Flexing Bryan Kohberger took strange shirtless selfies: One with ‘mother’ in the background

Forensic analysts who examined Bryan Kohberger‘s digital footprint in the days and weeks before and after the Idaho 4 murders in November 2022 have revealed an alarming detail about the shirtless selfies discovered on his phone.

Kohberger is currently serving four consecutive life sentences for the murders of Kaylee Goncalves, Zana Kernodle, Ethan Chapin, and Maddie Mogen, four University of Idaho students, in their off-campus Moscow, Idaho home.

Shirtless selfies, explicit phots of women

In an interview with NewsNation’s Brian Entin, Heather and Jared Barnhart from Cellebrite, a digital forensics firm that worked on the Kohberger case, said that, despite his efforts to erase search history, Kohberger left behind a collection of shirtless selfies and images of scantily clad or naked women on his device.

These photos, stored in cached files, depict Kohberger posing in mirrors, often flexing his muscles, and suggest a preoccupation with his appearance.

One selfie showed “mother”

According to Heather, Kohberger was still, “doing his selfies in December in Pennsylvania,” after the November murders and after he drove across the country from Washington State for the holidays. “He took two of himself,” Heather told Entin, and in one, “‘Mother’ is sitting in the background over his shoulder.”

As the Barnharts have also revealed in numerous interviews after Kohberger’s sentencing, he saved his parents’ contact information in his phone as “mother” and “father,” and he referred to each of them that way when he texted or spoke to his mom and dad.

“He took a lot of selfies,” Heather said, “and what’s interesting is he didn’t do anything with them. It was like he was documenting himself for himself. So he would take his shirt off and do different poses and mirror flexing his muscles,” as if he was trying to get a profile picture of himself, she said.

Forensic experts likened his behavior to that of Patrick Bateman, the narcissistic character from American Psycho, describing Kohberger as “very vain.”

“The the act of taking a selfie with your shirt off is not a big deal,” Jared added in the Entin interview. “Normally something else happens with that picture. It gets texted, emailed, posted, something. Just nothing. It was just like recording himself.”

In addition to shirtless selfies, investigators also discovered a disturbing image on Kohberger’s device, taken the morning after the 2022 murders, showing Kohberger in a bathroom, giving a thumbs-up while wearing a button-down shirt.

This selfie was introduced in March 2025 as evidence, highlighting his apparent lack of remorse and chilling demeanor following the brutal killings.

Additionally, in the weeks leading up to his arrest, Kohberger took a chilling selfie on December 28, 2022, just two days before his capture. The image, obtained by NBC’s Dateline, shows Kohberger wearing a black robe with a hood covering his head.