means to "not know" things, to be able to plan learning experiences for students to gain knowledge and control of a field, to try to learn themselves and fail--and then try again. That is, good teaching requires standards and empathy.

Yes Yes Yes @pittsburghgirl
IMO BK never wanted to be a teacher nor was teaching his life's dream. I think the TA job was bc of $$ and the cheapest way for him to get into a PhD program. Nor do I believe BK was inspired to be a police officer to protect and serve/help his community but more wanting a badge for authority; maybe for a cloak of respectability he had never found.
He did not seem to care about anything other than studying crime.
He did not seem to have any real devoted life plan at 28 y o.

As many have said here, he needed to be the smartest person in the room.
I think any room any where as long as he could continue his criminal studies/fantasies.

Einstein: ‘The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.’
MOO

 

[iamshadow21]

Does anyone remember what type of surface the shoe print was found on? I am remembering carpet, but could be totally wrong. According to the article below, amido black is most reliable on non porous surfaces, not so much on others:

“Amido black is very sensitive and works well on non-porous surfaces but its high background color (light to medium blue) compromises contrast on multi-colored porous surfaces.

Amido Black is a protein stain, and as such should not be considered as even a presumptive test for blood, let alone a confirmatory test. The protein may be present in other body fluids, in addition to blood. However, other actual presumptive tests may be successful after the application of amido black.”

Latent Blood Prints – Methods For Chemical Enhancement

This article reviews three popular methods for blood print enhancement: Amido Black, Leuco Crystal Violet (LCV) and Hungarian Red

www.crime-scene-investigator.net

Interested in other opinions about this.

The floors throughout are modern lino, as you can see if you look through the photo gallery linked at the beginning of each thread. Lino is non-porous and is great for retrieving clear prints.

The Amido black, in my opinion, was not used to identify blood or other body fluids, that was done with the presumptive test. When they knew the proteins were there, they used Amido black to stain it so that they could photograph it. Photographing prints this way is far easier than photographing prints revealed by Luminol, for example, which requires the chemical to make it glow and the area to be blacked out.

MOO

 

[DizzyB]

Those don't strike me as mutually exclusive reactions. BK could be devastated and at the same time feel the firing wasn't his fault.

In fact, losing his job might be even MORE devastating if he believed he wasn't to blame.

I completely agree. He may have been unable to fully understand the reasons for his termination. I wonder about locus of control. Did he believe if he changed his behavior, it would make any difference? Or was this a total inability to control his emotions in any circumstance?

 

[Charlot123]

This is true and was likely becoming true even 10 years ago. But it's still not free and Bryan was just finishing high school, I think?

It would have been about $10 per gram from what I can tell using today's figures and trying to compensate for inflation. I have no idea how long a gram might last someone.

He was also playing video games like Elderscrolls that are $25 a pop (plus a subscription, I believe), and I would assume he'd played the prequels to the Oblivion segment that he mentions on TapATalk (he says that the world inside the Oblivion game, bleak and lonely, is like his world).

At any rate, he does have that pizza job at around this time (although we don't know how long he kept it).

IMO.

This is a very good question, and also, even if heroin is "cheap", it is probably cheap for a one-time use, not for addicts. Addicts are chronically short of money and eventually, lose everything. Hard as I might try, I can see only a few ways to make money to support a habit for a teenager, and all of them would be street-related. One of obvious legal ways, fleecing the parents, doesn't seem feasible in this case. Some teens work, of course, but many might resell drugs. Do you think that to be a successful opiate dealer, one has to have some social skills? I believe that criminal part aside, it is still "sales business", so, yes. Also, his record is clean, it might have been sealed at 18, but I don't believe he'd have a chance in criminology if it were very dirty.
Maybe something else.

 

[Charlot123]

I might say something unpopular now, but I really blame the professor here.
He left tedious work of grading tests to a person who was completely not fit for this purpose.

The students were victims here - and they are the most important, they trust and pay for quality education.

Instead, they were subjected to twisted, unfair treatment by a person who should have never been given this job.
And it is professor's task to choose the best candidate.
JMO

Well, the students and the professor are traumatized now, so I am trying to imagine how it looked IRL. Chances are, the professor might have not met with BK personally before admission, Covid restrictions notwithstanding. They probably spoke on Zoom, so, there was no feeling of the atmosphere in the room. And if you remember, in one of the first interviews, a male student said that BK was not too harsh on him. So maybe he "behaves" better with men. And, give or take, he is smart, and was truly interested in criminology, for whatever purposes, so this is exactly what his professor saw. A young criminology enthusiast.

So... Let us talk about WSU. Acceptance rate of students - 86%. SAT score - between1020 and 1240. This is in general; I assume that some programs are more competitive, some less. I doubt that criminology is the most competitive one. So I believe that the professor, like the ones before him, thought he was getting an excellent TA. Not his fault that he got BK.

