A trial date has finally been set for Brian Kohlberger's trial, and it's now just months away! Join Meghan and Howard as they dig into the details of the case, including DNA evidence, cell phone evidence, and much more.
00:00:00.500Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM channel 111 every weekday at noon east.
00:00:12.080Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and today's true crime Christmas special.
00:00:18.380Hope you and your family had a great Christmas and now you can relax and unwind with the latest on the case of the alleged Idaho murderer Brian Kohlberger.
00:00:27.200I don't know why true crime is a getaway of sorts, but it kind of is.
00:00:32.520It just takes your mind off of what's going on in your own life, the to-do list that's constantly humming,
00:00:39.380and lets you focus on something else that's serious, that requires attention, and in this case, a bit of a mystery too.
00:00:47.720There's a lot to dig into with Howard Bloom. He's the author of the book When the Night Comes Falling,
00:00:53.620which includes much of his extensive and amazing reporting on this case.
00:00:57.920The big news is a trial is scheduled and it's now just months away.
00:01:01.680We'll get into that, plus all the avenues the defense is likely to employ when it comes to genetic genealogy, cell phone pings, and much, much more.
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00:06:53.300When you're doing this investigative investigation, where you're trying to build out a family tree, you can only go to certain genetic databases.
00:07:03.860The other ones are precluded by law from allowing the legal authorities to get into them.
00:07:10.620Did the FBI go into a database where they shouldn't have?
00:07:14.780That seems to be a question that they're trying to cover up.
00:07:18.980And ultimately, it comes down to was Koberger, one of the attorneys involved in the cases, compared it to as if they took him into a lineup.
00:08:20.360Because I think the only way they could have been doing this, the only way they could have been following him, is if they had accessed information that they should not have.
00:08:28.860All right, let me just stop you there.
00:08:30.880Let me stop you there, so we can walk the audience through what you're saying step by step.
00:08:34.700That was just a shot from a police body cam of them getting pulled over, which they did, was it three times?
00:08:48.000No, so they got pulled over when they were driving, this is post the murders, Brian Kohlberger's driving with his dad cross country back from Washington State to the Poconos, Pennsylvania, and they got pulled over not once but twice and let go with just, you know, a warning to obey the traffic laws.
00:09:04.780And you reported that the FBI was following him, was watching him during this trip, that at one point when he left Washington State, they lost him and they had to retrieve him or find him again thanks to like the easy pass data that, you know, can track the cars and they did find him.
00:09:30.460It wasn't just like the FBI knew who he was, so it's logical they were following him.
00:09:34.840You were reporting, no, no, they were following and they had a real decision to make about whether to intervene when the local cops with whom they did not coordinate genuinely pulled him over for two traffic violations.
00:09:49.000I mean, could you imagine you're the FBI, you're following this guy who's your person of interest in a murder case, and suddenly you see him being pulled over.
00:09:57.440And you don't know how he's going to respond.
00:10:00.560If he is indeed guilty, well, he could, you know, and if he is indeed the murderer of four people, something could happen to this police officer, this highway patrolman who's trying to stop the car or the car could take off.
00:10:13.860You could have an OJ chase across America.
00:10:15.960But the FBI makes this decision to hang back because one of the reasons they decide to hang back is because what they're doing is secret.
00:10:24.520They have not even told the Moscow police, who are their partners in this investigation, that they already have this person of interest.
00:10:32.200They don't reveal to the Moscow police until a week later, until after the Kohlbergers get to Pennsylvania.
00:10:41.920They're keeping secret that because of their zeal to catch a monster, they may be played fast and loose with the rules on DNA acquisition of certain websites.
00:10:53.240And that's what they're trying to keep.
00:10:55.360So because you say, you accurately point out, and I think the audience has a good enough feel to know this, the FBI, you're right, they never give statements.
00:11:02.660I mean, when does the FBI ever come out and say, we deny we were there?
00:11:06.280They let us as media people pound sand, do absolutely, like, just twist.
00:11:10.340They don't need to confirm or deny anything.
00:11:12.220It's kind of the way the DOJ operates, same, you know, related organization.
00:11:15.820So on your story, though, and with all due respect to you and Airmail, you've owned the story, but, like, it's not exactly like it was on the cover of the New York Times and they kind of, you know, felt like they had to.
00:11:28.440They could have blown you off, but they didn't.
00:11:31.220They come out and they're like, it's not true.
00:11:33.660We weren't following him, which in a way is more telling than if they'd said nothing.
00:11:41.800And then we have to go back on the timeline to figure out why they might be feeling squirrely about Howard Bloom's report that they knew Brian Kohlberger was their suspect and they knew it well before they now say they knew it, which was the end of December.
00:11:59.380Now they want us to believe they didn't have him until the end of December.
00:12:03.000But you're reporting they had him much earlier than that, thanks to the genetic genealogy and how they made the ID is where the big questions come in.
