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Newly uncovered posts made by an online forum may give us insight into Brian Koberger's character. Between November of 2009 and February 2012, while Koberger was a teenager, he allegedly made 118 posts, and in one of them he said he felt no emotion and said, quote, I can say and do whatever I want with little remorse. This is The Idaho Massacre, a production of KT Studios and iHeartRadio. Episode 7, KT.
In the dark. I'm Courtney Armstrong, a television producer at KT Studios with Stephanie Lidecker, Jeff Shane, and Connor Powell.
In July of 2011, a user going by the name XR posted on an online chat forum that, quote, The chilling statement is just one of more than 100 messages believed to be authored by a then-teenage Brian Koberger on the website Tapatalk.
In post after post, Koberger claimed to be suffering from a little-known neurological syndrome called visual snow. The rare condition has a range of disorienting symptoms, but the most common is constantly seeing snow-like flecks or black and white scattered dots, like the static on an old analog television. I see a large intensity of black, yellow, white fuzz. It makes my mind fizzle, and I can barely keep in the bounds of reality.
Koberger wrote that his condition led to anxiety, depression, and quote, crazy thoughts. These posts paint a picture of a deeply troubled person who would later turn to heroin and develop an obsessive interest in violent criminals. Koberger's dark mind and law enforcement background has led many to draw similarities to other serial killers like Dennis Radar.
Radar dubbed himself, quote, "the BTK for his fondness to bind, torture, and kill his victims." And Joseph James DeAngelo, otherwise known as the Golden State Killer. Both had a history of disturbing thoughts and an intense interest in law enforcement. So how does Brian Koberger fit into the larger history of killers? What in his background could have potentially led Koberger down a path to murder?
How did he go from someone who caught criminals to potentially becoming a killer himself? Or could he have potentially evolved into a killer as he descended deeper into the dark world of criminology? When investigators released the probable cause affidavit in the University of Idaho murders, the 19-page document laid out much of the evidence linking Koberger to the crime.
According to police, the 28-year-old criminology student's DNA was on a knife sheath found at the murder scene. And a white Elantra, like the one Koberger drove, was seen driving past the home on King Road multiple times. Koberger's phone also repeatedly pinged on towers near the house in the weeks before the grisly murders. But one key piece of the puzzle was conspicuously missing from the probable cause affidavit. Motif.
Here's Jeff and Stephanie. Motive is an essential part of the criminal justice process. Its official definition is the moving course, the impulse, or the desire that induces criminal action on the part of the accused. Basically, why did this crime or murder happen? As rational humans, we crave a justification for otherwise senseless and horrible acts.
I mean, it's a very important piece of the court process and it's not a requirement to get a conviction. But look, jurors really want to make sense of the case. This case is so fascinating, not only because of the sheer atrocity of the murders, but also because of the accused trajectory and how complex it is. Up until December 2022, Brian Kohlberger seemingly had wanted to be a hero. He told his friends he had hoped to study high profile criminals and aspired to help catch quote unquote bad guys.
This is the part that doesn't totally make sense about this case. How and why does Koberger go from that to being accused of brutally murdering four people? I speak for the general public when I say we're all immensely curious.
I guess depending upon what is revealed at trial, we may get a motive at some point. But as of right now, there really doesn't appear to be one. So it raises the question, was Brian Koberger born a killer or did something happen in his life to turn him into a monster? And one thing worth noting, listen, we don't officially know about Koberger's mental state. But what we do know is what he said about his symptoms around his condition called visual snow. And that's probably a pretty decent place to start.
Understanding visual snow is still not fully well understood. A lot of how it works or how it's affecting the brain is under kind of hypothesis. Kohlberger wrote on the Tap Talk forum that his visual snow symptoms began in September of 2009 when he was just 14 years old. He admitted the condition changed him, saying he became more anxious and developed a sense of derealization and hopelessness.
Joseph Allen is a doctor of optometry who has studied visual snow. He also suffers from the rare condition. Here he is speaking with Jeff.
