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Bryan Kohberger took the motive for the Idaho murders to his prison cell.
One filmmaker believes the answer may lie in why he chose the house he attacked.
“The fact that [this] was the house that he chose. This was a house that had five women living in it. The night that the murders happened, Xana Kernodle’s boyfriend, Ethan Chapin, was over, but really, this was a house full of women, and it seems quite clear that he targeted it,” Skye Borgman, director of the Netflix docuseries “The Idaho Murders: College Nightmare,” told Fox News Digital.
“He watched the house; he was around the house in the days, weeks and months leading up to the murders,” Borgman said. “So, it seems pretty likely that he had a very low regard, if not hatred, for women.”
“It’s all conjecture, but he seemed to struggle with his relationships with women,” Borgman explained. “And we look at this incel movement and the question of whether or not he was an incel, and whether or not he didn’t like women.”
“It seems to me that there was a hatred of women there,” Borgman added.
Kohberger, 31, is serving four consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole after pleading guilty to the 2022 stabbing murders of University of Idaho students Kaylee Goncalves, Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle and Madison Mogen at an off-campus rental home in Moscow, Idaho.
Before his arrest, former classmate Lilly Karaban recalled him as someone with a “his way or the highway” attitude who seemed to exist “in his own world.”
Interviews, court records and accounts featured in the documentary described a series of troubling interactions involving Kohberger.
According to the documentary, classmates described him as “not particularly well liked,” saying he frequently spoke down to women, engaged in “mansplaining” and became argumentative or aggressive during interactions. Several students said they found him “creepy” and that he made them feel uncomfortable.
“There were just strange incidents and strange behavior,” Moscow Police Chief Anthony Dahlinger said in the documentary.
Former Washington State University Police Chief Gary Jenkins recalled another student’s account of feeling cornered by Kohberger during an aggressive encounter. She also believed he occasionally followed her to her car. Kohberger was ultimately terminated from his teaching assistant position.
Jenkins said none of the reported incidents were referred to police because “nothing that occurred rose to the level of a crime.”
Ed Jacobson, an FBI special agent involved in the investigation, said in the documentary that “we never saw evidence that shows Bryan Kohberger is part of the incel movement,” an online community of mostly men who say they can’t find romantic or sexual partners and often direct their frustration toward women.
“But Bryan Kohberger was very good at hiding his online activity,” he noted.
For Borgman, the biggest question surrounding the Idaho murders remains the one Kohberger has never answered: why?
“I would love to, I think, along with the rest of the world, know why he did what he did,” she told Fox News Digital. “But it is one of those things that I don’t think any of us will ever know. That’s a frustrating thing for myself … and I know especially for the families. They wish so truly that he had been forced through the terms of his plea deal to give us more information about the why of it all.”
In the documentary, Karaban said she believed Kohberger “has a thing against women based on the description of what he did to those poor three girls.”
“People who brutalize women the way Kohberger did dislike them, find them threatening,” she said. “So they take all that anger out on them.”
Award-winning author James Patterson, who wrote a book on the case, previously told Fox News Digital his reporting uncovered multiple accounts of Kohberger engaging in unwanted interactions with women before his arrest.
At Seven Sirens Brewing Company in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Kohberger would push his way into unwanted conversations with female bartenders and patrons. He went as far as asking for their addresses. Some women, according to the book, complained to the brewery’s owner about “the creepy guy with the bulging eyes.”
“Pretty much everybody we talked to just said, ‘This is a strange man with a strange look — couldn’t look people in the eye,’” Patterson said. “If he did look you in the eye, sometimes people wished that he hadn’t. And his impression of himself was totally out of whack with the way other people perceived him.”
In a police report obtained by Fox News Digital, an exotic dancer said a man she now believes was Kohberger visited the club where she worked in 2019, about two hours from his family’s Pennsylvania home. She told investigators that while she was performing, the man remarked that he wanted to kill people. When she jokingly asked who, she said he replied, “Whoever I want.”
Believing he was trying to get her attention, she alerted bouncers to keep an eye on him. She said the encounter didn’t stand out again until she saw Kohberger’s photo on television after his arrest and became fairly certain he was the man she had encountered.
Borgman believes Kohberger was trying “to commit the perfect crime.”
“He failed in doing that,” she said. “But I think his silence is a way of attempting to keep the spotlight focused on him.”
Borgman said police are also “grappling with the why.”
“We spoke to one of the FBI agents who worked the case, and he essentially says, ‘You’ve got to be OK with not knowing,’” Borgman said. “And that’s really hard for humans to do: be OK with not knowing. And to crawl inside somebody’s mind and figure out the whys … it’s impossible. And I think that’s one of the reasons people followed this case for so long. … That question of the why still lingers with just about everybody.”
After years of searching for answers, the victims’ families are no longer waiting for them, Borgman said. Instead, they’re focused on honoring their loved ones’ legacies.
“I don’t think they expect the perpetrator to talk,” she said. ” … The families now are looking forward, not backward. … Every one of them is committed to trying to help families who may be going through something like this.”
“So while I don’t want to say they’re hopeful, every one of them is taking this tragedy and trying to make something good out of it because that’s the only thing they can do,” she said. “They can’t carry around the hatred in their lives, or else it’ll just consume them. So they carry the love forward. And the love is really with Ethan, Maddie, Kaylee and Xana.”
Just two days before the documentary premiered on July 29, Kohberger made a dramatic bid to withdraw his guilty plea. He asked a judge to let him stand trial instead, alleging his attorneys pressured him into accepting a plea deal by promising better prison conditions and warning him about life on death row.
In his request, Kohberger said his attorneys didn’t adequately represent him and that his guilty plea wasn’t knowingly or voluntarily entered because it “was induced by unkept promises” and threats, The Associated Press reported.
In 2025, Kohberger said he was pleading guilty “freely and voluntarily.” In doing so, he agreed to waive his rights to appeal, confirm that he understood the penalties for the crimes and assure the court that he wasn’t coerced by his attorneys or anyone else to enter the plea. In exchange, prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty.
Borgman said some investigators involved with the case were so shaken by the crime and its impact on Moscow that “they don’t work in law enforcement anymore.”
“It’s something that was too much, and they ended up leaving the police force,” she said. “So it’s important, I think, to really factor into what happened, the incredible toll it takes on law enforcement and the incredible toll it takes on the community.”
“So many people felt fear,” she said. “The fear was so deep that they weren’t leaving their homes. And that fear, along with the arrest of the perpetrator, also led to this amazing feeling of community. It brought people together.”
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