- Bryan Kohberger is charged with the murders of four University of Idaho students, found stabbed to death in November.
- DNA found on a knife sheath left at the scene of the crime connected Kohberger to the crime, according to a probable cause affidavit.
- According to journalist Howard Blum, police sent the knife sheath out of Idaho to be tested by a startup lab in Texas.
- Attorney Mark O'Mara said Kohberger's defense team are likely to contest the DNA evidence.
Bryan Kohberger's attorneys are likely to seize the opportunity to sow doubt about DNA left on a knife sheath at the scene where four University of Idaho students were murdered, according to legal experts.
Kohberger, 28, is charged in the deaths of Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Madison Mogen, 21, Xana Kernodle, 20, and Ethan Chapin, 20. The four University of Idaho students were found stabbed to death in a rental home in Moscow on November 13.
Police arrested Kohberger—a graduate student at Washington State University in Pullman at the time of the killings—on December 30 after DNA left at the scene connected him to the crime, according to a probable cause affidavit.
The affidavit said the Idaho State Lab reported that DNA found on a knife sheath was matched with DNA from the suspect's father found in trash taken from Kohberger's parents' home in Pennsylvania.
Kohberger was taken into custody and extradited to Idaho. He has not yet entered a plea to four counts of first-degree murder and one count of felony burglary, but a lawyer who previously represented him said he was "eager to be exonerated."
According to Howard Blum, a journalist and author working on a book about the murders, the knife sheath was sent out of Idaho to be tested by a startup in Texas.
"They sent it first to the lab in Idaho, and the lab in Idaho couldn't find anything. So they thought this might be a dead end," Blum said on The Megyn Kelly Show earlier in March.
In an appearance on NewsNation on Wednesday, Blum said investigators sent the knife sheath to Texas because they wanted to make an arrest.
"They wanted desperately to tie the suspect to this knife sheath," he said.
The lab in Texas "specialized in proprietary devices that made what is called kinship DNA," Blum said. "You could figure out a relative of the DNA that you already had, and this lab was set up to investigate unsolved murders."
The lab had only been used for cold cases prior to Moscow police sending it the knife sheath.
"It's a problem for the prosecution if the reports are accurate and the first lab did not match the DNA to Kohberger," Neama Rahmani, an attorney and former federal prosecutor, told Newsweek.
"Even though familial DNA matches are new, the state is going to have to explain why the first lab drew a different conclusion."
Rahmani added: "It's uncommon for such a bloody crime scene to have only a single source of DNA connected to a defendant. The defense will argue that it was transferred or planted. There may also be a lot of other peoples' DNA at the scene because it was a 'party house.' The defense will argue that law enforcement didn't rule them out as suspects."
Mark O'Mara, a criminal defense and civil rights attorney, also said Kohberger's defense team are sure to contest the DNA evidence.
"Defense attorneys look wherever they can find to find a potential of reasonable doubt," he told NewsNation's Ashleigh Banfield. "And when there is a test either that they have to do unique, they have to go out of state, they have to do a second or third time or it's inconclusive, those are little items, little catchphrases that defense attorneys use to see if there's reasonable doubt there.
"Now, again, it's got to be taken in comparison to all the other evidence but certainly a defense team has to be pretty happy that that test did not come back positive to Kohberger's DNA on it, for example, so yes, it's something they're gonna look at."
O'Mara's comments come after prosecutors in Idaho disclosed that an officer who worked on the Kohberger case has been the subject of a "confidential internal affairs investigation."
Latah County Magistrate Judge Megan Marshall granted a protective order requested by prosecutors to keep material from being publicly disclosed.
In January, Marshall issued a sweeping gag order, barring attorneys, law enforcement agencies and others associated with the case from talking or writing about it. She later broadened it to also prohibit any attorneys representing survivors, witnesses, or the victims' family members from talking or writing about the case.
Update 3/30/23, 11:30 a.m. ET: This article has been updated to add comment from Neama Rahmani.
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