Idaho murder convict Kohberger challenges guilty plea; victims' families call him 'narcissist'

Bryan Kohberger sat in prison last week and decided to undo the thing he had done a year earlier. He had pleaded guilty to four murders. He had accepted four consecutive life sentences. He had, in his own calculation, traded his life for the lives of four students he killed. Now he wanted it back.

On November 13, 2022, Kohberger drove to an off-campus home in Moscow, Idaho, and stabbed four University of Idaho students to death. Kaylee Goncalves, Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle, and Madison Mogen were housemates. They were young. They were asleep or nearly so when he entered their home. The case consumed the small college town for nearly two months before police arrested him. He was a criminology doctoral student at Washington State University, a different school, a different campus. No one has ever understood why he chose these four people, in this house, on this night. He never offered a motive.

Investigators could not establish a connection between Kohberger and any of the victims. But the evidence placing him at the scene was substantial enough that prosecutors felt confident. Last year, Kohberger pleaded guilty. He said he wanted to avoid the death penalty. The court sentenced him to life without parole, four times over.

Then, in recent days, he contacted the New York Times. He said he was taking back his plea. He said it had rested on false promises and what he called blatant disinformation. He said he was innocent. He said he would accept the death penalty if prosecutors wanted to pursue it. He wanted a jury trial now, a chance to argue his case before twelve people who had not yet made up their minds.

The family of Kaylee Goncalves responded with a statement that carried the weight of people who had already paid the price for his actions and now had to pay it again. They called him a narcissist. They said he had made a choice—a deliberate, voluntary choice—to plead guilty rather than risk a jury trial. For two years, they said, he and his lawyers had reviewed the evidence against him. He never complained. He never claimed he was pressured or misled or that the discovery materials were flawed. He simply decided to accept the deal. Now, they said, he was rewriting that history. And the real tragedy, they added, was that he was getting attention while the four people he killed were being forgotten.

Raúl Labrador, Idaho's attorney general, issued a statement acknowledging the families' pain. He said his office would do whatever was necessary to ensure justice was carried out. But legal experts offered little hope that Kohberger's reversal would succeed. Sam Newton, an associate professor at the University of Idaho College of Law, explained the problem plainly: Kohberger had testified under oath at his plea hearing. He had told the judge he understood the deal. He had said he was acting voluntarily. He had said he was pleading guilty because he was guilty. Courts, Newton said, do not look kindly on people who try to walk back those kinds of statements without evidence that something serious went wrong behind the scenes. The bar for overturning a voluntary guilty plea is high. Kohberger would have to clear it.