Admitted Idaho murderer Bryan Kohberger should get a new trial and face the death penalty, according to a digital forensics expert hired by the defense who says investigators missed damning evidence against the 30-year-old former criminology PhD student — evidence he told Fox News Digital investigators never properly analyzed or incorporated into the prosecution's case.
Sy Ray is a former Arizona homicide investigator who is now an expert on digital forensics, geolocation and similar data. Kohberger's lawyers hired him as an expert witness for the defense before Kohberger pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty for the home invasion murders of Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Madison Mogen, 21, Xana Kernodle, 20, and Ethan Chapin, also 20.
Kohberger, now serving four consecutive sentences of life in prison without parole, petitioned the court last week to withdraw his guilty plea and seek post-conviction relief, which could send the case to trial — and put the potential death penalty back in play.
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"Bring back the death penalty," Ray told journalist Brian Entin in a new podcast. "I am all for this."
He said he is confident that Kohberger would be convicted and claimed that Kohberger's smartphone data is much more incriminating than was revealed previously when police and the courts unsealed thousands of pages of evidence in the case.
"I 100% believe that the offender, who is Bryan Kohberger — there's no alternative theory in my head at this point," Ray said in the 82-minute episode, which also included Goncalves' parents, Kristi and Steve, and her older sister, Alivea. "I 100% believe he's been in the house before."
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Ray told Entin that the evidence he reviewed shows Kohberger potentially inside the victims' home, or at least in proximity outside, and at other places when they were present prior to the murders.
He told Fox News Digital that he didn't have to address this evidence in his own expert report, filed by the defense in January 2025, because he based it only on the contents of the reports produced by prosecution experts, which left out something called a location database of record, or LOCDBOR report, that he alleges contains damning new information about Kohberger's movements in his semester at Washington State University.
Ray acknowledged that his January 2025 report appears different from his current public comments but said the report evaluated only the prosecution's work product, not the underlying AT&T records he says investigators never mapped.
"My summary of no evidence is based on that work product and the work product that the state had put together at that time," he told Fox News Digital. "I can't put in my defense report, 'Hey, if you guys would just go look at the LOCDBOR report here, you'll solve your case and have a really rock solid case.' But I can put, here are some follow-up items that I would expect you guys to do. And one of those things is you'll see repeated over and over, you have to map all the data. Please go map all the data."
Speaking on the podcast, Ray said the LOCDBOR report contains location data that he believes shows Kohberger stalked the victims. Fox News Digital has not independently reviewed the LOCDBOR report, either, as it is not among thousands of pages of unsealed court documents in the case.
"If you look at those precise measurements, there's probably five that land directly on what would be the living room of the house," Ray told Entin. "Like the latitude-longitude is the physical house itself, and if you put the house back on the map, and you map those, the hits are inside the house."
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"I just want to make sure I understand correctly… because I haven't heard this before — so you're saying, based on the data you saw, the latitude-longitude for Bryan Kohberger's Samsung was in the living room?" Entin asked.
"The AT&T-derived latitude-longitude from the AT&T's network that it estimates a location, it lands in the house — and it's a 25-meter range, so we're talking 75 feet, so it could be anywhere in the house on any floor," Ray said. "It could technically be outside the house, it could [be] on the property, but it's showing in the immediate area. My personal opinion is when I look at those, and I map what's happening before and after and I'm looking at all the other evidence. I think these are accurate locations."
Speaking with Fox News Digital, he said he couldn't be certain that Kohberger actually went inside, but the geolocation data is damning in other ways.
"What's really telling is there's times where he's in that area, and then you'll see one of the victim's phones move over to this little A&W place, and then his phone moves over," Ray told Fox News Digital. "And the idea that, you know, these are just total random and there's no accuracy to it — we're actually seeing phones tracked together."
Ray said on the podcast that his theory is that Mogen was Kohberger's primary target due to the number of times he could trace their phones to similar locations — but he noted later that Mogen was often with Goncalves, and their phones moved together a lot.
"I believe Maddie was the target," he said, adding that repeated "collisions" between their phones placed them in roughly the same area at the same time, including at a Pullman party the first week of school and at the A&W store near the King Road crime scene.
He also flagged what he described as Kohberger's broader "pattern of life," pointing to evidence of stalking before the murders.
Because the state's "work product" didn't use this data, he said, his report only pushed back on what the state's witnesses used, which he said is lacking and missed the phone "collisions" entirely.
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"I am unable to locate any period of time between June 23, 2022 and November 13, 2022 where Mr. Kohberger's mobile device is in the same specific area as any of the deceased's mobile devices," he wrote.
That pattern of life was also broken on the night of the murders, when Ray said he believes the plan to target Mogen went awry and resulted in him fleeing south, where he'd never driven before.
While prosecutors alleged that Kohberger had visited the crime scene a dozen times before the murders and at least once the morning after, they have not pointed to "collisions" with any of the victims the way Ray described in the podcast. In a news briefing after Kohberger's guilty plea, the case's lead investigators said they didn't know who the target was.
"The evidence suggested that there was a reason that this particular house was chosen," said then-Moscow Police Cpl. Brett Payne. "What that reason is, we don't know. We don't know who the target was, and we're not going to speculate on that up here today. But we can tell you that, for whatever reason, Mr. Kohberger chose that residence. Perhaps it's the location, layout, we do not know."
And when they were asked by Fox News Digital if they had a motive, lead investigators replied, "We don't."
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Ray has maintained that investigators missed the evidence and should go back and take another look in case Kohberger's attempt to withdraw his plea and appeal his conviction succeeds.
"They need to get experts who actually know what the hell they're looking at, and they need to rebuild the case now," he said.
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Morgan Wright, another expert on digital forensics who is not connected to the case, said he is skeptical without seeing the LOCDBOR data firsthand.
"Show me the report. Show me the map," said Wright, the host of "Crime: Reconstructed" and the CEO and founder of the National Center for Open and Unsolved Cases. "Don't tell me, show me."
Wright, who has been following the case, said he hasn't seen LOCDBOR references in connection with the investigation prior to the podcast interview.
Ray argues the records speak for themselves if investigators are willing to revisit them.
After Kohberger's guilty plea, Ray said he offered to do a debrief with the FBI to show the evidence he said he found and they missed. He said he got no response, but added that he has presented before hundreds of law enforcement agencies around the country going back to November, he said.
Last week, Kohberger filed a petition for post-conviction relief, claiming he had ineffective counsel from his defense team.
Ray also speculated that Kohberger's post-conviction petition was part of a broader legal strategy by his lead defense attorney Anne Taylor despite the plea agreement's waiver of most appeal rights.
Kohberger pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty.
"This can never be the standard investigation that we see in cases," Ray said. "This can never be acceptable."
However, he said he's confident Kohberger would be convicted anyway at trial — if investigators introduced the evidence he found while working with Taylor.
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"The time is now to start this investigation over," Ray said.
Kohberger had followed other people in the Moscow-Pullman area, he said — a pair of college towns on the border of Washington and Idaho.
"I think he had multiple targets throughout the entire Moscow-Pullman area," Ray said. "Location information and pattern of life is by far the most telling."
Ray said he has no doubt that Kohberger committed the murders.
"If he ever does walk, he will kill again," he said.
Original article source: Bryan Kohberger's former defense expert calls for death penalty, says investigators missed key evidence