Bryan Kohberger: Catching Up On New Interviews with Investigators & Prosecutor Their Theories & More

Looking at the newest interviews by investigators, cell phone experts, and the prosecutor in their theories and what would've been testified to regarding cell phone evidence by the experts. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
What you know, Ali Byers, Welcome to another episode of
Pretty Lies and Alibis. I'm Gigi. It's Monday, August eleventh.
I've mentioned on an earlier episode that I wanted to
find out about restitution for BK and if that is
shaved off of his commissary deposits. I had a listener
in the comments let me know that they do practice

(00:22):
that in Idaho. So I went to the website and
here's what I found. The State Board of Corrections says
on their website that if the court ordered an inmate
to make restitution and the restitution is still owing, than
twenty percent of each deposit made in the inmate's account
shall be paid to the State Board of Correction who

(00:42):
shall within five days after the end of the month,
pay such moneies to the clerk of court in which
restitution was ordered and entered for payment to the victims.
So there you go, twenty percent of every penny he
gets on his books coming off. Speaking of which Kaylee's
dad old TMZ, initially he hoped BK's commissary money would

(01:04):
be taken away and used to fund his execution, but
since he pleaded guilty to all the charges and death
is off the table. Steve is in talks with two
Idaho legislators to make murderers like BK reimburse taxpayers for
the cost of the investigation through the Inmates Commissary Fund.
Steve also told TMZ the families don't want the crime

(01:27):
scene photos published, but with freedom of information, people can
get them, and they have on this episode. What we're
gonna do we did this before. We're going to take
little tidbits from interviews that have been done by investigators,
the prosecutor, and also the people who worked on BK's
phone in trying to find any evidence. I think after

(01:49):
this episode we maybe have one more to go to
finish this up unless I find something I have just
missed in all these documents, so I will keep looking.
Heather Bernhardt is the the senior director of forensic research
at Celebrate and her colleague Jared Bernhardt, were going to
testify for the state had this gone to trial. She

(02:10):
told the publication The Independent, what we learned is he prepared.
She talked about his digital footprint before and after the murders.
Her team uncovered scrubbed files from his devices. He also
searched through those VPNs, which is where you mask your
IP address, and that made it harder to trace. But

(02:31):
he had what she called deep downloads about serial killers,
and in their opinion, it told a story of BKA's
obsession and his planning. An analysis of his phone showed
there were only four periods when that phone wasn't active,
starting back in June of twenty twenty two, and one
of those times was when that device was offline the

(02:53):
night Xana, Ethan, Kaylee, and Maddie were killed. Jared Bernhardt
said about the night of the murders, he did and
just lose signal or run out of battery. This was
an actual button press power off on purpose, and then
a power back two hours later, and in the middle
of that four people were killed. Talking about his time

(03:14):
at Washington State University and his obsession with serial killers,
Heather said he didn't just google these cases. He downloaded
full PDF case files not once, but repeatedly. He was
downloading detailed reports on serial killers, including Danny Rowling, who
also murdered college students using a similar knife. This wasn't

(03:37):
casual browsing, this was meticulous research. In their research into
the loss of the signal from BK's phone, in the
timeframe of the murders. Heather's team recreated the digital environment
and also studied BK's call logs. She said, turning off
your phone isn't enough. You have to disable Wi Fi,

(03:59):
disable cellular and then powered down, and that's what he
did in the days before and after the murders. They
found that BK disabled Wi Fi access and routed his
traffic through nord VPN. Jared said he was diligent in
prep and cleanup, and he made our job really hard.

