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Bryan Kohberger saw a news article about a white Hyundai Elantra having been identified as a suspect vehicle in the Idaho student murders and immediately panicked, according to the forensic team that analyzed his phone.
“I think the vehicle was a huge stress point for him, because he had registered it to park there,” said Jared Barnhart, who along with his wife Heather works at the digital forensics firm Cellebrite. “He had a PDF download of like a list of Hyundai Elantras for the university, you know, and you can see this long list of cars.”
Kohberger was attending Washington State University, just 10 miles from the crime scene adjacent to the University of Idaho, and had been pulled over driving near both campuses in the weeks before the murders.
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A still image from bodycam video shows Bryan Kohberger during an Aug. 21, 2022 traffic stop in Latah County, Idaho. (Latah County Sheriff’s Office)
The car was still on his mind in the hours before his arrest, according to the Barnharts.
“If you weren’t the bad guy, you wouldn’t care, but he was scrambling, and he thought the police were on him,” Jared Barnhart told Fox News Digital. “And they were. They were at that point.”
Madison Mogen, top left, smiles on the shoulders of her best friend, Kaylee Goncalves, as they pose with Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle, and two other housemates in Goncalves’ final Instagram post, shared the day before the four students were stabbed to death. (@kayleegoncalves/Instagram)
According to phone data reviewed by the Barnharts, Kohberger did the following during the late-night hours of Dec. 29, 2022:
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- Kohberger searched for the phrases “wiretap” and “psychopaths paranoid”
- He read an article about how police were still searching for the suspect vehicle
- He visited the Moscow Police Department website and checked the latest press release on the case
- He “immediately” looked up an auto detailing shop
- Within 10 minutes, he was shopping online for another car
Bryan Kohberger appears at the Ada County Courthouse for his sentencing hearing, Wednesday, July 23, 2025, in Boise, Idaho, for brutally stabbing four University of Idaho students to death nearly three years ago. (AP Photo/Kyle Green, Pool)
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“Literally the pressure of, ‘Oh, look, they’re really talking about my car,’ caused…within 15 minutes of behavior, him trying to clean it and get rid of it,” Jared Barnhart told Fox News Digital. “Just not normal.”
At around 1:30 a.m. on Dec. 30, police swarmed his parents’ house and arrested him.
Police found a Ka-Bar sheath at the crime scene that had Kohberger’s DNA on it, which led them to his parents’ house in the Poconos with help from the FBI and state-of-the-art techniques called investigative genetic genealogy.
Moscow, Idaho, detectives released this stock photo of a white Hyundai Elantra and said they were interested in speaking with the occupant(s) prior to Kohberger’s arrest. (Moscow PD)
But detectives have maintained that even if they didn’t have the sheath, they would have found Kohberger by hunting down leads connected to the suspect vehicle, which appeared on surveillance cameras coming and going from the crime scene.
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Last month, after his lawyers failed to convince a judge to throw out key evidence and have the potential death penalty taken off of the table, Kohberger pleaded guilty to the murders of Madison Mogen, 21, Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Xana Kernodle, 20, and Ethan Chapin, 20.
All but Kernodle are believed to have been asleep at the start of the 4 a.m. home invasion attack.
He received four consecutive sentences of life without parole, plus another 10 years.