Page 109

Pullman, Washington

I n fact, the Washington State University administration is in total meltdown.

Inside Wilson-Short Hall, phones are ringing off the hook as the news of Kohberger’s arrest spreads like wildfire.

Professor Snyder is bombarded with calls. So too is Professor Willits.

The last people either one wants to engage with right now are members of the media.

Willits is distraught. It was he who admitted Kohberger.

A day or so later, he runs into WSU chief of police Gary Jenkins in the corridor, and Willits almost collapses.

“He was about ready to break down,” Jenkins said. “He said, ‘I just feel horrible. I’m the one who accepted him in this program.’ So he felt responsible.”

As Evan Ellis predicted, the administration’s mandate—don’t “give interviews”—comes down very quickly from on high to the faculty and the students in the department of criminal justice.

That’s the message in the email that Ben Roberts and the other members of Kohberger’s cohort receive from WSU administration.

Ben and the others are in transit back to Pullman after the holiday break when they receive the email.

Which is shortly followed by a bombardment of emails and calls from the media.

Kohberger’s class list is on WSU’s website for a further twenty-four hours before the department takes it down, citing privacy.

The students immediately reach out to one another, torn between shock and disbelief.

What had they missed?

And, worse, as advanced students of criminal minds, how had they missed it?

“I can’t think of a group of people who would be better positioned to see this sort of behavior, the red flags associated with it in their own ranks,” Ben said, “and we just completely didn’t see it.”

Several of them struggle with the idea that Kohberger was just there, in their midst, sharing office space and classes.

“It’s one thing to study criminology from the relative safety of academia’s ivory tower,” Ben said, “but it’s quite another [to] have a quadruple homicide on your doorstep.”

So when the graduate students arrive on campus, WSU administrators are ready for them; there’s a meeting attended by staff and students in which they learn they will receive psychological support from counselors loaned out by Gary Jenkins’s police department.

It’s much needed. The group feels not only blindsided by what happened but betrayed. And the curt answers they get from faculty in the meeting don’t help much.

“We enter into criminology because we want to make the world a better place,” Ben said.

“There’s a general interest, not really in taking the reins of power, but in figuring out how those reins of power can affect people and how you can service the system to be better.

And so when you see somebody run off and do the exact opposite of that and make the world a very, very dark and ugly place for somebody, it sort of really is the ultimate betrayal of everything that I think a criminology program stands for. ”

Making things worse is that the group is now under siege on campus.

Journalists pose as students. The cohort winds up locking their offices because random strangers mill around, holding out their phones, wanting a quote.

The cohort locks down. They decide that to protect the members’ sanity—and for practical reasons of getting on with their work—they’ll follow the case and they’ll talk to investigators when they inevitably come to question them.

But they no longer want to discuss Bryan Kohberger, even among themselves.