BOISE, Idaho — Childhood friends of Bryan Kohberger, who pleaded guilty Wednesday to stabbing four University of Idaho students to death in November 2022, have tracked his murder case from afar and said they felt shocked the former Pennsylvania resident suddenly agreed to a plea deal to spare his life.

“I won’t lie, I kind of spiraled yesterday,” Casey Arntz, 32, told The Idaho Statesman in a text Thursday. “Did he ever have thoughts like that before? Did he ever think that he wanted to kill me or my friends? Were we spared because we were friends with him?”

Arntz and her younger brother, Thomas, grew up together with Kohberger in the Pocono Mountains near the Pennsylvania state line with New Jersey among a small circle of friends. They spent time together playing video games after school, as well as getting outdoors in the heavily forested region.

As Kohberger got into drugs in high school, they said, a distance developed. Kohberger later overcame a heroin addiction. With the sporadic exception, they hadn’t spoken in years, which made his arrest at his parents’ Pennsylvania home in December 2022 so startling. He had been their awkward, chubby teenage friend, with heightened ability to observe and wit to match, they said.

Now he was accused of killing four students on the other side of the country in a nationally known investigation that unimaginably ended in their hometown. The victims were Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves, both 21, and Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin, both 20. Each suffered multiple wounds in the attack at an off-campus home on King Road in Moscow, Latah County Prosecutor Bill Thompson told the court Wednesday.

The allegations floored them then, and similar emotions rushed back this week after Kohberger, 30, admitted he repeatedly stabbed the four college undergraduates with a large, fixed-blade knife that prosecutors said he bought on Amazon in March 2022 while living in Pennsylvania.

Kohberger brought the knife and Ka-Bar brand leather sheath — which he left behind with his DNA at the crime scene — with him on his move a few months later to Pullman for a Ph.D. program at Washington State University.

On Wednesday, Kohberger pleaded guilty to the four counts of first-degree murder and a count of felony burglary. He agreed to maximum sentences for each, which is likely to see him spend the rest of his life in prison. Kohberger will have no chance of parole and he can never file an appeal, according to the terms of the agreement. A sentencing hearing is scheduled for July 23.

Donna Yozwiak, Kohberger’s high school guidance counselor, reacted with surprise.

“Actually, I was hoping that he was not the murderer who killed these four students,” she said in an email to the Statesman. “I hope that his family will survive this horrendous ordeal and be able to get on with their lives. I also hope that the victims’ relatives gain much needed closure and heal after this tragedy.

“As a society, we may never know the motivation for the murders or if Bryan Kohberger has any remorse for his violent actions.”

Kohberger’s admissions in court finally put any question of his culpability to bed for Jack Baylis, 31, another of their group of friends at the time.

“You wouldn’t plead guilty to it unless you did that,” he said in a phone interview Thursday. “If you were framed, you’d be fighting tooth and nail.”

Kohberger’s decision to take people’s lives was additionally disheartening, he said, because he had kicked his drug habit and seemingly had a life direction. But the desire to learn about people who commit murder — an area of interest for Kohberger — took hold, and he likely wanted to see whether he could get away with the perfect crime, Baylis said.

“I think he did it to see what it felt like, to experience it. If he wanted to write a paper about what killers feel and why they kill, to be accurate, you have to experience it yourself to truly understand it,” Baylis said. “To get into the mind of a killer, you have to be a killer, would be my guess.”

Casey Arntz told the Statesman she had conflicting emotions about how, after 21/2 years of legal proceedings, her former friend acknowledged he was responsible for the early morning quadruple homicide — perhaps the most talked-about crime in Idaho history. She felt for the victims’ families, especially those upset that the death penalty was no longer an option with the plea bargain, but welcomed the case nearing its conclusion.

“I’m disgusted that he could actually do something so heinous,” she said. “I understand why the families are so upset, they were starved for justice, and I would 100% be, too. However, there was never any guarantee that he’d be given the death penalty. So I think him taking the plea deal was better for everyone.

“He’s locked up for life. Let the inside deal with him.”

Thomas Arntz, 29, shared his sister’s sentiments. The result Wednesday removed any chance his childhood friend could be acquitted and get away with murder, he said.

