Why Bryan Kohberger’s plea deal raised more questions than answers

**Ana Garcia** (0:00)
A word of warning. This podcast explores graphic and disturbing stories and includes some strong language. It therefore may not be suitable for our young listeners or other folks who may find it disturbing. Hello and welcome to a special edition of True Crime News, the Podcast. I'm your host, Ana Garcia.
Everyone in the world of true crime has a story to tell about a case that they've worked on or perhaps they've lived through. Some are high profile, some you've never heard of, but they are all fascinating. Today's case, you for sure have heard of. The murders of four college students at an off-campus home in Idaho, admitted killer Bryan Kohberger, took a plea deal to avoid the death penalty.
Not all of the families of the victims feel like they got justice in this case or the answers that they needed. Our guest today is Christopher Whitcomb, a former FBI hostage rescue team sniper, an investigative journalist, and the author of a new book, Broken Plea, The Explosive Search for Truth Behind the Idaho Murders. Chris, welcome to the program. It's a pleasure to have you.

**Christopher Whitcomb** (1:06)
Thank you, Ana. Nice to talk to you.

**Ana Garcia** (1:07)
Chris, I feel like we've had so many conversations about this, meaning not just in the media because of the enormous media attention that this case has received, but I feel like as a nation, we have lived through this tragedy, and there was the horror of the actual murders, the brutality of it, then the search for a killer in which everyone felt like they were at risk, if you will. So is there anything left to be said about this case?

**Christopher Whitcomb** (1:40)
Well said. I would argue there's a lot to be said about this case. We're going to start out talking about this book, which is a 450-page, roughly, encapsulation of elements of this case.
But the reason I wrote this book is because I feel there's so much unresolved. There are so many questions yet unasked and unanswered. So I'll say upfront, many of you viewers may have seen me talking in other podcasts. What I would say is unresolved is I now know, looking in hindsight at the last month or so, six weeks, whatever, what has and what has not transferred from the book to the questions that people ask. And I'd love to talk about those issues today. I have a lot more to say about this now that I've gone through these questions in other formats. So I'm very excited to get into those with you.

**Ana Garcia** (2:24)
Okay, well, you know what?
I'm just gonna say to you, what's the one thing, let's start. What do you want to answer? You give me the question.

**Christopher Whitcomb** (2:34)
No, listen, I love the questions. We can talk about any aspect, but I'll say- Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's important to have a little bit of background because we live in an age now where everybody knows everything about anything and everybody has an opinion. As you said, this is a horrific tragedy. It is a case that will never go to trial. It's the first line in the book. We begin at the end of this book.
I wrote this book after Bryan Kohberger had pled guilty. So we know now what the prosecution said. We know what Bryan Kohberger has admitted to. But at that point, now more than well over a year ago, I was given access to the vast majority of this file, which people haven't seen, and we're talking about terabytes of information, by people involved in the investigation on both sides, meaning law enforcement, prosecution and the defense, who felt, I think maybe a reasonable word would be outrage, but certainly very strong concern that the facts presented by the prosecution and pled guilty to by Bryan Kohberger, they did not match things they saw in the file itself. So I started looking through these documents, and to the best of my knowledge, and I talked about a lot of them in the book, but the book's 400 and some odd pages, and this document is terabyte, or excuse me, the Brady disclosure of the case file, is vast. It's huge. It's astonishingly large. It took me months just to go through it. So what we've got here now is, on my part, a law enforcement-based and let me say up front, because your readers or your viewers are so knowledgeable, murder is not typically a federal crime.
Jurisdictions work different crimes. It can be in the federal system, but the FBI often works in association with and in support of local law enforcement, local and state law enforcement. So did I work murder investigations as an FBI agent? Yes, two of them.