Hayley Willette, 26, of Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, detailed her story about a strange and discomforting date with one Bryan Kohberger, the suspect in the Idaho Killings, in a TikTok video.
Willette was not following the case of the four University of Idaho students who were murdered inside their campus home but came across a news article about the horrific crime. As she was reading the story, Willette saw the suspect’s mugshot. That’s when she realized that Kohberger was the same man she had gone on an unfortunate date with when she was in college. “As soon as I saw his mug shot, I knew. He just has an unforgettable face,” Willette told The Daily Beast.
Willette provided The Daily Beast with texts she sent to her friends on Jan. 2 after learning of Kohberger’s arrest. One friend responded that she remembered the nurse telling her about the date in question previously.
Willette said he was “quiet but not shy” and matched with her on Tinder one morning. She talked with Kohberger all morning and afternoon before “he wanted to go to the movies and asked if I’d like to go with him. I got off 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 some for myself. We watched the movie and then he said he would take me back to my dorm.”
After driving back to her dorm Kohberger parked his car, which she assumed meant he wanted to talk, “because we couldn’t really talk during the movie.”
While she does not remember exactly what they talked about, she said that after talking for a while, she told Kohberger she wanted to go back up to her dorm room to “check to see if my roommate needs me, and he said he would come with.” Willette added that her roommate was not in their room and did not interact with Kohberger.
Back inside her dorm, they sat down to pick another movie to watch, Willette said. She also said that Kohberger was trying to rub her shoulders and tickle her.
When she asked him why he was touching her, Willette said “he got super serious and denied he was”, which she described as gaslighting. She told The Daily Beast that Kohberger later followed her to the bathroom and waited outside the door.
“I thought that was the weirdest thing so I was like, ‘I need to get this guy to leave’ but I didn’t wanna be mean, so I started to pretend to loudly throw up,” she said. “After a minute or two, he messaged me on Tinder saying he was going to go.”
“After an hour or so of him being gone, he messaged me and said I had good birthing hips and I just never messaged back,” she added.
The two never spoke again after Kohberger sent her the follow-up text about her hips. She said that while Kohberger “was very polite and nice” during the date, he “completely changed gears” afterwards.
“He just seemed very different,” she said. “Definitely felt uncomfortable when he decided he needed to wait outside of the bathroom for me.”
“It was shocking for sure,” Williette said about Kohberger’s arrest. “I don’t know if I’m a good judge of character either way, but I don’t feel surprised that he was arrested for it, either.”
Willette said that she decided to come forward with her story after seeing false information about herself, and to warn others about “who they are meeting up with… and maybe save another 19-year-old girl from being stupid.”