Episode Details

Long before the murders of Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin, Bryan Kohberger had accumulated a number of troubling complaints involving women and his behavior around them. One woman who met him through Tinder years earlier said their date became so uncomfortable that she pretended to vomit in order to get him to leave her apartment; she claimed Kohberger repeatedly touched her despite her objections and later texted her that she had “good birthing hips.” Other accounts surfaced from his time at Washington State University, where female students and staff reportedly complained that Kohberger lingered in offices, blocked doorways, followed women to their cars and made them feel unsafe. Some women were reportedly given security escorts after dark, and faculty members told investigators that multiple complaints had been made about Kohberger’s treatment of women. One instructor said the concerns became serious enough that his conduct was repeatedly discussed in disciplinary meetings and that the program eventually held behavioral training for graduate students.


Those incidents were not limited to graduate school. A former administrator at a Pennsylvania technical school said Kohberger had been removed from a high-school law-enforcement program after female students complained about him, forcing him to transfer into another vocational track. At WSU, meanwhile, reports described professors intervening when female students appeared trapped or uncomfortable around him, and some students reportedly kept office doors closed to prevent him from entering. Investigators later received additional accounts from women who said Kohberger had followed or persistently approached them despite their attempts to disengage. None of those earlier incidents proved that Kohberger would go on to commit murder, and they were not themselves evidence of what happened inside the King Road house, but after his arrest they took on much greater significance because they revealed a documented pattern of interpersonal problems, particularly involving women, that stretched across different periods of his life and existed well before November 13, 2022