Three years after four college students were brutally murdered in Moscow, Idaho, the family of their convicted killer, Bryan Kohberger, still struggles to reconcile love for a brother and son with the horror of what he has admitted doing.

Kohberger had suffered through childhood weight struggles, bullying, social awkwardness, and later, heroin addiction. But at the end of 2022 he was in recovery, and his life seemed on track.

“We were all so proud of him because he had overcome so much,” his sister Mel Kohberger told The New York Times in an interview published over the weekend.

The Kohberger family has not spoken publicly since Bryan Kohberger was charged with fatally stabbing 21-year-old Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves, and 20-year-old Xana Kernodle and her boyfriend, Ethan Chapin, between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. on Nov. 13, 2022, as they slept in the three women’s off-campus residence. The two roommates who were spared — Dylan Mortensen and Bethany Funke — encountered the gory scene the next morning. All were students at the nearby University of Idaho.

Their silence came largely out of respect for the victims’ families and the trauma of those left behind, which Mel Kohberger emphasized eclipses her own family’s fallout.

“The idea is making me so emotional that I can barely speak to you about it,” she tearfully told The Times.

The Kohbergers’ pride in Bryan was shattered by the revelation that he was suspected of and later admitted to the slaughter. In fact, when news of the slayings broke, Mel worried about his safety, she recalled. But on Dec. 30, 2022, police burst into the family’s Pennsylvania home, guns drawn, and arrested the then 28-year-old Washington State University criminology doctoral student for murder. In July 2025, Kohberger pleaded guilty to the brutal, meticulously planned killings, avoiding the death sentence. He is currently serving four life sentences with no possibility of parole.

Though Mel Kohberger and her brother shared an interest in true crime, she had no inkling he would manufacture one, she told The Times. Emotionally, the Kohbergers find themselves filled with a confusing, painful sensation of quasi-culpability that Mel likened to “being victimized but not really being a victim.”

A mental health counseling job she’d been training for was scuttled when inquiries about the family connection overwhelmed her would-be employer, she said. Rampant online burrowing into their internet pasts, and at least one author masquerading as Mel, have also been in the mix. Some believe the Kohbergers had to have know something, on some level, about what Bryan was capable of — but that was far from the truth, she said.

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

The Kohbergers keep in touch with Bryan and do their best to support him, but they never lose sight of the victims, Mel told The Times. Her mother prays daily for the bereaved families and their slain loved ones. Mel marks their birthdays in her calendar.