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Lehigh County, Pennsylvania

J osh Ferraro is on edge, waiting for the news.

Last night, Grace, a friend he works with at the Swim-In Zone, a local pool, told him that her dad was part of the state police team staking out the home of the suspect in the Idaho Four killings.

She tells him that it’s a former DeSales student.

Josh is shocked.

He went to DeSales. He studied criminal justice, then spent three years as a corrections officer. So he feels like he has more understanding than the average person about why people commit serious crimes.

The people he’s seen locked up, they look like average Joes.

They are average Joes, in fact, for most of their lives.

But underneath… underneath there’s an itch.

And these people spend their lives waiting for the chance to scratch it.

They put themselves in places where the opportunity is readily available.

On December 9, for the heck of it, Josh made a TikTok video suggesting the profile of whoever did this is a single male between the ages of twenty and thirty. That’s because, he theorized, Moscow was a college town, and the suspect would need to blend in.

Still, when the face and name of Bryan Kohberger flash on his TV screen, he’s taken aback. Something about that name rings a bell. But that face—he doesn’t remember that face.

Until he checks his phone and sees old emails.

“Oh, shit!” he says.

It’s the Ghost. His lab partner on a biology project.

The strange guy who showed up promptly for classes, then vanished into his car and drove off to one of an assortment of jobs.

The guy who didn’t speak to anyone except the professors.

Who occasionally hung back to talk to Professors Ramsland and Bolger.

When Josh last saw the suspect’s face, it was fuller. Different.

Josh is shocked.

Nothing about Kohberger stands out in his memory as a red flag. Nothing.

Quiet, yes. Strange, yes. Awkward, yes.

But a murderer?

“There’s nothing, there’s just nothing to the guy, except he was a good student,” Josh said.

He reaches for his phone and texts as many of his classmates as he can find. Does anyone remember anything peculiar about Bryan Kohberger? Anything that would indicate he’d turn into a mass murderer?

They ask one another the same question:

When they look back, what did they miss?