You obviously never treated Brian Koberger or know his state of mind, but for someone who's maybe not in the best state of mind, how do you think throwing visual snow on top of that would affect someone? So there is associations with visual snow and with depression and anxiety. Those probably are the two most consistent ones. On top of like headaches, like a lot of people who have visual snow usually have a history of migraines. It's like almost 60%.
of people who have visual snow syndrome also have a history of migraine headaches. You're somebody with visual snow and you're seeing visual phenomenon like this that you can't explain, that doctors maybe are being dismissive about, and you have other forms of anxiety or depression, I think it can really become more isolating.
In posts on the online visual snow forum, Koberger suggests he turned to the internet in 2009 in hopes of finding help. But in the absence of answers to his questions, Koberger said he felt like the demons in his head were mocking him.
As a result, he grew distant from the people around him. In a July 2011 post, Koberger wrote, "...I have had this horrible depersonalization in my life for almost two years. As I hug my family, I look into their faces, I see nothing. It is like I'm looking at a video game, but less. I am blank. I have no opinion. I have no emotion. I have nothing."
This type of disconnection is common for people suffering from eye issues, particularly visual snow. Here again, Dr. Joseph Allen speaking with Jeff.
I have identified as having visual snow. I fit the diagnosis requirements. It's something that I've struggled with since I was a kid. Like I can think of like maybe nine years old, third grade is when I first, I think, became just more perceptually aware of what was happening with my eyes. But like most people who have visual snow, they don't, either no one talks about it or we just sort of, you know, you grow up with it all your life and you just sort of assume that's how everybody sees it.
So did you go into optometry because you felt like you had eye issues? I think there is definitely some pull there. At a young age, around age seven, eight, I got thick glasses. And ultimately, I think what drove me to be in the profession is because I got contact lenses. Getting contact lenses allowed me to play sports and that helped me make friends. And having that boost of self-confidence at age of 13. It's interesting that you bring up optometry.
how getting your eyes kind of taken care of really opened up a lot of doors for you socially and kind of changed your life for the better because Brian Koberger struggled socially his whole life. He didn't connect with girls. He didn't really have a lot of friends. And so it makes you wonder, is it maybe because he couldn't see properly? Like he wasn't connecting with the world the way he felt he could have been. I think eyesight is super important. Like for my case, sports, like kids,
Like kids make much better social connections if they're involved in activities with other kids. And for me, it was hard to play football. You can't really play football with thick glasses on. So for me, getting into contact lenses really was that key to opening up that whole other stream of life for me.
But by his teenage years, Brian Koberger wrote on Tapatog he wasn't making personal connections with family or friends. Instead, his mind was moving in a darker direction. In posts as a then 16-year-old, Koberger wrote that his visual snow condition made him feel like a, quote, "...organic sack of meat with no self-worth."
He berated himself for his expanding array of mental struggles that ranged from depression to delusions of grandeur to anxiety to constant thoughts of suicide. Koberger even wrote lyrics to a rap song saying, Again, Joseph Allen.
There is no evidence right now that visual snow syndrome would cause mental illness, but it is, I think in his case, if he has mental illness and then a visual snow on top of it, it
it's like augmenting it. It's giving him more, maybe more reasons to lose grip on his own sense of reality, perhaps. There is some reported, on top of depression and anxiety, there is something called depersonalization and derealization, which is associated with it. Depersonalization, it kind of refers to these feelings that you've detached from your physical body or even from kind of your own mind.
And so people will feel that they are robotic or being maybe controlled by somebody else. And there's this concept of derealization, which I like to think of it as the matrix syndrome. If you've ever seen that movie, The Matrix, where people feel like the world around them isn't real. They feel that it's artificial. And you can imagine if you have visual snow syndrome and you see this static all the time, you could be like, well, maybe...
my body is just like a video game character and somebody else outside of this make-believe world I live in is actually controlling me. So I think if you have already existing mental illness, a poor grip on reality, a poor social structure, and then maybe having these feelings of depersonalization, derealization, then it's easier maybe to lose emotional connection between
other people and even maybe what's right and wrong. Let's stop here for a break. We'll be back in a moment. MITRE is investing in a massive AI supercomputer to power a new federal AI sandbox. With AI's potential to drive transformational advances across industries, MITRE's expertise in healthcare, cybersecurity, transportation, finance, climate, and national security will be critical. Transform your career while helping solve problems for a safer world.
