The family of one of Bryan Kohberger’s victims has blasted a bid from the convicted killer to rescind his guilty plea and go to trial.
“The mosquito you just can’t seem to swat. That is what Kohberger and his following have become to this family,” relatives of Kaylee Goncalves said in a statement on Facebook Monday afternoon following Kohberger’s claim that he had been “misled” into pleading guilty.
Goncalves was just 21 years old when she and three of her college friends were stabbed to death in their off-campus house in Moscow, Idaho, in November 2022.
“He never cried wolf or claimed he was uninformed, pressured, or that there were issues with the discovery that he and his counsel had for 2 years that he thought should have been challenged,” the Goncalves family said of Kohberger. “He admitted to guilt and asked whether he actually was guilty he said ‘yes.’”
Officials had built a case against Kohberger using DNA evidence from a knife sheath found at the bloody scene and surveillance footage of a car that matched Kohberger’s in the area at the time of the murders, along with other evidence.
Facing the death penalty if convicted of the quadruple homicide, Kohberger, now 31, confessed to the murder of Goncalves, her roommates Madison Mogen, 21, and Xana Kernodle, 20, and Kernodle’s boyfriend Ethan Chapin, 20, in July 2025 just weeks before he was supposed to stand trial.
The Goncalves’ statement came after Kohberger, a former PhD student of criminology at Washington State University, claimed “justice was not served.”
“Unanswered questions seem to multiply with each piece of discovery unsealed, and the public demands the truth,” Kohberger said in a statement to The New York Times published Monday.
“My actual innocence is my truth, and the plea, hinged on by false promises and blatant disinformation, MUST be withdrawn,” he said.
Kohberger filed a “petition for post conviction relief” in the Ada County District Court in Idaho Monday, NBC News reported.
The Goncalves family said should Kohberger succeed in getting another day in court, it would be a “nice break from his solitary confinement” for the killer.
“The real issue is that if as much energy was put into honoring the victims in this case as trying to set a guilty man free there would be statutes of the victims on every corner with parks and days honoring their ultimate sacrifice ‘their lives’ at the hands of narcissist,” the family wrote. “Regardless of how this turns out, our family is 100% ready. An actual trial this time? Let’s go!”
The Goncalves said if there is a trial, they are “confident he will get the death penalty that he escaped by pleading guilty the first time around.”
While Kohberger did waive his right to an appeal or chance of parole in his plea deal, since his petition to open the case is not an appeal, it does not violate the terms of the agreement.
He is currently serving four consecutive life sentences for the murders as well as an additional ten-year sentence for burglary after he broke into the victims’ college home with the intent to kill.
The Goncalves family previously accused prosecutors of having “failed” them with Khoberger’s plea deal, saying they were “beyond furious at the State of Idaho” in a June 2025 Facebook post.
They had hoped a trial would reveal the killer’s motive, which is still unknown.
