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Moscow, Idaho

S teve is praying as he takes his seat in the gallery of the courthouse: Let’s get a date. Let’s get a date.

To the Goncalves family, attempting to set the trial date is beginning to feel like Groundhog Day.

Anne Taylor seems to be winning every tactical battle.

Each time, she presents a consistent visual: Kohberger sits up at the front, suited and stone-faced, next to Taylor and her colleague Elisa Massoth as the defense attorneys debate what evidence might and might not be admissible at a trial.

Each time, Taylor is the star of the show. She’s on her feet talking and raising questions more often than any other lawyer in the room. Thompson barely says anything.

And the judge, as far as Steve can see, bends over backward to accommodate Taylor.

Last month, Steve, Kristi, and Shanon finally held an in-person meeting with Bill Thompson and his team, and they vented their frustrations about the lack of progress.

“We beat up on Thompson a little bit,” Steve said.

“On Friday [the judge] asked, ‘What can I do to make sure that we get this case done before 2025? What would I have to do?’ And Thompson said, ‘You got to start setting dates.’ And at the end of that court, what did he do? He didn’t set a date.

And we’re like, ‘That’s your fault, Thompson. ’”

Today, after yet another back-and-forth about how much of the IGG discovery the defense wants—Taylor asks the judge to allow three unnamed criminal investigators working for the defense to access the material—the meat of the session, finally, is a heated argument about a trial date.

Steve is hopeful at the outset of the dialogue.

John Judge and Thompson want to set it for March 3, 2025. But Taylor pushes back, managing to sound simultaneously calm and exasperated.

“Death is different,” Taylor says.

The words punch Alivea Goncalves in the gut.

Taylor continues, “This is a capital case. I’ve heard the court say the court only wants to do it once and I’ve heard the court ask what I can do to speed things up.”

She pauses.

“I need discovery. I need all of the discovery… when I ask for something I need to get it rather than have to go back and ask and ask and ask again.

“And I’m not trying to be mean about Bill Thompson,” she says, looking directly at her former boss. “I’m just not. I think he tries his very best.”

She blames the problem on agencies like the FBI, who, she says, hand things over piecemeal. “It’s like if you wanted to play fifty-two-card pickup with a hundred thousand decks of cards and throw them in the air, and I have to go figure out how to put them together.”

She wins the hour. No trial date is set. The judge adjourns with a further hearing scheduled for May to discuss a venue change.

Steve can barely believe it.

“So here we are stuck in this situation and we have a judge and a prosecution that’s supposed to be defending us, acting like the biggest victim, and just keeps making us feel like a victim over and over.

Every time we go into the courtroom, he just sits there and just lets her hit him and lets her dictate everything that’s going to happen. It’s so frustrating.”

Steve feels he has got to do something—anything—to change the momentum. He’s going to keep doing his own digging. If no one else can get a break in the case, he will.

“The discovery hasn’t closed. If we do find something that they don’t have, then they’re going to have to put it in the case. And I don’t care if they don’t like the fact that somebody else found it that isn’t part of Idaho… I don’t know what kind of world we live in where we hide the truth.”