Hayley Willette says she hadn’t been closely following the latest developments in the case of the four University of Idaho students who were murdered in their campus home when she came across a news article about the heinous crime last week.
While Willette was reading the story at a small Pennsylvania news outlet detailing the scene in which Bryan Kohberger was arrested on Dec. 30, the 26-year-old OB/GYN nurse came across the police photo of the suspect. That’s when she said she realized Kohberger was the same guy she went on an awkward Tinder date with in December 2015 when she was in college.
“As soon as I saw his mugshot, I knew it. He just has an unforgettable face,” Willette told The Daily Beast.
Willette said that after matching on Tinder, the pair went to watch an action movie before Kohberger drove her back to her dorm room in Penn State Hazleton. Once back on campus and talking briefly in his car, she said, Kohberger “started getting really pushy about coming to her room” to watch another movie. She said that while she initially agreed, she later pretended to “vomit loudly” in the bathroom before Kohberger — who she said was waiting for her outside the bathroom door — left.
“After about an hour after he left, he messaged me and said I had good hips during labor and never texted back,” she added.
Willette first detailed her story of a strange date with one of America’s most notorious murder suspects in a series of TikToks starting Sunday night. Kohberger’s lawyers did not immediately respond to a request for comment on this story.
Classmates: Normally chatty Kohberger ‘completely silent’ about student killings in Idaho
Authorities allege that 28-year-old Kohberger murdered four students — Kaylee Goncalves, Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle and Madison Mogen — around 4 a.m. Nov. 13 in Moscow, Idaho. The freshman Ph.D. A criminology student at Washington State University was returned to Idaho from Pennsylvania last week and faces four counts of first-degree murder and one burglary charge.
But seven years before prosecutors say Kohberger committed the harrowing crimes, Willette says he was a “quiet but not shy” psychiatrist who had matched with her one morning on the dating app. Kohberger graduated in 2018 with an associate degree in psychology from Northampton Community College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Property records show that the Kohbergers have lived in their Lamsden Drive home since at least 2014. If Kohberger was living with his parents at the time, he would have been about 45 minutes away from Willette’s dorm in Hazleton.
Willette provided The Daily Beast with text messages she sent to two of her friends on Jan. 2 after learning of Kohberger’s arrest — a conversation in which one friend replied that she remembered the nurse telling her about the date in question earlier. told.
Willette told The Daily Beast she talked to Kohberger all morning and afternoon the day of their date before he “said he wanted to go to the movies and asked if I wanted to go with him.” After agreeing to the date, she said Kohberger had a movie in mind – and while she can’t remember the title, she said she “didn’t really want to see whatever it was”.
“I came from work and met him at the theater,” she said. “He paid for my movie ticket, but he didn’t want popcorn, so I ended up buying myself some. We watched the movie and then he said he would take me back to my dorm.”
After driving her back to her dorm room, Willette said, Kohberger eventually parked his car in a way that she thought meant “he just wanted to talk, because we couldn’t really talk during the movie.”
While she doesn’t remember exactly what they discussed, she said that after talking for a while, she told Kohberger she wanted to go back to her dorm “see if my roommate needs me, and he said he’d come with me . .” (Willette said her roommate wasn’t in their dorm room at the time and didn’t see Kohberger.)
Back in her dorm room, the pair sat down to pick out another movie to watch together, Willette said. In her TikTok describing the date, she also claimed that Kohberger kept trying to rub her shoulders and tickle her.
When she asked him why he touched her, Willette said in her video that he “got super serious” and denied doing that, which she described as gaslighting. She told The Daily Beast that Kohberger later followed her to the dormitory’s shared women’s bathroom and “waited outside the door.”
“I thought that was the weirdest thing, so I thought, ‘I have to let this guy leave,’ but I didn’t want to be mean, so I started pretending to throw up loudly,” she said. “After a minute or two he messaged me on Tinder saying he was going.”
The two never spoke again, she said, after Kohberger sent her the curious follow-up text over her hips. She said that while Kohberger was “really polite and nice” during the date, he “changed gears completely” when the pair arrived at her dorm room.
“He just seemed very different,” she said. “I definitely felt uncomfortable when he decided he should wait for me outside the bathroom.”
Willette said in her TikTok that she decided to bring forward her story about Kohberger after seeing false information about herself online and to warn others about “who they’re meeting… and maybe save another 19-year-old girl of stupidity.”
“It sure was shocking,” Williette said of seeing Kohberger’s mug shot. “I don’t know if I’m a good character anyway, but I’m not surprised he got arrested for it either.”
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