Kohberger's web searches revealed in new evidence

Daily Mail​

a day ago

Bryan Kohberger made sickening internet searches focused on attacking and [sexually assaulting] sleeping girls before he slaughtered four students. The 30-year-old criminology PhD student was cruising the internet for [adult film] content with searches that included appalling terms about non-consensual [sexual] acts. It was the early hours of November 13, 2022, when Kohberger broke into an off-campus home in Moscow , Idaho , and stabbed Madison Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin to death. Prosecutors have said there was no evidence of a sexual component to the murders, leaving Kohberger's motive and connection to his victims a complete mystery.
Now, the Daily Mail can reveal for the first time the exact [adult film] searches made by the killer which may shed some light on his mindset and motivations at the time. The search terms were shared with the Daily Mail by the digital forensics experts hired by state prosecutors to dig into Kohberger's Android cell phone and laptop. Heather Barnhart, Senior Director of Forensic Research at Cellebrite, and Jared Barnhart, Head of CX Strategy and Advocacy at Cellebrite, joined the case back in March 2023 and were set to testify as expert witnesses in Kohberger's capital murder trial. However, just weeks before the trial was slated to begin, Kohberger struck a plea deal with prosecutors to avoid the death penalty.
Under the terms of the deal, he pleaded guilty to all charges and waived his right to appeal. On July 23, he was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. Through their years-long forensic analysis of Kohberger's devices, the Cellebrite team was able to recover his searches. The terms they found included 'sleeping', 'passed out', 'Voyeur', 'Forced '[sexual assault]' and 'drugged'. 'The easiest way to say it is that all of his terms were consistently around non-consensual [sexual] acts,' Jared told the Daily Mail.
Kohberger's sleeping and [sexual assault] fetishes raise questions about what he may have planned to do the night of the murders. The 30-year-old killer broke into his victims' home at 1122 King Road at around 4am, when most of the students were sleeping. Prosecutors believe he did not plan to murder all four victims that night and that either Mogen or Goncalves, both 21, was the likely target. Kohberger entered the home through the door leading to the kitchen on the second floor and went straight up the stairs to Mogen's room on the third floor. He found Mogen and Goncalves in the same bed and killed them both.
Coming down the stairs, he encountered Kernodle who was still awake, having just received a DoorDash order. He killed her and her boyfriend Chapin, both 20. Latah County Prosecutor Bill Thompson said in an interview with ABC News that it's likely Kohberger did not expect to encounter Kernodle still up and about. But only Kohberger knows what exactly his plan was that night. So far, he has refused to reveal any details about his crimes. When given the opportunity to speak at his sentencing, he told Judge Steven Hippler: 'I respectfully decline'.
But Kohberger's digital footprint around the time of the murders paints a picture of his interests - and possible inspirations. As well as the [adult film] searches, the Cellebrite team found a clear obsession with serial killers and home invasions. On Kohberger's laptop, Heather said they found searches for 'serial killers, co-ed killers, home invasions, burglaries and psychopaths before the murders and then up through Christmas Day'. There was one serial killer Kohberger showed a keen interest in that stood out to the team: Danny Rolling.
Rolling, known as the Gainesville Ripper, broke into the homes of University of Florida students at night and murdered five - four female and one male - in the fall semester of 1990. He [sexually assaulted] the women during his attacks and decapitated one of his victims, posing her head on a mantle in her home. Just like Kohberger, Rolling's murder weapon of choice was also a Ka-Bar knife. The similarities between the crimes are eerie and the Cellebrite team found Kohberger had downloaded a PDF onto his phone about Rolling. He had also watched a YouTube video about a Ka-Bar knife.
Kohberger's cell phone also contained many selfies where he was posing shirtless or flexing his muscles, Jared and Heather revealed. There was also the chilling thumbs-up selfie to the camera a few hours after the murders and a creepy hooded selfie days before his arrest. The digital evidence was uncovered despite Kohberger's best efforts to scrub his cell phone and laptop of anything incriminating. In fact, the Cellebrite team found a pattern where Kohberger went to extreme lengths to try to delete and hide his digital footprint using VPNs, incognito modes, and clearing his browsing history.
Three days after the murders - on November 16 - he ran an eraser software on his laptop. The software is used to wipe data from a hard drive. Heather explained that the team has been unable to determine if Kohberger actively ran the software to destroy evidence or if the killer innocuously ran it as part of a virus scan. That would have been for the jury to decide. What the digital experts did find was that Kohberger had tried - unsuccessfully - to wipe his disturbing searches from his phone. There was no record of them in his search history, which Kohberger had scrubbed. But, he hadn't done a good enough job.
'The searches were in autofill,' Jared explained. 'As a user, you can clear your search history. But when you choose to type text and press search, that text box depending on where you're searching and how, it can keep [the search terms]. 'So the next time you go to the same text box and search for something, it prepopulates and that's where these search terms were found.' Had they testified at trial, the digital experts would have presented both a wealth of data - as well as evidence of Kohberger's cleanup operation. 'He did his best to leave zero digital footprint. He did not want a digital forensic trail available at all,' Heather said. And, while he succeeded in part, she said that this abnormal behavior and the very efforts to hide his digital activities revealed more than he realized about his guilt. 'The absence of things is almost telling more of a story,' she said.