Bryan Kohberger to Be Sentenced in Killing of 4 Idaho Students

Bryan Kohberger, a former Ph.D. student in criminology who pleaded guilty in the fatal stabbing of four University of Idaho students, will hear from the victims’ families in court for the first time on Wednesday as a judge considers his sentence for the crimes.

Mr. Kohberger, 30, has already agreed to accept four consecutive life sentences as part of a plea deal that allows him to avoid the death penalty. But many questions remain unanswered, including one that has vexed investigators and families for years: What was the motive?

Prosecutors have said Mr. Kohberger had no known relationship to the victims, and even President Trump urged the judge in the case to press for answers before sentencing. “I hope the Judge makes Kohberger, at a minimum, explain why he did these horrible murders,” Mr. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on Monday. “There are no explanations, there is no NOTHING.”

Family members of the students will have a chance to address the court, an emotional conclusion to a case that created fear across the small college town where the murders occurred and elicited sympathy nationwide for the students whose lives were cut short. Some family members have expressed outrage that prosecutors agreed to drop their bid for the death penalty in exchange for the guilty plea.

Mr. Kohberger was a student at nearby Washington State University when the murders occurred sometime around 4 a.m. on Nov. 13, 2022. The victims — Kaylee Goncalves, 21; Madison Mogen, 21; Xana Kernodle, 20; and Ethan Chapin, 20 — had spent a typical Saturday night out near their campus before returning to the three-story house that several of the students shared.

Two roommates survived the night. Text messages show that they discussed a masked person one of them had briefly seen inside the home, but neither seemed aware that something so horrific has happened. A 911 call was made more than seven hours later after several additional friends gathered at the home.

Mr. Kohberger was not identified as a suspect until weeks later, after investigators used DNA that was found on a knife sheath on one of the victims’ beds to build a genetic family tree that led them to Mr. Kohberger, who by then had left school and was staying at his parents’ house in Pennsylvania.

Questions immediately arose about his training in criminology. He had studied in detail how police process crime scenes and researched high-profile murders under the teaching of a serial-killer expert.

Investigators have laid out other evidence tying Mr. Kohberger to the killings, including records showing that he had purchased a Ka-Bar knife and a sheath a few months earlier. Surveillance footage showed a white car similar to his circling the students’ house around the time of the killings.

Mr. Kohberger provided only a vague alibi, saying he had been merely driving around in the area at the time, and initially denied any involvement.

In a hearing on July 2, he took full responsibility for all four murders, but said nothing about how or why they occurred. It was not clear whether Mr. Kohberger planned to make a statement during his sentencing.

Family members of Mr. Chapin said they did not plan to attend the hearing. In a Facebook post on Monday, the Goncalves family shared Mr. Trump’s post about the case.

“I definitely do not want to get into politics at all so I hesitated even posting this but wow. Absolutely shocked,” it said. “Kaylee, Maddie, Xana, Ethan — you have always mattered so much.”