MOSCOW, Idaho – The Pennsylvania man accused of killing four University of Idaho college students in November is a Ph.D. in criminal justice. candidate who studied under leading expert on serial killer Dennis Rader, known as the BTK killer.
Bryan Christopher Kohberger, 28, was arrested in the Poconos on Friday nearly seven weeks after police say he broke into the home of a group of sleeping students and attacked four of them in their sleep.
The ambush killed Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves, best friends of 21, as well as her housemate, Xana Kernodle, and her boyfriend, Ethan Chapin, both 20. Two other women on the bottom floor of the three-story building and six -The house with the bedrooms was not attacked.
As part of his prior studies at DeSales University, Kohberger worked under the tutelage of BTK expert Dr. Katherine Ramsland, a fact that shocked the daughter of the infamous serial killer after news broke of the arrest of Kohberger on Friday.
SCHEDULE OF MURDERS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF IDAHO
Left: Bryan Kohberger in a suicide gown after his arrest in Pennsylvania on Friday, December 30, 2021. Right: Dennis L. Rader, the man known as the BTK serial killer, is escorted to the El Dorado Correctional Center on December 30 August 19, 2021. 2005 in El Dorado, Kansas.
(Monroe (Pa.) County Correctional Facility via AP, Jeff Tuttle-Pool/Getty Images)
Rader’s daughter, Kerri Rawson, revealed on Twitter over the weekend that she got sick to her stomach when she found out about the connection.
Ramsland is an expert on serial killers and has, or had, both an academic relationship and a friendship with Rader, Rawson says, expressing fears that Kohberger was in contact with his father before the crimes.
It’s frustrating to be the daughter of someone like that and continually see this happen.
“It’s very common for criminology students in general to write to my father,” he said. However, he previously cut off contact with his father and said that he has not spoken to Ramsland in several years. “Ramsland would know, but he’s not talking.”
Ethan Chapin, 20, Xana Kernodle, 20, Madison Mogen, 21, and Kaylee Goncalves, 21, along with the two other roommates of the women in Kaylee Goncalves’ latest Instagram post, shared the day before the murders.
(@kayleegoncalves/Instagram)
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Kohberger, after earning his master’s degree from DeSales, pursued a Ph.D. at Washington State University’s department of criminal justice and criminology, just a few miles from the house near the University of Idaho, where police allege she brutally stabbed four students on November 13.
After the murders, Kohberger reportedly continued classes at WSU on both his Ph.D. program and as a teaching assistant.
“The suspect is a criminology student, [and] my father has a degree in criminal justice,” Rawson told Fox News Digital. “And after his first murders, which he was of people at the age of 28, he enrolled at Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas, for criminal justice.”
Victims of the November 13 massacre at the University of Idaho.
(Instagram @xanakernodle / @maddiemogen / @kayleegoncalves)
That was the first connection he made, he said.
“And then sometime on Friday I put the Ramsland one together, so that really bothered me,” he added. That’s the part that turned his stomach.
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Ramsland has refused to comment publicly on the case thus far.
His work on serial killers includes several books such as “The Criminal Mind: A Writer’s Guide to Forensic Psychology” and “Confession of a Serial Killer” co-written with Rader.
Rader’s daughter also said she sympathizes with Kohberger’s relatives who might have been ignorant of a family member’s alleged misdeeds, just like she was.
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“It is a difficult place for the Kohberger family, for the families of the victims; it’s a horrible, horrible thing,” she told Fox News Digital. “It’s not easy for LE (law enforcement)… It’s frustrating to be the daughter of someone like that and continually see this happen. Did my dad have a connection to this guy? What was his connection to Ramsland? It’s frustrating “.
Idaho State Police search for clues in Moscow Monday, November 21, 2022 outside the home where four University of Idaho students were killed.
(Derek Shook for Fox News Digital)
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Kohberger was due to appear in court in Pennsylvania Tuesday morning and was expected to waive his extradition to Idaho, where he faces four counts of first-degree murder and one felony count of robbery with intent to kill.
Through his Pennsylvania public defender, he has expressed confidence that he will be exonerated.
