- Heather Barnhart, the digital forensics expert who led the team tasked with examining Bryan Kohberger’s phone and hard drive, is speaking to PEOPLE about the case
- Barnhart says that Kohberger called his mother at 6:17 a.m. on Nov. 13, 2022, less than two hours after murdering four University of Idaho students
- Her investigation also discovered that Kohberger called his mother again for 54 minutes at 8:03 a.m., which would have been when he returned to the crime scene that morning
Bryan Kohberger called his mother less than two hours after he murdered four University of Idaho students.
The former criminology student, 30, called his mother Maryann Kohberger at 6:17 a.m. on the morning of Nov. 13, 2022, shortly after he arrived back at the residence he was living at on the Washington State University campus.
This new information comes from Heather Barnhart, the digital forensics expert who led the team tasked with examining Kohberger’s phone and hard drive.
She is now speaking with PEOPLE about the case, which she became part of after the Latah County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office brought her on to assist in their investigation.
Kohberger first reached out to his mother at 6:13 a.m. that morning and when she did not answer, he called his father at 6:14 a.m. Barnhart says, citing the exhaustive records assembled by her team.
He had his parents saved as “Mother” and “Father” in his phone, says Barnhart, and would often call his mother first followed immediately after by his father if he did not get an answer.
“And he would go back and forth texting: ‘Father, why did mother not respond? Why is she not answering the phone?” Barnhart says.
This morning she did eventually answer, and the two spoke for 36 minutes.
It wasn’t long after Kohberger and his mother got off the phone that he called her a second time.
“Then at 8:03 a.m., another outgoing call to ‘Mother’ that lasted 54 minutes,” says Barnhart.
The timing of that call means that Kohberger would have been speaking with his mother while in his car driving back to the scene of the crime.
Latah County Prosecuting Attorney Bill Thompson said at Kohberger’s plea hearing that he spent 10 minutes at the crime scene around 9 a.m., which would be around the time he got off the phone with his mother.
He also spent nine minutes on the phone with his mother at 9 a.m., says Barnhart, connecting with her just minutes after their previous conversation.
The two spoke for two minutes at 4:05 p.m. and at 5:53 p.m. had their final conversation, which lasted 96 minutes.
By the end of that day, Kohberger and his mother had spoken on the phone for well over three hours.
Not present on Kohberger’s phone were any texts with friends or any person outside his family.
“There was a group chat but it was all benign conversations,” Barnhart explains.
Kohberger would mostly speak to his parents, says Barnhart, who adds that Kohberger would start calling his mother as early as 4 a.m. some days.
This information was all gathered from the Samsung Galaxy phone Kohberger owned and had purchased in June, around the same time he moved to Washington from Pennsylvania.
Barnhart notes that Kohberger had completely powered his phone off between 2:54 a.m. and 4:48 a.m, a move likely meant to protect himself while he committed the murders.
In the end, it was a move that proved to be incredibly revealing, she explains.
“When he powered it off, it was from a human pressing a button, and the battery was at 100 percent charged,” Barnhart says.
That was a “pretty awesome” moment, says Barnhart, who has previously done digital forensics on the Gabby Petito case, the Delphi murders, and the capture of Osama bin Laden.
She went on to say that this discovery meant Kohberger’s defense team could not claim his phone happened to die around the time of the murders.
The Head of CX Strategy and Advocacy at Cellebrite, Jared Barnhart, who is also Heather Barnhart’s husband, points out that the phone being off seemed to be in conflict with Kohberger’s alibi as well.
“If you’re stargazing and taking pictures of the sky, your phone needs to be on,” Barnhart says, referencing a comment made by her husband in a court filing.
In the end, that alibi did not matter.
On July 2, Kohberger appeared in court and confessed to killing the four University of Idaho students: Madison Mogen, 21; Kaylee Goncalves, 21; Xana Kernodle, 20; and Ethan Chapin, 20.
Three weeks later he was back in court, where he was sentenced to serve four lifetimes in prison for those murders.
In the courtroom that day were two of Kohberger’s family members — his sister Amanda and his mother.
He ignored them both as he left the courtroom.