BOISE, Idaho — A month before the scheduled start of his murder trial for the 2022 killings of four Idaho college students in their off-campus home, defendant Bryan Kohberger admitted his guilt and entered a plea deal that removes the possibility of the death penalty.
At Wednesday morning’s hearing before state district Judge Steven Hippler in Boise, Idaho, Kohberger pleaded guilty to all five counts in the indictment.
Kohberger, a 30-year-old former PhD student of criminology, was charged with four counts of first-degree murder and one count of burglary in Latah County, Idaho, where the gruesome discovery in a Moscow home first captured national attention.
The plea deal – which at least one victim’s family has condemned – ends a tumultuous case that included a cross-country hunt for the suspect and a lengthy legal battle, including several attempts by the defense to have the charges dismissed or the death penalty taken off the table.
On the burglary charge, Kohberger will face a sentence of 10 years. He will face a life sentence each of the fours counts of first degree homicide. All five counts will run consecutive to one another.
Kohberger waived his right to appeal the plea and sentence, and to seek leniency and reconsideration of the sentence later.
Wednesday’s hearing was fairly straightforward, with Hippler reading Kohberger the plea offer, before asking him whether he had voluntarily accepted it and “was informed of the consequences of the plea, including minimum and maximum punishments, and other direct consequences that may apply,” according to Idaho’s law on pleas.
“Are you pleading guilty because you are guilty?” the judge asked. “Yes,” Kohberger responded.
Key questions, however, linger: How and why were these victims chosen? Why were other roommates at the home spared? And how exactly did the killer get into the home, carry out the crimes, then avoid capture for weeks?
The answers surely would have been probed at trial.
Now, if they ever emerge, they could come at Kohberger’s sentencing hearing when family and friends of the victims will be invited to share victim impact statements, often gut-wrenching attestations to loved ones’ agony and grief.
Victims Ethan Chapin and Xana Kernodle were 20, while Goncalves and Mogen were 21, when they were killed. These three questions, central to how they died, are still unanswered as the plea deal hearing gets underway:
Why the victims were targeted
Why Goncalves, Mogen, Chapin and Kernodle were killed remains a mystery. All four were students at the University of Idaho, and three lived together – along with two other roommates – at a residence near campus in Moscow, a college town of about 25,000 people.
On Saturday, November 12, 2022, Goncalves posted a series of photos on her Instagram with the caption, “one lucky girl to be surrounded by these ppl everyday.” One photo shows Mogen sitting on Goncalves’ shoulders, with Chapin and Kernodle standing next to them.
That night, the group of friends had gone out in Moscow and returned late to their shared home. The next day, police found the four students slaughtered inside the home, with no signs of forced entry or damage.
There was “no connection between Mr. Kohberger and the victims,” an attorney for the defendant argued in a mid-2023 court filing, pointing to a “total lack of DNA evidence from the victims in Mr. Kohberger’s apartment, office, home, or vehicle.”
But while authorities had “not said if the victims knew Kohberger … the suspect’s now-deleted Instagram account — which was reviewed by PEOPLE before it was removed — followed the accounts of Mogen, Goncalves and Kernodle,” the outlet reported in early 2023.
The suspect allegedly contacted one of the female victims “repeatedly” late that October, roughly two weeks before the killings, People reported, adding the unidentified victim did not respond to the messages. It’s unclear whether that victim had seen the alleged messages from Kohberger.
Kohberger also visited the restaurant where two of the victims worked in the weeks before their killings, according to People. It’s unclear whether either of the victims were at the restaurant when Kohberger visited, whether he ever interacted with them there or whether he ever sat in the restaurant to eat his food.
Why 2 roommates were spared
Xana, Goncalves and Mogen shared their three-floor, six-bedroom home with Dylan Mortensen and Bethany Funke. Both were home during the time of the murders – but spared – police have said.
Mortensen, identified in court paperwork as “D.M.,” told investigators she “heard crying” in the house the morning of the killings and heard a voice say, “it’s ok, I’m going to help you.”
She then saw a “figure clad in black clothing and a mask that covered the person’s mouth and nose walking towards her,” according to a probable cause affidavit released in early 2023 in prosecutors’ case against Kohberger.
“D.M. described the figure as 5’10” or taller, male, not very muscular, but athletically built with bushy eyebrows. The male walked past D.M. as she stood in a ‘frozen shock phase,’” court documents reveal.
“The male walked towards the back sliding glass door. D.M. locked herself in her room after seeing the male,” the document says, adding the roommate did not recognize the male.
“I’m freaking out,” Mortensen texted Funke about the masked man dressed in black in their house nearly eight hours before calling 911 to report Kernodle unconscious at the home.
Funke later texted Mortensen: “Come to my room” and “run.”
After Kohberger’s arrest, Mortensen couldn’t definitively say whether he was the man she saw in her home around the time of the killings, court filings showed.
Both surviving roommates had been expected to testify at Kohberger’s trial.
How the murders were carried out
Under the proposed plea deal, “there’s no guarantee” Kohberger would share details of the crime, Goncalves’ father, Steve Gonclaves, told CNN on Tuesday.
“We want something like his knife – where he threw it – his kill kit, his suit, anything like that,” he said. “If he gave those type of details, people would just be like, ‘We were wrong. He did it, and let’s leave everybody alone and move on to another case.’”
An “edged weapon such as a knife” was used in the killings, Moscow Police said, but only a knife sheath was found at the crime scene, on the bed next to Mogen’s body. Kohberger had purchased a military-style knife, a sheath and a knife sharpener on Amazon in the months before the killings, prosecution filings show.
A selfie Kohberger is believed to have taken on the morning of November 13, 2022 – only hours after the murders – is also among case documents. In it, he stands in front of a shower, dressed in a white shirt, smiling and giving a thumbs-up.
Five days after the students’ deaths, Kohberger got a new license plate for his white Hyundai Elantra, court documents reveal. An officer at Washington State University, where Kohberger was a PhD student at the time of the killings, found a 2015 white Hyundai Elantra registered to Kohberger in an apartment complex parking lot, and investigators in the case of the slain students zeroed in on Kohberger because his driver’s license information and photo were consistent with a surviving roommate’s description.
Trash, recovered from the Kohberger family residence by Pennsylvania law enforcement and sent to the Idaho State Lab for DNA testing, was used to help investigators narrow down Kohberger as the suspect in the Idaho student killings in December 2022, court documents show.
Soon after that, “the Idaho State Lab reported that a DNA profile obtained from the trash” matched a tan leather knife sheath found “laying on the bed” of one of the victims, according to the documents.
Kohberger was arrested for the killings on December 30, 2022, in his home state of Pennsylvania, authorities said.
