Bryan Kohberger has declared his innocence and asked to withdraw his guilty plea for the 2022 murders of four University of Idaho students.
Four years ago, four University of Idaho students were killed in their sleep in the town of Moscow, Idaho. The victims were roommates Madison Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, and Xana Kernodle, along with Kernodle's boyfriend Ethan Chapin, who was staying overnight. Six weeks later, police arrested 28-year-old graduate student Bryan Kohberger, who was studying criminal law and criminology. Prosecutors said Kohberger wore a mask over his face and entered the rented home on the night of November 13, 2022, killing all four students with an 18-centimeter Ka-Bar combat knife before fleeing.
Kohberger ended years of legal proceedings on July 3, 2025, when he agreed to a plea deal to avoid the electric chair. He assured the judge at the time that he was pleading guilty because he was guilty, and he received four life sentences. However, on July 26, 2026, Kohberger released a statement to The New York Times in his first communication with the press since his arrest on December 30, 2022. He stated that he intends to revoke his plea deal because justice did not prevail and unsealed records leave unanswered questions. He described the prosecution narrative as a shortsighted fiction that had remained unchanged since his arrest warrant was issued nearly four years earlier, adding that its flawed premises were never challenged in court.
Claims Of Defense Deception
After releasing his written statement, Kohberger called reporter Michael Baker from prison. Although The New York Times did not publish a full transcript, Kohberger told Baker that his defense attorneys had deceived him. He said his lawyers failed to examine facts proving his complete innocence and misled him regarding the conditions of his life sentence, specifically about visits and prison employment. CNN reported the following day that extracts from Kohberger's motion to withdraw his plea claimed his attorneys promised him visitation upon request, freedom of movement in prison, and employment, none of which materialised.
Kohberger declined to reveal specific details of his evidence to Baker, but he asserted that he possesses undeniable grounds to prove his innocence. In asking for a new trial, he confirmed his intention to declare his innocence and agreed to let prosecutors present their evidence in court while seeking the death penalty again.
New Details In Documentary
Four days after Kohberger contacted the newspaper, Netflix released a documentary series titled Idaho Murders: College Nightmare. The series examines the night of the killings, including the actions of two surviving female roommates who rented rooms in the same house. One roommate encountered Kohberger in the hallway as he was leaving the building, but she called police and emergency services eight hours later after discovering her roommates were dead. Addressing public debate over whether immediate notification could have saved lives, Steve Goncalves, the father of Kaylee Goncalves, said none of the victims could have been saved.
Unsealed court documents shown in the documentary reveal that Kohberger inflicted more than 150 knife wounds across the four victims. The documentary also highlighted that Kaylee Goncalves suspected she was being followed about a month before her death, telling a friend that a man stared at her from a hill behind the house while she walked her dog. Police investigations established that Kohberger visited the area near the students' house 23 times between July and November 2022. He had also added Goncalves and her friends on social media and tried to message them.
Digital Forensics And Evidence
Digital forensics expert Heather Barnhart told People in an exclusive interview that Kohberger spent the evening after a family Christmas dinner on December 25, 2022, researching serial killers Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Danny Rolling. On November 19, 2022, Kohberger also read about Rolling, who killed five students in Gainesville, Florida, in August 1990 after breaking into rented homes with a 1942 US Marine Corps Ka-Bar knife. Barnhart expressed certainty that Kohberger acted as a copycat of Rolling. The article noted that Kohberger's defense could argue that studying serial killers is normal for a criminology student, though a narcissistic student convinced of his intellectual superiority since high school might have attempted an ideal murder out of curiosity.
The primary physical evidence against Kohberger was his DNA found on a Ka-Bar knife sheath left on the bed of one victim. His defense team argued that the genetic genealogy method used by investigators was too new, unreliable, and controversial, but the court rejected the motion to exclude it. Kohberger's legal strategy for proving his innocence remains unclear as his closed case reopens.
