Bryan Kohberger, 30, was sentenced this Wednesday in Idaho on Wednesday, after pleading guilty earlier this month. At the helm, the families of the four young victims, brutally stabbed in their sleep in the middle of the night in November 2022, succeeded each other to express their pain. A final audience rich in emotions that conclude this affair which had shocked the country.
The case had shocked the United States and plunged the state of Idaho in terror. On November 13, 2022, Madison Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle were brutally killed in the middle of the night, in their house located on the Idaho University campus in Moscow. On Wednesday, July 23, after a last audience rich in emotions, Bryan Kohberger, 30, was sentenced on Wednesday to incompressible life imprisonment for these four assassinations.
On July 2, this criminology student had pleaded guilty, recognizing the facts in a stoic tone and thus avoiding the death penalty. An agreement of sentence which, in fact, does not leave room for a trial. During the hearing on Wednesday, at the end of the declarations of the families of the victims, Bryan Kohberger refused to express themselves or to provide explanations as to his motivations, leaving relatives of the four unanswered students. Almost three years later, the mobile of the crime therefore remains unknown.
A night of horror
The night of their murder, the four students had spent a classic Saturday evening on a university campus. Xana Kernodle and her boyfriend, Ethan Chapin, 20, had gone to a party organized by a fraternity. The roommates of Xana, Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves, 21, best friends since childhood, had gone to a bar, ordered to eat to a foodtruck before returning around 2 a.m. A few hours earlier, the four friends had taken a photo together, in the company of the two other roommates of the house, a photo that has now toured the media, marking the last moment of the group.
In the early morning of November 13, 2022, a masked attacker parked his car behind their house and entered a sliding glass door. The individual is mounted on the first floor, stabbed Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves who slept in the same room, then went down this time to Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin. The other two roommates, living on different floors of the house, came out unscathed. Behind him, the murderer left a macabre crime scene but also a knife case with his DNA. Video surveillance images showing a vehicle corresponding to that of Bryan Kohberger had also made it possible to locate it. It was not until December 30 that the suspect was finally arrested at his parents in Pennsylvania.
“You will go to hell”
After almost three years of investigation, the mystery of the mobile of the crime remains. However, the theories are not lacking online and in the media, some qualifying Bryan Kohberger as “Incel”, poorly managing the refusals of the fairer sex, fascinated by the criminals and serial killers. “The more we strive to seek an explanation for the inexplicable, the more we try to extract a reason, the more we give him power and control,” concluded the judge, Steven Hippler on Wednesday.
During the hearing, the families of the victims succeeded each other to express their pain. “You are going to go to hell. You are evil. There is no room for you in paradise. You have taken our children. You will suffer,” said Randy Davis, a stepfather of Xana Kernodle.
“If you had not attacked them in their sleep, in the middle of the night, like a pedophile, Kaylee would have kicked her ass,” said her sister, Alivea Goncalves, to the applause of the room.
“She was the only thing good that I really did. And the only thing I was really proud of,” said Ben Mogen, Madison’s father. Describing his fight against addiction, he added that his daughter “allowed him to stay alive in the most difficult moments”.
In tears, Dylan Mortensen, one of the two roommates who survived the murders, also spoke about the loss of his four friends. “He didn’t only remove them from the world, he took them away from me. My friends, these people who were my home. The people I admitted and that I adored more than anyone. He deprived me of my ability to trust the world around me. What he made me shattered in places that I did not think of Cassable.” The young woman told the panic attacks that hit her “like a tsunami” since the night of the facts, confident that she had to sleep with her parents for months.
“Bryan, I’m here today to tell you that I forgive you, because I can no longer live with this hatred in my heart,” said Kim Kernodle, the aunt of Xana.