Usually, young people in the position of power can be either too soft, or too harsh on the students. If i were to take a guess, i'd think most would be too soft.

 

[Dotta]

When I read that there was a party with nearly 150 people in the house the previous night I lost hope Police could find perp's traces there.

Only successful traces might be if they were directly connected to victims' bodies/blood/beds.

It was a miracle that a sheath with perp's DNA was there.

JMO

 

[Momac-07]

I found it odd when the father told the officer, "My son is a student at WSU." As if a cop in the Great Lakes Midwest would automatically know the dad meant Washington State.

Pullman is by no means the only "WSU". There's Weber State U. in Utah, and an entire system of Wisconsin State Universities. Wayne State and Wright State are both near Indiana, the former in Detroit and the latter in Dayton.
Yet Mr. K assumed the officer would know he meant Washington State, even though it was almost 1,500 miles away and much farther than a number of other "WSUs".

I doubt this proves anything but Mr. K's lack of sophistication and knowledge of higher education. No wonder he was proud his son was in a Ph.D. program!

Wordsmithed is not a term I would associate with that PCA, especially not "expertly." MOO I'm sure there's plenty of strategy in it, but wordsmithing?? No. MOO

What do you think wordsmith means? Your message implies it’s a negative thing - it simply means ”skilled user of words”. Which is exactly what the authors of the PCA did - very skillfully IMO.

 

[ktm44]

When I read that there was a party with nearly 150 people in the house the previous night I lost hope Police could find perp's traces there.

Only successful traces might be if they were directly connected to victims' bodies/blood/beds.

It was a miracle that a sheath with perp's DNA was there.

JMO

I can't remember if that has been verified or is that something floating around on social media.

 

[Justice101]

When I read that there was a party with nearly 150 people in the house the previous night I lost hope Police could find perp's traces there.

Only successful traces might be if they were directly connected to victims' bodies/blood/beds.

It was a miracle that a sheath with perp's DNA was there.

JMO

Yes agree! And where did I see that there was a FINITE number of samples taken from the house. Wasn't it only like 150 samples and items removed?? You don't need to take DNA sample from the bathrooms, kitchen, etc...only areas that are directly in the path and/or related to the murders.

Even though others will vehemently disagree with my opinion, since it looks like there was only a little DNA on the underside of the snap of the sheath, I would not be surprised if he wiped it off before he left and had on his gloves and DELIBERATELY left the sheath there to taunt/throw off LE. What he didn't do was dunk the whole sheath in rubbing alcohol. He probably just wiped it down cleanly but didn't get every nook and cranny.

His biggest weakness is his overly developed sense of pride of his brilliance.

He's so smart that he is dumb in that regard. He can't see the forest for the trees. We've all met people like that.

JMO

 

[Justice101]

<modsnip>

I wouldn't discount self harm.

- cuts on face and throat
(supposedly from shaving)
- a big bruise on throat
- some cuts on hands/wrist
(during the traffic stop, were they from the night of murders?,
were they just shadows?)
- stained bed linen taken from the flat
( was it his blood?)

I also think he is terrified of dying.

His alleged "murderous fantasy" got out of hand and now, when arrested, he is scared stiff.

He lost his "superior" look and is following meekly the advice of his FEMALE attorney.

Just my opinion

Yes, I thought that the other day. He hates women and thinks they are inadequate as students. Now he gets a female public defended. Chew on that for a while BK.

 

[Dotta]

Yes agree! And where did I see that there was a FINITE number of samples taken from the house. Wasn't it only like 150 samples and items removed?? You don't need to take DNA sample from the bathrooms, kitchen, etc...only areas that are directly in the path and/or related to the murders.

Even though others will vehemently disagree with my opinion, since it looks like there was only a little DNA on the underside of the snap of the sheath, I would not be surprised if he wiped it off before he left and had on his gloves and DELIBERATELY left the sheath there to taunt/throw off LE. What he didn't do was dunk the whole sheath in rubbing alcohol. He probably just wiped it down cleanly but didn't get every nook and cranny.

His biggest weakness is his overly developed sense of pride of his brilliance.

He's so smart that he is dumb in that regard. He can't see the forest for the trees. We've all met people like that.

JMO

I also think the DNA is underneath the snap.
And he possibly cleaned only the outer surfaces.
JMO

 

[Dotta]

"The decision to eliminate his funding and remove him as a TA was based on his unsatisfactory performance in the position, including his failure to meet the “norms of professional behavior” in his dealings with the faculty, according to the sources."

