The news item that has held the United States in suspense for almost two months is beginning to unravel. Suspected of having stabbed to death, on November 13, 2022, four students in Moscow, Idaho, Bryan Kohberger agreed on Tuesday January 3 to be extradited there from Pennsylvania, where he was arrested four days earlier. .
The 28-year-old student, a doctoral student in criminology and criminal law at Washington State University – who is “20-minute drive to the scene of the crime that horrified and wiped out a college town”, Write the New York Times –, will appear in the coming days in a court in Idaho. It is only there that the motive, hitherto kept under seal by the police, will be revealed to the public, who is lost in conjectures to try to understand this murder as mysterious as it is shocking.
A complete mystery
Le Washington Post sums it up like this what happened in Moscow, a small town of 25,000 inhabitants in the American West, on November 13: Kaylee Goncalves and Madison Mogen, on one side, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin (as a couple), on the other , were students in their twenties with no history. After going out on a Saturday evening in the fall, “all four went home” around 2 a.m. and went to bed, in their two-story house with three bedrooms. Their two other roommates were already sleeping on the ground floor.
When these “woke up the next morning to find one of the victims, who they believed had passed out”. They first called friends, and together they called for help. The police then “found the four dead victims on the second and third floors of the house”, says the daily. Brutally stabbed to death. But no trace of break-in was found at the scene, and the two surviving students were quickly cleared. The mystery was complete.
The case fascinated the United States, as reported by public radio NPR in a comprehensive summaryand it gave rise to countless amateur investigations, on Facebook groups or on the Reddit forum, such as during the Gabby Petito case in January 2022. But the investigators did not appreciate this untimely help and accused “internet sleuths and online rumors” to create a “huge distraction” who could have prevented them from working, explains the British newspaper The Independant. For example, a self-proclaimed medium on TikTok saw fit to “spread false allegations” about a history professor at the University of Idaho, who received death threats and had to end up suing for defamation, tell it Guardian.
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