John Snyder is a kindly older man who lives in my small town. He’s what you’d consider a normal person — a married homeowner who teaches at the local university.
He’d been a public defender for almost 30 years when he took the opportunity to teach students about the legal system instead of defend them in it, feeling he was nearing burnout in a demanding profession.
I’ve come to know John pretty well over the years, not just because we live in the same town — my wife, Alexis, is his favorite bartender, and he likes going out for dinner with his wife or having a beer after work as much as the next guy.
But there was a marked theme to John’s happy-hour conversation in fall 2022: His teaching assistant in Washington State University’s Criminal Justice and Criminology Department was “an a–hole” who was driving him crazy.
Normal after-work grumbling, one might think, even if in a high quantity. Then bucolic life in our peaceful region was interrupted in November 2022 when four University of Idaho students were brutally murdered just 20 minutes away.
After the new year, John came into the bar carrying a newspaper and looking bad enough that my wife said, “What’s wrong? You look like shit.”
John held up the paper and confirmed what we suspected after the arrest: His teaching assistant was Bryan Kohberger.
John Snyder has avoided the media since Kohberger’s arrest, but due to our friendship he agreed to meet me at the Palouse Caboose Bar & Grill, where my wife is a bartender, for some pitchers of beer and his first, and probably only, in-depth interview about supervising Bryan Kohberger.
John graduated from the University of Idaho Law School in 1988 and began working as a public defender, his specialization throughout his legal career, saying, “Criminals are more honest and easier to work with than people going through a divorce.”
He was also attracted to the field by his sense of justice and desire to see people who may have disadvantages within society treated fairly by the legal system.
And something of a troublemaker himself — his skill at pool paid his bar tabs all through law school — he could imagine being caught making some of the same mistakes as his clients.
He occasionally dealt with homicides or other serious crimes, but in a college town it’s mostly young people screwing up.
John doesn’t feel this career has given him any greater ability to sense evil than the average person.
As a professor, John had a high volume of students and couldn’t get to know many of them well. Teaching assistants are different, and in normal circumstances one works with them extensively.
It used to be that professors chose preferred potential TAs from a list, but for reasons he never discovered, the school abandoned this system and randomized the process, which is how he was assigned Kohberger.
When the graduate student came to introduce himself early in summer 2022, John didn’t think much of him: “He was a little odd, but a lot of people in academia are odd.”
Despite the TA-assignment system being designed to prevent this exact problem, Kohberger had a scheduling conflict and thus limited attendance in class, though he also often didn’t show up when available.
The infrequency of his class appearances didn’t stop one female student from emailing a friend near the semester’s start, “My class’s TA looks like a murderer.”
John says he tries to look at TAs’ individual attributes and put them to work where they will be the most useful while training them on their weaker points.
In this instance, however, “Bryan quickly disabused me of the idea that I would get a sufficient amount of work out of him, and I quickly figured out he was a bit of a douche. And within a few weeks I realized this was going to be an exceptionally long semester.”
Despite Kohberger missing class, the prof saw him plenty.
Here’s the latest coverage on Bryan Kohberger:
“He rapidly developed the habit of coming in at the end of the day, when I clearly wanted to go home,” he says. “He would start talking about inane, stupid and immature things. . . . I quickly realized this was a technique where he felt like he was in control as long as he was wasting my time.”
Kohberger once tried to tell John how he was going to get out of a parking ticket, even managing to get him to examine the “scene.” It turned out the TA had parked next to a yellow curb in a lot where he didn’t have a permit anyway.
Admonitions that in his experience as a defense attorney, people who believe they know the law better than the courts are always wrong fell on deaf ears.
John says over time Kohberger “would follow me down the hall yapping, and I started calling it his ‘terrier routine.’”
When John’s wife was waiting for him in the car once, she saw Kohberger following him and recoiled nearly to the other side, a reaction he’d never seen from her in many years of marriage.
Snyder had grown to hate Kohberger over the course of the semester but never thought he was dangerous — he actually considered him a wimp.
He learned of Kohberger’s arrest along with everyone else. He was in his office Dec. 30 in a nearly empty building when the custodian told him the police had the basement sealed off.
They ended up walking to a picture board of department members, and the custodian started pointing at photos speculating whose office the police might be searching.
When the custodian got to Kohberger, it hit him: His teaching assistant was the murderer.
Then his phone rang; his brother-in-law told him Kohberger had been arrested. That call was interrupted by his son calling, which was interrupted by the Moscow, Idaho, police calling to set up an immediate interview; he drove to Moscow instead of waiting around for them to show up.
From the police he learned Kohberger had a list of women’s names of unknown purpose — though surely not anything good — and one of them was a woman he knew from the department. But overall he wasn’t able to greatly help them besides describing Kohberger’s character.
Having worked with a mass murderer was a system shock for John, even if he always disliked the guy.
The university’s standard trauma-assistance programs proved unhelpful; the support “hotline” he called listed every imaginable identity group besides his own — old white men — and then said it could set an appointment in two weeks.
But he says the stream of graduate students and undergrads coming into his office to offer support “was one of the coolest things I’ve ever experienced.”
The department chair also transferred his own excellent teaching assistant to John for the next semester to ease his workload — and so there would be no more surprises.
John says the reality of the crime isn’t what bothers him — it is instead someone studying criminology to become a better criminal instead of to pursue justice.
“It was the assault on why I do what I do: promote justice and fairness, to find honor where there isn’t any, to teach people to be decent human beings, and to realize that life goes on, and to let people who had not experienced respect from the system know that the power to move past their troubles is inside them.”
Most of the people he worked with throughout his career were in bad circumstances and needed help out of the abyss, while Kohberger chose to dive into it.
Though this may be over for the public, for those affected it will never go away, and a feeling of safety is slow to return when you learn you have been in close contact with a monster.
This coming year is likely to be Snyder’s last spent teaching, not just because of Kohberger — he has been working to make a more just society since 1988 and is tired.
Let’s hope some of the students he’s taught over the last 10 years can pick up the torch and none of them turns out to be the next Bryan Kohberger.
As for his former TA, it is John’s belief that being both extremely irritating and physically weak he won’t survive to the end of his natural life in prison.
Brad Pearce writes The Wayward Rabbler on Substack.
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