Bryan Kohberger Prosecutor Speaks

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what was it like to be the lead prosecutor in the brian koberger case a case that captured the world's attention with seemingly everyone looking over your shoulder and commenting on your every legal move and how did that plea deal come to be?

And why was there no stipulation that Koberger provide key answers?

Today, I'm speaking with Layton County, Idaho prosecutor Bill Thompson.

He has worked on this case from day one.

This is inside the Bryant Koberger case, the Idaho Student Murders.

I'm 48 Hours correspondent, Peter Van Sant.

It is great to be with you, Bill.

Thank you for joining us.

Can you tell us us what it was like for you to be at the center of this case that literally commanded attention all around the world well i didn't feel like i wanted to be at the center of the case it's really just a team effort this was a huge team effort I've been the prosecutor here for over 30 years now.

I've never seen this degree of coordination with agencies like the FBI and the Idaho State Police, as well as our Moscow Police Department.

You're the quarterback, kind kind of the team captain, and all of that social media pressure.

Did you feel that during the course of all of this?

Did you pay any attention to it, or did you try to brush that aside?

Actually, I don't watch social media.

We made our decisions based on what the law was and what the evidence was.

And frankly, we were pretty successful in insulating ourselves from what the swings of public opinion might be out there on the internet.

Bill, I have to tell you, during that sentencing hearing, I have never, as a reporter who's been in dozens and dozens of courtrooms, I've never seen such emotion as I witnessed during that hearing.

Both you and the judge were moved to tears.

What is it about this case that touches you so personally?

It's just so

it's so sad in every possible sense.

We've dealt with many homicide cases, unfortunately, during my time here as the prosecutor.

But this one just was so sad, such a loss of life for these young people, you know, four people killed in their home in the middle of the night.

It was just simply cruel and heartless.

And feeling for those families and feeling for the two surviving roommates.

My goodness.

I was sitting right next to one of them as she was giving her statement, and she asked that we block her view of the defendant.

That's why I was sitting kind of at a funny angle, but that was overwhelmingly powerful.

Pure honesty and emotion from this young woman and such strength.

And it was remarkable.

And for Dylan Mortensen, after what she had experienced through social media, she just said it all from the heart.

It brought that teared me.

It teared me up.

I mean, she was just a remarkable person.

What was it like for you to listen to her?

Oh, it was almost overwhelming.

But I saw her strength, and I knew that we needed to be strong with her and for her.

Bill, you have been in the house where these students were brutally murdered.

You saw the blood.

You've seen what was done to these students' bodies.

How do you describe the crimes that Brian Kohlberger committed?

These crimes, these murders were brutal.

We've seen plenty of homicides, and each one is different.

But this is one that you'll never be able to erase from your eyes and from your memory.

Were you actually inside that house while the victims were still present?

Yes, Ashley Jennings, my senior deputy, and I were both on scene on November 13th.

We were in the house.

We were working with the investigators and seeing firsthand what was going on, what the crime scene looked like.

It's part of our philosophy.

We work with our officers right from the very beginning, but it brings with it some challenges, and this certainly brought emotional, physically emotional challenges with it.

You've also been in the same room as Brian Kohlberger.

You've looked into this man's eyes, and you've watched his reactions during these victim impact statements.

What did you see?

I saw nothing in Brian Koberger while the impact statements were going on.

It's as though his eyes were empty.

He made eye contact with each of these people completely unmoved.

No reaction, no remorse, no tears.

What does that tell you about this man?

What is inside him, if anything?

I don't know how to answer that.

He's an enigma to me.

The evil that he committed is incomprehensible.

In many cases, when I'm in court, I'm engaging directly with the defendant.

I think I did it once at the sentencing, and that was just to point out that he wasn't going to leave prison until he was dead.

And that was it.

I don't care to ever interact with him again.

I'd be happy to never hear his voice again, never see him.

Bill, I want to ask you a question.

I know you've been asked this already a bunch of times, but as you well know, everyone, the families and friends of those students, the public at large, everyone is vexed by the question of why did he do this?

Do you have a theory?

I don't know why he did this.

Early on in the investigation, when we had folks from the FBI's behavioral analysis unit, their profilers, they were here helping with the investigation in the first few weeks.

