Bryan Kohberger appeared at a courthouse in Latah County, Idaho, final Thursday to face murder charges for the brutal killings of four University of Idaho students in November.
Just two months in the past, the 28-year-old was enrolled at Washington State University at Pullman, 10 miles from the Moscow, Idaho, campus the place the killings occurred, ending up his first semester of a criminology Ph.D. program during which college students debate the motives of criminals, amongst different issues, and research how prosecutors collect proof.
By final week, he had change into an inmate in an orange jumpsuit at Latah County Jail, and descriptions of his educational background have been ubiquitous within the media protection of his alleged crimes.
It’s tempting to attract a connection between Kohberger’s educational pursuits and the crime he’s accused of committing, however specialists say that neither the proof within the case nor the character of criminology scholarship helps that link.
“Studying criminology is not going to make you a criminal, and it’s not going to make you a better criminal,” mentioned James Allan Fox, a longtime professor of criminology at Northeastern University and the previous dean of its College of Criminal Justice. “What we teach is ‘how come?’ Not ‘how.’”
Kohberger was a instructing assistant in addition to a Ph.D. scholar at Pullman when he was arrested late final month. He was certainly one of 34 college students—24 doctoral candidates and 10 pursuing their grasp’s levels—within the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice. On Friday the college eliminated the division web site itemizing its graduate college students and their contact information, citing privacy concerns, however a cached model of the webpage was nonetheless obtainable as of Monday.
Inside Higher Ed reached out to a dozen college students utilizing the information on that webpage, however none responded. Phil Weiler, WSU’s vp of selling and communications, wrote that one classmate, Shah Alam, was not obtainable for media remark, however he didn’t tackle the opposite requests. Weiler additionally didn’t reply to a request for touch upon the potential connection between Kohberger’s research and his alleged killings.
After Kohberger’s arrest, directors issued a assertion saying the college was “aggrieved by the alleged horrendous acts of one of its graduate students.” Officials at DeSales University in Pennsylvania, the place Kohberger obtained his bachelor’s and grasp’s levels, issued a similar statement, writing, “We are devastated by this senseless tragedy” and “recognize the impact this news can have on our community’s well-being.”
Mary Ellen O’Toole, a former FBI profiler and the director of George Mason University’s forensic science program, mentioned that whereas some psychopaths who commit mass homicide harbor a fascination with criminals, she doesn’t imagine one essentially results in the opposite.
“People go into these subjects because they have an intellectual appetite for it,” she mentioned. “It’s clear this individual did have an intellectual interest in criminology and the criminal mind … but I don’t think it was a cause-and-effect situation, where he chose to study this and his studies led him to become violent.”
“Studying criminology is no more likely to lead to crime than studying accounting is to lead to accounting fraud,” mentioned Richard Rosenfeld, professor emeritus of criminology on the University of Missouri at St. Louis and a former president of the American Society of Criminology. ”The focus needs to be on that particular person who has been accused of committing these murders and what introduced him to that time. That has little to do with what he might have been studying in school.”
A ‘Brilliant Student’ of the Criminal Mind
Michelle Bolger, certainly one of Kohberger’s criminology professors at DeSales, instructed the U.Ok. newspaper The Daily Mail that Kohberger had been a “brilliant student.”
“In my 10 years of teaching, I’ve only recommended two students to a Ph.D. program and he was one of them,” Bolger instructed the Mail. “He was one of my best students, ever.”
When reached for remark by Inside Higher Ed, Bolger forwarded the request to Carolyn Steigleman, DeSales’s affiliate vp for advertising and communications, who wrote, “At this time faculty are not available for interviews about this matter.”
While at DeSales, Kohberger additionally studied underneath Katherine Ramsland, an professional on serial killers who helped Dennis Rader—often known as the BTK Killer, who strangled 10 folks to dying in Kansas within the mid-Nineteen Seventies—write his autobiography. Ramsland instructed Inside Higher Ed by way of electronic mail that she was “making no media statements at this time.”
Fox pushed again on these making an attempt to connect Ramsland’s scholarship with Kohberger’s alleged killings.
