Alivea Goncalves unleashed on the man who murdered her little sister during Wednesday sentencing hearing, peppering Bryan Kohberger with questions that she says “reverberate violently in my own head so loudly that I can’t think straight.”

“How was your life right before you murdered my sisters?” she asked.

“Did you prepare for the crime before leaving your apartment?

“Where is the murder weapon, the clothes you wore that night?

“What did you bring into the house with you?

“What were Kaylee’s last words?

At the heart of Alivea’s demands was the same overwhelming question that continues to haunt the loved ones of Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin, as well as the public: Why did he do it?

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Kohberger, 30, declined to speak during his sentencing hearing inside the Ada County Courthouse in Boise, Idaho for the 2022 murders of the four college students.

When asked if he wished to address the court, he simply said, “I respectfully decline.”

That is the longest sentence he’s said publicly in years. But his vague response continues to frustrate the families who simply want to know why their kids were killed.

With no explanation offered and no known link between the killer and the victims, the motive behind one of the most shocking crimes in Idaho history remains a mystery.

Even the judge, who gave emotional comments to the families in his remarks, acknowledged the frustration.

“As we sit here today, this case is ending, and we are now certain who committed these unspeakable acts of evil,” Judge Steven Hippler told the court before handing down four consecutive life sentences.

“But we don’t know, and what we may never know, is why.”

A crime without a known motive

On November 13, 2022, Madison Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin were stabbed to death at their off-campus home in the college town of Moscow, Idaho. Two other roommates were home at the time and survived, but they were not harmed.

Nearly seven weeks later, authorities arrested Kohberger at his parents’ home in Pennsylvania.

Key evidence that led to Kohberger’s arrest and conviction included surveillance footage of his white Hyundai Elantra and DNA found on a knife sheath left at the crime scene.

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But while police were able to trace physical clues and build a case, they found no thread connecting Kohberger to the victims.

“We have never, to this day, found a single connection between him and any of the four victims or the two surviving roommates,” Lt. Darren Gilbertson of the Idaho State Police said at a press conference following the sentencing on Wednesday

“There is no evidence of a history of violence, no evidence of a serial killer in waiting,” added Latah County Prosecutor Bill Thompson.

“If people are concerned he had some history or trail of disturbing behaviors before this, we’re not aware of it.”

Unanswered questions

Kohberger’s sentencing marked the end of the legal battle but offered little peace for the victims’ families.

Hippler acknowledged the families and public’s desire to understand why the crime happened, but cautioned against giving Kohberger the power that comes from public attention.

“The need to know what is inherently not understandable makes us dependent upon the defendant to provide us with a reason, and that gives him the spotlight, the attention and the power he appears to crave,” Hippler said. “Yet, even if I could force him to speak, which legally I cannot, how could anyone ever be assured that what he speaks is the truth?”

“Do we really believe after all this, he’s capable of speaking the truth or of giving up something of himself to help the very people whose lives he destroyed? Rather, I suspect the so-called reason would be dished out in enticing, self-serving and aggrandizing untruthful bits, leaving people wanting more information, more insight, and thus enhancing even further the power he seeks to hold,” Hippler added.

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Prosecutor Bill Thompson echoed this at the press conference.

“I don’t believe that there’s anything that would come out of his mouth that would be the truth,” Thompson said.

Kohberger was sentenced to four consecutive life terms for murder, an additional 10 years for burglary, and ordered to pay $290,000 in restitution.

Still, for the families of Mogen, Goncalves, Kernodle and Chapin, justice feels incomplete.

In the end, they may never know what led a man with no known connection to the victims to commit such a calculated act of violence, why he chose to rip a community apart.

Sister Alivea made it clear in her scathing address to Kohberger that having her questions answered would not make her think any better of him.

“You act like no one can ever understand your mind,” she said. “But the truth is you’re basic. You’re a textbook case of insecurity disguised as control. Your patterns are predictable. Your motives are shallow. You are not profound. You’re pathetic.

“You aren’t special or deep, not mysterious or exceptional. Don’t ever get it twisted again.”

President Trump is threatening to derail a plan to build a new stadium in Washington, D.C., for the Washington Commanders football team unless the team changes its name back to the previous name.

“The Washington ‘Whatever’s’ should immediately change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social account. “There is a big clamoring for this.”

The football team dropped the longtime name in 2020 after many years of criticism that it was racist toward Indigenous people.

Trump also called for the Cleveland Guardians baseball team to change their name back to the Cleveland Indians. That name change was announced in 2021.

“Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen,” Trump wrote, without offering evidence. “Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen. Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from them.”

Suzan Harjo, a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes who fought for decades to get the team’s name changed, told NPR in 2022 that the “R-word” was connected to racist attitudes that perpetuated “emotional and physical violence” against Native Americans. “When I was a girl, you barely could make it through your young life without getting attacked by a bunch of white people — whether they were boys or girls or men or women. And they would always go to that word,” she said.

In a later post, Trump threatened to scuttle the Commanders’ plans for a new stadium, which would move the team from its current location in Maryland back to the nation’s capital after renovating an antiquated stadium on federal property.

“I may put a restriction on them if they don’t change the name back to the original ‘Washington Redskins,’ and get rid of the ridiculous moniker, ‘Washington Commanders,’ I won’t make a deal for them to build a stadium in Washington,” Trump wrote.

