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The man had a plan.

The Internet’s huge slop of (mis)information plus Netflix has inflated American murders, fuelling an obsession with mass and serial killers that began with Ted Bundy, creating new and easier paths to femicide, and an online fascination with crime-solving.

Kohberger’s criminology professor back in Pennsylvania where he grew up is eager to talk to him. A self-described expert on serial killers, said he “was very polite, respectful, seemed genuinely engaged with the material as a potential researcher, teacher, somebody who was interested in a career.”

 A warning bell.

To my eye Kohberger, whose plea let him escape the death penalty —in Idaho it’s a firing squad — always looked guilty, almost cartoonishly so. His 4 a.m. slaughter of three sorority sisters plus a fraternity boyfriend on Nov. 13 may have at an off-campus Florida university sorority house, even to the point of similar mistakes.

When Bundy, who Kohberger studied, was facing trial, one reporter wrote that he was either guilty or the unluckiest man on earth.

Kohberger wasn’t unlucky. He was just a lousy student. Arrested six weeks after the murders, his details were red flags. 

What kind of man wants three degrees in serial killing? Kohberger had surveilled the students’ house dozens of times in his white Hyundai Elantra, as CCTV and cellphone pings would reveal. At 4 a.m., headed for one particular bedroom with a student’s in the window — a signal of femininity — he stabbed  in their beds, killed another coming upstairs by chance after a DoorDash, and then stabbed her sleeping boyfriend.

In the Bundy case, another female resident had spotted a man with a pointy nose wearing a ski-type cap coming downstairs and exiting the sorority. This time, another female resident saw a man with bushy eyebrows and a ski-type mask coming down the stairs towards the door.

Hours after the murders but before police were called, Kohberger was home smiling in an appalling thumbs-up selfie in his bathroom. Bundy-like, he scrubbed his car and apartment meticulously, and later hid his garbage as police watched.

Still, DNA caught him, on the knife sheath he left on a bloodied bed.

If Ramsland had liked Kohberger, no one else did. He was . All his life girls and women had been alarmed by his manner and behaviour, had felt menaced by him and to their credit complained. This is the “,” an increasingly valued theory that tells women to respect their instinctive alarm.

He had been fired from many jobs for conflicts with colleagues, customers, professors and female students. Just after losing his job, scholarship and student access at Washington State, Kohberger — like 2014 incel Elliot Rodger shooting the blonde student “Stacys” who rejected him — set out with a knife bought on Amazon.

ɫɫ�� van-attacker ���������� Rodger, as he wrote before he killed 11 people, nine of them women, on Yonge Street in 2018. 

As with Bundy, Kohberger beat his first sorority victim, the blonde and extremely pretty Madison Mogen, in the face and head before stabbing her to death.

Like many authoritarian men who seek status via uniformed jobs enforcing petty rules, Kohberger yearned for power. He was a from “The Office,” a rule-enforcing martinet, a “category error in human form,” out of place and angry.

That blue Idaho house where they died, now demolished, was full of Stacys, young beautiful women who saw men as friends, who radiated happiness and hope for a brilliant Midwestern future.

Their names were Madison Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, and Xana Kernodle, plus dear friend Ethan Chapin. I dwell on their photos. Such sunshine.