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Moscow, Idaho

F or once, in the morning meeting, the Chief hopes that they might be getting somewhere with the DNA found on the knife sheath.

It’s been a meandering process.

Othram labs had checked the sample against DNA in public geneology databases such as FamilyTreeDNA. Those results had led to “low matches” with four brothers.

The Idaho State Police had reached out to one of the brothers, requesting he give a DNA sample so that Othram could keep working to build a family tree. But he had refused.

So the team had conferenced. On December 10, Idaho State Police had asked Othram to stop work and hand over its findings.

The ISP had then turned those findings over to the FBI to take the step of running the DNA profile through GEDMatch and MyHeritage, two genealogy databases which purport not to permit law enforcement searches.

The FBI can legally do this because, as later noted in court records, there is a loophole in Justice Department policy that permits government agencies to use discretion when searching data provided to websites that do not have customers’ permission to share it.

The chief doesn’t know all the details, but it turns out he is feeling optimistic with good reason.

Four days from now, on December 19, the FBI gives “a tip” to Brett Payne. Payne will later say that the name provided is not one they’d previously associated with the investigation.

The name is “Bryan Kohberger.”

Now the investigators can look at Kohberger’s vehicle records, which show he owns a white 2015 Hyundai Elantra.

The Moscow team will look at the video they’ve gotten from cameras around King Road, to see if the white car that appeared to drive around the house several times that night could be a 2015 Elantra. And it turns out that, yes, it could.

And when they do a video canvass in Pullman—where Kohberger lives—for the night of November 13, they can see that at 2:44 a.m. the car is headed north on Nevada Street. But less than ten minutes later, it’s headed south on State Route 270, the road that connects Pullman to Moscow.

And when investigators check Kohberger’s name in their databases, a police body cam shows that on August 21, a Bryan C.

Kohberger was detained in Moscow at a traffic stop—and that the car had a rear Pennsylvania license plate LFZ-8649 that was set to expire on November 30.

It had no front plate, which is permissible in Pennsylvania but not in Idaho or Washington.

The car they’d captured on video had no front license plate.

Further DMV records will show that on November 18, just five days after the murders, Kohberger registered the vehicle in Washington and received new license plates, front and back, as is required: CFB-8708.

From there, locating the car will be relatively easy. The new plate showed up on a license plate reader in Loma, Colorado, on December 13. And on December 16, CCTV footage put the vehicle in Albrightsville, Pennsylvania, where, according to databases, Kohberger’s parents live.

They will also note that Bryan Kohberger’s driver’s license photograph shows a man with dark hair and dark bushy eyebrows—the description that Dylan Mortensen gave of the masked man she had mistaken for a fireman on the night of the murders.

Obviously, Fry isn’t going to start smiling in his press conferences. He’d like to. “I’m not a downer person,” he complains to Julie, his wife.

But he’s hopeful.

And no one passes on anything to the victims’ families.