As they were looking at the case, even just the little we knew then, they were telling us, in all likelihood, we would never find out or understand why this occurred.

And even if the murderer were to tell us the reasons, that in all likelihood, it wouldn't make sense to ordinary people like ourselves.

So we know that Koberger had done some homework.

He'd studied past crimes.

Is it within the realm of possibility that for Koberger, this was a thrill kill?

I don't think we can rule out anything.

I mean, he certainly is a criminal justice major.

He was studying criminal behavior.

He studied serial killers.

We know that.

The investigators recovered textbooks on those topics that were part of classes he was taking.

He studied how to manage a crime scene, and that was evidence that we were prepared to offer at trial to help explain why this particular crime scene was so clean of incriminating evidence, and his car was so clean of incriminating evidence.

There was a lot of thought and preparation put into that.

When I talk to people about this case, people know that there are ring doorbells and security cameras that pick up automobiles in an area, and everyone knows about DNA.

How would you describe it?

He meticulously seemed to prepare for this, and yet he made some mistakes.

Well, no plan is perfect, and

we don't know what may have changed his plans if it did inside the home

because we don't know who he intended to attack first.

We do believe that Xana encountered him while she was still awake.

She was up.

She'd received a door dash order.

That very likely could have put him into a panic.

And panicked people make some mistakes.

Or maybe it's just simply he's not as smart as he thought he was.

We'll never know for sure, and we really don't need to know for sure.

I mean, we look at where this investigation went.

They started out with one sample of DNA from a knife sheath that was from a single male unknown source and the car leaving the scene.

That's what the investigators had.

That's what Koberger left behind.

And from there, the team put the case together to where he was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

There's no question.

You know, in those weeks after the murder, when the public was getting more and more frustrated that they felt as though no progress was being made.

In fact, progress was being made.

It's just you can't reveal it, right?

Correct.

Yes.

Whenever investigations going on, the investigators aren't going to compromise what they know.

That's important to protect the quality of the investigation.

It was a bit satisfying when we finally were able to come public with the charges and the basis for the charges and to see the skeptics out there scratch their heads and say, oh, yeah,

these folks really did know what they were doing.

And I know you've talked about this quite a bit, but the fact that the defense team came to you seeking a deal, doesn't that mean that you had the leverage in this case, that essentially you were holding all of the cards that since Brian Kohlberger clearly now wanted to live?

So help me out on this, because even the President of the United States weighed in on this issue.

Why didn't you put a stipulation into this deal where Kohlberger would have to have honestly answered all questions about these murders to the satisfaction of detectives before this plea could be finalized?

Why didn't you do that?

Well, and, you know, Judge Hipler talked about this at the time of sentencing.

There is nothing that I believe that Mr.

Kohlberger could say that would shed the actual truth on what happened.

If he were to talk, he would only say things to benefit himself that would further victimize the families.

That's what we've seen repeatedly over the years,

particularly in major cases.

Under Idaho law, there's no way we could compel him to disclose.

And if we'd gone to trial, he would have never even acknowledged guilt.

We would have just moved into appeal time.

So it was our conclusion that straight-up guilty pleas as charged, waiver of appeal for closure, so we have accountability and closure with fixed life sentences was the best course.

Bill, based on my experience and

with my colleagues on 48 Hours, we cover murder cases for a living.

I had a story in which in a plea deal, the defendant was,

it was contingent on the defendant agreeing to show where he had disposed of a body.

And a colleague of mine had a case in another state where the plea deal stipulated that not only did they have to show where the body was, but give a narrative of how that person committed the crime.

And it answered all sorts of questions for the families.

You guys didn't decide not to do that.

And why not at least try?

I don't understand that.

Well, and I understand what you're saying.

And I certainly understand and hear from the families and members of the public who will always have the question why.

As we viewed this and looking at the circumstances of this case, it was our conclusion and ultimately my conclusion, I'll take responsibility.

I'm the elected prosecutor, so it stops with me.

But it was our team's decision that getting the guilty pleas, straight up factual guilty pleas, was going to be the best legal way to approach this.

