[laughs]

So I had not paid any serious attention to it.

I'd been into Stravinsky and Bartok and Mozart and Beethoven and all that stuff.

Um, but I got the opportunity to get into pop culture.

And then I got the opportunity to get into the music industry.

And I was looking for the land where the gods are, the gods inside of us, and where the rituals are that bring the gods inside of us to life.

And the only hint that I'd had about h- how this all worked was that this transcendent experience, um, was, uh, a, a, a four paragraphs in a book by...

Mm.

This all tipped off, started, ignited in your mind, Howard Bloom, author of When the Night Comes Falling, because at the time of arrest, Koberger said, who else was arrested? That's what got you going?

No, not at all.

What got me going was where the crime scene photographs, the discussion of a cleanup, the discussion of the number of wounds, the Bill Thompson talking about a second weapon and are still trying to grapple with the question of a motive.

Why would he have picked that house.

The defense still wonders why.

The prosecution was going to say, well, he just picked it at random.

Well, nothing Kohlberger did that night seems randomish.

Why is it beyond the realm of possibility that Koberger did use two weapons?

Explain, and why did the FBI, who absolutely was following Koberger, as he and his dad across the country, thought that their entire operation may go up in flames?

Well, as you point out, the FBI decided that Koberger was a person of interest.

They decided this earlier before they even told the Moscow Task Force.

They kept this to themselves for either one of two reasons.

The first reason was that the identification was based on a genealogy, genetics, investigative genetic genealogy, and they thought that wouldn't hold up in court, or a... much more cynical explanation would be that the FBI didn't want to share the credit for Kohlberg's arrest with anyone else.

So they go off and follow him, and they have cars, they have a plane in the air that's following his route, and suddenly they see Koberger being stopped and they don't know what's going on and they don't know what to do.

Had they think a local cop, a local sheriff had seen the, be on the lookout for notice and swooped in on this Hyundai Elantra? Or they're also wondering, how is Koberger going to react? He is a suspect in a quadruple homicide.

And they're watching from a bird,

Nothing changed other than Bryan Kohberger's willingness to take the plea.

Uh, it is such a cynical decision on the part of the state to make this plea bargain, and during the course of the recitation by, uh, Thompson, he kept on saying things, "So many things we don't know." He said, "For whatever reason.

We don't know exactly why he did this.

Uh, the state, the evidence suggests." These are answers that we will never get.

That the families, more importantly, will never get.

I think they need to know this.

Uh, it was a very dramatic moment and ultimately very disappointing moment.

He wants to go to trial.

Who could she call at that hour? Well, the night owl, Bryan Kohberger, of course.

She's afraid to stay there.

She goes to his apartment, they spend the night together.

There's nothing romantic, but she stays there and she feels comfortable.

It's only later that she begins to put the pieces together and she begins to think, "Well, maybe Bryan knew about the letter I had received.

He knew about the watch.

Could he have taken them?"

And when the installation proved to be a little too complicated for her, again she called Kohberger.

Wow, incredibly disturbing. Just so the audience understands that the murders happened at 4:00 AM. That call did not get placed until almost noon the next morning, 11:55 AM. And for all this time, they have not released the 911 call. It wasn't until this week we finally got to hear it. We believe, not totally confirmed, but we believe that the girl who made the call initially was Bethany Funk, one of the two roommates who survived. The other roommate is named Dylan Mortensen. She's the one who saw an intruder, which they were trying to tell the 911 operator, who wasn't in the mood to talk about what happened the night before. Um, but those are the two surviving roommates so we believe that's Bethany Funk who could barely get sentences out. And Howard, the, you know, the remarkable thing, of course, is that they're talking about their roommate having been drunk and she isn't waking up, and just the one roommate. They're not... I- I am assuming that they had found Xana Kernodle, who was on the second floor with her boyfriend, Ethan, because they are not saying four... They only, they only had three of the female roommates. So they're not saying four of our friends are dead. They're saying one girl's passed out and, and she was drunk last night. We think she's dead.

Right. It seems that they did not even go up to the third floor. What's so, you know, horrific, you just listened to, to that hyperventilation. Uh, it, it's just, it's so poignant of what they went through. And the idea, first of all, that they did not make the call, as you pointed out, until about eight hours after the crimes took place. And it's just been released that they were up that morning, one of the girls at 7:30, another at about 8:20, and they were making other calls and texts. And they still wait until (laughs) 11:50 or so to call the police, and that's sort of hard to understand. And yet, you know, these children, and they are children, were overwhelmed by this. And part of their reluctance, why they might not have called the police and the fact that they were drunk, they didn't, they didn't want to face the reality. We all hate to face impossible things. But you can see from the dispatcher how the kids, the students in, in this college town, felt the adults react to them. We saw that on the police videos e- earlier when they come to the house o- on the noise, uh, disturbances calls. How the cops go out of their way to dump their beer o- on the sidewalk. There's a real antagonism between the s- the, the students a- and the town. And that actually, that adds, I think, to, to their reluctance to have reached out for help. But also-

That is such a stretch. I mean, what I'm gleaning from what's getting released now is, the defense knows it's, (laughs) I don't wanna say it has lost, but it's got an enormous uphill battle. And you tell me, 'cause you've been following it so closely, it appears to me they're now just doing what they can to mitigate the expected bad result, as opposed to truly try to get a not guilty, which I'm sure they'd love, but I think they're getting realistic.

Uh, I think in the back of the defense's mind, and this is what I'm hearing, uh, is (laughs) they're trying to avoid the death penalty. Just last week, I think it was March 12th or so, uh, Brad Little, the governor of Idaho, signed a law that makes the firing squad the primary form of execution in the state. That, that's what happens. You get convicted in a death penalty case, y- you go before the firing squad, that's your sentence. And Kohberger's team is now trying to do whatever they can to avoid it. Key to that defense is they've raised, uh, that Kohberger has- is on the autistic spectrum and they're saying that he's has, uh, inability to concentrate, to focus, his presence in the courtroom, uh, will disturb people, and they're saying that would be prejudiced jurors and therefore that, that the death penalty should be taken off the table because of that. I believe, and this is just my, my theory, my hypothesis, is that they don't think that will fly, but they're hoping down the road that if Kohberger still wants this case to go to trial, that they're going to be able to say, because of his autistic spectrum, uh, profile, that he can't make his own decisions, that they have to make the decisions for him, and that they want to enter into a plea deal. Will the prosecution go along with that? Well, that's, uh, that's what we- w- we'll see. That's going to be the, I think, the big drama of this trial.