Bryan Kohberger’s Lawyers Seek to Have Evidence Against Him Thrown Out

To be blunt, I think Bryan Kohberger is guilty as hell. I think that because the evidence that he murdered four college students in Idaho is pretty overwhelming. His DNA was found at the scene on the sheath of a knife (it was found under one of the bodies). A man with a trim build and bushy eyebrows, like Kohberger’s, was seen exiting the house by one of the survivors the night of the murders. A footprint was found in the house which seems to match with shoes found belonging to Kohberger. His car was identified as being in the area. His cell phone shows he left home late that night and returned home early that morning with the exception of 2 hours when the phone was turned off, right at the time the murders were happening. Phone data also showed he had been near the house a dozen times prior to the murders, apparently stalking one or more of the victims. And he has not been able to come up with an alibi, i.e. he claims he was awake and out driving in the middle of the night, but no one can place him somewhere in particular (other than the murder scene) at the time of the murders.

So what do you do when there is this much evidence stacked up against you? You try to have it thrown out of court. And that’s exactly what Kohberger’s attorneys are doing this week. They are objecting to the genetic techniques used to identify him.

…investigators tied Kohberger to the crime scene using the Investigative Genetic Genealogy method or “IGG.” IGG is a way of mapping DNA genealogy that identifies certain protein sequences that are unique to a person’s DNA profile. It is often used for individuals to locate family members through their DNA.

So after finding the DNA on the knife sheath it was compared to DNA uploaded to online DNA services and that directed police to Kohberger. He hadn’t uploaded his DNA but apparently some relatives had. They then took DNA from the trash at his family home and got a near match, specifically to his father. Here’s how the police affidavit described how Kohberger was identified:

On December 27, 2022, Pennsylvania Agents recovered the trash from the Kohberger family residence located in Albrightsville, PA. That evidence was sent to the Idaho State Lab for testing. On December 28,2022, the Idaho State Lab reported that a DNA profile obtained from the trash and the DNA profile obtained from the sheath, identified a male as not being excluded as the biological father of Suspect Profile. At least 99.9998% of the male population would be expected to be excluded from the possibility of being the suspect’s biological father.

Kohberger’s attorneys are claiming that the use of IGG violated his constitutional rights. And since IGG led to all of the warrants directed at Kohberger, they want all of the evidence found via those warrants thrown out. Not just the DNA evidence but the phone evidence, etc.

Kohberger’s attorneys say law enforcement violated his constitutional rights when they used a process called Investigative Genetic Genealogy, or IGG, to identify possible suspects.

“There would be no investigation into him without that original constitutional violation,” attorneys Jay Weston Logsdon and Ann Taylor wrote in a court filing. They later continued, “Without IGG, there is no case, no request for his phone records, surveillance of his parents’ home, no DNA taken from the garbage out front. Because the IGG analysis is the origin of this matter, everything in the affidavit should be excised.”

The IGG process often starts when DNA found at the scene of a crime doesn’t yield any results through standard law enforcement databases. When that happens, investigators may look at all the variations, or single nucleotide polymorphisms, that are in the DNA sample. Those SNPs, or “snips,” are then uploaded to a genealogy database like GEDmatch or FamilyTreeDNA to look for possible relatives of the person whose DNA was found at the scene…

The defense team also says that once Kohberger was identified as a possible suspect, law enforcement officers either purposely or recklessly lied or omitted crucial information when they asked the court to issue search warrants for his apartment, his parents’ house, his car, his cellphone and even for his own DNA. They want all of that evidence kept out of the trial as well.

This isn’t the only time IGG has been used to identify a murder suspect. The most famous case is the Golden State Killer who was identified after DNA from a 1980 crime was uploaded to a DNA site and matched with some relatives of the killer. That was used to build family trees and that led investigators to narrow the search to one man. And just like in the Kohberger case, once they had a suspect they collected his trash and found an exact match that confirmed he was the killer. 

Hearings will be held today and, if necessary, tomorrow on the defense’s requests to toss all of the evidence. I don’t think this is going to work but I guess they have to try given that their client is facing the death penalty for four premeditated murders backed by a mountain of evidence.

Here’s a video describing in detail how the IGG process was used in the Golden State Killer case.