This is Hidden Killers with Tony Bruske.

Here now, Tony Bruske.

Imagine sitting across from a friend at a quiet small town bar.

It's something a lot of us do or have done at some point in our lives,

the local watering hole, the local cheers, the local, hey, let's sit down and talk and be humans

and distress over a beverage type setting. Venting about work, venting about life,

people experiences. It's nothing unusual. Professors complain about grading students,

the oddball teaching assistants who show up late or talk too much.

That's, you know, if you're a professor, that's your job. You're going to talk about that with colleagues.

You nod, you sip your beer, you laugh. Another day, right?

Months later, that same friend walks in with a newspaper in his hand and his face drained of color.

That TA, he was talking about, the teaching assistant, the TA stands for.

It's the one he'd been calling a douche all semester.

Well, he was just arrested for murdering four students in Idaho.

That's when the ordinary gripe became something darker in a story you wish you hadn't brushed off.

But what are you to do?

It's a friend blowing off steam. There's

nothing you could have done to stop this tragedy, nor could have your friend. And so John Snyder,

a longtime public defender turned professor at Washington State University, realized that Brian

Coburger, the graduate student, assigned to help him teach

criminal justice, wasn't just annoying. He was something far worse. And Snyder was not alone.

We're going to talk about his experiences here today and what he was telling friends about

...