Bryan Kohberger is accusing his former legal team of ineffective assistance, alleging in new court filings that his attorneys withheld exculpatory evidence and misled him with “elaborate lies” about death row before he entered his guilty plea.
Kohberger, who recently signaled plans to withdraw his 2025 guilty plea, claims his lawyer failed to disclose key evidence before he admitted to killing four University of Idaho students. In a petition for post-conviction release obtained by Oxygen, he specifically alleged that victim Ethan Chapin was found clutching hair from an unknown source.
The filing also states that his counsel allegedly told him “that petitioner’s plea need not be truthful, despite petitioner’s vehement denial of actual guilt.” Kohberger further claimed that he and his family were given “elaborate lies” about what life on death row would be like.
In an accompanying affidavit, Kohberger argued that those alleged actions left him “convinced to falsely confess to capital murder, and felony burglary, by coercion, disinformation [and] false promises.”
He also claimed he was “advised to lie” about his involvement in the killings and accept the plea deal because, according to what he says he was told, the possibility of being sent to death row was “imminent.”
Kohberger described one alleged conversation in which his attorney told him and his family an “elaborate, fabricated story of counsel’s horrific experience touring an actual ‘8×8’ death row cell.”
In the court documents, Kohberger called that account a “gross misrepresentation” of Idaho’s death row conditions and argued it played a role in his decision to accept a plea agreement that removed the death penalty from consideration.
He wrote that the alleged advice left him “convinced that actual guilt was not an important factor in considering plea acceptance.”
Oxygen reached to Kohberger’s trial attorney Anne Tyler for a response to the allegations, but did not receive an immediate reply.
Kohberger made his first public comments on the case when he told The New York Times in a written statement July 26 that he was innocent of the crimes.
“My actual innocence is my truth,” he wrote, “and the plea, hinged on by false promises and blatant disinformation, MUST be withdrawn.”
He also filed a petition for post-conviction release in which he argued that he had not “knowingly or voluntarily” entered into the plea because it was “induced by unkept promises” and “threats asserted by [his] legal counsel.”
Oxygen reached to Latah County Prosecuting Attorney Bill Thompson about Kohberger’s recent innocence claims but has not received a response.
Victim Kaylee Goncalves’ father Steve Goncalves said he was “not surprised” by Kohberger’s proclamation of innocence, calling him a “mosquito you can’t seem to swat.”
“Regardless of how this turns out, our family is 100 percent ready. An actual trial this time? Let’s go,” he told People. “We are confident he will get the death penalty that he escaped by pleading guilty the first time around.”
