Episode Details

After Bryan Kohberger was arrested, commentators and true-crime observers drew comparisons between the Moscow killings and several notorious attacks on young women in shared residences, including the 1992 murders near the University at Buffalo and some of Ted Bundy’s crimes. The similarities being discussed were largely circumstantial and behavioral rather than proof of any direct connection: a male attacker allegedly entering a residence occupied by young women, striking during the overnight hours, using a knife, attacking multiple victims at close range and leaving behind a scene that appeared intensely personal and extraordinarily violent. The college setting also fueled the comparisons, because the victims were young, socially connected students living together or near one another, while the killer allegedly approached and departed without immediately being identified.

The Bundy comparisons were especially common because Bundy had committed nighttime attacks against women in communal living environments, most famously the 1978 Chi Omega sorority-house attacks at Florida State University, where he entered the residence and assaulted several women in rapid succession. Similarities were also discussed in relation to the unsolved 1992 Buffalo-area student murders, which likewise involved young women and generated speculation about whether an offender had selected victims within a college environment. None of those parallels established that Kohberger had modeled the Idaho murders on Bundy or on the Buffalo case, however, and investigators did not publicly demonstrate that the crimes were connected. The comparisons were primarily attempts to understand the Moscow killings through the history of other predatory offenders who entered residential spaces, attacked vulnerable victims at night and relied on surprise, speed and close-range violence.


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