While Bryan Kohberger’s alleged motive for killing Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin has never been revealed, The Idaho Murders: College Nightmare director Skye Borgman revealed the former criminology student may have targeted the group because young women lived in the home.
“This was a house that had five women living in it,” Borgman told Fox News of the crime scene in Moscow, Idaho.
Goncalves, 21, Mogen, 21, and Kernodle, 20, lived in the home with fellow students Bethany Funke and Dylan Mortensen when the grisly murders took place on November 13, 2022.
“The night that the murders happened, Xana Kernodle’s boyfriend, Ethan Chapin, was over, but really, this was a house full of women, and it seems quite clear that he targeted it,” Borgman speculated.
The Netflix docuseries features stories from Kohberger’s former classmates from Washington State University, who explained he was “not particularly well liked” and often spoke negatively about women.
Kohberger, 31, was reported to Washington State University police by a female student, who claimed he followed her to her car. Kohberger was a teaching assistant at the time of the incident and lost his job after he was reported.
Amid the investigation, suspicions that Kohberger was watching the home began when Funke, 23, told authorities that Goncalves claimed she saw someone “staring at her” while she was walking her dog.
“He watched the house; he was around the house in the days, weeks and months leading up to the murders,” Borgman said. “So, it seems pretty likely that he had a very low regard, if not hatred, for women.”
Another topic discussed in the docuseries was the theory that Kohberger was allegedly part of the incel movement, which is an online subculture of men who are involuntarily celibate and have intense hostility towards women.
“It’s all conjecture, but he seemed to struggle with his relationships with women,” Borgman said. “And we look at this incel movement and the question of whether or not he was an incel, and whether or not he didn’t like women.”
Kohberger was taken into custody on December 30, 2022, after DNA evidence connected him to the crime scene, where a Ka-Bar knife sheath with the USMC insignia was located next to a victim’s body.
He pleaded guilty to the murders in July 2025 as part of a plea deal, in which he avoided the death penalty and was sentenced to four lifetimes in prison without the possibility of parole. (Prior to his plea deal, Kohberger claimed to be out stargazing on the night of the murders.)
In a shocking turn of events, Kohberger filed a petition to withdraw his guilty plea in July 2026.
“My actual innocence is my truth, and the plea, hinged on by false promises and blatant disinformation, MUST be withdrawn,” he said in a statement to The New York Times.
Shortly after he made the filing, the Goncalves’ family slammed Kohberger while issuing a statement about the situation.
“‘The mosquito you just can’t seem to swat’ — that is what Kohberger and his following have become to this family,” the Goncalves family wrote in the July 27 statement.
They added that Kohberger was “a guilty man once again claiming he is innocent,” and that he previously “chose not to leave his fate — or the facts of the case — to a jury” when he accepted the plea deal.
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