I've investigated Bryan Kohberger since the night of the Idaho murders. He didn't have an accomplice. He WAS the accomplice: HOWARD BLUM

Bryan Kohberger has dramatically broken his years of silence and begun a campaign to reinvent the story of his life.

From his cell behind the two tall razor wire perimeter fences of the Idaho Maximum Security Institution, Kuna, just 18 miles south of downtown Boise, the self-confessed multiple murderer, has now proclaimed his innocence.

With a handwritten petition to the court, he alleged last week that he had been ‘convinced to falsely confess’ to the savage deaths of four University of Idaho college students and that his lawyers had withheld ‘exculpatory’ evidence from him. As a result, he wants a new trial.

He quickly reinforced this startling legal turn with a defiant statement to the New York Times claiming that, despite his previous admission to the November, 2022, killings, he was not guilty: 'My actual innocence is my truth.’

So could Kohberger, a 31-year-old former graduate student in criminal justice, now get a new trial?

In open court in July 2025, he tersely admitted his guilt to the pre-dawn stabbing deaths of Maddie Mogen, 21, Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin, both 20, in their off-campus home.

Further, when dutifully queried by the sentencing judge, he had specifically asserted that this admission was voluntary and that he had in fact committed each of the murders.

Yet despite Kohberger’s own unequivocal courtroom statements, there remains a small legal loophole. And it is one through which, with the assistance of Gregory Rauch, his new court-appointed attorney, Kohberger might possibly squeeze.

The Sixth Amendment guarantees that a signed guilty plea can be overruled when it can be demonstrated that a defense lawyer provided inadequate counsel or failed to follow a client’s instructions.

If that can be established, then Kohberger’s plea deal to serve four consecutive life sentences would be vacated. He would once again stand trial in a death penalty case.

And if convicted, he could under Idaho law, be sentenced to face the long guns of a firing squad.

It is a startling situation. And yet it is an event that I, as a reporter who has followed the case since the four bodies were discovered, believe was the almost inevitable result of strategic mistakes made by both the prosecution and the defense teams.

Their errors created the situation that now gives Kohberger the chance – albeit a very small chance, according to most legal experts – for a new trial.

Go back, then, to last summer. After more than two years of legal wrangling, the trial was at last set to begin. As I saw things, the prosecution, headed by long-time Latah County prosecutor Bill Thompson, had a strong case: a knife sheath with Kohberger’s DNA had been found at the scene of the crime.

This commanding position had been made even stronger by recent court decisions.

The judge had ruled that the defense’s flimsy contention that Kohberger had been stargazing without witnesses in a frigid wilderness park at 4am when the murders had occurred was ‘not an alibi.’

In addition, the defense’s attempts to assert that there was an alternate perpetrator were too vague and too unsubstantiated to be admissible.

Nevertheless, only days before jury selection was to begin, when Anne Taylor, the Legal Aid attorney who headed Kohberger’s defense team, approached Thompson with the possibility of a plea bargain, the prosecution swiftly cut a deal.

Kohberger would spend his life in prison, but he would avoid the death penalty.

But – and in my assessment this was the most perplexing part of this hastily negotiated settlement – Thompson, who was holding all the cards, did not demand an allocution. He did not require an on-the-record colloquy where Kohberger would have been required to detail precisely what had happened.

As a result, a startling number of important questions were left unanswered. A motive for the murders was never articulated. There was no evidence introduced of Kohberger’s having any connections to the victims, either of his stalking them, following them on social media, or his having previously been in the murder house.

There was no explanation of how a seemingly unsullied knife sheath with a minute speck of his DNA on the button snap had wound up in the bed of one of the victims, or, for that matter, what he had done with the murder knife.

No less perplexing, how he had managed to leave a murder house soaked with blood without leaving a discernible trail, was never explained. The failure to obtain on-the-record answers to these explosive questions (and others) has left a large vacuum that Kohberger and his new attorney can fill with their latest versions of the truth if the case returns to trial.

As for the defense, in the years leading up to the plea deal they adamantly insisted on Kohberger’s innocence and spent more than $5.5 million of Idaho taxpayers’ money to pursue what, in my opinion, were patently ill-conceived strategies that were doomed to fail.

They offered up, for example, an absurd alibi and then tried, with ludicrous last-minute desperation, to identify other possible perpetrators.

Yet they never pursued the one mitigating argument that, I have come to believe, was at their disposal. For the volumes of police forensic reports that were available during pre-trial discovery raised substantial questions about the prosecution’s firm contention that Kohberger was the lone assailant.

Consider, for example, the autopsy evidence. Once the judicial gag order was released last summer, it’s been apparent to me that another version of events was likely.

The four victims received a total of more than 100 separate stab wounds. At least two of the students fought back and were severely beaten. There was the distinct possibility that a second weapon other than a knife had been used. Which made the official timeline for the murders on two floors of a dark house – 13 minutes according to both the prosecution and law enforcement, a swift nine minutes by my own calculations – unrealistic.

In fact, as I interpreted events, the only way such extensive carnage could have conceivably happened in that time frame would have been if there were two assailants. That Bryan Kohberger was not alone in the house that fateful night.

But for the defense to have pursued such an inquiry would have required them to admit that their client was one of the murderers.

And that was an admission they refused to make – until, at the eleventh hour, they did. By then it was too late. A deal had been cut, and any investigation into their client having an accomplice had become irrelevant.

But it will not, I am convinced, stay that way for much longer.

After his desperate attempt to get a new trial inevitably fails, the day will come, I predict, when Kohberger, bored, lonely and forever malicious, will try a new, startling tack to get attention.

He will reveal that there is more to his story than has previously been shared.

It will be revealed not just that Kohberger had an accomplice. Rather, I believe, that he was the accomplice.

That Kohberger, the knowledgeable criminal justice student, willfully assisted someone who had a more understandable motive for the brutal murders. Someone who is still out there, still on the loose.

Howard Blum is the author of the New York Times bestseller When the Night Comes Falling: A Requiem for the Idaho Student Murders and the forthcoming Stranded. The Untold Story of the Mission That Changed Space Travel.