The FBI watchers were thankful for the snow. It had started to come down in a swirl of thick, white flakes over the winding Albrightsville, Pennsylvania, roads, and that meant Bryan Kohberger would very likely be staying put.
Earlier that afternoon, December 16, at just about 2:30, the Hyundai carrying the Kohbergers had completed its cross-country journey. The family lived in a fraying white clapboard house in a gated community called Indian Mountain Lakes Village, although the name was a bit of a mystery since there was neither an Indian, a mountain, nor a lake in sight. A decade ago, the residences had largely been modest summer cottages for families wanting to escape from the heat and tumult of New York and Philadelphia. But now full-time residents were the norm. Still, a throwback to the community’s grander days, there were a manned sentry box and a pair of white boom gates at the main entrance. The high security was meant to keep the homeowners safe and sound from all the many dangers that lurked outside. However, after the FBI team saw the boom gates raise high and Bryan Kohberger drive through, one of the observers couldn’t suppress an ironic speculation: they very possibly had just let a quadruple murderer into their midst.
The falling snow also gave the bureau another advantage—the time to think.
From the start, they had been flirting with disaster. First, losing track of the targeted vehicle would’ve been bad enough. Then, not one, but two unexpected highway traffic stops, and each a disaster just waiting to happen. By now the bureau had learned that the Indiana authorities’ vigilance had been prompted by a drug interdiction operation that zeroed in on out-of-state license plates. But if Kohberger had behaved differently, if an Indiana cop had the nationwide BOLO about a white Hyundai Elantra taped to his dashboard, it was anyone’s guess what would have happened. And so they considered: if this op was indeed accident-prone, then maybe it would be good practical politics to be able to share the blame, even if it also meant sharing the glory. Besides, they had not originally anticipated that there would be a Pennsylvania component to the hunt. The locals would need to get involved; the jurisdictional issues were impossible to ignore. But, most persuasive, they had come to realize it just didn’t make sense to keep the Moscow taskforce out of the loop. It had grown clearer and clearer that they would need their help to bring this case to the nearly ironclad juncture where an arrest would be legally possible.
The snow kept falling, and they kept thinking. Until at last the bureau team, like good soldiers, finally did what it should have done days earlier.
ALL ALONG, CORPORAL BRETT PAYNE had been praying for a name, and now he had it. On December 19, the bureau, according to the official records, shared what had been discovered after the forensic genealogists had extended the DNA-rooted family tree to its farthest branch. Unofficial insider accounts, however, peg the notification to a day, maybe even two, earlier (although those might be attempts by the FBI to mitigate the sting of their self-interested delay). But while there is debate over the actual date, there is no disagreement that once Payne had Bryan Kohberger’s name he jumped into action.
Early on, he entered the name and the license plate number the feds had shared into the Motor Vehicle Records system. The computer screen promptly displayed a state driver’s license. It listed Bryan Kohberger as a white male, a sturdy 6' and 185 pounds. Which, Payne told himself, was pretty close to the broad description of the intruder Dylan Mortensen had seen. As well as, he also matter-of-factly conceded, a few thousand other guys on either the U of I or WSU campuses.
Then he turned to the photograph. Was this the face of a killer? He stared at it intently, but for all his scrutiny, he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Nevertheless, he kept boring in on the photo, and just like that, something caught his gaze: the eyebrows. They were bushy. Same as those of the intruder Dylan had spotted. And this small confirming detail, while too subjective to be admissible in a courtroom, further nudged his sense of urgency.
Armed with a name, he could also hunt for a cell phone number. Here, for once, he got lucky. For when he searched the department’s own records, to his immense satisfaction he learned that back in August, Kohberger had been stopped for a routine traffic infraction. A Latah County sheriff’s deputy had nailed the grad student for driving without a seat belt and, as was the standard practice, had included Kohberger’s phone number in the summons report.
With that number in hand, he reached for another file. In the inchoate days of the hunt, he had blindly bombarded the phone companies with search warrants requesting information about any devices that had pinged the cell towers in the vicinity of the King Road house between 3:00 and 5:00 a.m. on the morning the murders occurred. Now he could return to this previously unsatisfying list in a more purposeful way. He searched to see if Kohberger’s number had been recorded; this discovery would be the smoking—or more accurately, the pinging—gun.
Payne found nothing. Kohberger’s phone had not been caught at the crucial time by a cell tower in the vicinity of the murder house. It was not encouraging, but he decided to store this knowledge away until, he hoped, another part of the puzzle might give it a more meaningful context.
And so, undeterred, on December 23—more than five weeks after the murders—he decided to investigate what Kohberger’s phone had been up to around the time of the homicides. He sent a search warrant to AT&T, the provider of Kohberger’s cell service, requesting the records for the number between November 12, 2022, at 12:00 a.m. and November 14 at 12:00 a.m.
