Cost of murder case soars into millions

Bryan Kohberger, the suspect in the Moscow college student homicides, has now been jailed in Idaho for 469 days following his December 2022 arrest.

For each day that passes as he awaits his anticipated murder trial, the public costs shouldered by Idaho taxpayers climb.

Financial records obtained by the Idaho Statesman through public records requests across a dozen public entities detail the taxpayer dollars already spent on the Kohberger case.

The total includes costs for the nationwide law enforcement investigation and ensuing legal proceedings so far. It also accounts for the daily rate to hold Kohberger in custody at the county jail while he awaits trial.

The amount of money spent on the high-profile murder case already exceeds $3.6 million, the Statesman investigation found.

The cost of Kohberger’s prosecution is heightened, financial studies have shown and legal experts told the Statesman, because the state plans to pursue the death penalty if a jury convicts him.

Judge John Judge of Idaho’s 2nd Judicial District in Latah County, who is overseeing the case, said at a hearing earlier this month that he was mindful of the public costs for the extended pretrial process.

“If we have to have hearings on every single thing, we’ve got a long ways to go,” he said. “And it’s a lot of time, it’s a lot of work, it’s a lot of money, and it just makes everything more difficult.”

Still, the Kohberger case appears to be bringing exceptional expenses to the state. For comparison, the combined costs for the murder cases against Chad and Lori Vallow Daybell were roughly the same amount — about $3.6 million — but over three years’ time, East Idaho News reported in March 2023.

Kohberger, 29, a graduate student at nearby Washington State University at the time, is accused of stabbing four University of Idaho students to death at an off-campus home on King Road in Moscow. He is charged with four counts of first-degree murder and one count of felony burglary.

A Latah County grand jury unanimously indicted him on the five charges in May 2023. The victims were seniors Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves, both 21, junior Xana Kernodle and freshman Ethan Chapin, both 20.

The three women rented the home with two other female housemates who went unharmed in the November 2022 fatal attack, while Chapin was Kernodle’s boyfriend and stayed over for the night, police said.

STATE POLICE INVOICES ID GENETIC TESTING LAB

Police costs to land on Kohberger as the suspected killer after a nearly seven-week manhunt were at least $740,000, the Statesman’s analysis found, most of which covered payroll for the cadre of Idaho State Police officers.

That sum also includes an overtime bill of 600 hours for the Moscow Police Department, which led the homicide investigation, and the use of a private firm to secure the King Road property while it was still an active crime scene.

That total included any police investigative work on the homicides, ISP spokesperson Aaron Snell, who relocated to Moscow to assist with public communications for most of the investigation, told the Statesman by phone.

“It’s any expense that supports the work, the majority of which were indeed the travel and the forensics services — the testing,” he said.

Those expenses exclude any costs to the FBI, which assisted with the case. As a matter of policy, the federal agency does not comment on how it pursues specific cases, including the associated costs, FBI regional spokesperson Sandra Barker said in an email to the Statesman.

Since 2021, the state has had a contract with Othram, a private lab in Texas, for forensic genetic testing services. Othram has helped Idaho solve three cold cases in that time and is assisting on other active cases, Matthew Gamette, ISP’s forensic lab services director, said in an email to the Statesman.

Law enforcement and prosecutors have never identified Othram by name for work on the Kohberger case, including investigative genetic genealogy, or IGG. But records the Statesman obtained revealed that Othram billed ISP $5,000 in November 2022 for the rushed service, which entailed submitting crime scene DNA to publicly accessible ancestry websites to develop suspect leads.

The FBI eventually took over the advanced police technique that has run into constitutional rights questions.

Latah County Prosecutor Bill Thompson acknowledged six months after Kohberger’s arrest that IGG was employed to initially lead detectives to him as the suspect. Police made no mention of IGG in the probable cause affidavit for Kohberger’s arrest.

Another invoice record detailed the costs of the autopsies. Latah County Coroner Cathy Mabbutt had the Spokane County Medical Examiner’s Officer conduct the examinations of the four victims, including toxicology.

The four autopsies were considered “complex” because they required more time than a standard case, Mabbutt said in an email to the Statesman, and the total cost came to $9,600, according to an invoice dated three weeks after their deaths.

Early into the investigation, Gov. Brad Little pledged up to $1 million in emergency funds to backfill costs to ISP and the city police force for each agency’s dedication of expanded resources to the high-profile homicide case.

Total reimbursements reached about $435,000 from the governor’s fund, between ISP and Moscow police, said Emily Callihan, Little’s spokesperson.

UI TAKES BRUNT OF COSTS

UI has taken on the greatest known financial burden to date from the quadruple-homicide. The university has spent more than $1.6 million on direct impacts from the deaths of the four students, university spokesperson Jodi Walker told the Statesman.

