On December 29, 2022, at 9:08 a.m., Bryan Kohberger read an article in The New York Times about the police search for the driver of a white 2011-2013 Hyundai Elantra.
Just two minutes later, he looked online for an “auto detailing shop.” By 9:19 a.m., he was searching for used cars like the Ford Fusion, Volkswagen Jetta, and Honda Civic. This information came from digital forensics expert Heather Barnhart, who was hired by prosecutors to check Kohberger’s phone and computer.
By the next morning, Kohberger was already in the custody of Pennsylvania State Troopers, waiting to be sent back to Idaho to face charges for killing four University of Idaho students.
Other searches on his devices during this time show that he was becoming more paranoid as police closed in on him at his parents’ home.
On December 29, Barnhart said, Kohberger searched for topics like “psychopaths paranoid,” “wiretapping,” and “serial killers.” That same day, he downloaded information about serial killer Wayne Nance, who was killed at age 30 while trying to murder his boss and attack his boss’s wife.
The day before, Kohberger downloaded a Fox News article reporting that 90 Hyundai Elantras had been given parking registrations by the University of Idaho between 2018 and 2022. The article did not mention anything about out-of-state searches for the car, even though Kohberger’s Elantra was registered in Washington.
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(749x0:751x2):format(webp)/bryan-kohberger-car-71525-d0d9746bcca54ff8b587041370c41c08.jpg)
Kohberger also downloaded four daily updates on the Idaho murders from the Moscow Police Department on December 28. On Christmas Day, he had spent hours downloading articles about more than 20 serial killers.
Barnhart, who has worked on high-profile cases from the Delphi murders to Osama Bin Laden, said she was surprised by what she and her team found.
“I feel like we were just in shock thinking, where the heck is the data and what are we going to do?” Barnhart explained.
She said Kohberger was very skilled at deleting or hiding digital evidence. “He was really good at the anti-forensics aspect on his hard drive, too.”
Still, her team was able to recover enough key information to help the investigation. The searches from December 28 and 29 were especially important because Kohberger had not yet fully erased them.
At the same time that he was looking up “wiretapping” and “psychopaths paranoid,” authorities were already watching his home. They had been conducting surveillance for days.
Just after midnight on December 30, 2022, state troopers and FBI agents carried out a search warrant at Kohberger’s parents’ house and arrested him.
A week later, he was returned to Idaho for his first court appearance. There, a judge charged him with the murders of Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle, and Ethan Chapin.