A detailed report arrived back at his desk that same day. And with that began the steady, careful paperchase. Working side by side with Benjamin Dean, an experienced FBI special agent on the Salt Lake City field office’s Cellular Analysis Survey Team, they set out to chart the interaction between Kohberger’s pinging phone and the time-coded surveillance videos that had captured passing glimpses of the white Hyundai Elantra in the fateful hours after midnight on November 13. When they were done, they had put together a grimly compelling narrative.
According to their reconstruction, Kohberger—or at least his phone—had left his apartment in Pullman at 2:47 a.m. on November 13 and had been heading south when abruptly it stopped reporting to the network. Turned off? Switched to airplane mode? Or, for that matter, the phone could have traveled into a rural area with no cell reception; this was northern Idaho, after all.
But those possibilities seemed highly unlikely when the videos that had captured what appeared to be Kohberger’s car filled in the picture. There was the white Hyundai—the infamous Suspect Vehicle 1—recorded making three slow, laborious passes by 1122 King Road from 3:29 a.m. to nearly 4:00 a.m. Then the car returned a fourth time at 4:04 a.m., only to abruptly disappear from sight. Yet at 4:20, there it was again, hightailing it out of Moscow at a breakneck speed.
And just as suddenly—at a telltale 4:48 a.m.—the cell phone pinged back to life. Heading out south from Moscow on US 95, the device continued to ping its way on a circuitous route through the countryside. But at nearly 5:30 a.m., the phone was making its way back to Pullman—just at the same time as surveillance cameras spotted the white Hyundai crawling back to the WSU campus neighborhood.
There was also a tantalizing coda to the drama Payne and the FBI expert had stitched together: At 9:00 that Sunday morning, Kohberger’s phone left Pullman and headed back toward Moscow. Then for nine long minutes—an interlude heavy with mystery—the phone was pinging like crazy off the cell tower that serviced the King Road house. For many of the cops on the taskforce, the explanation was clear: the murderer was returning to the scene of the crime.
But not so fast, Fry had challenged his team leader. What about the gap when Kohberger’s phone went silent? It included the precise time when the murders had occurred. How could the team tie Kohberger to the crimes if they couldn’t even prove he had been in the house when the murders happened?
Payne, always resourceful, had an answer—or at least a theory—handy. It had its antecedents in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of Silver Blaze,” where Holmes’s canny solution had been prompted by the “curious incident” of the dog that didn’t bark. Payne, too, had found reassurance in a “negative fact.”
“Individuals,” he would write, “can either leave their cellular telephone at a different location before committing a crime or turn their cellular telephone off prior going to a location to commit a crime. This is done by subjects in an effort to avoid alerting law enforcement that a cellular device associated with them was in a peculiar area where a crime is committed.” And, although he didn’t come out and say it, a further implication was clear: this shrewdness was precisely the sort of precaution a graduate student in criminal justice setting out to commit the perfect crime would employ.
Payne was now convinced: the cell phone records and the Suspect 1 car videos inexorably pointed toward Bryan Kohberger.
But he also understood that no judge would sign an arrest warrant for murder that was stitched together with all this speculation. And, he further conceded when pressed by Chief Fry, all the pinging phones might, under close scrutiny, add up to nothing than a lot of noise. The discomforting truth was that cell phone towers cast a wide net, often as far as twelve to fourteen miles. In a town like Moscow, that would take in a lot of territory. However tempting it was to claim the data was irrefutable evidence, the reality was that being in the vicinity was not the same thing at all as being at an exact address.
And so as Christmas came and went, the hunters gathered once more on December 26 in the PD’s conference room. Only now the discussion turned to refuse—garbage cans, actually—and just like that, things started to improve.
AS IT HAPPENED, IN ALBRIGHTSVILLE there was talk in the Kohberger household about garbage, too. Melissa, the older of Bryan’s two sisters, had come home for the holidays from New Jersey. For over a decade, she had been a practicing psychologist who specialized in helping families deal with thorny issues. And now without really trying, she began to notice certain things about her own family. There was Bryan wearing white surgical gloves as he suctioned the Hyundai’s upholstery and trunk with a shop vacuum. Then there he was in the kitchen late at night sorting his day’s personal detritus into plastic Ziploc bags. And though she had not set out to spy, and afterward wished she never had seen it at all, there was her brother sneaking out after midnight. Like a man on a mission, he walked down the long drive in the starlit chill to deposit the family’s trash bags in a next-door neighbor’s bins. When she put a name and purpose to all she’d been witnessing, it left her shaking.
At last, though, Melissa found the will to share her increasingly certain deduction with her father. Michael listened, yet he could not respond. A long, agonized silence filled the room, until at last he turned his back and walked away.