(04:19):
This is someone who tried really hard to not be detected.
But with all his work to cover his tracks, he
didn't clean everything off his phone. They did find scrubbed files,
private browsing history, VPN activity, and the obsessive downloads about
serial killers were found in the deepest corners of his phone,

(04:41):
and according to the team, they found he had also
downloaded reports on the Idaho murders and extensive searches of
his victims, but he was successful in other ways. The
team said there was a period of time from the
time the crime happened until identifying him as a suspect,
the arrest, the seizing of the phone, and then the

(05:03):
phone extraction. So some of the best information was most
likely wiped, but Jared added, with time and attention, we
were able to paint a picture of what he did
on this night, even though some of the best stuff
wasn't there. He certainly did not cover all his tracks.
The night of the murders, his phone was searching for

(05:24):
a Wi Fi signal and he was not at home.
The team said. There's also some digital evidence to suggest
that he was at or near the Mad Greek restaurant
where Kaylee and Maddie worked. How they know this. His
WiFi log showed the restaurant's Wi Fi, possibly more than
once before the murders, although there's nothing to confirm that

(05:47):
he interacted with Kaylee or Maddie or that he actually visited,
but it is possible, Heather said. There it was his
device had passively logged that network. The team said there
was no aha moments when reviewing his digital footprint. There
was no single smoking gun, but the evidence did show preparation.

(06:08):
Jared said, DNA can tell you who did it, but
the digital evidence showed us intent, and that's what we
were going to testify to. Heather added that proving intent
was building a baseline of his normal digital behavior, and
that drastically changed leading up to the murders. Heather said,
if you can prove normal behavior and then go, WHOA,

(06:31):
this is completely abnormal and that moment aligns with the crime,
well that's not an accident. She said. The periods of
silence on his phone showed that to them, and they
also noticed a connection to his parents. Heather said, starting
at six thirteen am the morning after the murders, he
is calling and texting his mom and dad NonStop. But

(06:54):
that was one of the only things he did that
matched his normal behavior. He frequently interacted with his parents
and his sister, but leading up to the murders, there
were very few signs of interactions with friends, other than
one brief contact that was with a group chat of
classmates on December twenty ninth, the day before his arrest,

(07:15):
Bkay was obsessively calling and texting his parents, kind of
like what they saw on the morning of the murders.
If he called his mom and she didn't pick up
the phone, he would immediately call his dad. We know
we've heard that. While incarcerated at the jail, Bka was
on the phone with his mom for hours every day.

(07:36):
That same day, BKA searched for terms like paranoia and
wire tapping. Heather said after all of their exhaustive searches,
they never could pinpoint a why. She said that was
frustrating because they wanted to do that for the families.
But she said they did find the how. She said,
this isn't someone who just snapped. This was someone who planned.

(07:59):
He didn't accidentally stumble into this house or commit this
heinous crime. It was intentional. Move it on to another
story by e online prosecutor say BK plan to accuse
other people of the murders. This was that last ditch
effort with the alternate perpetrator theory. In a filing by
the judge that describes the connection that three of the

(08:22):
four names given by b K had to the victims,
he wrote they were each socially connected to one or
more of the victims, interacted with one or more of
the victims at social events in the house prior to
the homicides, lived within walking distance of the crime scene,
and they were familiar with the layout of the victim's

(08:42):
home from prior social events. Judge Hipler noted each of
the four individuals BK Naine had cooperated with police, including
given their DNA and fingerprints. Hippler also said that three
friends lived within walking distance of the now demolished King
World House, and that conflicted with the investigations finding that

(09:05):
the perpetrator drove a vehicle to the crime scene. While
none of these suspects that BK named were identified in
the filing, one was believed to be Kaylee's ex boyfriend
and he gave his fingerprints thirteen days after BKA's alternate
perpetrator theory filing. A friend of Kaylee said there were

(09:26):
no issues between the two and noted they shared the
dog Murphy together. Now after this motion failed, that is
when BKA pleaded guilty to all charges, because that was
their last chance. Prosecutor Bill Thompson talked to forty eight
Hours correspondent Peter van Sandt. He said they did not
pay attention to social media during the investigation. They made

(09:49):
their decisions on what the law and the evidence was
and said they were successful insulating themselves a public opinion
on the internet. On being in the house and seeing
the aftermath of the murders, he said, the murders were
brutal and this is one you'll never be able to
erase from your eyes and your memory. He was inside

(10:09):
the house before the victim's bodies were taken out. As
to why BK committed the murders, he said they had
people from the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit, their profilers, and
they were on the case very early on with what
little they were telling prosecutors. In addition to what the
prosecutors knew, in all likelihood, they knew they would never

