Unsolved home invasion mirrors Idaho student murders just miles away in Washington state

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Washington police have released documents describing an unsolved home invasion involving an intruder with a knife and ski mask just a few miles from the Idaho students’ murders crime scene.

“[The victim] said she was asleep in bed in her room in the basement when she awoke to her bedroom door being opened,” according to a Washington police report obtained through public records. “She said she saw a person enter the room and approach her bed. She said the person was wearing a full-face burgundy ski mask and was holding a knife in their right hand.”

She was unable to tell if the intruder was male or female, but they raised the knife, she told a responding officer.

“I like kicked the s— out of their stomach and screamed super loud, and they like flew back into my closet and then ran out my door and up the stairs,” she told responding officers in bodycam video. 

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The officer told her to sit tight in a locked vehicle with her roommates as police swept the house and surrounding neighborhood and confirmed the intruder had fled.

“This is not something that happens in Pullman,” the officer told them all later. “About 18 years ago, we had some situations like this, but this is very, very unusual for Pullman.”

The following fall, a mass murder with eerily similar details would rock the community.

The Pullman Police Department reopened the case days after Bryan Kohberger’s arrest for the Idaho students’ murders in December 2022 – more than a year after the incident, but it remains unsolved. It had been reported previously, but following Kohberger’s sentencing and the end of the gag order, police files have been released to the public.

The suspect was described as between 5-feet, 3-inches and 5-feet, 5-inches tall, wearing a maroon mask. He or she has not been identified, but police suspected a neighbor early on and later looked for ties to Kohberger.

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Read the police report:

It happened around 3:30 a.m. on October 2021 in Pullman, Washington. Kohberger moved there to attend Washington State University in pursuit of a Ph.D. in criminology for the fall 2022 semester. The town is on the state border with Moscow, Idaho, and a 10-mile drive from the University of Idaho, where Kohberger killed four students, three of them in their sleep, in a November 2022 home invasion stabbing spree.

After his arrest in the quadruple murder of four University of Idaho students just 10 miles away, police looked for a possible connection to the Pullman case due to the similarities between the two home invasions. The police report indicates they found no evidence linking him to the earlier case, and they ruled him out and dubbed the investigation “inactive.”

The victim was not attending WSU at the time but had ties to students there. Like two of the four Idaho victims, Xana Kernodle, 20, and Madison Mogen, 21, she worked at a small restaurant in town.

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Police investigated the neighbor, identified as Jose Anibal Cruz, but while they identified alleged holes in his alibi, they said they did not have probable cause to arrest him.

Even Cruz’s connection to the case is reminiscent of how Kohberger stalked his victims repeatedly before the murders. The victim told police she worried he could see through her bedroom window when he went outside to smoke. He even told police that he rarely spoke with his neighbors – except when they complained he was smoking too close to their door.

Cruz could not immediately be reached for comment. According to police records, he allegedly broke into another woman’s apartment in 2017 and watched her sleep.

Police also received another, albeit unconfirmed, report of a man in a burgundy ski mask up to no good. Two days after the Pullman break-in, other residents reported a masked man waving at students through their window. 

Another similarity between the two home invasions is that police found unlocked doors and windows.

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“Without the DNA on the sheath, this would’ve been nearly impossible, and he would’ve probably struck again,” said Joseph Giacalone, a retired NYPD sergeant and criminal justice professor at Penn State Lehigh Valley.

Kohberger, who had a master’s degree in criminal justice from DeSales University in Pennsylvania, studied crime scene cleanup extensively and appears to have known how to avoid detection as a result. However, he left a Ka-Bar knife sheath with his DNA on it under Mogen’s body.

It wasn’t until the FBI assisted Idaho police with investigative genetic genealogy techniques that Kohberger’s name surfaced in the investigation. The lead investigators said after his sentencing last month that they would have caught him eventually – explaining how they had a plan to whittle down the list of suspect vehicles until they had their man.

Pullman police asked WSU officials if Kohberger had come to campus for any recruiting events, but they had no record of his presence during that timeframe.

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There’s a chance he could’ve been in town without having documented it with the university, but air travel, toll booth records or cellphone data could be used to conclusively place Kohberger in his home state of Pennsylvania or in Washington at the time of the incident, Giacalone said.

“But at this stage of the game, it doesn’t matter,” he said.

Idaho Judge Steven Hippler sentenced Kohberger to four consecutive sentences of life in prison without parole – plus another 10 years. As part of a plea deal that spared him from the potential death penalty, he waived his rights to appeal and to seek a sentence reduction.