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By 2011, Brian Kohlberger was desperate for a solution. The effects of visual snow were weighing on him. He wrote on the online forum that he visited a neurologist and took anti-migraine medicine. Neither worked.
Kohlberger later adopted a strict diet, removing sugar, bread, wheat, soy, and other carbohydrates from his meals. High school friends described him during this time as obsessive about his new health regime, which did help him lose a significant amount of weight, at least 100 pounds, if not more. And, according to his own words, Kohlberger began to improve.
Koberger wrote on the Tap Talk forum in February of 2012 that he had accepted his visual snow and that the condition no longer scared him. However, in his final post, he also said, quote, Again, Stephanie and Jeff.
Between 2012 and 2013, Kohlberger went through this huge transformation. After several years of feeling very down and depressed, according to reports, he really started to turn things around and turned a corner. He adopted a new diet. He started to lose a ton of weight. And he was apparently much more happy about life and seemingly more optimistic.
But it's also around this time that he gets kicked out of the law enforcement educational vocation program and ends up having to finish high school remotely in the spring of 2013. This is a pretty big deal. And according to multiple friends, this turmoil really spun him in a dangerous direction. He started to use drugs. Apparently he started with marijuana, but then that really escalated to heroin, which is a huge leap.
One of his friends, Rich Pasqua, who worked with Kohlberger at the pizza shop, said that by 2013, Kohlberger was a full-on heroin addict. But he was eventually able to kick the habit, going to rehab and enrolling at the Northampton Community College. It does seem that Kohlberger has a bit of a history of locking in and almost obsessing about certain parts of his life, whether it's the visual snow or drugs, his diet, and in some ways, even his own criminal behavior.
This type of compulsive behavior is something we see with other serial or prolific killers. After years of being socially detached, addicted to drugs, and suicidal, Koberger appears to have found a new purpose after rehab: an intense fascination with the criminal mind. This fascination led Koberger to study at nearby DeSales University and ultimately under the renowned forensic psychologist Dr. Catherine Ramsland.
You have to study the victim and you have to know things about offenders. So you have to study offenders and you have to know the kinds of things they might do. Ramsland is one of, if not the leading expert on serial killers and murderers. She's written more than 60 books and hundreds of articles on violent criminals.
On December 22, 2022, producer Jeff Shane conducted an interview with Ramsland for a different project. Just eight days later, her former student Brian Koburger would be arrested. In hindsight, their conversation is chilling. What can you tell me about people who commit crimes?
So you're looking at the body and the crime scene, maybe the whole geographic analysis in terms of their comfort zone and et cetera. But you're also looking at what do we know about offenders to apply to this? And then you want to build as detailed biography of the person as you possibly can. It's all going to be probability based moreover.
more likely to have education than not education or more likely to be compelled sexually because of certain rituals and nothing missing. But if things are always missing, well, more likely to be motivated by greed.
or in eliminating witnesses. Not really interested in the murder itself, more interested in eliminating witnesses while they get off with the goods. But if the victim is mutilated in some way, overkill, things like that, that's going to tell you a different story about the offender. So a lot of it's going to be based on what you're finding at the scene. It's
There's a retrospective profile and a prospective profile. And too many people are doing the prospective profiling. And that is more of a risk evaluation based on a pattern of behaviors. Retrospective profile is what do we see right here at the crime scene today that will tell us something about this offender? And if we have several scenes that we think are
related to the same offender, what do those various scenes tell us about this person? Ramsland has refused to comment publicly on her former graduate student, but she is most famous for her extensive research and books about the serial killer Dennis Radar, most commonly known as the BTK.
DeSalles University is known for its hands-on criminology program, and as an undergraduate criminology student, Koberger would have studied radar. As a graduate student of Ramsland, it's likely Koberger would have studied radar in depth. He may have even had access to Ramsland's primary research information about both serial killers and Dennis Radar. Tell me about BTK and how modern-day criminals might have evolved since then.
