Madison Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin were never supposed to be famous. In the pre-dawn hours of November 13, 2022, the four University of Idaho students were stabbed to death in their beds, likely while they slept, inside the off-campus house they rented in Moscow, Idaho. The man accused of killing them now sits in a jail cell facing the death penalty. He also has fans: women who adore him, and who believe it is their destiny to save him.
A town that seemed safe
Moscow has been called one of the best small art towns in America and one of the best college towns. It is walkable and friendly, with an award-winning farmer's market and a crime rate 82% lower than the national average. It was one of the last places anyone would expect a quadruple homicide.
The coroner said the weapon was probably a "pretty large knife." A social media video showed two of the victims at a food truck just hours before they died. For days the campus sat deserted and the murders went unsolved. Then authorities arrested 28-year-old Brian Kohberger in eastern Pennsylvania. Kohberger, a former graduate student in criminal justice at Washington State University, was charged with four counts of first-degree murder and one count of felony burglary, and was held without bail. Prosecutors announced they would seek the death penalty.
Love letters to a cell
Forensic psychologist Dr. Carole Lieberman, author of the bestseller Bad Boys, traces the attraction back to childhood. "It's like an addiction to heartbreak," she said. A girl who feels her father never found her lovable can grow into a woman chasing that same wound, hoping to rewrite the ending. Freud called it repetition compulsion, the urge to replay an old injury. Dr. Soman Doss, a forensic psychologist in London, adds that abuse survivors gravitate toward "what's familiar instead of what's safe." A man behind bars can't hurt anyone. The woman holds all the control, maybe for the first time in her life.
None of this is new. Charles Manson, Ted Bundy and Richard Ramirez all had admirers. Even Jeffrey Dahmer drew female fans, who somehow managed to overlook not only his cannibalism but his sexuality. What's new is the megaphone. More than 16,000 people joined the "Justice for Brian Kohberger" group on Facebook, one of many fan pages there. Reddit shut down a subreddit (a topic forum on the site) called "Bryan Kohberger's girls" for its creepy parade of fangirling and shrine-building. Posts hail Kohberger as "the divine masculine" and spin theories about a Deep State plot to frame him, a plot more tangled than Inception.
One Kentucky woman named Brittany became the public face of the crush, and the target of a pile-on. She committed no crime by falling for him. In Newsweek, Lieberman urged her to get therapy and find a relationship in real life, with "a real life boy, not Pinocchio." For Brittany and others like her, the crush became a crusade.
Stacys, Chads and a crime of passion
Before Kohberger was even arrested, Lieberman wrote in Newsweek that the killer was an incel, short for involuntarily celibate: a man who has been rejected by women all his life and has let the rejection curdle into rage. Two things tipped her off. The first was the savagery. When a father asked how many times his daughter had been stabbed, he was told "it isn't about stab wounds." The victims had been shredded. The second was who died: three beautiful, popular sorority women and the boyfriend of one of them. Incels call women like that Stacys, and call their boyfriends Chads.
Kohberger himself told someone after the killings that it looked like a "crime of passion." Lieberman agrees, though the passion was rage. She points to a middle-school girl named Kim who rejected him, a Barbie-like blonde who resembled Kaylee and Maddie, and she doesn't think the resemblance is a coincidence. He was rejected all through high school, and later at a bar he frequented in Pennsylvania. On one social media forum he called himself "Pappa Rodger," a nod to a notorious name.
Brian Kohberger is accused of slaughtering the kind of popular young women who would never give him the time of day, and now that he's behind bars, women are writing him love letters.
The supreme gentleman
That name is Elliot Rodger, who killed six people in Isla Vista, California, in 2014 before killing himself. He left behind a 107,000-word manifesto and a YouTube video in which he promised to punish women for not wanting him and called himself "the supreme gentleman." The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in The Hague later called his crimes "misogynistic terrorism," and the U.S. Secret Service labeled them "misogynistic extremism." In the online chat groups where incels egg each other on, Rodger is a hero. Lieberman argues that Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, fit the profile too. He had no relationship history and no sexual history, and the one woman who kissed him soon broke it off. Nobody had the word incel when the FBI arrested him in April 1996.
Kohberger spent a lot of time on Instagram. He followed all three of his female victims and kept sliding into Maddie's DMs, the app's private direct messages. She ignored him, the way women are taught to ignore strangers writing "hello, pretty, hello, beautiful." Ignore it and he'll just go away. Not this time. Lieberman also points to evidence that he returned to the scene hours after the killings: "incels like to be known for when they kill people or when they have a conquest like this."
Why, not who
At his arraignment, Kohberger declined to enter a plea, so a not-guilty plea was entered for him. His trial was set for October 2, 2023, but that date was widely seen as a placeholder. In a death penalty case, the cell phone data, forensics and DNA all take time to process. A plea deal that takes execution off the table is considered the least likely outcome.
No verdict will bring back Kaylee, Xana, Maddie or Ethan, and no verdict will make sense of what was done to them. Brittany isn't the first woman to believe her love can redeem a killer, and Kohberger isn't the first incel accused of turning his grievance into bloodshed. People will spend years asking who Brian Kohberger is. The better question is why he is.
