Inside the Hunt for the Idaho Killer
In the weeks after four University of Idaho students were found slaughtered in a house near campus last November, a growing roster of investigators desperately searching for answers had yet to identify a suspect or even find the murder weapon.
Publicly, the authorities were assuring worried residents in the small college town that they were making progress. Privately, they were exhausting their prospects, scouring through the backgrounds of those with the thinnest possible connections to the case.
Through the first two weeks of December, investigators put some of their focus on classmates of the victims; they also widened the search to examine a man in another state who had been known to send harassing messages to women but had visited Idaho only twice in his life. They looked at a woman previously charged with assaults in the region. They looked at a man once accused of wielding a knife. They looked at sex offenders. They looked at a white supremacist. Each turned out to be a dead end.
Then, after spending weeks sifting through an array of evidence that seemed to lead nowhere, investigators announced an arrest in late December on the other side of the country: Bryan Kohberger, a Ph.D. student from a nearby university. He was identified only after investigators turned to an advanced method of DNA analysis that had rarely been used in active murder investigations.
Source: The New York Times