Bryan Kohberger fired as teaching assistant before arrest in student killings

Bryan Kohberger was fired as a teaching assistant at Washington State University after it investigated him for run-ins with a professor and his behavior toward women in the weeks leading up to his …

nypost.com

 

[Deleted member 718]

Police have ‘no record’ of whether Bryan Kohberger was offered internship position

The Independent filed a public records request with the Pullman Police Department earlier this year

www.independent.co.uk

The Washinton state police department that interviewed Bryan Kohberger for an internship months before the Idaho murders has “no documentation” regarding whether he was offered the position.

The Independent filed a public records request with the Pullman Police Department earlier this year, asking for any documents relating to Mr Kohberger’s application for the research assistantship for public safety position.

One of the core goals of the request was to determine whether Mr Kohberger had been offered the position - as the department had previously declined to answer that question.


A public records officer responded to the request with 10 documents on Friday - but with a major caveat.

“The Pullman Police Department does not have any documentation regarding whether or not Mr. Kohberger was chosen for the internship position,” the officer stated in an email.

​

 

[Dotta]

Police have ‘no record’ of whether Bryan Kohberger was offered internship position

The Independent filed a public records request with the Pullman Police Department earlier this year

www.independent.co.uk

The Washinton state police department that interviewed Bryan Kohberger for an internship months before the Idaho murders has “no documentation” regarding whether he was offered the position.

The Independent filed a public records request with the Pullman Police Department earlier this year, asking for any documents relating to Mr Kohberger’s application for the research assistantship for public safety position.

One of the core goals of the request was to determine whether Mr Kohberger had been offered the position - as the department had previously declined to answer that question.


A public records officer responded to the request with 10 documents on Friday - but with a major caveat.

“The Pullman Police Department does not have any documentation regarding whether or not Mr. Kohberger was chosen for the internship position,” the officer stated in an email.

​

Well,
A Success has many fathers
But...
A Failure is an orphan

 

[10ofRods]

Yes agree! And where did I see that there was a FINITE number of samples taken from the house. Wasn't it only like 150 samples and items removed?? You don't need to take DNA sample from the bathrooms, kitchen, etc...only areas that are directly in the path and/or related to the murders.

Even though others will vehemently disagree with my opinion, since it looks like there was only a little DNA on the underside of the snap of the sheath, I would not be surprised if he wiped it off before he left and had on his gloves and DELIBERATELY left the sheath there to taunt/throw off LE. What he didn't do was dunk the whole sheath in rubbing alcohol. He probably just wiped it down cleanly but didn't get every nook and cranny.

His biggest weakness is his overly developed sense of pride of his brilliance.

He's so smart that he is dumb in that regard. He can't see the forest for the trees. We've all met people like that.

JMO

Why do you think it's only a "little" DNA on the sheath? How much DNA would it take to be considered a medium or large amount?

I'm just asking because a person sheds about 500,000,000 epithelial cells every day - with many of them rubbed off on things we use. It's very likely the DNA was deposited over time, each time the owner of the sheath opened and shut it. I figure the tiny groove around the edge of the snap (and the other half of the snap) would contain hundreds of thousands of epithelial cells in various stages of disintegration - but the DNA won't disintegrate. DNA lasts a very long time indeed. It is also very tiny. So there could thousands and thousands of chromosome bits on that sheath.

Half life of DNA is about 600 years, but there are bits of DNA that are much older. There would still be DNA on that sheath after 600 years, IMO, and some of it would be in the actual leather (where it is very hard to clean off). They likely will test the sheath again as part of ongoing discovery, now that a destructive test could be ordered by a judge (it wouldn't really destroy much of the sheath, but it isn't usually done without approval of a court, when there are opposing parties both wanting results).

There is no reason that even one of BK's chromosomal segments should be found on an object on the bed of the deceased victims, IMO.

And no, I don't believe that someone stole BK's knife (using gloves) and planted it.

IMO.

 

[10ofRods]

I also think the DNA is underneath the snap.
And he possibly cleaned only the outer surfaces.
JMO

Yep, me too. And in the leather itself. Leather is a really good medium for capturing and preserving DNA, but of course, the procedure for obtaining the human DNA (separate from the bovine) is a bit more complicated than a swab would be. Although a swab could have turned up DNA on the leather, of course - all that's needed is one good sample to tie someone to an object. In this case, so far, only one person's DNA is there.

I suspect the defense will want extensive testing of that sheath, in the hopes of confusing the jury with bovine and possibly other human DNA left over from manufacture. However, the most recent user of the sheath (BK) will have likely deposited so much DNA on that sheath that very little other DNA would be found (perhaps none at all, depending on how the sheaths are made and packaged).

I think NewsNation should visit the Ka-Bar manufacturing plant and give us a look inside. The sheaths are apparently made in Mexico, according to the Ka-Bar site, so I would assume that would aid in figuring out who is a worker at Ka-Bar and who is not.

IMO. (Only partly joking).