These days, serial killers quite often are a little more sophisticated. They're aware of, you know, that investigators are looking at patterns. But even back in, you
you know, the 70s. Sometimes they would have a ritual, so there would be similarities, but then they'll pick up somebody, a victim of opportunity, weren't even looking, but they had their murder kit, so why not go for this? And then it's completely different. I remember Dennis Rader, for example, the BTK killer. So 1970s into the 80s, and his final one of the 10 he killed was
It was in 1991. And by 1991, he realized how the FBI approached all this. And so instead of killing people in houses that he entered, he took a couple of victims and dumped them outside. One victim, he called it in, none of the others.
Several of them, he wrote notes to the newspaper, but not all of them. So he's not a particularly sophisticated person, but he did change things up a little bit. He murdered a family of four, then he murdered a single woman. They didn't connect them at all because even though the bodies all were bound, he'd use different knots.
on the single woman than he had on the family. And he didn't do that purposely. He just liked knots and he was mixing it up. How much Kohlberger studied or understood about serial killers like Radar isn't clear, but there are unique and disturbing similarities between Kohlberger and Radar.
Both are accused of committing their murders while pursuing degrees in criminal justice. Radar was earning an undergraduate degree from Wichita State as he embarked on his killing spree. And, as Dr. Ramsland mentioned in her interview, Radar mixed up his killing profile to evade investigators.
When Kohlberger was arrested, he was wearing rubber gloves and sorting his trash into smaller plastic bags in an apparent effort to prevent police from collecting evidence against him. In an interview with TMZ, Dennis Radar said he saw similarities between Kohlberger and himself. The convicted killer of 10 said he believed Kohlberger, like himself, was motivated to kill by the fantasy of homicide. Again, Stephanie and Jeff.
This is really the scariest question about Koberger. We know that he told people from a young age that he wanted to catch violent criminals and be a police officer. Later at WSU, he said he wanted to help rural police departments solve crimes. So was this all talk, just a front or a ruse to get in with investigators? Did he want to figure out how they worked so he could operate around them? Given what we know about his teenage years, his feelings of isolation and the demons in his head, is it possible that he had a longstanding desire to kill?
So with that in mind, are you saying that possibly studying criminology was part of the plan to learn how to kill people without getting caught? Exactly. Or I also wonder if he has this personality type that's a bit obsessive. Was it possible that he's
studying criminals at school because he's been obsessed with crime and fantasizing about being a killer his whole life? Or is it because he was studying criminology and about killers that he began to fantasize about it? That could make sense. And he definitely could have used what he learned from his criminology studies to help him get away with murder, at least for a little while. Let's stop here for another break.
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Michelle Bolger, an associate professor of criminology, wrote a letter of recommendation for Kohlberger's PhD application, describing him as "perfectly professional in all their interactions." She also advised Kohlberger with his master's thesis on script theory, which focused on how and why criminals commit their crimes.
As part of Koberger's deep dive into script theory, the idea that people largely fall into patterns or scripts, Bolger oversaw the creation of Koberger's request for criminals to fill out a survey on Reddit about their thoughts and emotions while committing a crime. Stephanie and Jeff.
This Reddit survey is just so interesting. Yes, while his former professor says that type of work is very common amongst criminology students, the specific nature of the questions and what he would later be accused of certainly raises some serious questions. We looked up the original survey. He posted it on Wednesday, June 1st, 2022, which was 212 days before Zanna, Ethan, Madison, and Kaylee were murdered. Here's what it said.
Hello, my name is Brian, and I am inviting you to participate in a research project that seeks to understand how emotions and psychological traits influence decision-making when committing a crime. In particular, this study seeks to understand the story behind your most recent criminal offense with an emphasis on your thoughts and feelings throughout your experience.
The questions read, did you prepare for the crime before leaving your home? Please detail what you were thinking and feeling at this point. After committing the crime, what were you thinking and feeling? How did you travel to and enter the location that the crime occurred?
After arriving, what steps did you take prior to locating the victim or target? Please detail your thoughts and feelings. How did you leave the scene? Why did you choose that victim or target over others? Before making your move, how did you approach the victim or target? Please detail what you were thinking and feeling. How did you accomplish your goal? Please explain what you were thinking and feeling. Before leaving, is there anything else you did?
