Latah County Prosecutor Bill Thompson was in Spokane on November 13, 2022, when he got the call that there had been a quadruple homicide close to the University of Idaho campus.
It soon became clear that a brutal and vicious crime had been committed in Moscow. Thompson and the Moscow Police Department got right to work.
Over the last two and a half years, he and his team worked tirelessly to bring the man responsible for the deaths of Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin to justice, culminating in the July 23, 2025, hearing where Bryan Kohberger would be sentenced to die in an Idaho prison.
Thompson, like many of those involved with the investigation, quickly became emotionally invested, postponing his retirement to ensure justice was served.
“This whole case is just so sad, it’s so tragic,” he said in an interview with The Argonaut. “These beautiful young lives lost, brutally and for no reason.”
“In the end, I want the public and the families and friends and the communities … to appreciate and understand that they had a team of at times hundreds of professionals working to fight to bring the killer to justice and to close this case,” Thompson said.
At the beginning investigators had two pieces of evidence, Thompson said: the knife sheath on which an unknown male’s DNA was found, and video footage from a neighbor’s security camera that shows a white sedan coming and going in the hours before the homicides and then taking off at high speed right after the time investigators believe the crime occurred.
“That’s where we started. That’s all the investigators had,” Thompson said. “It’s pretty amazing what came together over … seven weeks to get us to the point where we could charge him at the end of December.”
The investigation was an undertaking that ended in an unexpected way, a plea deal which required Kohberger to admit guilt to all five indictments: four counts of first-degree murder and one count of felony burglary, resulting in four consecutive life sentences and $270,000 total in fines.
“We didn’t go looking for a plea,” said Thompson. “We were not expecting to be approached.”
After two years of Anne Taylor, former Kootenai County public defender and Kohberger’s lead defense attorney, attempting to convey her client’s innocence, including an attempt to provide alternate perpetrator evidence, Taylor approached the prosecution and inquired about a plea deal, asking Thompson if his team had “considered making an offer.”
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the week before, the judge let them know that their last-ditch efforts to continue the trial or confuse the trial were not going to be allowed,” Thompson said, “Perhaps that was a reality check.”
Thompson and his team met with representatives of the families to discuss the status of the case and the potential for a plea deal at the end of June.
“One family in particular very strongly felt that the death penalty should be pursued, even if it would be decades before anything came to a conclusion,” said Thompson.
“We had other families who felt equally strongly that they wanted this case over with,” he said, “They wanted closure, they wanted finality. They didn’t want the trauma that would have gone with the trial.”
Thompson and his team decided the best outcome would be a plea that ensures the man responsible admits guilt, waives his right to appeal and accepts fixed life in prison.
“All it takes is one juror out of 12 to derail the whole thing,” Thompson noted.
Despite the split, all but one of the families attended the sentencing hearing with the opportunity to address Kohberger directly.
“I was so glad the family members had the chance to finally say their piece, however they wanted to express it,” said Thompson, expressing gratitude to Judge Steven Hippler for providing that opportunity.
Both during and after the sentencing, there was still a lingering desire to know why this brutal crime had been committed — to hear Kohberger not only admit guilt but tell the world why. This is what legal professionals would call allocution.
According to Thompson, “When he pleaded guilty and he was placed under oath and he admitted that the charges were true, that’s a type of allocution. And that’s as much as the law requires.”
Thompson also said, “I can tell you from the very beginning, we had agents from the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit … and they said right up front, ‘first off, we are never going to know exactly why he did it, and if the person who did this told us, it wouldn’t make sense to anybody but him.’ That’s the nature of these types of violent crimes. You have someone that lives in a different world, functions in a different world, in ways that we can’t understand.”
As Judge Hippler passed sentence, he alerted Kohberger and his team to the deadline for appeal in 42 days, or the first Wednesday of September. Despite Kohberger waiving his right to appeal by agreeing to the plea deal, he still has the right to ask his attorney to file for appeal. This would then be considered a violation of the plea.
“If he wants to play games like that, we’ve already talked to the Attorney General’s office and we are ready to deal with it,” said Thompson. Given Kohberger’s uncoerced agreement to the plea, it would be very difficult to convince the state to allow such an action.
Now that a sentence has been delivered, the non-dissemination order, or gag order, issued in January of 2023 has been lifted, but actions in the time between the 2023 issuance and July 17, 2025, are under investigation.
On May 9, 2025, NBC’s “Dateline” aired an episode dedicated to the ongoing investigation at the time. The episode shared information leaked by an unknown source that was not public at the time, including information related to Kohberger’s Internet search history.
Details of the investigation are confidential and protected by state law, preventing those involved from divulging information. Thompson said that he “was mad beyond description” when he saw the episode after his Senior Deputy Prosecutor Ashley Jennings sent it to him.
“Whoever leaked the information, that was legitimate information … I hope they find who those people are, and they are held accountable,” he said. “Whoever did that, no mercy.”
The Moscow Police Department is releasing investigation Information regarding the King Road homicides online as documents are reviewed by officials.
Mackenzie Davidson can be reached at [email protected].