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Moscow, Idaho

T hey bring Bryan Kohberger up from his cell into the tiny Latah County courtroom, and he sits in the defendant box within spitting distance of the Goncalves and Laramie families.

He’s shackled and clad in orange prison clothes.

He doesn’t turn to look at anyone. His only animated gestures are directed to Anne Taylor, his public defender, who sits easily beside him.

Taylor has long, blond, shiny hair, and everything about her—clothing, posture, and demeanor—exudes a no-nonsense confidence.

If she’s ruffled to be representing America’s most notorious suspect, she doesn’t show it.

Taylor works for the public defender’s office in Kootenai County, where serious crime is far more abundant than it is in Latah County.

(In an irony that will soon come to light, one of her clients was Xana’s mom, Cara Northington.

Taylor avoided the conflict of interest by quietly filing for a withdrawal from Northington’s case.)

Moscow is scarcely unfamiliar territory for Taylor. She attended the University of Idaho’s law school—it’s almost impossible to find a lawyer in the area who didn’t. In fact, the man who gave Taylor her first job is now sitting a couple of feet away from her on the other team: Bill Thompson.

Judge Megan Marshall, the Moscow magistrate, is another part of the cozy UI law graduate circle, and she reads out the charges against Kohberger.

Four counts of murder, one of burglary. She asks if he understands them—he says he does.

She explains that the punishment is either the death penalty or life in prison.

The prosecutor has sixty days to decide which one he intends to pursue.

Judge Marshall sets another court date a few days hence to determine the date for the weeklong preliminary hearing during which the prosecution will lay out its evidence to show grounds for a trial.

Steve Goncalves watches it all go down with a mixture of extreme emotions. He has not been eating or sleeping more than three hours a night. Kristi and Alivea have been telling him they are worried about him.

But it’s tough for him to sit back and watch this guy with the strange eyes and the passive face, considering the fact that he’s alive and Kaylee is dead.

Where is the justice in that?

Steve read Brett Payne’s probable-cause affidavit—it was filed one hour before the court proceedings began—and there’s a lot in it, undoubtedly.

The highlight, clearly, is the DNA found on the snap of the knife sheath.

It’s going to be hard to argue against that.

That’s what his sources in the local FBI are telling him. DNA is the gold standard of evidence.

But Payne’s affidavit says that investigators got to Kohberger’s DNA via his dad’s, so the defense could look for loopholes there—and Steve is worried.

Will the DNA evidence hold up as legitimate and legitimately obtained? Will the defense try to argue that Kohberger’s DNA could have gotten on the knife sheath years before? Steve plans to do his own research on how long DNA could last there.

“I’m told that that version of a Ka-Bar has a special material for the button and it’s copper-based, and that dramatically speeds up the deterioration of the DNA—tests have shown sometimes less than twenty-four hours to the max seven days,” he said.

And what about the lack of an obvious link between Kohberger and the victims?

Kohberger wasn’t part of Kaylee’s circle, so will the lurid speculation that Kaylee had an OnlyFans page or some sort of secret life worsen?

Steve wants to protect Kaylee, be her mouthpiece now that she’s unable to speak for herself.

But Judge Marshall just made that harder.

Ahead of Kohberger’s extradition from Pennsylvania, Judge Marshall imposed a gag order stopping the police, investigators, attorneys, and anyone connected to the investigation from talking to the media. The point of this, obviously, is to protect the investigation.

But a few days later—without any public process or rationale—she refines the gag order to include the lawyers for the victims’ families and witnesses.

Steve doesn’t like this one bit. His attorney, Shanon Gray—and thirty news organizations—filed an appeal.

Steve’s concern isn’t simply that his First Amendment rights are being restricted, though that is a legitimate issue.

It’s that he has seen and felt the harm that occurs when there’s a vacuum in the narrative.

He’s seen all the rumors about Kaylee on Facebook, which Alivea, thankfully, was able to quash.

He’s seen innocent people like Jack DuCoeur falsely accused until the police cleared them.

Now there’s no official check on the rumors and speculation about Kaylee and Maddie other than a trial that could be years away.

Kohberger’s defense can say anything in the courtroom—and Steve is helpless to speak out against it.

“All this misinformation will get out there and then it will just sort of become legend,” he says.

He’s so upset that he stays locked in his home office for hours, glued to internet conspiracies. Concerned, Kristi and Alivea come up with an idea to help him.

They decide to take control of a Goncalves family Facebook page and repurpose it.

Now that Kohberger has been arrested, what had originally been set up to field tips will become a supportive online community, not only for the Goncalves family but also for other families going through similar experiences.

It’s a way, at the very least, to tell the world what they are thinking and feeling—a way to keep Kaylee and who she really was alive in the public imagination.