Washington police have released documents describing an unsolved home invasion involving an intruder with a knife and ski mask just a few miles from the Idaho students’ murders crime scene.
“[The victim] said she was asleep in bed in her room in the basement when she awoke to her bedroom door being opened,” according to a Washington police report obtained through public records. “She said she saw a person enter the room and approach her bed. She said the person was wearing a full-face burgundy ski mask and was holding a knife in their right hand.”
She was unable to tell if the intruder was male or female, but they raised the knife, she told a responding officer.
“I like kicked the s— out of their stomach and screamed super loud, and they like flew back into my closet and then ran out my door and up the stairs,” she told responding officers in bodycam video.
Crime scene tape surrounds an entrance to the Pullman, Washington, apartment used by Bryan Kohberger after his arrest in December 2022. (Stephanie Pagones/Fox News Digital)
“Without the DNA on the sheath, this would’ve been nearly impossible, and he would’ve probably struck again,” said Joseph Giacalone, a retired NYPD sergeant and criminal justice professor at Penn State Lehigh Valley.
Kohberger, who had a master’s degree in criminal justice from DeSales University in Pennsylvania, studied crime scene cleanup extensively and appears to have known how to avoid detection as a result. However, he left a Ka-Bar knife sheath with his DNA on it under Mogen’s body.
It wasn’t until the FBI assisted Idaho police with investigative genetic genealogy techniques that Kohberger’s name surfaced in the investigation. The lead investigators said after his sentencing last month that they would have caught him eventually – explaining how they had a plan to whittle down the list of suspect vehicles until they had their man.
Pullman police asked WSU officials if Kohberger had come to campus for any recruiting events, but they had no record of his presence during that timeframe.
Wilson-Short Hall at the Washington State University campus in Pullman, Washington, which houses the school’s Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, where convicted murderer Bryan Kohberger was seeking a Ph.D. before his arrest. (Derek Shook for Fox News Digital)
There’s a chance he could’ve been in town without having documented it with the university, but air travel, toll booth records or cellphone data could be used to conclusively place Kohberger in his home state of Pennsylvania or in Washington at the time of the incident, Giacalone said.
“But at this stage of the game, it doesn’t matter,” he said.
Idaho Judge Steven Hippler sentenced Kohberger to four consecutive sentences of life in prison without parole – plus another 10 years. As part of a plea deal that spared him from the potential death penalty, he waived his rights to appeal and to seek a sentence reduction.
