FBI ‘lost’ Bryan Kohberger for hours during road trip to PA

The FBI surveillance team tasked with following University of Idaho murders suspect Bryan Kohberger as he drove across the country lost him almost as soon as he started his journey, according to an author penning a true-crime book about the University of Idaho slayings.

The feds had planned to constantly have eyes on the troubled 28-year-old criminology student as he and his dad made the three-day journey from Pullman, Washington, to their family home in Pennsylvania for the holidays.

But they lost the suspect almost as soon as he pulled out of the parking lot of his graduate housing, just 10 miles from where he was suspected of killing four students as they slept in a merciless slaying on Nov. 13 last year, sources told author Howard Blum.

It meant that “for several alarming hours — or more,” the “chief suspect in a quadruple homicide that had shocked the nation had seemingly vanished,” Blum wrote on Air Mail.

Blum said law enforcement admitted the potentially disastrous slip-up “with a bristle of embarrassment.”

“It would be a disaster — not just professionally, but also for their own peace of mind,” Blum wrote of the officers’ eagerness to arrest him.

Worse, it meant they had not just lost sight of Kohberger, but also his white Hyundai Elantra, which had first made him a suspect after a car matching that description was seen racing away from the murder scene around 4 a.m. after the murders.

“They had lost him even before” the intense cross-country surveillance operation “could get underway,” Blum wrote.

Complicating the hunt, Kohberger chose to take an indirect route home, one his 67-year-old dad, Michael, would tell a friend seemed to make little sense, Blum said.

For the FBI team attempting to follow, “a mood of panic rapidly escalated into one of despair,” Blum wrote.

“Then they got lucky,” he said, reporting that investigators found their suspect again thanks to an automated license plate reader picking up his car in Colorado.

While he said “authorities are keeping the precise details of this screwup close to the vest,” the Kohbergers were not found again until they were in Loma, Colorado, the report said — about 900 miles and a 15-hour drive from where they set off.

Once back on the trail, the surveillance squad feared an even bigger disaster in Indiana when the Kohbergers were twice pulled over by local cops.

Previous reports suggested that the stops could have been at the behest of the feds, but Blum’s sources maintained that it was unconnected and left the agents “frustrated” and “angry.”

“The possibilities were too dangerous,” he wrote of fears that the local cops would recognize the car from appeals and arrest the suspect too soon — or that he might even be armed or flee arrest.

Instead, the officers did not catch on and let the Kohbergers go — allowing the agents to finally follow them home to the Pocono Mountains, where officers busted him after obtaining damning DNA evidence.

Kohberger’s dad had flown from their home to Washington in order to accompany his son on the lengthy car ride home for the holidays. He is not a suspect in any of the alleged crimes.

Here’s the latest coverage on the brutal killings of four college friends:

Kohberger has since been extradited to Idaho, where he was formally charged with killing Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Madison Mogen, 21, Xana Kernodle, 20, and Ethan Chapin, also 20.

Kohberbger is being held in jail in Moscow, Idaho. He has yet to enter a plea in the case, and will not do so until his next court date in June. He has previously hinted through his lawyers he intends to plead not guilty and “is eager to be exonerated.”