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Moscow, Idaho

On the back roads, it can take hours.

When Brett Payne’s affidavit became public, it explained the police’s belief that Bryan Kohberger took the circuitous route.

According to the affidavit, after the murders, Kohberger’s Elantra left Moscow, headed south toward Genesee, then turned west to Uniontown—which is not so much a town as a shack surrounded by miles of cornfields.

If WSU kids have been drinking in Moscow and don’t want get pulled over by the cops, they’ll risk the back roads, well known to be deserted during the day, unlit at night, and treacherous with snow and ice in winter.

But Rand Walker, the Moscow therapist, opined that to someone who has committed murder, the road’s most dangerous facets could become conveniences.

He suggested that a person could toss a murder weapon into the surrounding snow-covered fields, and the chance that anyone would find it was negligible.

That early morning, according to Payne’s affidavit, it took Kohberger over an hour to make his way back to Pullman—fifty minutes longer than it took to drive the eight miles on 270.

But he stayed home for less than four hours.

At around nine a.m., according to Payne, he left Pullman and returned to Moscow.

Not just to Moscow, but to the very scene of the murders.

Every criminologist knows that the more emotional the crime, the more likely it is that the criminal will revisit the scene.

Kohberger’s phone pinged on the 1122 King Road network between 9:12 and 9:21 a.m.

It was the last time that the cops saw his phone use the Moscow cell network.

And then, the cops believe, he went home.

His cell phone records showed him arriving back in the Pullman area at 9:32 a.m.

But Kohberger wasn’t done driving for the day. Not by a long shot.

Just three hours or so later, his cell records suggest, he made the forty-minute trip from Pullman to Clarkston, Washington, via US Highway 195, where cameras saw him at Kate’s Cup of Joe coffee stand and then, at 12:46 p.m., at the Clarkston grocery store, Albertsons, where he purchased unknown items and left at 1:04 p.m.

Students of local crimes—and Kohberger was most certainly one of those—knew that Clarkston was a good place to throw things into a river.

Twelve years earlier, Charles Capone strangled his estranged wife and threw her body into the river. It was never found. Bill Thompson got the conviction only after an accomplice talked.

Next, Payne wrote, Kohberger returned to the country roads he had been driving the night before.

His phone pinged in the rural backwoods of Johnson, Washington, two hours from Lewiston, between 5:32 and 5:36 p.m. Then it vanished from the network for two and a half hours, from 5:36 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.

Payne didn’t account for what happened in those hours.

But Kohberger’s defense attorney, when he got one, wrote in court papers that the police never found the murder weapon, nor did they find any of the victims’ DNA on his clothes or in his car.

In fact, the knife sheath appears to have been his only mistake.

Gary Jenkins said, “From what I’ve heard of his activities afterwards, he was pretty sophisticated in knowing how to get rid of DNA and whatever else he needed to do.

“I don’t know if he went to Lewiston, but he certainly did a lot of driving around.”