Idaho student murders suspect accepts plea deal to avoid death penalty

6 hours ago 4

By Mike Baker and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs

July 1, 2025 — 3.30pm

Bryan Kohberger, the man charged in the brutal stabbing deaths of four University of Idaho students, has reached a plea deal to avoid the death penalty, according to a lawyer for the family of one of the victims.

Kohberger, 30, had been set to go on trial for the killings in August, nearly three years after the killings, which occurred at a residence near the university in Moscow, Idaho.

Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle, Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves were killed in their beds in their university share house, allegedly by Bryan Kohberger.

The lawyer, Shanon Gray, who represents the family of one of the victims, Kaylee Goncalves, said they had been notified that a plea agreement had been reached to take the death penalty off the table.

The Goncalves family wrote in a message on Facebook that they were “beyond furious at the State of Idaho”.

“They have failed us,” the family wrote. “Please give us some time. This was very unexpected.”

The Goncalves family had been pressing for the state to pursue the death penalty and had pushed to expand Idaho’s capital punishment rules to allow executions by firing squad.

Prosecutors did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment, nor did lawyers for Kohberger.

Kohberger was a criminology doctoral student at Washington State University, about a 20-minute drive from the crime scene. He grew up in Pennsylvania and studied psychology in college. He was arrested in December 2022 at his parents’ home in the Pocono Mountains area of Pennsylvania, about six weeks after the killings.

Police remove evidence from the crime scene in Moscow, Idaho.

His defence team tried unsuccessfully for months to undermine key pieces of evidence that investigators collected against him.

Prosecutors have said that Kohberger’s DNA was found on a knife sheath recovered at the crime scene, and that records showed he had purchased a knife of a kind matching the sheath in the months before the killings. Video footage showed a car similar to his circling the neighbourhood around the time of the deaths.

But investigators have yet to suggest a motive or offer any details on how the victims were chosen.

Delay sought

Kohberger’s lawyers filed a flurry of motions in recent months, including one trying to bar prosecutors from seeking the death penalty – in part, they said because Kohberger had been diagnosed with autism.

Madison Mogen (top), and her friends (lower left to right) Kaylee Goncalves, Ethan Chapin and Xana Kernodle were brutally killed in the early hours of November 13, 2022.

They unsuccessfully sought a delay in the trial, arguing that their team had not had enough time to comb through the vast amount of evidence in the case. But the judge ordered jury selection to commence on August 4.

Just hours before news of the plea deal on Monday (US Pacific time), one of Kohberger’s lawyers was in court in Pennsylvania, where she successfully argued that two witnesses who knew Kohberger as a teenager should be forced to testify at trial even though they did not want to.

Kohberger has been in jail since his arrest. His lawyers have given few hints about what defence they planned to offer, but have said that he was “out driving” on the night of the killings.

In the years before the killings, Kohberger indicated that he was interested in studying criminals. In a message to a friend in 2018, he wrote that he would like a job “dealing with high-profile offenders”.

Kohberger appears in court for his arraignment hearing in 2023.

A few months before the killings, he posted on Reddit asking people who had spent time in prison to describe their “thoughts, emotions and actions from the beginning to end of the crime commission process”.

Investigators have said that the killings happened sometime around 4am on November 13, 2022.

The victims – Goncalves, 21; Madison Mogen, 21; Xana Kernodle, 20; and Ethan Chapin, 20 – had spent a typical Saturday night out near the university campus and returned to the house in the early hours of Sunday.

A roommate who survived the attack said she had heard what sounded like crying coming from the room of one of the women. She later told the police that she had opened her door and seen a man with bushy eyebrows in black clothes and a mask. The man left the house, and the roommate began texting with another surviving roommate downstairs before taking refuge in her room.

But neither she nor anyone else called the police until more than seven hours later, when a friend came to the house and discovered the body of one of the victims.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.