00:12:24.240And that was because of car license plate readings.
00:12:28.020And then they still hadn't done the DNA yet.
00:12:30.980I am saying that on approximately December 11th, that's when they first got aware of Kohlberger and everything else followed.
00:12:39.940It was the DNA that led the case and allowed them to track everything else down.
00:12:45.300And you see in the public affidavit at the time of the arrest, there's really no mention of the investigative genealogy work that was done.
00:12:55.200And the prosecution would like to keep this all out of the case.
00:12:58.400They say it's irrelevant to how we made our case.
00:13:01.340But the defense, and I think that's a really good case, is saying, show it to us.
00:13:14.580I want to just keep this linear line going so people can follow because it's complex.
00:13:20.240This explains so much because when the case was first unfolding, we were all reading the Howard Bloom updates in airmail like it was, you know, your college admissions letter.
00:13:30.980It was like, you couldn't wait for it to hit.
00:13:34.440And you reported the genetic genealogy.
00:13:39.900Like, we were hearing, yes, they got him thanks to genetic genealogy and DNA.
00:13:44.620But NBC News had this explosive dateline right around that time in which Steph Goss, who's a good reporter, reported that, no, they got him.
00:13:58.180She wasn't disagreeing with anybody specifically, but she was saying we've got how it went down.
00:14:02.200They got him thanks to identification of the white Hyundai Elantra that some eagle-eyed cop who was at the University of Washington where he was a TA saw that this was the car that they were looking for and just on his downtime started searching files and found that they did have somebody at the University of Washington.
00:14:24.660And we do believe that this all happened, but the what actually led to the identification of Kohlberger and when is what we're trying to get to here and said, aha, there's there's one.
00:14:45.140So he sends in the tip or contacts somebody tries to at the FBI to say, I think I might have somebody you should look at, but that they had a big, big stack of white Hyundai Elantra Elantras and it took them a while to get to it.
00:14:59.400But then they did get to it and boom, that's how they eventually figured out it's Brian Kohlberger, bushy eyebrows, eagle-eyed guy over at University of Washington.
00:15:07.340And now it seems in retrospect, this is my opinion, that that very well may have been the FBI telling her that or Moscow police, which didn't know about the FBI, saying, no, that's how we found him.
00:15:21.980And I would agree it was the Moscow police.
00:15:24.960The report is sent on the white Hyundai that the Washington state police, they sent it to Moscow.
00:15:29.860And what they do is they stick it in their file, basically, and it sits there for several days until they get around to it.
00:15:37.780Then the FBI begins following him and then the decision is made to get the confirming evidence they need.
00:15:45.600This is before just days before the arrest, around December 27th.
00:15:49.860They steal garbage from the Kohlberger home and that ties it to his father, but but not to Kohlberger directly.
00:15:57.420The only direct DNA evidence that the prosecution has that was willing to admit on Kohlberger comes from after he's arrested.
00:16:07.640The first thing they do is take a cheek swab of the DNA and then they compare that to the DNA that was found on the knife sheath.
00:16:15.560And that that's when they have they're convinced they have their guy.
00:16:18.520OK, but before that, when they're still because yet the audience remembers there was all sorts of pressure on law enforcement to produce the suspect who did this crime for beautiful, promising Americans were killed on this university campus in the middle of the night.
00:16:38.040Their throat slit, their throat, their them stabbed to death within moments.
00:16:43.860I mean, the whole crime took between like 12 and 18 minutes at most.
00:16:54.520And the suggestion by the defense seems to be the FBI understanding and feeling that pressure when it should have been limited.
00:17:05.460We've had CeCe Moore who invented genetic genealogy.
00:17:08.340She's she's the one who came up with this amazing technique, which has solved a lot of crimes that she told me directly.
00:17:14.520You are only allowed when you're pursuing these leads to access this public database of DNA.
00:17:22.440So if you go and you let's say you go to 23andMe or you go to Ancestry.com or any of these these public companies and you want to get your genealogy and you give them your DNA.
00:17:33.500They're not allowed to share that with anybody.
00:17:36.540But if you say share with everybody or if you go upload your DNA on this public database, then that's different.
00:17:45.660Some people really want it to be everywhere.
00:17:47.120Some some people are like looking for their birth mother and their adopters.
00:17:50.140They want it as in as many places as possible.
00:17:53.220You're using a website, not 23andMe, not Ancestry.com called GED Match.
00:17:58.400And my understanding is the way you populated this GED Match, because you point out you need as many samples on there as possible, is by encouraging people who are into this, who would like to connect with other relatives to take their 23andMe, their Ancestry.com results and upload them to GED Match and to widen the chances that they'll connect with somebody.
00:18:22.440Right. So GED Match was started by two friends of mine, Curtis Rogers and John Olson, back in 2010-11.
00:18:30.220And of course, when it started, there was no one in there.