Jeff, what you said about this type of survey is pretty typical of graduate students, but it did get us curious if he had used any of this information in his thesis, and it doesn't appear that he did. So maybe he didn't get enough participants and scrapped the idea? Or he took the survey, collected the information, it was a ruse that he was using it for his thesis, and instead used it to plot murder.
If Kohlberger was potentially using his academic opportunities to learn how to kill, one skill he potentially appears to have employed in murdering Kaylee, Maddie, Zanna, and Ethan is the ruse. A ruse is something that the killer presents to calm the intended victim while the killer knows he's going to be murdering them.
He doesn't want them to know anything violent is going to happen to them. So he'll use a ruse to get them perhaps to go with them to a more secluded place. But even then, if he does something, he may present another ruse even as he's binding them.
"See, I'm not going to hurt you. I just need to do this." And it will vary with some of these different killers. But even when the person suspects something wrong, if the killer is not in the position to do everything they need to do, then they will try to calm them once more and it'll be done by a ruse, which is usually what they say to them in the kindest way possible. And hopefully it will be believed by the victim.
Kevin Sullivan is an investigative journalist and author of several books about the serial killer Ted Bundy. He sees several similarities between Koberger and Bundy, who confessed to killing at least 30 people in seven states. According to the probable cause affidavit, roommate Dylan Mortensen heard crying coming from Zanna Kernodle's room, and then a male voice saying, quote, it's okay, I'm going to help you.
This effort by a killer to reassure a victim is common in pre-planned murders.
BTK did this. He would try to assure people that like nothing was going to happen or it was for a different reason or whatever. A lot of these people do this. The key is, is to get them calm. I mean, the mob does this. Sometimes the mob will go out and say, let's go get, spend the whole night with somebody, four or five of them. And then they say, let's go get breakfast or whatever. And they'll go and immediately kill this guy. And it was planned from the start.
Some killers used the ruse in a tense moment to calm a panicking victim. Others, like the serial killer Ted Bundy, would create elaborate stories to trick unsuspecting targets.
He said that he knew that he was hunting girls that were from normal, good families and that they would be more likely to help somebody if they were either on crutches and fumbling with books or they needed directions or something else was asked of them. They would be completely unsuspecting.
In 1974, then 18-year-old Georgianne Hawkins was walking near her sorority house at the University of Washington. The disappearance of young women was front-page news at the time. Georgianne was well aware of the threat and had been regularly walking with friends. But after leaving her boyfriend's home, she set out alone on a well-lit road to walk the short distance to her house.
As she was walking home, she ran into a man who had a leg cast on with his pants are split and was on, I believe, his right leg. He was fumbling with a briefcase and on crutches. That person was Ted Bundy. He asked her, would you mind helping me take my briefcase to my car?
Of course, she doesn't think this guy with a cast on his leg, Ruse, this guy with crutches, Ruse, this guy who's so nice and articulate, Ruse, is going to do anything to her. In her mind, she thought, yeah, I can help him. And what does she do? She takes the briefcase. They walk down the alley. And he had put his crowbar right behind his VW, his
his beige vw and as she was putting the the crutches in the car he reaches back grabs the crowbar and he hit her in the head he hit her so hard that both her earrings flew off and she came out of one of her shoes he didn't grab those then he put her
put her in the car, and then he took her to a remote area about 20 minutes from there where she had awakened on the way, and he hit her again. And then he killed her soon after that. But the ruse played a part in obtaining her. If he would have had a bad look, if he would have looked like a criminal, if he didn't have the ruse of a cast or crutches, there would be no reason to help him. And so he tells Bill Eggmar, he said he did all these things.
so that these good kind women who were raised right would help me. So here you got a woman, Georgianne Hawkins, who knows about the women disappearing, who already assumes their homicide, and yet she meets somebody that doesn't fit what her criteria is for an evil individual.
Kohlberger appears to have potentially tried to use the ruse to calm at least one of the roommates. And if the 28-year-old had been fantasizing or even planning to kill for a long time, Kohlberger could have been using the cover of a criminology student to prepare for those future murders. This type of long-term fantasizing turned organized planning is also common with killers like BTK and Ted Bundy. Again, Jeff and Kevin Sullivan.
