Police arrested a 28-year-old man on Friday and charged him with murder in connection with the brutal killing of four University of Idaho college students who were found stabbed to death overnight in a home near their campus last month.
The man, Bryan C. Kohberger, was arrested in Chestnuthill Township in the Pocono Mountains region of Pennsylvania. He was scheduled to appear at an extradition hearing next week, and the police in Moscow, Idaho, scheduled a news conference for later on Friday.
Mr. Kohberger was listed as a Ph.D. student at Washington State University, which is less than 10 miles from the site of the murders, and had been studying criminal justice and criminology, according to the school’s website.
The college town of Moscow has been reeling since the attack in the early morning hours of Nov. 13, when four University of Idaho students were attacked in at least two separate bedrooms, probably as they slept. Two more roommates apparently slept through the stabbings and did not wake up until several hours afterward.
The crime devastated the city of about 25,000 people along the Washington State border and brought intense scrutiny to its police department as weeks passed with little information on who could have carried out the slayings. The F.B.I. had assigned more than 60 agents to the case.
In recent weeks, the police had asked for the public’s help in finding a white Hyundai sedan that they said had been near the students’ house, which sits just off campus, on the night of the murders. Investigators said that the suspect had used a long knife to carry out the killings.
The three female victims — Madison Mogen, 21; Kaylee Goncalves, 21; and Xana Kernodle, 20 — lived at the house, while the fourth victim — Ethan Chapin, 20 — was there visiting Ms. Kernodle, his girlfriend. All had been members of fraternities or sororities at the school.
On the night of the killings, the students had all spent the night out with friends. Mr. Chapin and Ms. Kernodle attended a party at the Sigma Chi fraternity nearby, while Ms. Mogen and Ms. Goncalves went to a bar called the Corner Club together. All four students had returned to the home shortly before 2 a.m.
Between 2:26 and 2:52 a.m., seven unanswered phone calls were made from Ms. Goncalves’s phone to a former boyfriend. Several calls were also placed to the same man from Ms. Mogen’s phone, the police said. The former boyfriend had not answered the phone because he was sleeping at the time, Ms. Goncalves’s older sister later said.
When the two surviving roommates woke up, they called friends to the house because they believed that one of the women who lived upstairs “had passed out.” When the friends got there, someone in the group called 911 just before noon, and the police arrived to find the victims and what the coroner later described as a bloody scene.
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.