University of Idaho murders lead prosecutor Bill Thompson is sharing new details about the case after convicted killer Bryan Kohberger was sentenced to life in prison.
In a Wednesday, July 30, interview on CBS’ 48 Hours, Thompson shared just how often prosecution experts were able to pinpoint Kohberger, 30, near the vicinity of 1122 King Road in Moscow, Idaho, before the fateful night of November 13, 2022.
48 Hours correspondent Peter Van Sant noted to Thompson that “police reports reveal that [victim] Kaylee Goncalves had told roommates that she saw a creepy looking man while she was walking her dog, and that roommates returned to find that the front door had been damaged.”
This led to Van Sant asking the Latah County prosecutor, “Do you believe that Kohberger was possibly stalking the house, stalking them?”
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Thompson responded, “Well, we think that Kohberger was certainly stalking that neighborhood,” though he said that data from Kohberger’s cell phone did not “correlate” to the timings of the aforementioned incidents.
However, the prosecutor claimed phone-tracking experts “were able to show that he was in that area of some 20-plus times other times at night, between like 10 and early morning hours … 10 in the evening, when there would be no legitimate reason for him to be over here to shop — here being Moscow — which was his routine practice.”
“So we certainly believe that those trips … involved Mr. Kohberger looking and surveilling or stalking, whatever the case may be,” Thompson added.
Last month, Kohberger pleaded guilty to the murders of Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin as part of a plea deal to avoid the death penalty. Goncalves, Mogen and Kernodle all lived at the off-campus student house, while Chapin, Kernodle’s boyfriend, was staying over when the fatal incident occurred. Two roommates, Dylan Mortensen and Bethany Funke, survived the attack.
Kohberger was handed four consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole during a hearing in Boise, Idaho, on July 23. He was also sentenced to a further 10 years in prison for burglary.
In an interview with The Idaho Statesman after the sentencing, Thompson shared his theory on why Kohberger spared Mortensen — one of the two surviving roommates — who told police she had seen a man “approximately 6-feet tall, slim build, with a black ski mask leave the second-floor patio area” on the night of the murders, per a police report.
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“From what Dylan described, I have a hard time imagining that the killer did not see Dylan,” Thompson said.
He added, “At that point, he’d been in the house probably longer than he planned, and he had killed more people than he planned. … It wouldn’t surprise us that the killer was scared at that point and decided they had to leave, not knowing if law enforcement already had been called.”
