Brian Kohberger's Loving Family
The Idaho killer seems to come from a supportive environment, so what's up?
After learning Brian Kohberger, who is accused of murdering four college students in Moscow, Idaho, had been charged in the case, his family issued a statement which read in part, “We will continue to let the legal process unfold and as a family we will love and support our son and brother.”
Statistics show that nearly all of us will be forced to issue a statement regarding a friend or family member (or at the very least a neighbor) becoming a murderer at some point in our lifetime, and increasingly people are grappling with proper decorum and phrasing.
“There’s a certain line you have to walk,” says Dave Gacey, brother of John Wayne Gacy, while staring daggers into my eyes, “you want to show support for your brother, but you don’t want to heap a lot of praise either, because then it seems like you’re rooting for a high victim count once they cross-reference his DNA to other murders.”
Other family members offer similar advice. Stay away from triggers.
For example, if your beloved toe-headed rascal shoots up a church, don’t say something like, “He can really light up a room!”
Similarly, do not describe a cornfed dude who committed a hate crime against an immigrant convenience store owner by stating, “He just loves his country, and Jesus.”
Adding to the difficulty of this already touchy subject, less than half of Americans are currently “loved,” down from seventy percent a decade ago.
All of this data may show, for some yet-to-be-determined reason, murderers appear to have more loyal friends and family than the average person.
Comedian Bill Hicks once touched on this phenomenon, observing the killer Ted Bundy’s courtroom being packed with women pining to give him love letters and marriage proposals and quipping, “Sorry to say, my first thought was, and I can’t even get a girlfriend.”
In the modern era there have been many activists who have lobbied the media for a law that forbids releasing the names of mass-murderers and serial killers, because, the reasoning goes, this media coverage gives them exactly what they wanted. Attention.
Limiting the notoriety of these killers would lead to less of them seeking this out. Agree or disagree, the reasoning is sound and it’s worth considering.
But why not a law that says if your favorite kid butchers four college students you have to release a statement saying, “We will not be calling him on his birthday and will really try and not have any more children. Furthermore, we also find him very creepy, just like everyone else.”
Would that be so difficult? Why such loyalty to these particular people, in an age where many non-killers find loyalty difficult to come by?
For example, every murderer has a neighbor willing to describe them as “always friendly.”
I am not a serial killer, but I’m certain if I was arrested for urinating in public my neighbors would give statements such as, “He was this annoying guy who would take the trash out pretty late, that’s all I remember.”
The following is a real excerpt from an article about Lonnie Franklin, a particularly freaky and macabre serial killer who terrorized South Los Angeles for decades before being apprehended, with a journalist interviewing friends and neighbors of Franklin:
Fernando Cole said he knew Franklin for over forty years. He seemed “normal.”
They confided in each other, Cole said, and Franklin showed him the many photos he'd taken of partially nude women.
"It looked like they were drunk or dead or something," Cole said.
Herein may lie the rub. Serial killers may have a lot of loyal friends and family members because their friends and family members are also total creeps who share similar genetics and priorities, and so they sympathize with the killer much more than an average person would.
In the above instance, two guys were hanging out, and one of them showed the other a voluminous number of photos of women who appeared to be dead, and the other guy found this to be “normal,” and did not alert the police.
I may not have any friends that loyal because I’m not a serial killer, in the same sense I would not be loyal to a friend who showed me hundreds of photos of potentially dead women.
Which is not to say I don’t have loyal friends. I can count at least seven people I would lie to the police for, if they were arrested for money laundering or any number of non-violent offenses.
But not rape or murder or something along those lines. Especially when the evidence started trickling out, like, say, they found my friend’s DNA on the knife used to stab four people.
That’s when I would issue a statement saying, “I always knew!”
Even if I didn’t know. It would just be the classy thing to do. People have no class anymore.
Another way of putting it, any time a sociopathic criminal reforms their life and writes a book about it they are hailed as a hero and given a platform on Oprah.
Nobody cares about you if you were a good person your entire life.
I’m personally working on selling a book right now, and the unfortunate truth is that if I had a history of incarceration for violent Danny Trejo style crimes, the publishers would be paying a lot more attention.
Most people don’t hear anything nice about themselves all day. Brian Kohberger has a supportive family. That’s very un-comforting to know.