Before the tragic incident where four University of Idaho college students were discovered murdered in their off-campus residence, Bryan Kohberger had already visited a crime scene over two years prior.

The scene he encountered consisted of bloodied bodies strewn across a stuffy, dimly lit living space inside an old stone building located on the lush intersection of Taylor Drive in Central Valley, Pennsylvania.

It is important to note that Kohberger played a different role in this particular crime scene compared to the one at 1122 King Road in Moscow, Idaho, where the grim murder took place. In Pennsylvania, he was a mere onlooker with a keen interest in what unfolded.

The corpses were mannequins, the blood was paint and the living room was a set inside Pennsylvania’s DeSales University, where Kohberger was an undergraduate in celebrated forensic psychologist Dr Katherine Ramsland’s course ‘Psychological Sleuthing.’

But that was then. Now that Kohberger has pleaded guilty to the savage slaughter of four innocent people, many are asking if his study of forensic psychology – the gruesome science exploring the dark, twisted criminal mind – encouraged him to kill or even taught him how to do it.

And not the least among those posing these questions is Kohberger’s former professor and advisor: Dr Katherine Ramsland.

‘I have to look at the framework of what I taught and wonder, “Did I inspire him in some way?”‘ Dr Ramsland told NewsNation in an interview on July 2, the day Kohberger entered his guilty plea. 

‘But I can’t second-guess that,’ she added, ‘because I may have inspired somebody else to become an FBI agent. And unfortunately, in this field, that’s what we live with.’

I will leave it to others – including the administration of DeSales University, where Kohberger earned his master’s degree in criminal justice – to determine if that potential trade-off is worth it.

But in the meantime, it is worthwhile examining Dr Ramsland’s relationship with her killer criminology student and her shifting and – I believe – self-serving explanations of her involvement in his story.

In May, I first reported on the professor’s outreach to Bryan Kohberger’s family following his arrest on December 30, 2022.

According to a source close to the family, Dr Ramsland counseled them against delaying Kohberger’s extradition from Pennsylvania, where he was arrested, back to Idaho, where the killings had occurred.

The family also told Kohberger’s local court-appointed attorney that they would not meet him until they spoke with Dr Ramsland to ask if she approved of the consultation, my source said.

In response to this reporting, Dr Ramsland issued an adamant denial. She specifically took issue with some of my prior reporting on her alleged contact with Kohberger and his family, and I apologized and retracted some of my statements.

But the rest of the reporting stands. And I cannot ignore some of her seemingly conflicting claims about her involvement in Kohberger’s life.

I reached out to Dr Ramsland again on July 3, for the reporting of this article, and I asked her about her apparent concern that her coursework may have planted the seeds of murder in Kohberger’s mind.

She responded forcefully and, to my mind, in a contradictory fashion.

‘Please do not represent me as thinking I planted the seeds or think I’m a victim. In the context of criminal justice, we all have to think about the kinds of students we get in these classes. Some enter because they’re already inclined. I’m doing no more interviews,’ she wrote.

Dr Ramsland’s message seems at odds with her statement just one day prior: ‘Did I inspire him in some way?’ she asked.

She has also said that she would interview Kohberger in jail and, in fact, she’d been thinking about that possibility ‘for the past two and a half years.’ That’s a period which stretches back to the moment of his arrest – the time when she’d made a call to the family.

Indeed, one question that Dr Ramsland should ask Kohberger, should the opportunity arise, is: What, if anything, did I have to do with your decision to kill?

Idaho state prosecutors, sources with knowledge told me, explored the theory that Kohberger, who took four courses with Dr Ramsland, had planned the murders as a twisted homage to her.

The state even filed notice that they were preparing to call her as a trial witness before Kohberger’s guilty plea, sources said.

Like the assassin John Hinckley Jr, who had attempted to kill President Ronald Reagan to win the heart of the actress Jodie Foster, Kohberger, too, was driven by his own twisted erotomania, the hypothesis goes.

In response to a request for comment, Dr Ramsland told Daily Mail: ‘That is Howard Blum’s theory. I have no knowledge about the prosecutor’s theory. He did not subpoena me to testify. Kohberger was already in Idaho before I ever spoke with a member of his family. Prior to that, I did not know them.’ 

So, was Kohberger attempting to prove to Ramsland that he had learned her lessons so well that he executed the ‘perfect crime’? He is many things, and determined is certainly one of them.

Kohberger had already found the will and discipline to kick a teenage heroin addiction, lose over 100 pounds and make his way from a community college to a distinguished university by the time he discovered Dr Ramsland.

Perhaps, to him, she was very impressive. After all, Dr Ramsland had written a small library of books, appeared in more than two hundred crime documentaries and television shows, and developed personal relationships with some of the most deviant minds on the planet.

That last qualification, Kohberger’s classmates told me, impressed him the most.

Dr Ramsland spent five years communicating with serial killer Dennis Rader (who branded himself with the initials BTK, which stands for ‘bind, torture, and kill’) in preparation for writing her 2016 book, ‘Confession of a Serial Killer: The Untold Story of Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer.’

She spoke to Rader in prison by phone and corresponded with him in lengthy letters that he’d written in a dauntingly complex code that she’d persevered to decipher.

‘Serial killers fascinate us. We want to know what makes them tick,’ she once wrote.

As part of Kohberger’s graduate work at DeSales, he emulated his advisor by reaching out to ex-cons.

‘I am inviting you to participate in a research project that seeks to understand how emotions and psychological traits influence decision making when committing a crime,’ he wrote in a survey that he posted on Reddit in 2022.

‘Why did you choose that victim or target over others?’ he asked.

‘How did you approach the victim or target?’

‘How did you leave the scene?’

It was at about the same time that Kohberger posted this survey that, in March 2022, he ordered a Ka-Bar knife with a 7-inch steel blade on Amazon. That is the same weapon that prosecutors alleged was used in the Idaho murders eight months later.

Dr Ramsland, however, insists that she saw ‘no red flags.’ And, last week, described her student to the New York Times as ‘very polite, respectful, seemed genuinely engaged with the material as a potential researcher, teacher, somebody who was interested in a career.’

Recalling how she reacted to news that Kohberger had been arrested, Dr Ramsland said, ‘I thought, “They have to have this wrong. This has to be wrong. It’s not the Bryan Kohberger that I know”.’

Apparently, Dr Ramsland never made the connection that, as she once perceptively wrote: ‘Fantasy also builds to an appetite to experience the real thing.’

The paperback edition of Blum’s bestselling book ‘When the Night Comes Falling: A Requiem for the Idaho Student Murders’ has now been released with a new afterword.