How a DNA technique to pin Bryan Kohberger as Idaho murder suspect could shape case law
What if Bryan Kohberger, the man charged with the University of Idaho student stabbings, helped lead police right to him?
His own attorneys may raise the question — including at trial — in their efforts to defend him. Kohberger is accused of killing four U of I students in November 2022 in a case that continues to collect national intrigue.
By the end, it could create new case law for criminal investigations across the U.S., legal scholars told the Idaho Statesman.
Anne Taylor, Kohberger’s lead public defender, said she has repeatedly pored over law enforcement’s evidence summary to justify his arrest and still wants to know what led police to her client as the suspect.
“The clear picture that I’m concerned about is the state’s pathway of how Bryan Kohberger comes to their attention and is identified,” Taylor told the court at a hearing last month. “Over a year into this case and … we’re not sure. I know different pieces, but I don’t know where they fit together.”
Depending on the circumstances that come to light, it could be grounds for a constitutional rights challenge over the methods police used to find and charge Kohberger, his defense attorneys have said.
In a probable cause affidavit, police described using traditional investigative techniques to arrive at Kohberger as the suspected killer and close an almost seven-week manhunt that confoundingly ended on the other side of the country in eastern Pennsylvania. DNA evidence also factored for police to allege they had their suspect, but only after the other elements established through surveillance footage of the suspect’s car and Kohberger’s cellphone location data fell into place, according to the affidavit.
But six months after Kohberger’s December 2022 arrest, state prosecutors acknowledged for the first time that an advanced DNA technique known as investigative genetic genealogy, or IGG, initially led investigators to Kohberger. The process involves submitting DNA located at a crime scene to public genealogy websites to build a family tree related to possible suspects and narrow an investigation. Police made no mention of the FBI’s use of IGG in the affidavit.
In the court filing that revealed the FBI’s use of IGG, Latah County Prosecutor Bill Thompson argued that the state was not required to disclose the DNA technique. Prosecutors did not intend to introduce it at trial, he said, and it was irrelevant to Kohberger’s defense. Instead, they planned to present a comparison of DNA evidence police obtained from a swab of Kohberger’s cheek during his arrest against the knife sheath DNA, which showed a “statistical match,” Thompson said.
“The IGG process pointed law enforcement toward (Kohberger), but it did not provide law enforcement with substantive evidence of guilt,” Thompson wrote in the court filing. “The IGG information is not material to the preparation of the defense.”
For eight months, the two sides fought over the release of the IGG records to the defense through the legal process known as discovery. Judge John Judge of the 2nd Judicial District in Latah County, who is overseeing the Kohberger case, last month granted the defense at least some of the FBI’s records from the IGG process. What was turned over, and what may have been withheld, is unclear to the public because the documents were sealed.
The next battle between the attorneys on each side of the Kohberger case could be over whether the defense will be allowed to present IGG evidence to the jury at trial, Gurney told the Statesman by phone. IGG records have been introduced at trial a couple of times before, he said, but only when prosecutors chose to do so when they felt it beneficial to their case.
For instance, prosecutors have not publicly disclosed which genealogy websites police used to land on Kohberger — only that the FBI submitted the crime scene DNA to “one or more” of the publicly available services. Law enforcement primarily works with two lesser-known websites called GEDMatch and FamilyTreeDNA, but has at least in some past instances found ways to access DNA profiles on a more widely used platform with more users, Gurney and Roy said, and other IGG experts testified at an August hearing for Kohberger’s defense.
If the IGG records now in the defense’s possession divulge that FBI investigators conducted themselves in an improper way or violated expectations of privacy to get to Kohberger, it may help create legal openings for creating doubt about the evidence, they added.
“It’s a good tool, but the question is, does it violate civil rights?” said Greg Hampikian, a biology professor at Boise State University who heads the Idaho Innocence Project. “Some say that it’s just another technique, but this technique involves something more intimate than a body cavity search. It’s an every single cell in your body search.”
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Kohberger used a knife.
