Bryan Kohberger sat front row at a lecture by feminist author Margaret Atwood just a few years before his supposed “incel complex” allegedly drove him to kill four college students, a new photo reveals.
Kohberger, now 28, is spotted front and center at the 2018 event at Pennsylvania’s Northampton Community College, Fox News Digital reported.
The Pennsylvania native is seen clutching a copy of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Atwood’s best-selling 1985 dystopian novel set in a patriarchal, white supremacist society in which women known as “handmaids” are forced to produce children for the ruling class.
Kohberger was arrested at his parents’ home on Dec. 30, 2022, in connection with the Nov. 13 stabbing deaths of four University of Idaho students. He is set to stand trial on four counts of murder in October.
“He didn’t come here for the author,” John Kelly, a criminal profiler and psychoanalyst, told Fox News Digital of the Atwood lecture photo.
“He came here for the audience.”
Kelly noted that Kohberger is one of the very few men in an audience mostly made up of young women.
“In other words, he’s an incel, he doesn’t like women, but how come he still has to have some kind of distant relationship? I totally believe this guy was always looking,” he explained.
The term “incel” is an abbreviation of “involuntarily celibate” and is generally used to refer to men who struggle to establish romantic or sexual relationships. The identity is occasionally linked to misogynistic online forums and, in extreme cases, crime.
“This guy’s a ‘looker,’ all the way. He’s the kind of the guy who’s not gonna chat somebody up to try and get a date or something like that. He’s strictly, pretty much focused on looking,” Kelly said of Kohberger, who was a student at Northampton when the photo was taken.
“He’s sitting in the front, he likes to ask or give the extravagant answers to the questions. He’ll answer them in a very upper-class way.”
Though investigators have remained tight-lipped on Kohberger’s alleged motive for the grisly killings, some experts and former acquaintances have speculated that he struggled with feelings of rejection from women, and harbored sexist or even violent feelings as a result.
“I think he may have developed a sort of incel complex,” former FBI agent and security expert Pete Yachmetz told The Post shortly after Kohberger’s arrest.
“I believe a continued stabbing of a victim indicates … an uncontrollable rage and extreme anger,” he continued, noting that Kohberger has been described as “socially awkward with a long history of interpersonal problems.”
Yachmetz’s assessment echoed that of forensic psychiatrist Dr. Carole Lieberman, who told CourtTV that Kohberger’s “choice of victims,” or decision to target mostly female college students, convinced her “he’s an incel.”
At the time of his arrest, Kohberger was a doctoral student in criminology at Washington State University in Pullman, just 15 minutes from the off-campus house where the victims were slain.
While WSU classmates remembered Kohberger as gregarious and sometimes aggressive, peers from his Pennsylvania hometown remembered him being ruthlessly bullied for his weight.
“I honestly think that’s what led up to this, because he didn’t get the proper help, and it was mainly females that bullied him,” high school classmate Sarah Healey told Fox News Digital.
One middle school classmate, who asked to remain anonymous, told the Daily Mail that Kohberger was targeted by the coveted popular crowd.
“The whole clique of popular girls made fun of him in school. They were the cheerleaders and the ones that every kid had crushes on,” they said.
Police now say that the four Idaho victims — Madison Mogen, 21, Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Xana Kernodle, 20, and Ethan Chapin, 20 — were fatally stabbed at their Moscow house in a targeted attack.
The probable cause statement in Kohberger’s arrest warrant indicated that he visited the students’ neighborhood several times in the months before the murders.
“He saw these girls somewhere,” Kelly speculated.
“These types of guys would be looking, stalking, peeping at them through that hill out in the back there.”
Last month, it was reported that Kohberger also broke into a female classmate’s apartment and moved items around in the months before the killings.
He was ultimately linked to the Moscow crime scene through DNA left on a knife sheath found under Mogen’s body.
“I just wanna hear this guy’s explanation on how his DNA ended up on a Ka-Bar knife sheath under Maddie’s body,” Kelly said of Kohberger’s defense.
“He doesn’t have a shot in the world unless he has some kind of explanation.”
Kohberger stood silent at his arraignment in Latah County last month, and the judge entered “not guilty” pleas on his behalf.
All four victims were honored posthumously at the University of Idaho’s spring 2023 commencement ceremony.