The vast majority of those costs — about $1.4 million — related to an expansion of security throughout the Moscow campus and surrounding area. The total included $241,500 to cover charges for ISP to patrol the college community for six weeks immediately following the homicides and for room and board for its officers over that time.

That money also is included in the total police cost for the case. UI also paid nearly $780,000 to a pair of private security firms to help with a revised campus security plan and patrol the area, including the King Road house. The university spent another $393,000 to increase its own campus security, an expense report showed.

The Idaho Legislature appropriated $1 million in additional funds to UI to help defray the unexpected security costs. The remaining expenses were paid for through the university’s reserve funds, Walker said.

“This did not cover all our expenses but was certainly appreciated,” she told the Statesman.

Once police released the King Road property back to its owner, it was donated to the university. The school took ownership on Feb. 24, 2023, Walker said, which in turn placed the house’s ongoing 24/7 security costs on the university.

While neither prosecutors nor Kohberger’s defense took issue with the house being demolished once their investigations were finished, some of the four victims’ families wanted it to remain standing until after the trial.

They raised concerns about jurors who may ask to visit for a more complete understanding of the attack or any possible evidence that may not have been found and still could be later.

With remediation work, including fencing to secure the King Road property and transfer of the title, plus the private security costs of several hundreds of dollars per day, UI spent about $346,000 on the house before it was torn down in late December. According to an invoice, the total included nearly $14,000 paid to Moscow-based Germer Construction to demolish the house.

“While the documented financial toll of dealing with a capital crime such as this is incredibly high, there are other costs as well, such as the emotional toll on our employees who worked countless hours to support students and keep our university as strong as possible through this tragedy,” UI President Scott Green said in a statement to the Statesman. “While we know it most changed the lives of the families of the victims, it also touched and changed every employee and student at our university on that fateful day.”

Over the Idaho state line in Pullman, where Kohberger lived in graduate student housing at the time, Washington State did not track costs tied to UI student homicides, university spokesperson Phil Weiler said in an email to the Statesman. WSU campus police had limited expenses for overtime, including helping serve search warrants, he said, but no additional costs were logged from officers’ heightened presence around campus.

COURT COSTS RISE WITH DEATH PENALTY CASES

Since arriving in Idaho, Kohberger has remained at the Latah County Jail located beneath the county courthouse. The cost to the county is about $194 per day to house him there, the sheriff’s office said, which so far has totaled about $91,000 since he was brought to the state in January 2023.

By comparison, the state pays an average of about $87.50 per day to house a person in an Idaho prison.

To get Kohberger to Idaho, the Pennsylvania State Police escorted him aboard a Pennsylvania state plane from Scranton, Pa., to the Pullman-Moscow Regional Airport. The cost of the flight was about $14,100, KTVB reported.

Moscow police were not sent an invoice for the flight, the city’s finance department told the Statesman. But it’s unclear whether any agency in Idaho was billed for those costs, which were excluded from the Statesman’s totals; Pennsylvania State Police have yet to fulfill the Statesman’s request for public records.

The Latah County Sheriff’s Office, which manages the jail and provides the bailiffs for court, has not experienced any other cost increases associated with Kohberger or the case, jail personnel told the Statesman by email.

The Idaho court system covers the expenses at the Latah County Courthouse, including judges’ salaries. The state court system is unable to distinguish the costs of a specific case, including for two appeals filed in the Kohberger case with the Idaho Supreme Court, Nate Poppino, spokesperson for the state court system, told the Statesman.

The same would apply to the grand jury seated by Thompson in May 2023 exclusively for the Kohberger case to review the four first-degree murder charges and one count of felony burglary against him.

The grand jury unanimously indicted Kohberger during three days of hearings overseen by senior Judge Jay Gaskill of the 2nd Judicial District in Nez Perce County, according to court records.

The running tally for the Kohberger case excluded the judges’ time. But court costs are among those that the financial studies showed increase in a death penalty case.

Those cases were as much as eight times more expensive for the judicial system, according to the Washington study, which was co-authored by Bob Boruchowitz, director of the Defender Initiative at Seattle University’s law school.

Overall, the studies found that pursuit of a death sentence on average cost taxpayers upward of $1 million more than when prosecutors sought life imprisonment in aggravated first-degree murder cases.

“Regardless of what one feels about the death penalty, if you’re spending millions of dollars to kill one person … how is that a good investment?” Boruchowitz previously told the Statesman.

Thompson is leading the prosecution of Kohberger and is joined on the case by Ashley Jennings, his office’s senior deputy prosecutor. Thompson earns about $120,000 each year, while Jennings is paid $104,000 annually, according to the Latah County Clerk’s Office.

In April 2023, Thompson requested help from the Idaho attorney general’s office on the case, which Judge granted. Idaho Deputy Attorneys General Jeff Nye, who leads the office’s criminal law division, and Ingrid Batey were appointed to the Kohberger case.

