Mystery Surrounds Bryan Kohberger's Retrial Hearings After Abrupt 11th-Hour Cancelation

Three upcoming court hearings for Bryan Kohberger, who pleaded guilty in the 2022 murders of four University of Idaho students, have been abruptly canceled.

A lawyer for his family says the cancelations aren't the end of Kohberger's effort to withdraw his guilty plea.

"This simply marks the start of a longer post-conviction relief process," said Jason Goldman, a New York attorney representing Kohberger's family.

The first of the vacated hearings was scheduled for Thursday, October 15, and the cancelations came at the last minute, according to reports. The hearing was set to address a motion from Kohberger's new Idaho lawyer, Greg Rauch, asking Judge Steven Hippler to step aside from the case over concerns of potential bias, according to a report.

Two other hearings scheduled for next year were also vacated, and several deadlines over the coming months are expected to change as well. Hippler's amended scheduling order is expected to shed more light on why the hearings were canceled, but it hasn't been made public yet.

In July, Kohberger filed a handwritten motion for post-conviction relief in which he claimed he was innocent. He argued that he received ineffective counsel and was misled into pleading guilty, and he has asked the court to let him withdraw his plea.

Kohberger has also claimed that his family joined the plea negotiations. New court filings claim he struggled to understand legal rulings and make decisions about his defense while he was represented by public defender Anne Taylor and her team.

Kohberger, 31, pleaded guilty in July 2025 to four counts of first-degree murder and one count of burglary as part of a deal that took the death penalty off the table. He was sentenced to four consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole, and he gave no motive or explanation for the killings when he entered his plea. Some of the victims' families opposed the deal at the time and said they wanted the case to go to trial.

Hippler oversaw the case after it was moved from Latah County to Boise. Kohberger is serving his sentence at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution near Kuna, Idaho.

Madison Mogen, 21, Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Xana Kernodle, 20 and Ethan Chapin, 20, were stabbed to death in an off-campus house in Moscow, Idaho, on Sunday, November 13, 2022. Mogen and Goncalves were best friends, and Kernodle and Chapin were dating. Two other roommates who were home that night survived. Kohberger, who was a criminology Ph.D. student at Washington State University about 10 miles away, was arrested six weeks later at his parents' home in Pennsylvania on Friday, December 30, 2022.

With no suspects publicly identified for weeks after the murders, his arrest came as a national surprise. Investigators said they found a Ka-Bar knife sheath with Kohberger's DNA on the snap under Mogen's body, and they tracked his white Hyundai Elantra around the area at the time of the killings. The house where the students were killed was demolished in December 2023.