Bryan Kohberger's Shirtless Selfies and Naked Women Were Discovered on His Phone: ‘Very Vain, Like American Psycho’ By Chris Spargo 18

Bryan Kohberger went to great lengths to hide his search history in the weeks before and after he murdered four University of Idaho students, but he did not delete his photos from his phone.

What investigators largely found on his phone were half-naked selfies of the convicted killer and a number of women in various states of undress, Heather Barnhart tells PEOPLE.

“Lots of him posing half naked in the mirror while flexing,” Barnhart says.

It is unclear what, if anything, Kohberger did with these images of himself because there is no evidence of him ever sending them to anyone, she says.

Then there were the women, all dressed in very little clothing, if any at all.

“There were some women in bikinis and others who were completely naked,” says Barnhart.

None of these images were actually taken by Kohberger, though, explains Barnhart, adding that “these were all cache files saved to his device.”

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The only thing Kohberger seemed interested in photographing other than himself was his car — the 2016 white Hyundai Elantra that he drove on the night of the murders.

“Very vain, like American Psycho,” Barnhart says of the photo collection.

That is a reference to Patrick Bateman, the protagonist of the 1991 Bret Easton Ellis novel and later 2000 film starring Christian Bale of the same name.

Bateman, as written by Ellis and later portrayed by Bale, is an image-obsessed misanthrope and nihilist who questions his own sanity and may or may not be a serial killer.

There were also two previously released images from Kohberger’s photo roll, among them the thumbs-up selfie he took in his bathroom of his apartment on the Washington State University campus after driving back to the murder scene in Moscow the morning of Nov. 13, 2022.

That image shows Kohberger with a bandage on his hand and a shower curtain can be seen in the background, which had disappeared by the time police obtained a search warrant for his residence.

Barnhart notes that this image, much like the shirtless selfies, was also never sent to anyone and instead seemed to exist just for Kohberger.

What Barnhart and her team did not find, however, were any images of Kohberger’s victims saved to his photo roll.

The photos speak to the incredibly isolated life Kohberger led both before and after the murders, with no images of friends or family found on the device.

Barnhart, a SANS Institute Fellow and the Senior Director of Forensic Research for Cellebrite, was brought on by the Latah County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office to assist in the case by searching Kohberger’s cell phone and hard drive for any clues.

She has previously leant her expertise on a number of high-profile legal proceedings such as the Crystal Rogers case and Delphi murders, as well as the Osama bin Laden raid.

She says that her team — which on this case included Jared Barnhart, Josh Hickman, Ian Whiffin and Mattia Epifani — was forced to dig deep due to the expertise of Kohberger, a former criminology student who left a very small trail of clues.

Kohberger is now in Idaho’s lone maximum security prison facility serving out four life sentences.

The former criminology student took a last second deal that allowed him to avoid the death penalty in exchange for pleading guilty to the murders of Kaylee Goncalves, 21; Madison Mogen, 21; Xana Kernodle, 20; and Ethan Chapin, 20.

The four University of Idaho students were brutally stabbed to death in the early morning hours of Nov. 13, 2022, for reasons that are still unknown.