The agreement between the attorney general’s office and Latah County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, which the Statesman obtained from the prosecutor’s office, stipulates that the attorney general’s office covers travel to and from North Idaho by state vehicle, including gas, and in-office printing costs.

The prosecutor’s office reimburses for hotel stays and meal costs. So far, the attorney general’s office has billed for about $6,500 and incurred about $380 in expenses for gas, according to invoice records.

Nye makes $166,000 in annual salary, while Batey earns $110,000, each according to Transparent Idaho.

It is unclear how many hours per week the two work the Kohberger case. Nye and Batey did not respond to the Statesman, and neither did Dan Estes, spokesperson for the attorney general’s office, despite repeat requests over a month.

Unlike defense attorneys, most prosecutor’s offices don’t tally the time they spend on capital cases, death penalty cost studies from Washington in 2015 and Oregon in 2016 found. As a result, settling on public costs for prosecutors, in addition to court, is challenging, said Los Angeles-based criminal defense attorney Joshua Ritter, who previously worked as a county prosecutor.

“The problem with calculating costs with a government agency, including with man-hours, is no one keeps track of it,” Ritter told the Statesman in a phone interview. “It’s just government workers doing their job. There’s no kind of billable hours and invoicing of the work, even overtime.”

DEFENDING KOHBERGER AN ‘ENORMOUS UNDERTAKING’

After Kohberger’s arrest, Magistrate Judge Megan Marshall of the 2nd Judicial District in Latah County appointed Anne Taylor, Kootenai County’s chief public defender, to represent Kohberger. Jay Logsdon, Taylor’s chief deputy, joined her on the case. Both are death penalty-qualified attorneys, per state requirements for capital cases, and Taylor’s pay rate was set at $200 per hour, while Logsdon will make $180 per hour.

In comparison, the salaries for prosecuting attorneys on the case amount to about $50-$57 per hour, based on a 40-hour work week. The highest paid attorney from the attorney general’s office assigned to the case makes $80 per hour.

Kohberger is considered an indigent defendant because he can’t afford legal representation, so the cost of his public defense team is covered by the county. The money for that is paid out of its general fund, and the county received no emergency funds to help with those costs, Latah County Clerk Julie Fry told the Statesman.

“The taxpayers have to cover the costs — the Latah County taxpayers,” Fry said by phone.

In March 2023, Marshall also appointed to Kohberger’s defense a third attorney, mitigation expert Elisa Massoth, who maintains a private practice in Payette County. Like Logsdon, Massoth is paid $180 per hour for work on the case, according to a record obtained from the Latah County Clerk’s Office.

Mitigation involves research work into a defendant’s background completed in preparation for sentencing if a jury returns with a guilty verdict.

“It’s an enormous undertaking,” Boruchowitz said. “The need to document every single part of the client’s life for the sentencing phase is much greater when death is on the table. The prosecutor needs to know it, too, but the defenders have got to spend considerable time, energy and funds doing that.”

It is unclear how many hours each public defender has committed to the case. Attorneys on both sides of the case remain subject to the court’s gag order and Taylor told Judge at a pretrial hearing earlier this month that the defense hasn’t responded to media inquiries.

“There are things that we can say publicly, but we choose not to,” she said. “Our team doesn’t even so much as answer ‘no comment’ to emails, to calls, to people trying to talk to us because we just don’t want to do that. It’s easier to say nothing.”

After Kohberger’s legal defense was appointed, Latah County established a “public defense extraordinary services” account. The fund essentially acts as a budget from which his public defenders can cover costs to prepare for trial.

Shortly thereafter, Judge appointed an out-of-county judge to oversee and approve the defense’s use of the county fund for expenses. Judge selected Judge Mark Monson of the 2nd Judicial District in Nez Perce County as the case’s “resource judge,” according to a Latah County District Court record obtained by the Statesman. “One of the things that I’m concerned about is how much said at a pretrial hearing this month.

The possible defense expenses Monson would review include salaries, travel, investigative charges and fees for expert witnesses. Each of those specific costs and expenses are sealed, per a January 2023 order Monson issued, because he determined the interest in privacy outweighs the interest of public disclosure and cited a desire to preserve the right to a fair trial.

However, through last week, Kohberger’s defense has spent almost $1.4 million, according to Latah County budget records. Ritter estimated the costs so far for the prosecution on the case would be roughly commensurate.

“It would not surprise me at all,” he told the Statesman. “None of this is viewed as a cost, even though it’s a cost to taxpayers, because it’s not seen as above and beyond the normal budget.… If it was a private enterprise, it’s something you would absolutely be keeping an eye on. When it’s the government, it’s a whatever-it-takes kind of mentality.”

Last week, Judge rescheduled a hearing for arguments over a trial change of venue for June 27. Kohberger’s trial date has not been set. It isn’t expected to start until at least spring 2025.

Kevin Fixler is an investigative reporter with the Idaho Statesman.