Authorities have not yet named a suspect in the slayings of Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and her boyfriend, Ethan Chapin. They were found stabbed to death in an off-campus rental house on November 13.
Police investigators have said they believe the murders were a “targeted attack,” but have not elaborated on what led them to that conclusion.
Goncalves and Mogen were in the same room on the house’s third floor when they were killed, but it has emerged that the former had injuries that were “significantly more brutal” than those sustained by her best friend.
Mary Ellen O’Toole, who retired as an FBI profiler in 2009, told Newsweek that this “would suggest that the offender’s target was Kaylee.”
“At a scene where there are multiple victims, profilers always look at which victim was the focus of the offender,” O’Toole said.
This is determined, she said, “by the injury patterns to the victims and if one victim is treated differently in terms of their injuries.”
O’Toole added it could also be determined by how the offender treated that victim in other ways, such as their placement in the crime scene.
However, Gregg McCrary, another former FBI profiler, has said that there could be other reasons why one victim was subjected to more violence.
McCrary told NewsNation in an interview earlier this week that he has worked on other cases of multiple murders where a victim who sustained excessive injuries was not the target.
“It was the person who had put up the most resistance and enraged the killer, so… the killer inflicted more wounds on that person, even though that person wasn’t specifically targeted,” McCrary said.
“So we could be dealing with anything like that. So it’s important not to get tunnel vision on a given hypothesis, important to have multiple competing hypotheses and then let the evidence sort that out and support one and maybe dismiss the other.”
The Moscow Police Department on Monday said it is “committed to providing information whenever possible but not at the expense of compromising the investigation and prosecution.”
There have been “statements and speculation about this case, victim injuries, cause of death, evidence collection and processing, and investigative techniques,” the department said in a news release.
“With the active criminal investigation, law enforcement has not released additional facts to the family or the public. We recognize the frustration this causes and that speculation proliferates in the absence of facts. However, we firmly believe speculation and unvetted information is a disservice to the victims, their families, and our community.”
The police department said that officers will start removing the victims’ personal belongings from the house to give back to their families from Wednesday.
