(NewsNation) —Bryan Kohberger frantically searched online for a new car minutes after seeing a news story that a white Hyundai Elantra was identified as the vehicle belonging to the suspect in the murders of four Idaho college students.
The car, later identified as Kohberger’s, was a point of “stress” for him in the aftermath of the killings, the forensic team that analyzed his phone told Fox News.
“If you weren’t the bad guy, you wouldn’t care, but he was scrambling, and he thought the police were on him,” Jared Barnhart, who works at the digital forensics firm Cellebrite, told the outlet. “And they were. They were at that point.”
Barnhart and his wife, Heather, were the analysts tasked with combing through Kohberger’s phone after his arrest.
“I think the vehicle was a huge stress point for him, because he had registered it to park there,” Barnhart said. “He had a PDF download of like a list of Hyundai Elantras for the university, you know, and you can see this long list of cars.”
The forensic team told the outlet that Kohberger started shopping online for another car within 10 minutes of seeing the news articles on Dec. 29, 2022.
He also searched for the phrases “wiretap” and “psychopaths paranoid,” read an article about how police were still searching for the suspect vehicle, checked the latest press release about the case on the Moscow Police Department website and “immediately” looked up an auto detailing shop, they said.
“Literally the pressure of, ‘Oh, look, they’re really talking about my car,’ caused…within 15 minutes of behavior, him trying to clean it and get rid of it,” Jared Barnhart told Fox News. “Just not normal.”
One day later, Kohberger was arrested at his parents’ home in Pennsylvania.
The former graduate student accepted a plea deal for the Nov. 13, 2022, murders of Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin.
That deal took the death penalty off the table in exchange for his guilty plea. He also agreed to waive his right to appeal those charges.
The former graduate student was handed four life sentences last month.
Security footage had captured Kohberger’s white Elantra circling the King Road neighborhood where the victims lived multiple times in the hour before he killed the students.
The 2015 sedan, which didn’t have a front license plate required in Pennsylvania, where it was registered at the time, appeared four separate times on the neighbor’s security camera at 1112 King Road.