(10:33):
know why, and as he said in the past, even
if BK told them why, it probably would not make
sense too ordinary people like themselves. When asked if he
thought this could be a thrill kill by BK, he said,
they cannot rule out anything. He studied criminal behavior and
serial killers. He studied how to manage crime scenes, and

(10:54):
they planned to offer that at trial to explain why
this crime scene was so clean, incriminating evidence and his
car as well. He said, there was a lot of
thought and preparation for that, but no plan is perfect,
and they don't know what might have changed his plans
if it did change once inside the home, because they
don't know who he intended to attack first. He said,

(11:18):
we do believe Xana encountered him while still awake. That
DoorDash order could have put him in a panic, and
panicked people make mistakes, or it could be he wasn't
as smart as he thought he was. He said, they
really don't know for sure, and they really don't need
to know for sure. He said, we started out with
one sample of DNA from the knife sheath and the

(11:39):
car leaving the scene. That was what the investigators had initially.
Their team put all the evidence together, and to them
he was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, no question. When
asked if he thought b K thought it was a
victory to get death off the table, the prosecutor says
he doesn't see it as a victory because he's going

(11:59):
to p and the only way he's going to leave
is when he's dead. He talks about getting the familial
DNA from a Q tip in the trash pull, which
identified the killer as the son of the person whose
DNA they found. He said that was what triggered them
to be able to get the arrest warrant in place,
as well as the search warrants in Pennsylvania, get him arrested,

(12:22):
and get a direct DNA sample from him which matched.
He said that evidence was overwhelmingly powerful, He said after
BK's arrest and talking to his parents, there was nothing
there to indicate they knew he had committed the murders.
In fact, he said him pleading guilty may have been
the first time they actually heard it. When asked in

(12:43):
relation to Kaylee saying she saw someone stalking the house
and if he believed that was BK, prosecutor Thompson said
he thinks BK was certainly stalking the neighborhood, and while
the cell phone experts couldn't put him there at the
time of those occurrences that Hayley saw, they could put
his phone in the area some twenty plus times, often

(13:05):
at night, between say ten and early morning hours, when
there would be no legitimate reason for him to be
over here to shop in Moscow, he said, being in
Moscow two shop was BK's routine practice, So we certainly
believe that those trips involved the BK looking and doing
surveillance or stalking, whatever the case may be, the prosecutor

(13:28):
said it's possible in addition to seeing what the living
patterns were at the residence, he was also looking for
other potential victims. They just don't know. When asked if
he thinks it's possible BK had been in the house before,
since it seems he went right to Maddie's room. Thompson
said it's possible, even though they never found any evidence
to suggest that, but it is a legitimate point. He said.

(13:53):
The layout of the house is unique and a bit confusing.
They do believe he was parked on the bank behind
the house, and from there he would be able to
see who was in the house and where their rooms were.
They can't exclude him being in the house prior to
the murders, but they'll know for sure. ABC News reported
that investigators think Xana interrupted b K as he was

(14:14):
attacking Kaylee and Maddie. Idaho State Police Lieutenant Darren Gilbertson
said he chose to go in and kill someone. One
right away became two because they were in the bed together,
and as we know, Xana had just gotten her door
dash delivery and was eating in the kitchen on the
second floor. That's when she likely heard the commotion. Investigators

(14:36):
believe Xanna went up the stairs towards where Kaylee and
Maddie were, which could have distracted b KA. It could
have thrown him off, and he felt like he had
to do something. They think he left Maddie's room and
followed Xana downstairs, and that could be the moment he
left the knive sheath. Investigators believe he did not run
after Xana, and they also think this is when he

(14:59):
said it's a okay, I'm here to help you. Gilbertson
also believes it was Xanna who said somebody's here. That,
as we know, was over heard by one of the
surviving roommates. They believe at the point Xana got to
her doorway, that's when BK began attacking her. Gilbertson also
said b KA would ask peers and colleagues, how would

(15:21):
you kill someone. Investigators did find social media photos of
female Washington State University students saved on his device, so
not a lot today, but those are the newest interviews
and I'm always interested in hearing their theories on what
happened the night of the murders. So that is it

(15:43):
for today. Hope you guys have a good rest of
your evening and we will see you soon.