Today, we're
getting new and
disturbing insights
into the mental state of Brian Coworker,
the PhD criminology
student accused of murdering
four University of Idaho students.
The New York Times
has uncovered online
posts from his past
that paint a picture of an isolated
and depressed teenager.
And one Post coworker writes,
I can say and do whatever I want
with little remorse and another.
As I hug my family,
I look into their faces.
I see nothing.
It is like I am looking at a video game.
Kabuga is currently being held
on four counts of first degree murder
in the fatal
stabbings of Kaley Gonsalves,
Madison, Mogan,
Xana, Carreno, Condal and Ethan Chapman
joining us now is CNN chief
law enforcement analyst
John Miller and retired FBI profiler
Kathy Canning Melo.
She's also an instructor of criminology
at the University of North Carolina.
At Wilmington.
Kathy, let me start with you first.
How typical is it
to learn that a suspected
killer viewed their own life,
as it were, a video game without emotion?
I mean, when you hear
about something like that,
some of that starts to make sense.
Yeah, absolutely.
I find these texts really fascinating
and they give us some really,
I think, important insights as to
what Brian
Berger was feeling during his teen years,
where he was experiencing a dark period.
Right.
We have him addicted to heroin
at the time.
He's talking about suicidal ideation.
He's talking about
this lack of emotion that certainly
we see evidenced at the crime scene.
And John,
how do you think all of these details
will impact the case
as investigators
try to determine a motive?
Well, motive
has been still the burning question here,
because there is still no indication
that he knew any of the victims.
And it is such
a personal and hateful crime.
And yet,
you know, as Kathy could underscore,
when I mean every offender
in the serial killer
or mass murderer
or field is going to be
highly individualized.
Each one is different.
That's a given.
And yet there are common traits
that run across these offenders.
And one of them,
and he kind of reads us through this
in these emails is
an inability to feel sympathy,
no relationship with empathy,
an inability to feel guilt or remorse,
which, of course, is is the combination,
the emotional cocktail
that allows them to do the things they do
and then to be able to repeat those acts
again if they're not stopped.
And, John,
this detail
in the Times
that the suspect
became fascinated
with criminal psychology,
said he hoped to provide
counseling for high,
high profile criminals.
I mean, that is
that's a wrinkle
that you don't see in
many of these types of cases.
We do know, Jim.
Yeah,
this is highly unusual,
but it's also in this case,
there are so many things that really beg
to be dug into more.
If you look at the
the posting he did
as part of his master's project,
asking criminals
to come in
and be interviewed
with him as the coordinator
about the psychological traits
of decision making during their crimes.
What were you thinking
when you did this violent act?
How did it make you feel?
What was your plan?
What, if anything, did you leave behind?
On one hand,
you could say
that was a study,
although the structure
is very nonacademic.
On the other hand,
you could say that this was as
as Mary Ellen O'Toole posited last night.
This was an act of voyeurism
meaning these interviews
would allow him to immerse himself in
and feelings
that he was having
by experiencing them through others
That is disturbing.
And Kathy,
The New York
Times says that one of co-worker's
friends told them
or told this individual
he suffer from a neurological condition
called visual snow, where
people see scattered
dots like static on a TV.
And one of the posts,
as I'm reading here,
it is as if the ringing in my ears
and the fuzz in my vision
is simply all the demons in my head
mocking me.
Doesn't sound good.
No, it sounds very disturbing, but
we're going to have to have,
I think, more
deep interviews of people who know Brian
well in order
to understand that condition that he had
and any impact
it might have had on his
behavior at the time or later in life,
if the condition still exists,
we don't know that.
So I think it's going to be incumbent
upon prosecutors, investigators.
It is great
now that they have a few more months
to do this.
To to conduct these long,
behaviorally oriented interviews.
When I was in The View,
we had an instrument called
the General Assessment
Questionnaire that had a hundred
questions
that probed into areas of an individual's
life, their
their personality traits,
their hobbies, their attitudes and it was
meaning to
get more insight about their behaviors,
because we have some, you know,
casual contacts that said, you know,
he's charming.
Well, do we really know he's charming?
Does he lack empathy?
Is he Cunningham manipulative?
Is he controlling
Does he harbor misogynistic feelings?
All of these things
are going to be evident
in people that know him well.
Certainly we're getting some indications
of his personality
through his online persona,
but we need to understand him
offline as well,
because at some point,
the prosecutor is going to have to paint
a picture
of this individual to a jury
and they're going to have to make
some connections in their head.
Is this the kind of person
no one physically capable?
But number two,
psychologically, emotionally, capable
of committing such heinous crimes?
And John Cobourg
has maintained his innocence
through his lawyer.
But I mean, given
what we've discussed so far,
there is a decent amount of evidence
that police have that investigators
have in this case, do they not?
That is true.
And I mean, we're going by
the American standard,
which is he is innocent
until proven guilty.
But when you look
at the probable cause document,
you can certainly see,
based on the evidence
that they've put forward,
why he's charged in this case.
And you can certainly see
and this is something
that people really haven't focused
on, is authorities in Pennsylvania
that have put together the arrest
warrant and execute
the arrest
are now going very carefully backwards
through cold Berger's entire history.
From the time
those emails were written
as an adolescent, right up to the time
he left to
to go to the Washington,
Idaho area,
because
there is an overarching theory
that a multiple murder of four people
in the middle of the night
is probably
not an offender's first act of violence.
They're looking at unsolved cases.
They're going to use that DNA
to compare them to samples they have.
They're looking for
any stalking behavior.
They're really kind of
going backwards to say,
was there something we missed here?
Right.
Especially when you
go through
some of the things that he said
about himself.
I mean, that is very EYE-OPENING stuff.
All right.
John Miller,
Kathy Canning Melo,
thanks for that discussion.
Fascinating discussion.