“[The media] started playing on the fact that one of his professors had written a book about BTK, who was a serial killer, not a mass killer. These crimes are very different.” mentioned Fox, who can be the writer of Killer on Campus (Avon Books, 1996) and Extreme Killing (Sage, 2018). “I don’t think there’s any significance to that.”
O’Toole mentioned revelations from the release of an affidavit final Wednesday indicated that even when Kohberger thought of himself a scholar of crime as apply, he wasn’t a superb one.
“People are giving the suspect too much credit for his academic excellence,” she mentioned. “Looking at the affidavit, there were a tremendous number of elementary mistakes made from a forensic and technological perspective that led to his arrest.”
Those errors embody forgetting the knife sheath on one of many victims’ beds, being caught on digicam circling the victims’ neighborhood in his automotive and turning his cellphone on whereas nonetheless close to the residents’ home, she mentioned—all items of proof that helped result in his arrest.
She additionally mentioned that based mostly on the main points of his actions and the way in which he allegedly dedicated the murders, she doubts Kohberger’s intentions have been experimental or scholarly in nature.
“The way he carried out these alleged murders does not point to some detached academic interest; this was need-driven behavior,” O’Toole mentioned. “He came there to obliterate his victims out of hatred, which is a very scary state of mind, but which also put him at greater risk of giving himself away.”
Stranger Than Fiction
In 1990, Fox, then serving because the dean of Northeastern’s College of Criminal Justice, was invited to affix the duty drive investigating a mass killing in Gainesville, Fla., the place the our bodies of 5 University of Florida college students had been discovered mutilated throughout orientation week. He ultimately helped remedy the case, resulting in a USA Today profile that dubbed him the “Dean of Death.” Later, Fox mentioned, a manufacturing firm optioned the story and commissioned a screenplay based mostly loosely on the investigation, during which a professor along with his identify helps remedy a string of murders dedicated by certainly one of his college students.
In the screenplay, which was by no means produced, the fictional Professor Fox was capable of link his scholar to the crimes based mostly on handwriting evaluation, and he was haunted by the potential connection between the murders and his instructing.
But the true Gainesville killer was not a scholar, and Fox mentioned these sorts of connections between the classroom and the motives and strategies of a killer “really only exist in movies and television shows.” He mentioned he by no means favored the drama How to Get Away With Murder exactly as a result of it mischaracterized the work of criminologists and legal legislation students, main many to imagine that you would, the truth is, learn to commit the right crime from a faculty course.
“Most criminology, particularly at the Ph.D. level, really doesn’t focus on the analysis of crime scenes,” Fox mentioned. “It’s more theory, research and statistics, criminal psychology, etc.”
According to the website for the DeSales grasp’s program in legal justice, which Kohberger accomplished in 2021, the curriculum consists of six core courses: superior criminology, analysis strategies, ethics, justice techniques and processes, statistics and information evaluation, and a venture seminar. Potential electives for graduate college students do embody programs on forensics and crime scene evaluation, however Steigleman mentioned she didn’t have entry to Kohberger’s class data and didn’t know whether or not he’d taken them.
In an article printed Monday in The Idaho Statesman, Benjamin Roberts, a grasp’s scholar in criminology and legal justice at WSU Pullman who took courses with Kohberger, mentioned his classmate’s arrest had put his personal research into sharp aid.
“The stories you’re reading in the paper, the cases you’re reviewing, the studies you’re doing, it can become easy to forget that they’re connected to real people,” Roberts instructed the Statesman. “People lose people and find their kid’s bed empty. There’s a real heaviness looking at that and realizing and remembering, this is not just some sterile academic subject. This is something that affects people.”
Roberts didn’t reply to an interview request from Inside Higher Ed.
Fox mentioned he’s had college students earlier than whose fascination with violent criminals bordered on the regarding. Some even collected what Fox referred to as “murderabilia,” buying and selling playing cards and different souvenirs bearing the likenesses of serial killers comparable to Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy.
But their fascination, he mentioned, by no means resulted in violent crime. And no matter numbness would possibly end result from the repeated publicity to violent crime that comes with learning criminology, Fox mentioned there’s no cause to link Kohberger’s alleged actions to his scholarship or professors.
“Some people, a very small minority, study criminology because they may identify with the perpetrator. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to act on that,” Fox mentioned. “I really do not think anything about his academic training is responsible.”