I think that there were concerns that somebody like this particular defendant,

if he was trying to allocute in a specific factual fashion, he could actually undermine the basis for his plea, and the judge would not have a solid of a foundation to uphold the plea.

So we analyze this really from a pretty strict legal factual point of view.

It's not to say that we don't understand and appreciate folks' desires to know what really happened, but I have no faith at all that Mr.

Koberger would ever truthfully explain what happened or what he would say would make any sense and i think that would even further victimize our families but why not challenge him on that why not see if you might get some honesty from him yeah i i hear what you're saying peter and um we have considered that and we decided that our best course on this case with this defendant in idaho was to proceed as we did i'm not going to say the decision was perfect it certainly doesn't perfectly answer everybody's questions i i realize that but i also accept that,

as I said earlier from the beginning, we were advised by the profiling professionals that even if the person who committed these homicides tried to explain his reasoning and what occurred, that it wouldn't make sense to ordinary people.

And that would further victimize these poor families.

It was a judgment call.

I accept it.

It was a judgment call.

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Is it true that you are personally opposed to the death penalty?

You know, I don't know that I have strong feelings one way or the other.

We've had a handful of death penalty potential cases during the time here.

We have had one case where the death penalty was imposed and it was thrown out

after the Arizona versus Ring versus Arizona decision came down.

And that was a case involving Mr.

Dale Shackelford.

That That was a 10-week trial.

And we elected at that point, that many years after the fact, that it wasn't realistic to go back to trial just to seek the death penalty.

So, you know, we have pursued the death penalty where we think it's appropriate.

In the cases we've had to try and death penalty

eligible, we've had it there.

We've decided each case on its merits.

And I really don't have a personal moral feeling one way or another.

The law of the state of Idaho is the death penalty is a sentencing option for certain crimes.

And this crime would certainly fit the elements of a death penalty case if we'd gone to trial.

How difficult was it for you to take the death penalty off the table in this case?

I don't know how to characterize it as being difficult.

Making the decision was difficult because it was a major decision.

And it was changing course from where we'd been working for so many months preparing to go to trial.

So we took a step back and looked, we being the attorney team, the prosecutor attorney team, and just kind of analyzed each aspect of this case.

And we came to the conclusion that if the defendant was prepared to plead guilty straight up, factually admit the crimes

and agree to waive appeals and we get fixed life sentences, that that was an appropriate resolution.

I've always thought that the death penalty in various states is basically reserved for those

spectacularly heinous crimes like this one, where someone like Hoberger, here he butchers these four kids, shows no remorse.

Wasn't it your responsibility to

take this case as far as you could so that he gets the maximum penalty that is in Idaho law?

What do you say to that?

I would say that it's my responsibility as a prosecutor to do justice.

Prosecutors who blindly go into court on an agenda, I think, are doing a disservice to their profession and the public.

This case and his actions certainly deserve the death penalty if we had had to go to trial.

No question about it.

For Koberger, in his mind, wasn't this plea deal a victory?

He gets to live.

You know, I can't speak to what's going on in his mind.

I don't see it as as being a victory where he's going to prison.

The only way he's going to leave is when he's dead.

I've been in many a maximum security prison, and for what it's worth, they are places of extreme punishment.

I'll put it that way.

I can say a lot more than that.

But when you park sometimes in the parking lot outside a maximum security prison and you hear people shouting inside from the parking lot, you know there's a hellscape behind those walls.

You're right.

And there's something to be said for a person being reminded every day of the punishment for what they've done.

Give us a sense of what your closing statement would have been if you had an opportunity to sum it all up.

Peter, actually, the best way to look at that is go back to what we did in court on July 2nd in front of Judge Hipler, where we gave the summary of the evidence in this case.

And we presented it.

I presented it

in a manner very similar to what we have argued, would have argued to the jury, would have presented in opening statements and argued in closing arguments.

The length of the evidence here, that once the investigators identified Mr.

Koberger, they were able to bring into play not only the DNA match, which was significant in and of itself.

It's kind of tough to explain that away when your DNA is on the sheaf of the murder weapon next to the body of one of the victims.

As you know, Bill, jurors want that CSI moment, they call it.

And you had one in this case.

