Judge schedules two court hearings next June in Bryan Kohberger’s petition to take back guilty plea
By Emma Tucker, CNN
(CNN) — A pair of court hearings have been scheduled for next June as Bryan Kohberger, the man convicted of fatally stabbing four University of Idaho students, attempts to take back his guilty plea, court records show.
Kohberger filed a petition to reopen the case late last month, blaming his plea on “threats,” “false promises” and wrong information, according to his post-conviction relief form.
Judge Steven Hippler, who heard Kohberger’s guilty plea in court last year, scheduled a status conference for June 3, 2027, and an evidentiary hearing two weeks later as part of a procedural step while he considers the petition, records show.
After initially pleading not guilty, Kohberger agreed to a plea deal to avoid the death penalty and was convicted last July, during which he publicly — and for the first time — admitted to fatally stabbing Ethan Chapin, 20; Kaylee Goncalves, 21; Xana Kernodle, 20; and Madison Mogen, 21, on November 13, 2022, in Moscow, Idaho.
“Are you pleading guilty because you are guilty?” Judge Hippler asked at the time. “Yes,” Kohberger replied. He was then sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
But a year later, Kohberger is claiming his defense team did not disclose or review exculpatory evidence and cites “ineffective assistance of counsel during criminal proceedings” in his motion.
Kohberger’s attorney declined to provide a statement when reached by CNN.
Steve Goncalves, the father of Kaylee Goncalves, released a statement to CNN’s Jim Sciutto reacting to the two new scheduled court hearings next year: “It’s not where we want to be, putting all our hope on Santa Claus getting it tossed is a scary position we find ourselves in.”
CNN has reached out to the Chapin and Mogen families for comment and is attempting to contact the Kernodle family.
What happened the night the students were killed
The four students were found dead in their off-campus home in Moscow after a Saturday night out, and accounts of what unfolded have emerged from the two surviving roommates who were both expected to testify at trial before Kohberger pleaded guilty.
One survivor, Dylan Mortensen, told investigators she was woken overnight by strange noises and saw a masked man with “bushy eyebrows” in the home, according to an affidavit.
When their roommates didn’t respond to their text messages in the morning, Mortensen and the other survivor, Bethany Funke, called 911 around noon, records show.
“Something has happened in our house, we don’t know what,” one of the roommates says in an audio recording of the 911 call.
Police arrived to find Kernodle and Chapin dead on the second floor. Upstairs, Goncalves and Mogen were dead in one of the beds with visible stab wounds.
More than a month after news of the stabbings in the small college town gripped the nation, Kohberger, then a PhD student of criminology at nearby Washington State University, was arrested in his home state of Pennsylvania.
Forensic DNA testing from trash collected outside his family’s home gave Idaho law enforcement probable cause to take him into custody and he was charged in January 2023 with killing the four students.
DNA found on a knife sheath on a bed close to Mogen at the crime scene led investigators to a single-source profile that was determined to be male and matched to Kohberger through investigative genetic genealogy, which prosecutors submitted as evidence.
Family of victim ‘confident’ he will get death penalty
The case was delayed numerous times, including by a change of venue, frustrating the victims’ families before Kohberger ultimately pleaded guilty.
The plea agreement angered families of the victims who said they weren’t notified beforehand or provided with any chance for input.
As part of his plea deal, Kohberger waived the right to appeal, but that does not preclude him from filing a new case challenging the validity of his agreement.
He also claims in his handwritten filing that he was given a “gross misrepresentation” of what a life sentence and death row in Idaho would look like.
The Goncalves family said last year prosecutors “have failed us” with the plea deal, saying families of the victims had been “treated as opponents from the outset.”
After learning of Kohberger’s petition last month, the family spoke out again, calling Kohberger “the mosquito you just can’t seem to swat.”
“He did this after deciding not to leave his fate and the facts of the case up to a jury to decide his guilt,” the family said in a statement on Facebook, noting Kohberger “never cried wolf or claimed he was uninformed, pressured, or that there were issues with the discovery.”
The Goncalves family said at the time they welcome a trial. “We are confident he will get the death penalty that he escaped by pleading guilty the first time around,” they said.
This story has been updated with additional information.
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CNN’s Cindy Von Quednow and Jim Sciutto contributed to this report.
