Bryan Kohberger Never Had a Trial — and What His Defense Cost You Is Still Under Seal

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This is Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:07)
Oh, have you heard about the money, the money that has been spent on the defense of Bryan Kohberger or the lack of information about the money that was spent on Bryan Kohberger, his defense, the trial, the whole nine yards? And this isn't a piece just about, oh my gosh, how can they spend money defending someone who admitted doing, I mean, everybody's entitled to a defense. I think the big question here is, how much of a defense are you entitled to at the tax payers dime?
A fair, justifiable, competent attorney? Yes, without a doubt. And yes, I know this was a case involving a lot of people, involving a lot of things. But my God, my God, do we need to have a little chat about how to responsibly spend money or is it just the way it is? Some things will never change. That's just the way it is. Ah, but don't you believe it now. Let's get into this. Your thoughts in the comment section on Substack and YouTube as we do. Somebody handed the state of Idaho a house. Let's start there. The house on King Road for free. The owner of the place on King Road in Moscow, where four University of Idaho students were killed in November of 2022 They donated it to the university outright. Here you go. Take it. Do what you will. Didn't charge a dime. And by the time the public was finished with that free house, it had cost about $346,000. Remediation, fencing, a security detail around the clock. And then to finish the job, $14,000 to bulldoze it into the ground, a free house. $346,000.
And there's a cleaner way to measure that number than dollars. That house is not a fluke. It's not the one strange line item in an otherwise tidy budget here. It's the entire story in miniature. The money that secured it and tore it down was not anybody's money. It was the public's money. It was your money, my money. More specifically, it was the taxpayers' money of that community of Idaho. Tax money and public money, it turns out, gets spent in a way that private money never would. Like it's not quite real because to people spending it, it's not quite theirs. The man, of course, at the center of all this is Bryan Kohberger. He killed Kayleigh Goncalves, Madison Mogan, both 21 and Xander Kernodle and Ethan Chapin, both 20 in an off-campus house. He was a criminology PhD student at Washington State, about 10 miles away. He pled guilty in July 25 and got four consecutive life sentences with no chance of parole. There was no trial. He admitted it. Prosecutors have been chasing the death penalty the whole way. And then in a deal, they dropped it.
The all-in cost to the public of moving him from a crime scene to a prison cell runs north of $8 million.
That $5.5 million of that was his defense. And how that $5.5 million got carved up, like the honey bank ham on an Easter buffet. Which lawyer got paid what? Which expert cost how much? Is a number the public has never been allowed to see. Allowed to see. This is public money. And we're not allowed to see where it goes. The money that the taxpayers... I don't live in Idaho, but in theory, if I did, the statement would be that you and me pay for in our taxes. And yes, again, I'm not saying it's a bad thing to have a public defender. It's good that this exists. We have one of the best systems in the world for it, as flawed as it is.
But we can't see the line items at this point. Really? Seriously? Why? Why? It's done.
What are we not supposed to see? Is it going to enrage people? Are people just not going to understand it that they're going to be enraged? Either way, it's public money. I don't really care how someone perceives it. It's up to each individual to try to understand how this money was spent, whether it's justified or not. Either way, it's their money to know where it went. The taxpayers of Idaho. When the trial got moved from Moscow over to Boise, a lot of people who'd planned to be there had to rebook their travel. Two of them were government offices. They handed the exact same problem, or handled the exact same problem in two completely different ways. The prosecutor's office had reserved lodging in Boise. When the case moved and that ended in a plea, that reservation turned out to be, da-da-da-da. This is again, when you're not using your own real money, you make dumb choices. Non-refundable. The prosecutor's office ate the whole thing.