Bryan Kohberger Faced 13 Formal Complaints at Washington State — Including About These Offensive Comments By Chris Spargo 217

Bryan Kohberger was just days into his first semester of the doctoral program in criminology at Washington State University when administrators received their first formal complaint about his behavior.

There would be 12 more over the next three months, bringing the total to 13, according to newly unsealed documents and interviews with members of the WSU community obtained by PEOPLE.

The documents also contain multiple interviews with some of the women who made these complaints, including a divorced woman who claimed the murderer told her he didn’t date “broken women,” and a deaf classmate who was asked by Kohberger if “she would be comfortable procreating given the fact she had a disability.”

One classmate told the Idaho State Police that by September, Kohberger already had a reputation of “being a d—.”

The 2022 fall term at WSU started on Aug. 18, and one staff member told Det. Gary Tolleson of the Idaho State Police that a complaint had already been lodged against Kohberger before the end of that month.

Kohberger soon became a weekly topic of discussion during different disciplinary meetings, said the staff member, who also told Det. Tolleson that the discussions would often pertain to Kohberger’s “interactions with fellow postgraduate students, in and out of the classroom, along with his behavior around some of the Criminal Justice Professors.”

At first, the staff member thought Kohberger might just be socially awkward, but over time she realized the issue was how he spoke to staff and students and his alleged “stating of outspoken discriminatory comments which were homophobic, ableist, xenophobic and misogynistic in nature,” according to her interview.

She then added: “He would also stare at people and stand uncomfortably close or ‘lean’ over women, making them very uncomfortable.”

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When she invited Kohberger into her office to discuss the complaints, he said his “comments had been misunderstood,” according to the interview.

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One undergraduate who worked in the criminology department told the ISP that Kohberger would constantly come to her office and force her to speak with him, or physically corner her as she left work.

Kohberger eventually asked her on a date, but she told him that she had a girlfriend.

She said this didn’t deter Kohberger, however — and soon, she would get rides home from her boss so she wouldn’t have to walk or take the bus alone. This caused at least one person in her life to express concern about “how many precautions she perceived were being taken because of Kohberger.”

The undergraduate student, who was just 19 at the time, also “recounted an incident in which her neighbor saw someone very close outside her window.”

Soon after this, she learned that Kohberger lived nearby, according to her interview.

A female student in Kohberger’s doctoral program told the ISP he was a misogynist who made her feel “deeply uncomfortable.” Documents show that people complained he often spoke down to women and arrived late to classes taught by female professors — so much so that one group of classmates kept a board tracking each incident, according to interviews.

That same student described Kohberger as a “narcissist” who “never displayed empathy toward another person” and wanted “to be seen as the strongest, smartest, most important person in the room.”

It wasn’t just women who complained: One male graduate student recalled being “verbally kidnapped” by Kohberger, telling the ISP that he had been forced into a three-hour conversation as he was in the parking lot trying to leave one day.

Kohberger told him “he could pick up any woman he wanted in bars and clubs,” while also saying he “had no one to really have ‘guy talks’ with,” according to his interview.

By the end of the conversation, the man was considering filing a formal complaint, but declined to do so because he wouldn’t be anonymous.

Things got so bad that multiple first-year doctoral students in the criminology program claimed to the ISP that they were all required to take discrimination training because of the things Kohberger had said to students and professors.

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The training took place on Nov. 8, 2022.

That weekend, Kohberger murdered four University of Idaho students.

Judge Steven Hippler sentenced Kohberger on July 23 to four lifetimes in prison without parole for the murders of those students — plus 10 years for a burglary charge. He will also be required to pay approximately $250,000 in fines and civil penalties.

The convicted murderer, 30, appeared in an Idaho courtroom for his sentencing three weeks after appearing in the same Boise courtroom and confessing to the murders of: Madison Mogen, 21; Kaylee Goncalves, 21; Xana Kernodle, 20; and Ethan Chapin, 20.

The four were found brutally stabbed to death inside a Moscow home on Nov. 13, 2022.