Idaho college killings: Questions remain after stunning guilty plea

MOSCOW, Idaho -- Bryan Kohberger has been behind bars for nearly 1,000 days. All the while, his lawyers had repeatedly insisted he was innocent.

Now that the criminology student accused of killing four Idaho college students has instead pleaded guilty in a dramatic turn of events, he will almost certainly spend the rest of his days behind bars.

The guilty plea and admission to the stabbing deaths -- just weeks from the planned start of his trial -- stunned many, in a case that had ceaselessly gripped headlines.

What had been seen as a largely circumstantial case was suddenly crystallizing with every admission that Kohberger made to the judge on Wednesday.

But many questions remained unanswered. While Kohberger admitted to the killings of Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin -- students at a school mere miles away from his own and with no apparent connection to him -- many of the details remain a mystery, most notably: why he did it.

A killing that sent shockwaves

It has been nearly three years since the brutal stabbing deaths of Goncalves, Mogen, Kernodle and Chapin. The grisly crimes sent shockwaves rippling through the tight-knit college town of Moscow, and ignited a continuous firestorm across social and news media.

Their bodies were found in the girls' off-campus house on King Road on Nov. 13, 2022. Near Mogen's body, a KA-BAR knife sheath was discovered. The knife has never been found.

A more than six-week manhunt ensued, and many residents of the cozy college town began locking their doors at night for the first time. Whether the killer had skipped town or still lurked among them was anyone's guess. In the vacuum of real information being shared, conspiracy theorists and true crime hobbyists ran amok with false accusations.

Then one day before New Year's Eve, a criminology Ph.D. student at Washington State University was arrested, more than 2,000 miles from where the killings occurred.

Kohberger was taken into custody at his parents' home in Albrightsville, Pennsylvania, after driving cross-country to spend the holidays with family. He appeared to have no connection to the victims, save for their schools' proximity. And yet, prosecutors alleged, his DNA had been found on the button snap of the knife sheath.

His phone pinged off cell towers in the King Road home's area the night the killings occurred, they said. His car was caught on surveillance footage taking multiple passes by what would soon become a crime scene, they said. One of two surviving roommates told police she had seen a masked intruder with "bushy eyebrows" that night a description that has become a hallmark of the case and one, prosecutors said, applied to Kohberger, though his lawyers would later dispute that.

After Kohberger's arrest, the lawyer representing him in Monroe County, Pennsylvania, said his client was "eager to be exonerated of these charges." The case was largely circumstantial. There was barely any eyewitness testimony. The murder weapon was missing.

Kohberger was extradited to Idaho and indicted in May 2023. He was charged with four counts of first-degree murder and one count of burglary. He is now facing four back-to-back life sentences, as outlined in his plea agreement, for the crimes in addition to 10 years for the burglary count. His sentencing hearing has been set for July 23.

Shroud of secrecy

Even before Kohberger was named as a suspect, the murder case captured international attention despite or perhaps fueled in part by the heavy shroud of secrecy draped around its details. A strict gag order was imposed early on by the judge first overseeing the case that has forced the case to play out largely behind closed doors.

Little by little though, the shape of the evidence began to emerge. A slow, steady drip of information has trickled from at-times heated hearings and literally thousands of court filings and hundreds of thousands of pages of briefs.

For years, Kohberger's lawyers had aggressively accused prosecutors of failing to do their due diligence on other possible leads and that they were too single-mindedly focused on their client. They have said investigators used a "false information trail" to target Kohberger and even suggested that police intentionally misled a judge to get the search warrants they wanted on Kohberger a very serious allegation that ultimately went nowhere with the judge.

Meanwhile, the defense has levied a litany of legal salvos trying to puncture holes in prosecutors' case, including casting doubt on the DNA evidence, asking to have the indictment dismissed, and fighting repeatedly to get the death penalty taken off the table on a wide range of grounds, pointing to everything from the U.S. Constitution and international human rights to evolving social norms, to his autism spectrum disorder diagnosis as a factor on jurors' perception, to needing more time for the morass of discovery and intensive preparation they must do in such a capital case. All those attempts were unsuccessful.

If he had been convicted at trial, Kohberger could have faced execution by firing squad. That capital punishment method is newly legal in Idaho because of the ongoing nationwide shortage of the lethal injection drugs, as major pharmaceutical suppliers have withdrawn from the capital punishment market.

What all the legal back-in-forth has succeeded in, however, is continuously pushing back the actual trial to the frustration of some of the victims' families.

But those delays in the judicial proceedings could not freeze time. The off-campus home where the killings occurred was demolished in December 2023, after the property owner donated the home to the school. The school made the call to tear it down as a "healing step," they said at the time, despite mixed feelings from the victims' families. The sunrise demolition took less than two hours.

The Goncalves and Kernodle families had pointed to potential evidentiary value in preserving the house, while the parents of Ethan Chapin whose brother and sister were still students at the university were supportive of the demolition.

Neither Kohberger's defense nor prosecutors had pushed back on the planned demolition, and the school said it would help stop "efforts to further sensationalize the crime scene."

Lawyers for Kohberger have also denounced what they called "inflammatory" and "prejudicial" media coverage against their client. The trial, once slated to take place in Latah County, where the killings occurred, was finally moved to Boise after a long legal battle waged by the defense.

Early one Sunday morning in September 2024, Kohberger was transported by an Idaho State Police plane from the Latah County Jail, where he had been held, to Ada County. In both facilities, Kohberger has been housed by himself, for his own and others' safety, authorities have said.

A 'so-called alibi' unravels

His lawyers had said that Kohberger was driving around alone on the night the killings occurred, and the reason his phone stopped reporting from the network in the critical window when the killings occurred is because he was out in a very remote area, stargazing.

It's an alibi that both judges who have overseen the case summarily scoffed at: Judge John Judge in Moscow, dubbing it a "so-called" alibi; Judge Steven Hippler in Boise, saying "at this point, [Kohberger] has not provided an alibi, partial or otherwise."

Some of the search warrants served on Kohberger's online shopping indicated curiosities far earthlier than the cosmos, prosecutors said. Eight months before four Idaho college students would be found stabbed to death, as ABC News has previously reported, the man accused of the bloody killing spree bought a knife that matches what prosecutors said could be the murder weapon. Kohberger's lawyers, while arguing his innocence, had said the whole Kohberger family had access to that Amazon account.

But it was Kohberger's buy, prosecutors said. "He purchased online a KA-BAR knife and sheath with an Amazon gift card," prosecutor Bill Thompson said at Wednesday's plea hearing.

Prosecutors also pointed to Kohberger's own writings, including in their court briefs a homework assignment from his master's degree program that they said was essentially a crime scene how-to guide that showed he had been not just a scholar of crime he knew how to cover his tracks after committing murder.

It was a point Thompson explicitly made at Wednesday's plea hearing.

"The defendant has studied crime. In fact, he did a detailed paper on crime scene processing when he was working on his pre doctorate degrees, and he had that knowledge and skill," Thompson said.

Meanwhile as the case dragged on, its cost mushroomed. The financial burden has largely been borne by the local community itself. In 2022, Idaho Governor Brad Little had committed up to $1 million in emergency funds to support the manhunt and investigation, which has helped defray some of the expense. The change in venue to Boise would have also brought additional costs as prosecutors and others would have had to travel more than five hours to Boise for what was expected to be a three-month trial.

Now, that trial, where the actual evidence would finally come to light, will never occur. And at least for now, the case comes to a close much like it started: with still-unanswered questions.

ABC News' Josh Margolin and Jim Hill contributed to this report.