Bryan Kohberger, the man accused of murdering four Idaho college students in their beds in November, followed all three of the female victims on Instagram, but they did not follow him back.
Authorities have not stated if the victims knew Kohberger, but the suspect’s now-deleted Instagram account — which PEOPLE.com examined before it was deleted — followed Mogen, Goncalves, and Kernodle’s profiles.
An investigator familiar with the case previously told PEOPLE.com that Kohberger messaged one of the three female victims constantly two weeks before the slayings.
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According to the source, in late October, an account that officials suspect is Bryan Kohberger’s sent a message to one of the female victims. When the user did not respond, he allegedly sent her many further DMs.
“Essentially, he was simply saying, ‘Hey, how are you?’ But he did it again and over again “PEOPLE.com were notified by a source. Kohberger did not appear to receive an answer.
“[The victim] might not have noticed them since they went under message requests,” says the source of the inquiry. (When an Instagram user receives a message from someone they do not follow back, the message is not noticed, and it is saved in a different folder.) “We’re still trying to figure out how much the victims knew about him.”
On November 13, Madison Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle, and Ethan Chapin were stabbed to death at their off-campus Moscow, Idaho rented home. A masked assailant broke into the residence and slaughtered all four pupils with a fixed-blade knife in their bedrooms.
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Kernodle, Mogen, and Goncalves shared a room. Chapin did not reside in the house but was visiting his girlfriend, Kernodle. Two other housemates were at home at the time of the incident but were uninjured.
On December 30, Kohberger was detained at his parent’s house in Pennsylvania. The 28-year-old graduate student and teaching assistant at Washington State University were charged with four charges of murder and one count of criminal burglary. On January 4, he was returned to Idaho.
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Since his arrest, further information about the suspected killer’s psychiatric past has emerged. An account that appeared to belong to Kohberger during his adolescence revealed feelings of sadness, detachment, and being able to do “anything I want with no regret” on an internet forum.
The user thought to be Kohberger was a member of a site called “Visual Snow or Static,” where individuals talked about visual snow syndrome, an uncommon disease that causes people to experience static in their eyesight. Visual snow is defined as “a neurological disorder that affects an individual’s vision, hearing, and quality of life,” according to Visual Snow Initiatives.
A post titled “Am I the only one?” from May 12, 2011, indicates the user’s troubling emotional condition. “I constantly feel as if I’m not there, entirely depersonalized,” the post begins, followed by a series of symptoms the individual was experiencing, such as lack of cognition, despair, suicidal thoughts, “crazy ideas,” “delusions of grandeur,” “bad social skills,” and “NO EMOTION.”
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According to the post: “I am cruel to my family when I return home. This started with VS. I felt no emotion, and because of this, I can say and do anything I want with no regret… Everyone despises me because I am an a——-e.”
The final line of the post reads: “Nothing I do is pleasurable. I’m blank; I have no opinion, no feeling, no nothing. Can you identify?”
