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Center Valley, Pennsylvania

D eSales University professor Katherine Ramsland is deeply frustrated.

As soon as the news breaks that the suspect arrested for the murders of the Idaho Four was once a student at DeSales, the university issues an edict to the faculty:

No one who taught Bryan Kohberger is to say anything.

So the expert in forensic psychology and extreme offenders finds herself in a truly ironic situation.

She’s the author of seventy-two books, more than a thousand articles, and a Psychology Today blog called Shadow Boxing, the tagline for which is “a blog that probes the mind’s dark secrets.

” And yet she’s not allowed to write or talk about the one murder case she has personal knowledge of and for which she may or may not be called to testify—the case involving her former student Bryan Kohberger.

Her inbox and voicemail are cluttered with endless media requests that she has to decline.

She reads media reports describing her classes, like her Psychological Sleuthing class in the crime scene house where she staged murder scenes using dummy bodies and fake blood and asked the students to act as detectives.

She reads recollections of Kohberger as one of the better students, someone who evidently wanted to impress Ramsland by reading her books, including her most well known, Confession of a Serial Killer, about Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer.

In articles discussing her classes—including her course on spree murderers like Elliot Rodger—her students tell the media they remember Kohberger dedicating himself to the assignments, in particular to Rodger’s YouTube video, which was on the syllabus.

Classmate Brittany Slaven remembered that he was so “advanced” that she once peeked at his paper when stuck on a test, knowing he’d have the correct answers.

Brittany said they spent weeks learning from Ramsland, via the acronym IS PATH WARM, the characteristics that law enforcement should look for to detect a murderer-in-waiting:

I—Ideation

S—Substance abuse

P—Purposelessness

A—Anxiety

T—Trapped

H—Hopelessness

W—Withdrawal

A—Anger

R—Recklessness

M—Mood changes

What if Kohberger had copied Elliot Rodger? The character similarities were there all along. Ramsland’s students tell the media they learned from Ramsland that psychopaths like Rodger and Rader are very hard to detect.

Chad Petipren, another student of Ramsland’s, said that he remembered Kohberger as a normal guy. Bryan sometimes mentioned going to church and Bible study, but when Chad asked him questions about the Bible, Bryan didn’t always know the answer.

But look at Dennis Rader and what Ramsland taught them, Petipren said. “Rader had a son, he had a child… It’s like he became a normal person for years. He could have been my church president.”

Until, that is, Rader went out and committed murder.