You had a CSI moment that was irrefutable.

Well, and as the story came out, it really was a multiple CSI moment because we didn't file charges,

even though we had a lot of circumstantial evidence until they did the trash poll in Pennsylvania.

And we got the paternal DNA match from a Q-tip in that trash poll that said the source of that DNA on the Q-tip is the father of person whose DNA was on the knife sheath.

That was the CSI moment to start for us.

That's what really triggered us being able to get the arrest warrant in place, the search warrants in Pennsylvania, get him arrested, get a direct DNA sample from him, and it matched.

That was overwhelmingly powerful.

When do you believe the Koberger family realized that their son was the murderer in this case?

I don't know for sure.

When the investigators spoke with them after his arrest,

there was nothing the investigators heard or saw to suggest that the family knew that Mr.

Coburg was responsible for this.

The information we have, and the defense maintained his

factual innocence all the way up to the time of the plea, would suggest to us that he never acknowledged guilt to his family,

quite possibly not until he stood up in court on July 2nd and entered his guilty pleas.

And as his parents were there at that time, that may very well have been the first time they actually heard it.

Police reports reveal that Kaylee Gonzalves had told roommates that she saw a creepy-looking man while she was walking her dog, and that roommates returned to find that the front door had been damaged.

Do you believe that Koberger was possibly stalking the house, stalking them?

Well, we think that Koberger was certainly stalking that neighborhood um and we're aware of those incidents where where the roommates uh at the house would sense perhaps perhaps that somebody was up on the bank behind the house when the dog went out or that somebody was being followed um the cell phone experts were not able to correlate um Mr.

Koberger's phone being in the area at the time of those occurrences,

but they were able to show that he was in that area some 20 plus times,

other times at night, between like 10 and early morning hours, 10 in the evening, when there would be no legitimate reason for him to be over here to shop here, being Moscow, being in Moscow to shop, which was his routine practice.

So we certainly believe that those trips

involved Mr.

Koberger

looking and surveilling or stalking, whatever the case may be.

Wanting to see what what their living patterns were when they came and went from the house, getting familiar with that neighborhood, things like that.

Certainly.

And certainly, there may have been other potential victims that he was looking at.

The Gonzalves family told me in an interview some months ago that they thought he must have been in that house prior to the murders, because on the night of the murder, it's alleged that he had entered that house and gone right up to

Madison Mogan's room.

Do you think that's a possibility?

It's possible.

The investigators never undercovered any evidence that would definitively prove that, but I think that's a legitimate point.

The layout of the house is unique.

It's a little bit confusing.

Admittedly, if he was parked up behind the house on that bank, which we believe is where he parked, he would be able to see into the house at night and he would be able to see whose rooms were where.

Whether he was actually in the house at some point before November 13th, we don't know for sure.

We can't exclude that.

Bill, for you personally, what questions do you still have about this case?

Well, I don't have any question about whether we have convicted the killer.

I think if there are questions, there are more details that really in the big picture don't have any significance.

Our feeling is that we have accomplished a lot to obtain straight up guilty pleas to all five charges in the indictment

and have him spend the rest of his life, not leave prison until he's dead, with no appeals.

So we have that finality for the families and for our community.

And so each night now, Bill, as you put your head on that pillow to go to sleep, are you still preoccupied with this case?

Is your heart still broken?

Do you still have moments of emotion looking back at this tragedy for the state of Idaho, for the country?

There is never a day that goes by that I don't remember this and remember what happened to these poor young people and what happened to their families and their friends and the community.

And I don't know that that ever is going to end.

For the past over two and a half years, I have woken up every night around two o'clock in the morning and will just sit there with this spinning in my head.

I keep a pad of paper and a pen right beside the bed so I can sit up and write down what's going through my mind about what we need to do with the case before I fall back asleep and forget it.

That's been our life for well over two and a half years.

And I think gradually that that will change for us.

But what has happened happened in our community with these murders

is forever.

And one last message to Brian Koberger: if he happens to be listening to this:

Goodbye and good riddance.

Thank you, Bill Thompson.

You're welcome.

Thank you for the time.

And thanks to all of you for listening.

I'm Peter Van Sant.