(HorizonPost.com) – Bryan Kohberger, the 29-year-old currently awaiting trial for the murders of four University of Idaho students in November 2022, was possibly fixated on one of the victims, 21-year-old Madison Mogen, according to a new book by reporter Howard Blum.
In an interview on ABC’s “Nightline,” Blum said investigators believed that Kohberger likely targeted Mogen because he passed by the rooms of the two students who were unharmed in the attack before he began killing.
Blum, whose book When the Night Comes Calling: A Requiem for the Idaho Student Murders went on sale Tuesday, said if this had just been a “killing spree,” Kohberger’s instinct would have been to stop at each room rather than bypass the downstairs rooms to go up the staircase where his first stop was in Mogen’s room.
Blum concluded that it was likely Mogen was Kohberger’s primary target.
In his book, Blum also claims that Kohberger’s father Michael said he noticed that his son was “on edge” when he picked him up from Washington State University, where Kohberger was pursuing a Ph.D in criminal justice.
Blum said on “Nightline” that Michael Kohberger was aware of the murders and that the students were killed just 12 miles from where his troubled son was living.
He also claims that one of Kohberger’s sisters expressed suspicions to her father, but he dismissed them because he did not want to “confront” the possibility that his son was a killer.
Kohberger was arrested about six weeks after the bodies of the four students were found in a rental property near the University of Idaho’s Moscow campus on November 13, 2022.
The students were all fatally stabbed. Kohberger was linked to the crime scene from DNA found on the knife sheath left at the scene. Surveillance footage and cell phone data also placed Kohberger in the area at the time of the murders.
During his arraignment in May 2023, Kohberger refused to enter a plea so the judge pleaded not guilty on behalf of the defendant.
The judge scheduled a hearing on June 27 to discuss a possible trial date in the case.
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