Over the past two-and-a-half years, I’ve spent weeks in that small college town where four students were viciously stabbed to death in the middle of the night.
I’ve spoken to local Moscow, Idaho law enforcement with first-hand knowledge of the grim events. I’ve questioned FBI agents knowledgeable about the bureau’s exhaustive hunt to find the killer. And I have traveled to hardscrabble Pennsylvania communities where the suspect, Bryan Kohberger, was raised and schooled.
After conducting 300 interviews and poring over piles of documents, I am convinced that Kohberger, now 30, is guilty of the murders of Madison Mogen, 21, Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Xana Kernodle, 20, and Ethan Chapin, 20, on November 13, 2022.
But my opinion, of course, means little to a judge and a jury. And as the criminal case against Kohberger has moved through a series of combative legal hearings before a trial scheduled to start this August, several stunning courtroom revelations have left me thinking about the previously unthinkable.
Kohberger may walk.
It’s not that I now believe that the recovering heroin addict turned criminology student is innocent. It’s that he may, in my mind, have committed the nearly ‘perfect crime’.
Anne Taylor, Kohberger’s lead defense attorney, last month shared startling new information that will be, I suspect, the foundation of her trial defense.
She revealed that blood from a still unknown male had been found on the stair handrail of the murder house at 1122 King Road. In addition, blood from another still unknown male had been found on a glove outside the home.
I have traveled to hardscrabble Pennsylvania communities where the suspect, Bryan Kohberger (pictured), was raised and schooled.
After conducting 300 interviews and poring over piles of documents, I am convinced that Kohberger, now 30, is guilty of the murders of Madison Mogen (second from left, top), 21, Kaylee Goncalves (second from left, bottom), 21, Xana Kernodle (second from right), 20, and Ethan Chapin (center), 20, on November 13, 2022.
Over the past two-and-a-half years, I’ve spent weeks in that small college town where four co-eds were viciously stabbed to death in the middle of the night. (Pictured: Howard Blum).
Blood? Unknown visitors?
The residence was a party house; people were coming and going all the time. One could reasonably expect the handrail to be covered in fingerprints. But blood? And why would blood be on a glove?
Even Ada County District Judge Steven Hippler was caught up in this new mystery.
‘Does this suggest the potential of other persons involved?’ Hippler wondered out loud at the hearing last month. That doesn’t exclude Kohberger; he was quick to add. But the unknown blood did raise the possibility that there might have been accomplices in the murder.
Taylor, though, was prepared with her own theory. Perhaps, she offered, one of the two unknown males – whose blood had been found – had planted Kohberger’s DNA at the scene.
It is a hypothesis, tentative, still inchoate, that will no doubt be fleshed out this summer in a case that is suddenly more open than shut.
Indeed, at the crux of the case against Kohberger is DNA – smaller than a speck of floating dust – found on a knife sheath discovered laying adjacent to the bloodied body of Madison Mogen.
The technicians at the FBI crime lab in Quantico, Va., were able to upload this particle of DNA to a genetic database and that led them to a currently unknown member of the Kohberger family, who had shared their DNA information with an online ancestry website.
Only it has turned out that the FBI lab team had been too zealous in their rush to identify a suspect.
It was revealed in court last month, that they had accessed two online databases that explicitly prohibit law enforcement from using their inventories. It was a violation of the terms of service the sites offered their customers, as well as Justice Department policy. And the Kohberger defense team is determined to make this unprofessional behavior into something more. They want to use it as a wedge to pry open the entire case against him.
Kohberger’s 4th Amendment right to privacy, they assert, had been violated. And as a tainted consequence, all the subsequent searches that followed in the investigative wake – most significantly, DNA taken from a cheek swab after his arrest – should be thrown out.
Judge Hippler listened to this eye-catching thesis and didn’t rule out the possibility of holding a formal Franks hearing later this month. Named after Jerome Franks, the victimized defendant in a 1978 landmark Supreme Court case, the proceeding would consider whether law enforcement had knowingly included false information in the affidavits that convinced magistrates to issue search warrants.
If these searches are ruled illegal, the trial of Kohberger crumbles, for nearly all the evidence that remains is circumstantial.
Anne Taylor (pictured), Kohberger’s lead defense attorney, shared startling new information that will be the foundation of her trial defense. She revealed that blood from a still unknown male had been found on the stair handrail of the murder house at 1122 King Road.
Kohberger’s car, the prosecution alleges, was in the neighborhood of the house where the murders occurred at the approximate time of the killings; his cell phone had been suspiciously shut-off for that period; a surviving roommate had seen a man dressed in black and wearing a partial mask in the house who largely resembled Kohberger; when he was arrested at his parents’ home across the country in Pennsylvania, the state police found him wearing kitchen gloves and sorting his personal garbage into plastic bags as if to hide his genetic identity; the DNA on the snap on the knife sheath established that it belonged to a member of the Kohberger family; and, most incriminating, the DNA from a cheek swab taken after Kohberger’s arrest was a direct match to the genetic material on the knife sheath.
None of that amounts to a smoking gun.
On the other hand, there was no blood from any of the four victims found on Kohberger, his clothes, his car, or in his off-campus apartment. This had been a murder scene where torrents of blood had gushed, breaching the walls of the house and branding the exterior with jagged red rivulets. How could he stay so clean?
No connection between Kohberger and any of the victims has ever been established. There was, in resolute fact, no proof that he had ever been in the house on King Road where the victims lived. The suggestion that he’d stalked any of them, his lawyer asserted, was ‘an outright lie.’
There is no direct link between Kohberger and a murder weapon. The K-Bar knife used in the killings has never been found.
It was never confirmed that Kohberger’s car had parked by the victims’ house. In all the surveillance camera videos of a white car traveling by King Road at the time of the murders, there was not a single photograph that showed Kohberger sitting behind the wheel. Or an image that recorded his license plate.
The cell phone location of analysis of Kohberger’s travels at the time of the murder and subsequent morning were inconclusive. It showed he was within a ten-mile radius of the murder house, but being in the vicinity is not the same as being at a precise location.
Finally, it was revealed in court last month that the eyewitness identification was a lot less incriminating than the police had previously maintained.
According to Kohberger’s team, the witness in subsequent interviews had conceded that she ‘had a lot to drink’ that night and didn’t ‘know if this was real or if my mind was just, like playing with me.’ When police had shown her a photo of Kohberger just before his arrest, she had failed to identify him as the intruder she’d seen.
In short, without the DNA evidence, Kohberger, if he was the murderer, may have committed the perfect crime.
A former reporter for the NY Times, Howard Blum is the author of several bestselling nonfiction books, including ‘When the Night Comes Falling: A Requiem for the Idaho Student Murders.’