Pivotal hearings set in Kohberger case

In hearings this week that will likely set the table for his summer murder trial, Bryan Kohberger and his attorneys will return to the courtroom for the first time in more than two months to argue for excluding a host of evidence.

Since November, the defense and prosecution have traded legal briefs over the disputed evidence in the University of Idaho student homicides case. The pieces the defense wants suppressed include: DNA taken from Kohberger that the state says matches some from the crime scene in Moscow where the four college students were killed; every item seized from his college apartment, car and parents’ Pennsylvania home; and all the information from his cellphone and online footprint obtained through search warrants.

The defense has asserted that all of this evidence — and still more, including from two search warrants for Kohberger’s person when he was briefly jailed in Pennsylvania, and again when he was brought to Idaho to await trial — should be withheld from a jury over alleged police misconduct. 

Kohberger, who turned 30 in November, has now spent over two years in custody since his arrest in late 2022 on suspicion of the fatal stabbings that took place in the early-morning hours of Nov. 13 that year. He faces four counts of first-degree murder and one count of felony burglary, and could be sentenced to death if convicted. 

The victims were Madison Mogen, 21, of Coeur d’Alene; Kaylee Goncalves, 21, of Rathdrum; Xana Kernodle, 20, of Post Falls; and Ethan Chapin, 20, of Mount Vernon, Wash. The three women lived in the King Road house just off campus in Moscow where the killings occurred. Chapin was Kernodle’s boyfriend and stayed over for the night. 

At the time, Kohberger was a Ph.D. student of criminal justice and criminology at Washington State University and lived in Pullman, Washington, about 9 miles west of Moscow. Eleven days after police first arrived at Kohberger as a suspect, they arrested him at his parents’ home in Pennsylvania while he visited them on a break from school.

Detectives working the quadruple homicide case “intentionally or recklessly omitted” certain details from the investigation to convince a judge of probable cause for search warrants, Kohberger’s defense said in court filings. In addition, some of the warrants weren’t as specific as required by the law about what they sought, wrote his attorneys.

And, in what would prove most damaging to the prosecution if accepted by the judge, the defense is seeking to block use of their client’s genetic information in the case. Filed under seal, his attorneys argued that Kohberger’s Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure were infringed upon when the FBI pursued an advanced DNA technique called investigative genetic genealogy, or IGG, by using public ancestry websites to narrow the list of possible suspects. 

Police obtained most of the other evidence through search warrants after IGG first led them to Kohberger as the suspect Dec. 19, five weeks after the students’ deaths, according to recent defense filings. His attorneys argued all of that should be thrown out as a result of initially violating their client’s constitutional rights. 

Led by Latah County Prosecutor Bill Thompson, state attorneys contested the defense’s arguments to suppress any of the evidence and disputed claims that police did not follow proper procedures during the investigation. The probable cause affidavit for Kohberger’s arrest did not mention the use of IGG, but it was not intended as evidence at trial, Thompson said, and also wasn’t used as justification for any search warrants. 

The defense last week filed a motion to unseal the two sides’ IGG suppression filings, and asked that the hearing on that evidence be held in open court. In response, 4th District Judge Steve Hippler set a closed-door hearing for Tuesday at 10 a.m. at the Ada County Courthouse to decide how to proceed ahead of a previously scheduled public hearing for oral arguments on the evidence suppression issue, set for Thursday morning.