Bryan Kohberger had a flimsy alibi at best but his attempt to pre-emptively outwit the authorities on the night of his grisly crime is what blew his own story to smithereens.
Kohberger’s alibi was ultimately rendered pointless by his decision to plead guilty last month, mere weeks before his trial was set to start, but even before that, his story had a major hole in it. Kohberger, who recently confessed to the murders of four University of Idaho students, made a major slip up when he made the decision to turn off his mobile phone between 2:54 AM and 4:48 AM, around the time the murders are believed to have occurred.
Why was this a mistake for Bryan Kohberger?
Anyone who’s ever watched a police show or crime documentary will probably know that, in this modern age, our mobile phones can be used to trace our whereabouts. It seems Kohberger was aware of this which is why he made the decision to switch his phone off. It was an attempt to avoid having his phone traced.
There are two reasons this ruined his alibi. This first is that he underestimated how much digital forensics would be able to find out about his phone. An expert in the field, Heather Barnhart, spoke with PEOPLE and stated that they were able to determine that Kohberger had indeed powered the phone off and that it wasn’t a case of the battery dying.
“When he powered it off, it was from a human pressing a button, and the battery was at 100 percent charged.”
Barnhart, who previously worked digital forensics on the Gabby Petito case as well as the capture of Osama Bin Laden, explained that this meant Kohberger’s lawyers could not try and claim his phone had just so happened to run out of charge between those times. The fact they know he switched it off certainly makes him look guilty.
It also contradicts the alibi in another way
Not only does switching off the phone make Kohberger look suspicious, but it also seems to contradict his claim that he was out so late at night so he could watch the stars. “If you’re stargazing and taking pictures of the sky, your phone needs to be on,” Barnhart claimed.
It seems Kohberger thought himself smarter than the police, but this attempt to outsmart them was his undoing. Or it probably would have been had he not changed his plea prior to the start of his trial. Three weeks after his guilty plea Bryan Kohberger was sentenced to serve four lifetimes in prison for the murders. He’ll likely never walk as a free man again.
