BOISE, Idaho — A member of Bryan Kohberger’s immediate family has spoken publicly for the first time since the man convicted last summer of the University of Idaho student murders was arrested and charged three years ago.

In an interview with The New York Times published Saturday, Mel Kohberger, one of the confessed killer’s two older sisters, expressed grief over her family’s experience during her brother’s high-profile criminal case. She did so while stressing concerns about upsetting any of the four students’ families with anything she might say.

“It’s confusing,” Mel Kohberger told the Times. “It’s painful. It’s like being victimized but not really being a victim.”

A trained mental health therapist, she has sought to square the November 2022 homicides for which her brother now sits incarcerated for life some 2,500 miles away in Idaho with who they understood him to be, while also trying to honor the four victims’ memories. Mel Kohberger has annual reminders set in her digital calendar for each of the victims’ birthdays, she said. Her mother prays daily for their families, she said.

The four victims were U of I students Kaylee Goncalves and Madison Mogen, both 21, who were best friends since childhood, and Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin, both 20, who were in a relationship for nearly a year. The three women lived at an off-campus home with two female roommates who went unharmed in the early morning attack, and Chapin had slept over for the night.

In July, Bryan Kohberger agreed to a plea deal on four charges of first-degree murder that offered no chance of parole, and also required him to waive all of his appeal rights. In exchange, the now 31-year-old former Ph.D. student avoided the death penalty and was later handed four consecutive life sentences in prison.

The Kohberger family still does not wish to speak about the fatal stabbings, Mel Kohberger, 34, told the Times. But she shared more generally about how they’ve faced their own family tragedy.

Before his late December 2022 arrest, her younger brother by three years only briefly talked about the murders in Moscow — roughly 10 miles west of where he attended school at Washington State University — while he was back at the family home in the Pocono Mountains in eastern Pennsylvania for Christmas.

“I have always been a person who has spoken up for what was right,” she said. “If I ever had a reason to believe my brother did anything, I would have turned him in.”

Mel Kohberger did not respond Saturday to messages from the Idaho Statesman. An email to the Kohberger family’s attorney also wasn’t immediately returned.

In addition, members of the victims’ families had not yet responded to requests from the Statesman on Saturday morning.

Eastern Pennsylvania upbringing

Bryan Kohberger and his two sisters, Mel and Amanda Kohberger, 37, attended the local Pennsylvania public school system, the Pleasant Valley School District, where his parents also worked. His dad was a maintenance worker for the district, while his mother was a member of the education support staff.

Donna Yozwiak was Bryan Kohberger’s guidance counselor at Pleasant Valley High School. She didn’t interact with either of his sisters, but knew his parents, she said Saturday in an email to the Statesman.

“I met with his parents to help plan his academic and career goals,” Yozwiak said. “They were very concerned about his future and actively participated in his transitional plans as a student at Pleasant Valley High School. They genuinely cared for their son and seemed involved in his life.”

Bryan Kohberger had dreamt of joining law enforcement and enrolled in a technical program during high school. He was subsequently kicked out of the specialized training program for an undisclosed violation, the Statesman previously reported.

He went on to graduate from high school in 2013. The family helped him beat an addiction to heroin, which his former friends discussed with the Statesman and was also later disclosed in court records.

“We were all so proud of him because he had overcome so much,” Mel Kohberger told the Times.

Bryan Kohberger then went to work as a part-time security guard for the district from 2016 to 2021, according to his district personnel documents previously obtained by the Statesman through a public records request.

During that same stretch, he graduated from Northampton Community College in eastern Pennsylvania in 2018 while majoring in psychology. He then earned his bachelor’s degree in psychology in June 2020 from DeSales University, about an hour south from where Kohberger grew up.

He later earned a master’s degree through DeSales’ online criminal justice program in June 2022. That same month, according to police, Kohberger moved to Pullman, Washington, to attend the doctoral program in criminal justice and criminology at Washington State University.

Jail calls ‘nothing like you would expect’

While Bryan Kohberger was in custody awaiting trial for more than two-and-a-half years, he had hundreds of jail calls with his family, Idaho State Police Lt. Darren Gilbertson told the Statesman in a prior interview. The calls, which were monitored by police — almost always including both of his parents, and often his two sisters — dodged any mention of whether Kohberger committed the murders, Gilbertson said.

“Always about just completely trivial stuff,” Gilbertson said. “Everything was about: ‘Well, here’s what we’re going to do when he gets out. Here’s what food he’s going to cook when he gets out. Here’s what baseball game we’re going to go to when he gets out. How’s the dog doing?’ Just nothing like you would expect it to be.”

Mel Kohberger acknowledged to the Times that her family has kept regular contact with her brother in efforts to support him, and also avoided talking about the case. Bryan Kohberger has now spent three birthdays behind bars — most recently in November while at Idaho’s maximum security prison south of Boise.

He requested that his family bake a cake to his eldest sister’s tastes, and that Mel Kohberger blow out the candles, the Times reported.

Mel Kohberger did not attend any of her brother’s Idaho court proceedings in person. She planned to travel to Boise for his sentencing hearing in July, but stayed back on the East Coast to help care for their father who was experiencing heart issues, she told the Times.

Earlier that month, their mom and dad had been in the courtroom at the hearing where he admitted to murdering the four U of I undergraduates. His mother and other sister, Amanda, then attended Bryan Kohberger’s sentencing, where victims’ family members offered emotional statements about the impacts on them from their son and brother’s actions in violently taking the lives of their loved ones.

Stratton Kernodle, uncle of Xana Kernodle, gave a brief victim impact statement at Kohberger’s sentencing in July 2025 and referenced the Kohberger family in his comments. Their niece meant a lot to him and his wife and the loss of their niece brought anguish to many — just as Kohberger’s actions have done the same to all those in his life, too, he said.

“His parents, his siblings, his friends — his universe,” Stratton Kernodle said. “He has contaminated, tainted their family name and pretty much made a horrible, miserable thing to be ever related to him. And I know that that’s what he has to live with, and that has to be his pain.”

Prosecutors hinted last year that they might subpoena members of Kohberger’s family to testify at his planned capital murder trial scheduled to start in August 2025.

Only Amanda Kohberger was ultimately included in the prosecution’s list of trial witnesses, according to the unsealed court filing. Separately, the FBI interviewed Kohberger’s family members, including Amanda, after a raid on their parents’ home to arrest their son and brother, the prosecution’s unsealed exhibit list showed.

Mel Kohberger recalled to the Times receiving the call from her sister with the news that for the past three years has upended their family’s lives.

“She was like, ‘I’m with the FBI, Bryan’s been arrested,’ ” Mel said. “I was like, ‘For what?’ ”

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