But in a matter of minutes overnight, in a packed courtroom roughly 300 miles (480km) from the horrific scene of the crime, everything changed.

“Are you pleading guilty because you are guilty?” the judge asked.

How the murders were carried out

Even with the proposed plea deal, “there’s no guarantee” Kohberger would disclose details of the crime, said Goncalves’ father, Steve Goncalves, speaking to CNN on Tuesday.

“We want something concrete like his knife, where he disposed of it, his kill kit, his suit, anything like that,” he expressed. “If he shared those types of details, people would realize, ‘We were wrong. He did it, and let’s leave the matter behind and focus on another case.'”

An “edged weapon such as a knife” was used in the killings, Moscow Police said, but only a knife sheath was found at the crime scene, on the bed next to Mogen’s body. Kohberger had purchased a military-style knife, a sheath and a knife sharpener on Amazon in the months before the killings, prosecution filings show.

A selfie Kohberger is believed to have taken on the morning of November 13, 2022 – only hours after the murders – is also among case documents. In it, he stands in front of a shower, dressed in a white shirt, smiling and giving a thumbs-up.

Five days after the students’ deaths, Kohberger got a new licence plate for his white Hyundai Elantra, court documents reveal. An officer at Washington State University, where Kohberger was a PhD student at the time of the killings, found a 2015 white Hyundai Elantra registered to Kohberger in an apartment complex parking lot, and investigators in the case of the slain students zeroed in on Kohberger because his driver’s licence information and photo were consistent with a surviving roommate’s description.

Trash, recovered from the Kohberger family residence by Pennsylvania law enforcement and sent to the Idaho State Lab for DNA testing, was used to help investigators narrow down Kohberger as the suspect in the Idaho student killings in December 2022, court documents show.

Soon after that, “the Idaho State Lab reported that a DNA profile obtained from the trash” matched a tan leather knife sheath found “laying on the bed” of one of the victims, according to the documents.

Kohberger was arrested for the killings on December 30, 2022, in his home state of Pennsylvania, authorities said.