Bryan Kohberger officially pleaded guilty in court, admitting to murdering those four University of Idaho students back in November 2022. The government had so much evidence… but never a motive. So unless they force him to tell everyone, we may never know why he did it.
There’s been speculation he became obsessed with serial killers, as a criminology grad student, or that he was a fledgling serial killer himself. But as long as we’re entertaining theories we may as well listen to an expert.
Dr. Carole Lieberman is a forensic psychiatrist. And she thinks it may just come down to… looks. Speaking to DailyMail.com on Monday, she explained her take.
Related: Bryan Kohberger’s Parents Release Surprising Statement After Guilty Plea
We learned from the investigation that Maddie Mogen was likely the intended victim. She and Kaylee Goncalves were sleeping in a bed together, and Kohberger went straight to that room. It’s believed he may not have intended to kill anyone else — but ran into Xana Kernodle in the hallway because she was still awake at 4 am, having ordered late night DoorDash. He then killed her sleeping boyfriend, Ethan Chapin, who was sleeping in the room with her. The two roommates who hid in their rooms were untouched.
So if we believe he intended to kill Maddie — or perhaps both Maddie and her BFF Kaylee — the question remains: why? Dr. Lieberman thinks it’s because of their looks. They’re rather similar looking girls, and she believes they evoked feelings of rejection that Kohberger had harbored from his early teen years:
“It is especially significant that Maddie and Kaylee look like the blonde cheerleader who rejected him in middle school. He took out the rage that he built up over the years, towards this first love and all the subsequent women who rejected him, with each bloody stab of the knife.”
Yeesh!
Who is this blonde cheerleader from middle school?
That would be Kim Kenely. Kim contacted the FBI after seeing the suspect in the shocking Idaho murder case was someone who had also creeped her out as a child. Her mother explained that Bryan would leave her love letters in her locker — apparently crushing on her for months:
“He would always say, ‘Oh Kim, I think you’re very pretty.’ Just like weird comments. And she’d say, ‘Oh God, leave me alone.’ She did not give him the time of day.”
Kenely’s mom admitted:
“When kids are little, they’re mean. They don’t say, ‘Oh my God, thank you, but no.’”
Dr. Lieberman thinks Kohberger fixated on Maddie and Kaylee because he saw them as unattainable cheerleader archetypes.
In Dr. Lieberman’s view, Kohberger’s resentment built up as he continued to be rejected — in something of a vicious cycle:
“If he met a girl, they would be turned off by him. Not just because of his looks and being a little awkward, they probably wouldn’t have known exactly why, but because they would be able to sense this anger and rage within him. He already had this chip on his shoulder, and he was gathering all this anger… that made it harder and harder for him to meet a girl who wanted to go out with him.”
Kohberger reportedly went to the pizza place where they worked, and his phone was pinged near their house several times in the months leading up to the murders. And in the final weeks, an Instagram account apparently belonging to him had messaged Maddie and/or Kaylee several times, always asking simply:
“Hey, how are you?”
Thus, he felt the same repeated rejection, says Dr. Lieberman:
“This is a magnified revenge on them and all the women who went before them that had rejected him.”
This is all speculation, of course — albeit coming from years of training and experience. But the doc believes there is some evidence at least that the murder was fueled by intense rage:
“This bloody scene suggests it had to be someone with a lot of rage. And they used a knife, which suggests a very personal attack.”
Hmm. What do YOU think of this theory?
[Image via Law&Crime Network/YouTube/Maddie Mogen/Instagram.]
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