Bryan Kohberger’s unlikely attempt to undo his guilty plea in the murders of four University of Idaho students is centered in part on “clumps of unknown hair” allegedly found in the hands of one victim.
Legal experts, however, say the effort appears to be a desperate reach after taxpayers covered roughly $5.5 million for his defense.
Kohberger disclosed Monday that he is trying to withdraw his stunning confession from last year.
In a handwritten affidavit first reported by The New York Times, he claimed he had been “convinced to falsely confess … by coercion, disinformation, false promises, and withholding exculpatory discovery.”
Among the issues he cited were “clumps of unknown hair found in Ethan Chapin’s hands,” along with what he described as his legal team’s failure to pursue the matter further.
Former FBI agent Chris Whitcomb, who had no role in the investigation, also pointed to the hairs found in the 20-year-old victim’s hand in his book on the Kohberger case, describing them as one of several troubling questions surrounding the evidence in the Moscow, Idaho, killings.
Whitcomb told The Post’s Miranda Devine that the hair did not appear to be consistent with Kohberger’s, saying it was “about six inches in length” and “dark blonde, light brown with reddish tint.”
“Bryan Kohberger’s hair doesn’t fit any of those characteristics,” Whitcomb said.
More hair was found in blood on the frame of the bed left behind from Chapin’s hand, Whitcomb said. And the hair was never DNA tested, Whitcomb claimed.
The implication from Kohberger’s claim is that he believes the hairs could belong to the “real killer.”
Other observers, however, have suggested that there are many more likely explanations for the hair — for example that it could be from one of the other victims, and it was displaced in the violence of the killings.
The issue of the hair may be one of the only shots that Kohberger has to claim his constitutional rights were violated because his lawyers did not have it tested for DNA — but it’s still a long shot, legal experts said.
“He needs to allege enough to try and prove that there’s some merit to this claim. And so, my guess is that that’s him grasping at straws and trying to find something, some sort of way of getting just enough factual basis in this to try and get an attorney involved,” said Idaho based lawyer Ryan Black.
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Black explained that the judge will likely hold a hearing to determine if Kohberger should be granted representation by a lawyer to fight his new request.
If granted, both sides would need to file legal arguments and potentially argue the issue in court as well.
But ultimately Kohberger’s request has “almost zero” chance of succeeding, Black said.
Kohberger’s prior defense lawyer, Anne Taylor, is one of a select group of Idaho lawyers who has enough experience to be qualified to work on death penalty cases.
“I saw the defense team that worked on this case. I’ve worked with a lot of those attorneys before. Candidly, if there were exculpatory evidence in this case, I would expect that that would have come to light some time ago,” Black said.
“When you have a defense team like he did here, they were on top of things. They were very, very efficient. They were filing a lot of motions. They did a lot of really good work on his case,” he added.
Two other legal experts agreed that Kohberger’s request to take back his guilty admission isn’t likely to pan out for him.
“I think this petition will lose, it will not be granted,” former prosecutor Neama Rahmani told The Post.
Still, Kohberger raising the issue of the hairs found in Chapin’s hand, is “the only possible, narrow path there would be for him to actually withdraw his guilty plea.”
Kohberger either has to convince a judge his lawyers did a bad job or that favorable evidence was held back by the prosecution and that those things caused him to make a guilty plea he wouldn’t have otherwise made, New York Law School Professor Anna Cominsky explained.
As for the issue of the hair, “we don’t know that there’s any merit to anything that he’s saying,” Cominsky said.
“Part of the whole process will be for a judge to make a determination about whether there is any merit to any of the allegations he’s making and then, ultimately, whether or not that would have affected him pleading guilty,” she said.
Kohberger, a former criminology PhD student, allegedly stabbed Madison Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin as they were sleeping in their off-campus house in Moscow on Nov. 13, 2022.
Kohberger, who was facing the potential of death by firing squad if convicted at trial, took a surprise plea deal five weeks before the high-profile trial had been slated to start. Prosecutors agreed to take the death penalty off the table in exchange for Kohberger copping to the murders.
