Last summer Michael Kohberger, Bryan’s father, declared to a friend that his son, Bryan, was innocent; he had not committed four murders. And that a trial would clear his name.
I guess things changed… As we learned yesterday. At the eleventh hour before a trial which has been delayed and delayed, Bryan is pleading guilty. It’s a decision that has shocked everyone, including the victims’ families.
There were signs this was coming if you knew where to look.
A couple weeks ago, someone on Bryan Kohberger’s defense team phoned Connie Saba, the mother of Bryan’s one and only childhood friend, Jeremy Saba, who died, tragically of an overdose in 2021. This person asked Connie what she remembered of Bryan’s behavior and mental health, because, he said, they were looking for ways for him to avoid the death penalty. (Obviously, the lawyers have now found a different way to achieve that objective, with a guilty plea).
Connie told him, what she told me about Kohberger for The Idaho Four. He was a strange, silent young man, in awe of her popular, athletic son. Both of them had learning disabilities. Both of them turned to drugs.
Nearly two years ago, she and I spent a day driving around the utterly bleak neighborhood in the Poconos that Bryan grew up in. It’s a bedroom community where there’s nothing for teenagers to do. No movie theater; No restaurants; not even a bowling alley. Connie, who was a teacher, showed me the bike trail and other places where she believed Jeremy and Bryan would buy their drugs from dealers.
She showed me the house next to hers where Bryan grew up. I saw the path he’d come through the trees to spend time with Jeremy. Connie told me that when Jeremy went over to the Kohbergers, he was never allowed inside, which she thought was odd.
She also showed me the garage door through which Bryan had broken in to her house, in August 2016 the day afterJeremy was arrested for the first time for DUI and drug possession.
Bryan, by then a user himself, had phoned Connie to say he was so sorry to hear about Jeremy’s arrest. He asked her solicitously when she’d be visiting Jeremy in jail because, he said, he’d like to go visit him, too. So, Connie had given him the time, and then wondered why he didn’t show up at the jail. Until, that is, she got home and discovered someone had broken in during her absence and stolen her I-pad.
She knew at once who the culprit was.
A year or so later, she was standing in her kitchen and turned around and there was Bryan. She hadn’t heard him come in. He’d come to apologize. Connie understood why. He was in rehab for heroin addiction. Atonement is a critical step.
She never heard from Bryan after Jeremy died. But she wondered if he was the person who’d phone her cell, heavy-breathing. He had always been a strange child. His mother Maryann had told her he had Aspergers.
A year ago Connie ran into Michael Kohberger, Bryan’s father.
Here’s an excerpt from The Idaho Four about their conversation:
As Connie Saba is shopping in the Rite Aid in Brodheadsville, she sees someone in the pain- relief aisle who looks familiar.
She stops. Is it someone she used to work with? And then she realizes . . .it’s Michael Kohberger. Bryan’s dad.
“Connie?” he says. “Is that you?”
“How are you, Michael?” she replies.
He seems very pleased to talk to someone.
“My heart goes out to Maryann,” Connie says. “How is she?”
Michael tells her that his wife doesn’t talk to anyone, even on the phone.
“We lead a very quiet life,” he says. “We don’t go out.” And even when they are home, he says, they don’t feel safe. “People,” he tells her, “are watching our house.”
“What people?”
“Government people,” he says, leaving her slightly confused. Then he says, “You know Bryan didn’t do it, right, Connie?”
Connie thinks. She says: “The Bryan I know wouldn’t do it.” She wants to be supportive.
It’s then that Michael seems to remember that he hasn’t spoken to her since Jeremy died.
“We were both shocked to hear Jeremy died,” he tells her. “Maryann wanted to call you but she felt unable to.” He doesn’t explain why.
“Does Bryan know Jeremy died?”
“Bryan was away,” Michael says. He doesn’t say where. “We didn’t tell him for months.” But, yes, he knows.
“Bryan wasn’t the same after the drugs,” he adds. “He wasn’t the same person.”
Connie nods. But, she thinks, even on drugs, Jeremy had remained sweet and good- natured.
“But Bryan was framed,” Michael says.
Connie is startled. Framed?
“Someone planted the knife sheath,” he tells her. “The police didn’t find it when they first went in. There were a lot of drugs in that house, a lot of people around. But they only looked at Bryan. You know how he likes to drive around when he’s nervous?”
Connie doesn’t, but Michael tells her, “He always used to get in the car and drive at night when he needed to think or he had some fog. He had to get away and just think. Or when he couldn’t sleep, he would just drive around.”
Michael adds, “Things will come out in the trial. Everyone will see.”
Or not.
If you want to really understand who Bryan Kohberger was, and why he committed these evil acts, you’ll need to read our book. It’s not so much a who-done-it as a why, what, and where.
Sadly, it’s now the only definitive record we’ll have that gets near to explaining what happened on the night of November 13 2022.
You can pre-order it here.
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