Congress gave the city control over the site of the proposed new stadium last December, which former President Joe Biden signed into law in January. The D.C. Council is now considering a multibillion-dollar plan to redevelop the property for the team. It’s unclear how Trump could intervene with the project.

Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office said in an email that the mayor had no comment. The Commanders did not immediately respond to NPR’s request for comment. The Cleveland Guardians declined comment.

Monday

Rightwing American conspiracy theories often circle the drain of lurid abuse stories. So it was quite a twist this week to see the chickens of this particular rancid online conspiracy culture come home to roost in the form of Maga faithfuls turning on Donald Trump for what the US president now refers to as the “Jeffrey Epstein hoax”.

Epstein, a convicted child sex offender, killed himself in prison while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges in 2019, and Trump’s conspiracy-hungry supporters are now accusing the president of a cover-up. Specifically enraging to Trump fans is his decision to tread water on releasing the “Epstein files”, FBI files supposedly containing the names of the banker’s “client list”, which, last month, Elon Musk suggested Trump himself may appear on.

Until very recently, the Trump administration had been happy to throw meat to the lions by suggesting it would release the files. But in recent weeks the president has dropped that promise and instead recommended that everyone “move on”. Meanwhile, the FBI issued a memo last week saying it did not have evidence that would justify interrogating further suspects.

Well. Can you imagine? Across the US, the deep-state-is-lying-to-us klaxons went off like tornado warnings and before you knew it, the Maga megaphone Laura Loomer was calling for the attorney general, Pam Bondi, to resign, the Trump ally Steve Bannon demanded the dissolution of federal law enforcement, and Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, called the FBI memo a “cover-up”. Which brings us to the domino run of events this week: Trump coming out fighting against his followers, who he described on Truth Social as “weaklings” and “my PAST supporters”, who “have bought into this ‘bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker”. And a partial, 11th-hour climbdown when he ordered Bondi to release testimony from the Epstein grand jury. As Trump himself might say: beautiful.

Tuesday

What do tarantulas smell like? Not chocolates, apparently; a useful piece of information to have had at Cologne Bonn airport recently, where news was released this week of a smuggling attempt thwarted by customs officials tipped off by a “noticeable smell”.

Or rather, the notable absence of a smell: officials inspecting a large haul of cake boxes noted they didn’t smell chocolatey, and on further inspection turned out to contain, not confectionery from Vietnam, as the customs paperwork promised, but – what are the chances? – 1,500 baby tarantulas in individual plastic vials.

Many of the tarantulas hadn’t survived the journey from Vietnam, which feels like the opener to a dark Pixar movie or the trigger for an odd conflation of responses: revulsion, fear and sympathy.

Wednesday

The 2025 Emmy nominations are in and with them, more importantly, the snubs. At the top of the list is Keira Knightley, overlooked for her role in the very patchy Netflix show Black Doves (notable detail: Sarah Lancashire’s bored face in the pilot), followed by Tina Fey’s also really quite bad Netflix show, The Four Seasons, overlooked in every category bar a single nomination for Colman Domingo.

Meanwhile, the parlousness of John Hamm’s suburban comedy drama, Your Friends & Neighbours, was recognised by Emmy voters with a nod for the theme music and nothing else. But while some media outlets pointed to Renée Zellweger being overlooked for her role in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy – which found itself in the TV movie category since it went straight to streaming in the US – this wasn’t quite right. For a movie, show or performer to count as having been snubbed, voters must have approached it with reasonably high expectations in the first place.

Thursday

Crucial to Trump’s “Epstein hoax” about-face seems to be the existence of what, in a story broken by the Wall Street Journal, the newspaper described as a “bawdy” letter and cartoon, allegedly written by Trump to Epstein on the occasion of his 50th birthday and included in a special album compiled for Epstein by Ghislaine Maxwell – names that fall like a fantasy dinner party list but where the object is to assemble the worst people in the world.

It is the Journal’s attempt to describe Trump’s alleged cartoon-drawing skills that particularly arrests in this new twist: the president’s alleged sketch featured the naked silhouette of a woman in which, wrote the Journal, “a pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts,” (the choice of “denotes”, here, really raising the tone), and Trump’s “signature is a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist, mimicking pubic hair”.

The message, meanwhile, allegedly read: “Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret.” And while Trump jumped on Truth Social to call the note a fake and threaten the Journal with legal action, the rest of us could only sit back and marvel at the way life mimics pulp fiction – or rather, Alice in Wonderland, in which the president’s difficulties aren’t authored by a bold defender of Truth, but by the man who arguably bears more responsibility for his rise than any other: Journal proprietor and sudden hero of the hour, Rupert Murdoch.

Friday

In a week of awkward missives, Pat Brennan has resigned from his post as a parish priest in Coventry and marked the occasion with what the Metro described as a “sassy poem”. In his blog, Humble Piety, the priest posted a verse entry entitled Not I Lord Surely!, in which he blasted parishioners for being, among other things, “unfriendly”, “disdainful”, “bored”, “gossiping” and “tutting for a living”, and nailed a rhyme scheme in which he paired “holier too” with “you know who”, and “Lord’s own seal” with “it can feel”. We can only hope this style of critique catches on.