He was kind of staking out the house. He would drive by it. He went there a lot, you know, in the months leading up to the murders. Do you think that speaks to escalation? Like maybe at first he would just do a drive-by or follow them or maybe peer in their window and it just becomes, you need a little bit, a bigger fix, a bigger fix. So maybe one day he goes inside and then just becomes more and more until it ultimately leads to murder. I guarantee you,
that people that do this prior to the murder, they are thinking about it a lot. They are living mentally in that realm. And usually it has a sexual component to it, which will become masturbatory even prior to the event. Just as some of these people visit these locations afterwards,
and have to sexualize the experience through masturbation. So I would assume that he was trying to not unleash and do as much. And remember, there's always got to be a first time. Once you kill your first person, you can never go back and unkill that person. You were forever changed.
So if that attack and murder on those four kids, college kids, was the first one, and if that was Kohlberger, then he was doing everything he could to maintain and organize himself as an organized person so as not to make any problems for himself until that time happened. So when he got in there,
Whoever got in there, if it was Kober, he either unleashed it himself or he just couldn't take it anymore. And that's what Bundy did. Bundy lived in this dark realm of sexual violent fantasy for so many years. It was going to reach a point in his faculties.
where it was going to tip over and he was going to cross over from fantasy to reality. That's where it's going. And that's where these people ultimately want it to go. And when that first time happens, even if the person escapes, since if it's Koberger, he might have been thinking right after the murders in the days after, what did I leave there?
in way of forensics, something Bundy didn't have to worry about. What happened there, even if I had gloves, would anybody have seen me go in? It was probably pretty frightened as to what may have happened that could ultimately cause his apprehension. So in that case, would he be sitting back and planning his next murder?
No, he'd be trying to get to the place where if I can just wait this out and if I'm not arrested, then maybe I can I can go again. Do I think if he's the one that he would have ultimately killed again? Highly likely. It probably almost assured that he would, especially.
If he really enjoyed doing it, and if this person enjoyed killing with that knife while they were killing them, you've got somebody that's going to be a problem to other people down the road. Speaking of that, what are the traits of killers who hunt like Bundy, like allegedly Koberger?
Well, I think the people that do this have a lot of things that are extremely similar. When he said people have a hard time understanding. I did it because I just like killing people. Now that's it. That says it all. I just like killing people. Now, one thing these people do, they have a tendency to think that kind of they own them. They're like God or something. And they go, you know, I was I decided whether they would live or die and they died.
But I was also there when they took their last breath and breathed out their last breath. And that's something that the family can't boast about or no one can because that's mine and that's mine forever. That's why the murders and the ground in which the murders occur or even the dumping sites, if it's different, become very sacred to these people.
And that is across the board. You can go to Arthur Shaw across, who would revisit the sites, and so many of them do. Bundy always went back to these sites. We know that Koberger did too as well. The next morning, at least, based on cell phone tower records. Oh yeah, he wanted to look at it. He's probably thinking, my work's in there. I've done all this work now. I've done it. I've created my work. There it is. Does anybody know yet? Do they know yet? More on that next time.
For more information on the case and relevant photos, follow us on Instagram at kt underscore studios. The Idaho Massacre is produced by Stephanie Lidecker, Jeff Shane, Connor Powell, Chris Bargo, Gabriel Castillo, and me, Courtney Armstrong. Editing and sound design by Jeff Twa. Music by Jared Aston. The Idaho Massacre is a production of iHeartRadio and KT Studios.
For more podcasts like this, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Deanna, who you may know as Body Movin'. My friend and I, John Green, were featured in the Netflix documentary, Don't F with Cats. On our new podcast, True Crimes with John and Deanna, we're turning our online investigative skills to some of the most unexplained, unsolved, and most ignored cases. ♪
Police say 33-year-old Breidigan was shot dead. Gunned down in front of his two-year-old daughter. Detectives confirmed that it was a targeted attack. It appears to be an execution-style assassination. This is very active, so we have to be careful. I've heard that there's a house that has some bodies in the basement. I knew. I just knew something was wrong. Maybe there's something more sinister at play than just one young girl going missing. If you know something, heard something, please...
It's never too late to do the right thing. This is True Crimes with John and Deanna. The production of KT Studios and iHeartRadio. Justice is something that takes different shapes or forms.
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