From the first moments when police arrested grad student Bryan Kohberger for this crime, the obvious question has been about his motive. When the probable cause affidavit was released earlier this month there was plenty of evidence, including DNA and an eyewitness, connecting Kohberger to the crime. There was even some indication that he’d been stalking the apartment. What was missing was any clear connection to anyone who lived there. But yesterday, People Magazine reported that Kohberger had in fact DM’d one of the girls in the apartment on several occasions.

Two weeks before the slayings of four University of Idaho students last November, the man now accused of killing them sent a series of messages to one of the victims on Instagram, an investigator familiar with the case tells PEOPLE…

“He slid into one of the girls’ DMs several times but she didn’t respond,” the source tells PEOPLE. “Basically, it was just him saying, ‘Hey, how are you?’ But he did it again and again.”…

Authorities remain tight-lipped about the alleged motive in the attack. They have not publicly discussed the relationship between Kohberger and the victims. Kohberger’s now-deleted Instagram account — which was viewed by PEOPLE before it was removed — followed the accounts of Mogen, Gonclaves and Kernodle, but there was no public interaction.

No one is saying which girl he was contacting but if this report is accurate I’m sure we’ll be hearing much more about it during the trial.

People reports it’s unknown by the girl in question didn’t reply but it’s possible she simply never saw the messages. I don’t have an Instagram account but apparently when someone DM’s you that you don’t follow the messages end up in a separate folder. You can imagine that pretty girls get all kinds of messages this way from guys online and maybe she just stop looking at a certain point.

I think this sort of begins to paint a picture of Kohberger as a kind of lonely, awkward incel. And on that point, a woman who went on a date with Kohberger when they were both in college claims he was weird and awkward 7 years ago. She wound up pretending to throw up in a bathroom in order to get him to leave.

“My interactions with Bryan were very brief,” Hayley Willette said in a series of videos the shared to the social media platform. “I don’t know much about him. My total interactions with him were like 24 hours. We matched on Tinder. We talked for a couple hours, and then he was like, ‘Hey, you want to go to the movies with me tonight?’ And I was like, ‘Sure.’ So we went to the movies.”…

“He kept trying to touch me, not like, inappropriately, just like trying to tickle me and like, rub my shoulders and stuff,” she says. “And I was like, ‘Why are you touching me?’ Or, ‘What are you doing?’ And he would just like, get super serious.”

Here’s the clip.

@yellllyahhhh

#stitch with @__summer_sunshine__ Bryan was not even the creepiest Tinder date I’ve been on. Stay safe and always trust your gut. #bryankohberger #idahocollegestudents #idahomurders #tinderdate

♬ original sound – Hayley

In a later video she added that he seemed normal during the first part of the date.

@yellllyahhhh

Replying to @kelliekristine #BryanKohberger #tinderdate #idahomurders

♬ original sound – Hayley

So I think we’re starting to get an idea what happened here. Kohberger is, by all accounts, an awkward, somewhat off-putting guy who didn’t know how to interact with anyone but especially not with women. He became fixated on one of these pretty co-eds somehow. He was following her and her two female roommates online even though he doesn’t seem to have crossed paths with them in real life. Maybe he saw them interacting online (in photos together) and he followed them all to keep tabs on the one girl in particular that he was focused on. At some point he messaged one of the girls but she never replied. Maybe that’s when he decided to do something else?

Earlier this week the NY Post published a story about an ex-FBI agent who speculated about what was motivating Kohberger:

“The murders may have been … an effort to assert some type of dominance,” former FBI agent and security expert Pete Yachmetz explained to The Post this week…

“I believe a continued stabbing of a victim indicates … an uncontrollable rage and extreme anger,” Yachmetz said, noting that Kohberger has been described as “socially awkward with a long history of interpersonal problems.”

“I think he may have developed a sort of incel complex,” he surmised…

Yachmetz’s personal analysis of Kohberger echoed that of Dr. Carole Lieberman, a forensic psychiatrist who told CourtTV last week that she believed the suspect fit the incel profile.

“I’ve been saying from the beginning that he’s an incel,” Lieberman said, explaining that she was largely convinced due to Kohberger’s alleged “choice of victims,” or decision to target mostly female college students.

Granted this is speculation on their part and we obviously don’t have a complete picture of all of the evidence yet. Still, some of it is starting to add up and I think it’s possible to imagine Kohberger as a pathetic character who wanted a girlfriend and expressed interest in women but who found dating and relationships to be a mystery and a challenge that was beyond him. No doubt we’ll learn more as the trial approaches.