Page 118

Moscow, Idaho

T he Suburban pulls into the garage. The steel doors lock behind him.

Bryan Kohberger walks down the twenty steps to the fluorescent-lit dungeon that is the tiny, underground Latah County jail.

Most of the inmates are there for the usual reasons: drugs, DUIs, domestic abuse, assault.

Technically, the jail—with a capacity of thirty-eight inmates—is too small to meet the state’s legal requirements.

There aren’t enough rooms. The inmates are housed in a square around the common areas: kitchen, shower, and library.

They’re allowed just one hour a day, combined, to use the library and the twenty-by-ten-foot wired-in exercise yard.

There’s nothing else to do except watch TV.

It’s a twenty-four-hour cycle of boredom with the odd flash of excitement.

In 1984, Leslie Rogge, the “gentleman robber” who was being held for federal bank robbery, walked out, aided by a map and a door opened by the jailer. He was not apprehended until 1996, in Guatemala. He’s due to be let out in May 2034, at the age of ninety-four.

In 1992, William A. Davison, a twice-convicted murderer, escaped from the exercise yard. He was captured after a manhunt lasting a month.

The common shared cell for up to eight people is not where Kohberger goes.

Months later, a friend of Josie and Linden’s who is drunk and booked there for the night sees Kohberger in a cell alone, per his “maximum security” status.

Jail staff are not going to take a risk with him.

“Inmates have wives and children too,” Sergeant Brannon Jordan, the deputy who was injured in the fatal shooting of Officer Lee Newbill, said. “What he did is out of a horror movie.… In the prison world there’s status that comes with harming someone like him.”

The deputies’ priority is to keep Kohberger alive.

They need him to face the wheels of justice.

“Nobody,” Jordan said, “wants to fuck that up.”