Bryan Kohberger Paranoia Grew in Hours Before Arrest, Looked for Used Car

On Dec. 29, 2022, at 9:08 a.m. Bryan Kohberger read an article in The New York Times about the ongoing search for the driver of a white 2011-13 Hyundai Elantra.

Two minutes later, he searched online for “auto detailing shop,” and at 9:19 a.m. he started searching for used cars, including the Ford Fusion, Volkswagen Jetta, and Honda Civic, according to digital forensics expert Heather Barnhart, who was hired by prosecutors to examine Kohberger’s cell phone and hard drive.

By the same time the next day, Kohberger was in the custody of Pennsylvania State Troopers while awaiting extradition to Idaho to answer for the murder of four students at the University of Idaho.

Other searches and downloads conducted by Kohberger around this time show a man growing increasingly paranoid as authorities closed in on him at his childhood home.

On Dec. 29 he also searched “psychopaths paranoid,” “wiretapping” and “serial killers,” Barnhart tells PEOPLE.

That same day, Kohberger downloaded information about the serial killer Wayne Nance, who was shot and killed at the age of 30 while attempting to murder his boss and rape his wife.

One day prior, Kohberger downloaded a Fox News article which revealed 90 Hyundai Elantras had been given parking registrations by the University of Idaho between 2018 and 2022, but made no mention about out-of-state searches for that car, which Kohberger had registered in the state of Washington.

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Kohberger also downloaded four of the daily updates on the Idaho murders from the Moscow Police Department on Dec. 28. Three days earlier, he had spent Christmas day downloading stories on more than 20 serial killers.

Barnhart has previously worked on cases from the Delphi murders to Osama Bin Laden — but despite all her experience in the field, she says that even she was caught off-guard when she and her team began pulling data from Kohberger’s cell and hard drive.

“I feel like we were just in shock thinking where the heck is the data and what are we going to do?” Barnhart says.

“Because when people call me, I always say, ‘oh, yeah, we can find it. No problem. We’ll come in there.’ And I’m like, ‘We’re not, we don’t see it.'”

Barnhart says that Kohberger was incredibly skilled when it came to scrubbing his phone of information and similarly “really good at the anti-forensics aspect on his hard drive, too.”

What she and her team did find, however, would have been crucial had the case gone to trial, given the lack of a motive and murder weapon.

The information Barnhart and her team managed to assemble from Dec. 28 and 29 proved to be particularly helpful, likely because Kohberger had not yet scrubbed his phone.

That is because as he was searching for “wiretapping” and “psychopaths paranoid,” authorities were outside surveilling his home. And they had been for days.

Then, just after midnight on Dec. 30, 2022, state troopers and agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation executed a search warrant on Kohberger’s parents’ home and took him into custody.

A week laterm he returned to Idaho for his first court appearance, where a judge charged him with the murders of Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin.