Chilling Phone Finds: Kohberger’s Photos, Selfies, and What They Reveal About the Idaho Killer
Jordan Collins here. Okay, I’ll explain, but try to keep up. New court records and investigator interviews reveal what Bryan Kohberger kept on his phone before he murdered four University of Idaho students, and yes, the details are as telling as they are unsettling.
Investigators who examined Kohberger’s device after his arrest found that although he scrubbed his browsing history, he left his photo library intact. According to testimony and reporting from People and E! News, the 32-year-old former criminology student saved a variety of images that paint a picture of a man both vain and isolated. The collection included numerous shirtless mirror selfies in which he posed and flexed, pictures of unidentified women in bikinis, and other images showing women fully nude. Detective Hannah Barnhart described these as cache files stored on his phone, and she stated the images were never transmitted to anyone else.
Barnhart told reporters that the selfies and the sexualized photos of women give investigators a window into how Kohberger spent his downtime leading up to the November 2022 murders. She also noted vanity photos of his 2016 white Hyundai Elantra, the same vehicle he drove on the night the four students were killed. Those car shots were included in the forensics haul and corroborate his presence in the area the night of the crimes.
Prosecutors noted during the case that one selfie from Kohberger’s collection showed him giving a thumbs-up in a bathroom at his Washington State University apartment the morning after the murders, after he had driven back from Moscow, Idaho. That image was released during trial proceedings as part of the evidence chronology. Meanwhile, the Moscow Police Department released scene photos including a blood-soaked bed and the sliding glass door investigators believe Kohberger used to enter the King Road rental where Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle, and Ethan Chapin were killed on the night of November 12 into the early hours of November 13, 2022.
Victims’ families have pushed back against the public dissemination of graphic photos, calling for dignity and privacy. Steve Goncalves, Kaylee’s father, publicly asked that crime-scene images be withheld from the media to shield their children from further indignity. That plea underscores the tension between public court records and the anguish of bereaved families when graphic details become part of news cycles.
Investigators and prosecutors used the phone evidence to sketch Kohberger’s precrime behavior: a solitary routine, physical preoccupation with himself, and digital hoarding of sexually explicit images. Barnhart compared his vanity to the fictional Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, describing Kohberger as “very vain.” While that literary comparison is meant to capture a certain narcissistic profile, it is backed by the catalog of selfies and car photos forensic teams cataloged.
Kohberger pleaded guilty to all four murders as part of a deal that spared him the death penalty and received life imprisonment on July 23, 2024. The photos on his phone never proved a direct link to the victims, and officials say none of the saved images were shared with other people. Still, the content strengthens the portrait prosecutors and investigators assembled about who Kohberger was in the months before he killed four young people who were on the cusp of their futures.
If you want to follow what happens next, watch for any appeals filings, motions about evidence handling, and requests by the families for images to be sealed. There’s more courtroom paperwork and privacy fights to come, and they’ll determine how much of this case stays public record.
Well, now you finally understand.
Sources: Celebrity Storm and People, E! News, Moscow Police Department, NewsNation Banfield
Attribution: Creative Commons Licensed
