Murder In Moscow: More On The Extensive Search For The Murder Weapon

In March 2023, newly unsealed search warrants showed that Moscow investigators had been intensely focused on identifying the type of knife used to kill Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin. Police had recovered a tan leather Ka-Bar sheath beside Mogen’s body, stamped with “KA-BAR,” “USMC” and the Marine Corps insignia, while the actual murder weapon was still missing. Investigators obtained six separate warrants seeking sales records from Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Blue Ridge Knives and Ka-Bar itself for specific military-style knives and matching sheaths, including the Ka-Bar 1217 and 1217S sheath. The warrants had all been sought and executed before Bryan Kohberger’s arrest, showing that detectives were already trying to trace who had purchased a knife consistent with the sheath and with the large fixed-blade weapon the coroner believed had been used in the killings.

The warrants also showed just how central the missing knife had become to the investigation. Detectives asked retailers for customer names, account information, order histories, payment details, IP addresses and communications connected to purchases of the relevant knives and sheaths, hoping to connect a specific buyer to the weapon type suggested by the crime scene. At that stage, authorities had not publicly revealed what information those retailers returned, and a knife later seized from Kohberger’s Pennsylvania family home had not been identified as the murder weapon. The significance of the filings was therefore less that police had found the knife and more that, even before Kohberger was arrested, they were systematically working backward from the sheath left at 1122 King Road to determine who had bought the matching blade and whether that trail would lead them to the killer.


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