BOISE, Idaho — After the latest wave of new details and court rulings in the University of Idaho student homicides case, defendant Bryan Kohberger is set to be in court Thursday in Boise for his last scheduled appearance before this summer’s highly anticipated murder trial.

Among the items expected to be taken up at the hearing is the state’s effort to admit a variety of records that police obtained, including through dozens of search warrants during the expansive, multistate investigation. Some of those records for Kohberger and the four victims entail purchase histories and phone logs, a term paper Kohberger wrote concerning crime scenes, and surveillance camera footage from near the crime scene in Moscow and businesses around Pullman, Washington, where Kohberger lived.

In addition, some discussion at the final pretrial hearing may revolve around the defense’s and prosecution’s specific pieces of evidence intended for trial. A joint log of the case’s final proposed exhibits, including those where either side objects, is due to the court no later than Wednesday.

“This is a standard hearing where it’s really just sorting out the last issues before trial,” Nate Poppino, spokesperson for the state courts, told the Idaho Statesman.

Final lists of expert rebuttal witnesses for the sentencing phase of the case, should Kohberger be found guilty, also remain outstanding. Fourth District Judge Steven Hippler, who presides over the case, granted a deadline extension of three weeks to prosecutors, plus time to respond for the defense. The decision is tied to prosecutors conducting an independent mental health examination that they’re allowed on Kohberger by the end of this week.

Possibly left for the hearing as well are the language and parameters to be included in questionnaires that will be sent to prospective jurors around Ada County, and the instructions that will be issued to the eventual group of 12 and alternates who are chosen to make up the jury. So far, Hippler has kept all of the jury questionnaire and instruction filings under seal, outside of the public’s view.

The jury selection process is scheduled to begin in late July, with trial slated to start by the second week in August. Hippler has scheduled Kohberger’s trial to extend into November if sentencing is required.

Kohberger, 30, is accused of fatally stabbing the four U of I undergraduates in November 2022 at an off-campus home in Moscow. At the time, he was a doctoral student in the criminal justice and criminology department at Washington State University in nearby Pullman.

The victims were seniors Madison Mogen, 21, of Coeur d’Alene, and Kaylee Goncalves, 21, of Rathdrum; junior Xana Kernodle, 20, of Post Falls; and freshman Ethan Chapin, 20, of Mount Vernon, Washington. The three women lived at the home on King Road with two female roommates who went physically unharmed in the attack, while Chapin was Kernodle’s boyfriend and stayed over for the night.

A judge entered a not guilty plea on Kohberger’s behalf to four counts of first-degree murder and a count of felony burglary in May 2023. Led by attorney Anne Taylor, Kohberger’s defense for more than two years has maintained his innocence, and also worked to weaken the prosecution’s case and get the death penalty taken off the table.

Called in to assist local and state police, the FBI used an advanced DNA technique known as investigative genetic genealogy, or IGG, to initially land on Kohberger as the murder suspect. Detectives found a leather sheath for a Ka-Bar brand fixed-blade knife next to the body of one of the victims, and on it discovered a single strain of male DNA, which was later matched directly to Kohberger after his arrest in late December 2022, prosecutors disclosed in court filings.

However, the use of IGG in the case— which Kohberger’s defense argued for months violated his constitutional rights— may not be referenced at trial, Hippler ruled in February. Instead, he ordered prosecutors and the defense settle on telling jurors during trial that a tip was handed to investigators, who then established probable cause for Kohberger’s arrest through traditional police work. The proposed language for that explanation was jointly filed Tuesday under seal.

Defense: ‘Two people, two weapons’

Since last month’s hearing in the high-profile case, Hippler has made several consequential evidence rulings, and two others over whether to drop the death penalty as a sentencing option. His decisions spanned a litany of issues, including at what point Kohberger’s immediate family — some of whom are expected to be called by prosecutors to testify — may attend the trial, to which portions of a 911 call may be played for jurors, to whether one of the surviving roommates may testify she saw an intruder with “bushy eyebrows” in the home.

Earlier orders at the hearing included those that allowed prosecutors to use a 3D model as a reference at trial for demonstration purposes only and also show jurors unreleased police body-camera footage of Kohberger in his white Hyundai Elantra during a traffic stop in the months before the homicides. Over objections from the defense, Hippler also granted the prosecution’s request to use data from Kohberger’s Amazon account to reveal he previously bought a Ka-Bar knife and leather sheath.

A slew of other previously unknown details were disclosed at April’s all-day hearing.

The four homicides occurred within a 13-minute window, from 4:07-4:20 a.m., according to prosecutors. That theory of the case narrowed the timeline from the original 25-minute span from 4-4:25 a.m. detailed by Moscow police in the affidavit for Kohberger’s arrest.

Kohberger’s defense aims to argue at trial that alternative perpetrators, and not Kohberger, are responsible for the crime. The defense team is still investigating a tip to police that it recently came across about a different potential suspect, Taylor said.

“We have produced an expert that believes that it’s likely that there were two people, two weapons,” she told the court.

Hippler ordered the defense to present an “offer of proof” of a specific alternative perpetrator by Wednesday if that is a legal argument they intend to make at trial.

The judge also ruled to allow prosecutors to call Boise-based toxicologist Gary Dawson, a doctor of pharmacology, as an expert witness to testify to the degree of alcohol intoxication of the victims, particularly Mogen, according to court records. Mogen had no defensive wounds from the knife attack, Deputy Attorney General Jeff Nye announced at the hearing, which he said helps explain why DNA found under her fingernail was not believed to be from Kohberger.

Latah County Coroner Cathy Mabbutt, another of the prosecution’s disclosed expert witnesses, said early in the investigation that some of the victims had defensive wounds. But which ones did or did not has not previously been released.

Following Kohberger’s arrest, investigators amassed as much as 100 hours of video interviews with his WSU graduate student peers, Taylor said at the hearing. Nye responded that prosecutors have no plans to use any of those interviews to justify their push for the death penalty if Kohberger is convicted.

“To be quite frank, if we get to a penalty phase, we have a lot better aggravating evidence,” Nye told the court.

Details in ‘Dateline’ episode test gag order

This week’s hearing also arrives on the heels of a two-hour special on the case from NBC’s “Dateline,” which cited unnamed sources and offered new information about the investigation and Kohberger, including data allegedly obtained from his cellphone, as well as other details that the Statesman could not independently verify.

A court gag order remains in effect, restricting the defense and prosecution from making statements about the case outside of the court record. For the prosecution, that includes members of law enforcement as agents of the state.

“Those things are so under lock and key that there’s no way it came from anywhere else but a law enforcement source,” Edwina Elcox, a Boise-based criminal defense attorney, told the Statesman. “Law enforcement shouldn’t have even revealed that in the absence of a gag order.”

The public release of such information outside of court and just months before the trial risks spoiling the jury pool and jeopardizing Kohberger’s right to a fair trial, she said. It could lead to Kohberger’s defense requesting a dismissal of the charges, which she said would be unlikely, or motions to have the prejudicial details withheld from jurors by barring them from the prosecution’s case.

“I don’t know how you cure that poisoning of the well. I don’t think it can be done,” Elcox said. “I would be absolutely shocked if there wasn’t forthcoming litigation about this.”

Thursday provides the next opportunity for the defense to raise that issue with Hippler. The “Dateline” episode aired last Friday.

Kohberger will appear with his defense for Thursday’s hearing at the Ada County Courthouse in Boise at 9 a.m. Mountain time, and another at the same time Friday if it is necessary. Each can be watched live on the court’s website.

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