“I personally feel relieved with the acceptance of the guilty plea,” Arntz told the Statesman, adding he would pray for the four victims’ families. “I am deeply sorry that Bryan’s parents have to live with this as well. … I’ve always thought they were kind people, and they didn’t deserve this. And for Bryan, God have mercy on his soul.”

For Ben Roberts, 33, a former criminology graduate school colleague of Kohberger’s at WSU, Wednesday’s guilty pleas felt past due.

The U.S. justice system is built upon the belief that a person is innocent until proven guilty, he said, and yet his former classmate’s DNA at the crime scene, with no other suspects, strengthened his own suspicions. Still, Kohberger’s arrest left him “horrified,” he recalled.

“What surprises me at this point is that it dragged out so long, as I thought that a plea deal would never be reached,” Roberts told the Statesman by phone Thursday. “My general impression was he was not going to stop fighting it, and to all of sudden have this about-face was very surprising — but a pleasant surprise.”

Roberts spent several weeks just a few desks away from Kohberger in the days leading up to the close of the fall 2022 semester — just days and weeks after the murders. His graduate school classmate rarely exhibited much in the way of emotion around him, but also did not necessarily set off any red flags, he said.

“I noticed that unless he was deliberately trying to put on an appearance — if he didn’t have the mask — he was kind of nonexistent, or hollow, I guess,” Roberts said. “It’s kind of like you’re staring into an abyss. There’s something human supposed to be there, and it isn’t.”

A casual hunter, Roberts said he has felt bad in the past when he has shot and killed a deer. He said he couldn’t even fathom stabbing a person to death.

“I just can’t even begin to get inside the head of somebody who could do something like that, and then attend class like it’s business as usual,” Roberts said. “That’s just completely alien to me.”

Roberts said he did not watch Wednesday’s change-of-plea hearing. He didn’t want to hear Kohberger’s voice or see his face again, even though the latter has been difficult to escape the past two years, he noted. He was glad the high-profile case finally came to an end, and without the need for a monthslong trial.

“The first thing I said was that it was about damned time that the poor thing was put to rest,” Roberts said.

For now, the court’s gag order in the closely watched case, which restricts attorneys and their agents — including members of law enforcement for the state — is still in effect. Thompson asked that it remain so through sentencing, which Kohberger’s defense did not oppose.

The University of Idaho released a statement this week after word broke that Kohberger planned to change his plea to guilty in the shocking crime.

“We keep the families of the victims in our hearts as each deals with this outcome in their own way,” the state’s namesake university wrote in the statement. “We will never forget the four incredible lives taken on King Road, they are forever Vandals and each holds a place in our Vandal Family. Since that fateful day in November 2022 our university has become stronger, more intent on its purpose and more supportive of each other. And while we will not forget, we will heal.”

Similarly, Moscow Mayor Art Bettge, in office in 2022 when the murders took place and upended the community, shared optimism that the city’s residents might finally be freed from the clutches of the tragic incident.

“I recognize and understand that we all desire justice for the victims and their families,” he said in an emailed statement. “My heart, and that of our entire community, go out to the families of the victims. It is my hope that this resolution can begin to provide a small measure of closure for the families and our community. What is clear is that no matter what form justice would have taken, nothing will bring back Ethan, Madison, Xana, and Kaylee, and our world will be forever darkened because of it.”

WSU’s comment after Kohberger’s hearing was more succinct. A Statesman request to speak with professors in its criminal justice and criminology department who knew and taught Kohberger, including the semester he killed the U of I students, was again declined.

“Our hearts go out to the families, friends and colleagues impacted,” WSU’s statement read. “We do not have anything to add at this time.”

After Wednesday’s hearing, one main question remains for everyone, including the victims’ families: Why? Why did Bryan Kohberger choose to take these four young lives, thereby essentially also ending his own, to some degree?

That question was on the mind of Casey Arntz, Kohberger’s Pennsylvania friend thrust into the spotlight and forced to deal with her own form of grief over the past two-plus years.

“I wasn’t as close to him as my brother or my other friends, but we still hung out and talked a lot,” she said. “He was in my parents’ house. I was alone with him.

“I guess the one thing I would say to him is what everyone wants to say to him: ‘Why would you do this? Why would you take the innocent lives of four beautiful people?’ I can’t even begin to imagine what he would say. How does someone justify their actions when they’re so morbid?”

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