00:18:33.100So we had to convince people to download their raw data from one of the other sites, which at the time was just 23andMe and FamilyTreeDNA, and upload to GED Match.
00:18:44.080And so it was just a small site, kind of a playground for more advanced genetic genealogists.
00:18:49.640It was where we could try out new tools. We could do cross-company comparisons.
00:18:54.780So if you tested at 23andMe and I tested at FamilyTreeDNA or later Ancestry, we could both upload there for free and then compare our data looking for those long, identical shared segments.
00:19:07.140The public database is more limited in some ways than those private databases, which are more protected.
00:19:15.060And she was saying, you know, it's kind of a frustration that you can't get into those privates, but that's the way it is.
00:19:19.760You're limited as a genetic genealogist to this public database.
00:19:24.720The suggestion here seems to be maybe an overzealous FBI crossed those lines, and I don't know with which company, but crossed those lines in a way that they are not allowed to do.
00:19:38.040Yes, and that's what the defense is trying to get.
00:19:41.660And what's so interesting to me, and again, I'm a layman, I'm not a lawyer like you, but usually if you have your case, you give everything.
00:19:49.860Give the prosecution hands over everything. Let it all be out there.
00:19:53.800Let's not make an issue for the jury. Let them decide.
00:19:56.880Why are they holding this back? What are they holding back?
00:20:00.620They want to keep the investigative genealogy part of the case out of the trial even.
00:20:08.960They say all we're going to use, the prosecution, is after his arrest, the DNA we take from the chief swab.
00:20:15.300And that leaves the situation where you can have a man who's very guilty, who might very well be a monster,
00:20:21.680but there's going to be enough doubts in the jury's mind to maybe let him go, especially in a death penalty case.
00:20:31.080Well, let's talk about that because, you know, it's very interesting to me to think about if the FBI crossed a line,
00:20:36.680which is where the defense is driving, they're saying,
00:20:38.580why wouldn't you just turn over exactly what happened in your genetic genealogy search?
00:20:42.200There's no reason for us to know, for us to not know exactly how you got the name Brian Kohlberger,
00:20:47.080or more specifically, his dad's name. And they won't. They have been fighting this at every step of the way.
00:20:54.380It's very weird. If they didn't do anything wrong, why would you just show it? Just turn it over.
00:20:59.580But they've been, they asked judge, judge. They've been asking, and now they asked the new judge.
00:21:04.140Like, they've been trying at every turn to try to get this info over the FBI or now the prosecution's objections
00:21:11.000because the argument will be, we used to have this in law school. If you obtain evidence through an
00:21:17.560illegal search, you can't use it as the prosecutor. You're, it's, it's barred. You can't violate the
00:21:24.860constitution and just go into somebody's house and search for the murder weapon without having
00:21:29.560a search warrant. That's because people have constitutional rights to privacy, et cetera.
00:21:33.880Your fourth amendment rights. But there's an exception to this rule, which is if you can prove
00:21:42.540it's called inevitable discovery, that we inevitably would have discovered this person anyway, then you
00:21:48.900can get past having your case thrown out and the evidence you're trying to get in, you can potentially
00:21:54.980get it in as well. And this is why, for example, Matt Murphy, who's a 27 year prosecutor in the state of
00:22:03.460California. We've had him on the show a bunch of times. I asked him about this when you broke the
00:22:07.640news, Howard, about this is where the defense is going. This is why Matt Murphy does not think
00:22:12.080this will be an issue for team prosecution. Even if the FBI crossed lines, I'm going to run the
00:22:19.180soundbite standby. Here it is. So you're saying, even if they detected Brian Kohlberger's dad by doing
00:22:28.380something untoward by maybe accessing some database, they shouldn't have the feds and so on,
00:22:34.760that you still like the prosecution's chances because the, they were driving at Brian Kohlberger
00:22:40.800through more than just the DNA on the knife sheath. And it, he would have been inevitably discovered.
00:22:48.900Yes. And you, and the remedy generally for DNA problems like this is you just retest the suspect.
00:22:54.220You know, he can't, he can't change his DNA. His DNA doesn't, doesn't change. There's, there's a whole
00:23:00.180rash of these things and they've been challenged and they have repeatedly been shut down by the courts
00:23:06.600of appeal. And so, you know, the Kohlberger defense team, they're doing what they have to do. I have no
00:23:12.360criticism for them. That's their job is to ensure that their client can spare trial and to present
00:23:17.260whatever issues they can. But they're pretty dramatic about a lot of things that are doing. And I can tell
00:23:22.520you right now, I have, um, that's a, that sounds good. It sounds good, especially to a lay audience
00:23:28.100that, um, his DNA is that the DNA on knife shift on that knife sheath is going to be admitted against
00:23:34.100Brian Kohlberger in that trial. Um, they're not going to be able to successfully suppress it and it will