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Pullman, Washington

I t’s the week before classes begin at Washington State University in the small town of Pullman. The little airstrip Pullman shares with nearby Moscow, Idaho, is just a seven-minute drive from the hilly campus.

WSU is a large school, much larger than UI, with over thirty thousand students. WSU territory is marked by the massive billboard bearing the logo of the Cougars, WSU’s football team, who are competitive in their division, unlike Moscow’s Vandals.

But football is not the school’s only selling point.

This August, WSU’s famed criminology and criminal justice graduate program has attracted an international elite bunch, a self-described “cohort” of eleven students, seven women and four men, who will be pursuing master’s or PhD degrees.

One student comes from South Korea. Another, Sah, is from Bangladesh. Leon is from Taiwan.

At a meet-and-greet with the twenty-odd faculty members, the students pile their paper plates high with mounds of Panda Express and size one another up.

They make small talk and learn about their differing areas of interest, ranging from cybercrime to human trafficking to police militarization and domestic terrorism to drug crimes and drug courts. One person says he studies maps, a subject the others can’t quite fathom his interest in.

At forty-two, Ben Roberts is the second oldest in the group. He suspects he’s the only one from the West Coast. He looks at the others’ serious, scholarly demeanors and thinks he’s probably the only one who has ever used a chain saw.

Ben notices one of the students in particular.

His name is Bryan Kohberger.

Bryan stands out because he’s painfully thin. His eyes move too quickly, and the bags under them are dark and too prominent for someone his age.

Ben also notices that Bryan never takes off his jacket, even in the August heat. Ben assumes—wrongly—that he needs insulation on account of his willowy frame.

Ben does not know about Bryan’s history with heroin. He doesn’t know that Bryan might be keeping his forearms covered in public to hide the telltale track marks of his past addiction.

Ben is flattered when Bryan comes over to chat with him. Bryan is doing a PhD, which makes him senior to Ben, who is in the master’s program.

Bryan asks a lot of questions about Ben’s background. The conversation kicks into high gear when Ben tells Bryan that he worked for the TSA—he was head of security at a small airport.

Bryan lights up. “I’ve worked in security too,” he says.

“Cool,” says Ben. “Where?”

Bryan becomes vague. “Oh, back home…” He doesn’t say where home is, exactly.

Ben shares some experiences he thinks Bryan might have had himself.

He tells Bryan that there were times at the airport when he found it particularly “inelegant” to have to exercise “access control”—that is, having to tell people who believed they had clearance to enter a certain area that in fact they didn’t and then barring their path.

“Did you have any of that?”

Bryan nods vigorously.

Ben continues. “And the worst, I found, is when people do have the clearance, but they haven’t got the right paperwork on them. It’s so embarrassing to have to stop them going through.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” says Bryan.

Ben wonders for a split second if that is, in fact, true. (It “felt like he might have been stretching,” he later said, but at the time, Ben went with the flow.)

Bryan seems very articulate, Ben thinks. He spits words out with the fluency and confidence of someone who expects to be listened to.

Ben has no idea that Bryan is in fact giving a bravura performance, playing the role of someone he has never been—namely, someone who belongs in the room. The silent, awkward introvert has been replaced, for now, by a confident, articulate intellectual.

Bryan might be figuring that at WSU he can start fresh. Become the man he dreams of being.

No one needs to know about his troubled past.

Bryan turns from Ben and makes a beeline for the group of senior faculty members. Like a Wall Street CEO, one by one, he pumps their hands and works the room.

“I’m Bryan,” he says, “and I’m excited to be here.”