On Wednesday, Bryan Christopher Kohberger, a man charged with stabbing four University of Idaho students to death in 2022, appeared in an Idaho courtroom and pleaded guilty to four counts of first-degree murder and a burglary charge. Kohberger’s guilty plea, which comes days after his lawyer reached a deal with prosecutors, will allow him to skirt the death penalty. He is now expected to serve four consecutive life sentences for the murders and ten years for the burglary.
Kohberger, whose case was widely expected to go to trial in August, is accused of stabbing the students to death at their home near campus in the middle of the night. At the time, he was a 28-year-old Ph.D. student at a nearby university. The murders rattled the small town of Moscow, Idaho, and it took investigators more than six weeks to identify and arrest Kohberger; they have yet to offer any motive or establish any preexisting connection between the suspect and his victims. When asked by the judge on Wednesday if he was pleading guilty because he was guilty, Kohberger replied “yes,” before confessing to each murder. The BBC reports that he did not appear to show emotion during his confession, nor when some people sitting in the courtroom cried as the victims names were read aloud.
Kohberger had struggled with suicidal thoughts, heroin use, and an inability to feel remorse for his actions, according to a New York Times investigation published in 2023. He had applied for an internship at the Pullman, Washington, police department in the fall of 2022 and told a friend he was interested in “capturing violent criminals.”
Ahead of the trial, prosecutors said records show Kohberger had purchased a knife matching the sheath found at the crime scene, which also bore his DNA. His defense team has unsuccessfully tried to undermine key evidence against its client.
According to a letter prosecutors sent to the victims’ families, Kohberger’s team asked for a plea offer in the last week of June, which would have him plead guilty to all charges and face life in prison— but not the death penalty, which prosecutors had reportedly planned to pursue. The surprise development elicited mixed reactions from the victim’s families. The families of Ethan Chapin and Madison Mogen voiced their support for the deal. “We turn from tragedy and mourning … to the light of the future. We have closure,” a lawyer for Mogen’s mother and stepfather read on their behalf outside the courtroom on Wednesday.
Other families were upset. “After more than two years, this is how it concludes, with a secretive deal and a hurried effort to close the case without any input from the victims’ families on the plea’s details,” said the family of Kaylee Goncalves, one of the victims, in a statement to media outlets earlier this week. “Adding insult to injury, they’re rushing the plea, giving families just one day to coordinate and appear at the courthouse for a plea on July 2.”
On social media, Kaylee’s sister called the plea deal “shocking and cruel,” adding that “the system has failed these four innocent victims and their families.” “This is the opposite of our will,” their father, Steve Goncalves, told NewsNation. “We had an outsider come to our community, kill our kids in their sleep while they’re getting a college education, doing everything that they should do, and we don’t have the courage to hold him accountable.” A post on the family’s Facebook page says that after telling prosecutors a plea deal was a “HARD NO,” they were forced to accept that “all of our efforts did not matter.”
In their letter, prosecutors tried to reassure the families of Chapin, Mogen, Goncalves, and Xana Kernodle that they would still get justice. “This agreement ensures that the defendant will be convicted, will spend the rest of his life in prison, and will not be able to put you and other families through the uncertainty of decades of post-conviction appeals,” they wrote. But the Goncalves family publicly disagreed. “How can you say it’s just when you haven’t even talked to us to see what justice looks like for us?” Steve Goncalves told NBC News. Speaking to reporters outside the courtroom on Wednesday, he said he felt “pretty let down” and that the state “made a deal with the devil.”
Kohberger is expected to be formally sentenced on July 23.
This post has been updated.