What Would Bryan Kohberger's Defense Have Been Had He Gone To Trial_

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On "Forbes True Crime," On "Forbes True Crime," Howard Blum, author of "When the Night Comes Falling: A Requiem for the Idaho Student Murders,"  spoke about what Bryan Kohberger's defense might have been.

Transcript

00:00So can you lay out the prosecution's case a little bit more?

00:04Because aside from that knife sheath, a lot of that evidence was circumstantial.

00:08There was one witness, Dylan Mortensen, who was one of the roommates in the house.

00:13She saw the murderer leave the house.

00:16He had bushy eyebrows.

00:17But aside from that, she didn't really see much.

00:20So was the prosecution's case that strong?

00:23I mean, what were they going to say in court?

00:25And how nervous were they, if at all, heading to trial?

00:30The prosecutions had a good case, but it was a circumstantial case except for the DNA,

00:36because the DNA on the knife sheath was an exact match from a cheek swab taken from Koberger.

00:42That's pretty incriminating evidence.

00:44Then when you created the whole mosaic of the white car in the area of the cell phone triangulation,

00:51of Koberger, they had Koberger going online on Amazon, ordering a K-bar knife with a 7-inch

00:58steel blade, just like the one that was used.

01:01That was, you know, altogether a pretty strong case.

01:05And they had rulings from the judge recently that reinforced their case.

01:10The Koberger defense team had a couple of things that they were going to try.

01:15For example, there were drops, two drops of blood found in the house.

01:20One on a banister and another on a glove outside the house, in fact, on the threshold of the entrance to the house.

01:27All those two spots of blood had been identified solely as male DNA.

01:33The Koberger team was going to say that those spots of blood belonged to the real perpetrators,

01:41real perpetrators, and that Koberger was, in fact, a patsy.

01:45And, yes, this was his DNA on the knife sheath.

01:48However, those perpetrators were the ones who put the knife sheath in the bed.

01:54They were the killers.

01:55And so they tried this out on the judge.

01:58They gave four names in a motion.

02:01The names had been redacted of who they thought were the actual killers.

02:04And the judge looked at this and he said, this isn't evidence.

02:09This is an allegation.

02:11This is, in effect, a scarless rumor.

02:13And he said, you can't bring this into the courtroom.

02:16And there was another strategy the defense was rumored that they were going to try, which was,

02:21hey, no, he was just out stargazing at the time of the murder.

02:25But as you pointed out before, it was a cloudy night.

02:28It was freezing that that dawn of November 13th.

02:33But was the defense's strategy going to be, hey, we're just going to.

02:37We don't have much.

02:38So what we're going to do is poke as many holes in the prosecution's story.

02:42We're going to try to cast as much reasonable doubt really as possible.

02:46Well, you know, there's an old legal adage.

02:49When you have the facts, you pound the facts.

02:52When you don't have the facts, you pound the table.

02:54And boy, for the past two and a half years, they were, to their credit, pounding the table.

03:00Their large ambition was to save Brian Koberger from a firing squad.

03:06They wanted to make sure that the death penalty was not inflicted in this case.

03:10They wanted to raise reasonable doubt.

03:13But in recent weeks, as I said, the alternate perpetrator strategy was dismissed.

03:19And then the alibi, stargazing on a cloudy night, the judge looked at that and he said, quote,

03:25this is not an alibi.

03:27He wouldn't allow it to be introduced.

03:29So they really had nothing.

03:30All they could hope to do was delay, delay, and delay.

03:34And with the trial coming up, they run out of delays.

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