Page 135

Moscow, Idaho

Y et again, Steve thinks this hearing is a complete waste of everyone’s time.

Payne patiently explains that he deferred to the FBI expert, special agent Nick Ballance, to analyze the phone records and that the PCA (probable-cause affidavit)—no surprise—was put together based on input from the experts at command.

It’s clear from the matter-of-fact way Payne answers Taylor’s questions that he’s describing the workings of a well-oiled investigation—all the different teams and experts do what they do individually, then click together.

But Taylor is looking to exploit any gaps in the machinery.

She homes in on the fact that investigators didn’t create a central inventory for the thousands of hours of video surveillance.

Rather, it’s stored on different thumb drives.

And because he was focused only on the video that was relevant for the PCA, the video with the Elantra in it, Payne doesn’t know where all of it is.

Taylor wants the video they have of I-95, the main route back to Pullman, because the Elantra doesn’t appear in it. (In Payne’s probable-cause affidavit, he was careful not to specify which route Kohberger took from Moscow back to Pullman.)

Steve can see that the defense attorney is looking for any sort of hole.

It’s an absurdly low bar, he thinks.

Worse, though, the technique plants seeds of doubt.

Taylor is “poisoning the audience by saying that there’s no connection, that there’s no video,” Steve said.

“So when she starts doing that shit, I start getting impatient with Thompson and saying, you know, ‘She’s kicking your ass in there and you need to stand up for us.’”

Thompson is trying to push back. He’s told the judge, “The characterization that we are just consciously withholding information to the defense is utter nonsense.”

Indeed, at this point, Taylor concedes, the state has given the defense “a fifty-terabyte hard drive,” more than 13,000 photographs, more than 15,000 video clips from businesses, and more than 8,000 video clips from residences.

But Steve doesn’t think Thompson is doing enough to manage public perception. He’s upset with how Thompson questioned one of the defense’s expert witnesses on April 10.

“You acknowledged, falsely, that Mr. Kohberger allegedly stalked one of the victims. That’s false. You know that to be false,” Thompson said.

The defense expert confirmed that the information was false.

Steve is totally confused.

Maybe Thompson is being strategic, or maybe stalking has some legal definition that Steve isn’t aware of.

But as far as he knows—and Steve knows a lot at this point—Kohberger for sure looked in at the King Road house several times before the night of November 13.

Steve has even gotten hold of a video of a car idling outside it for fifteen minutes.

He isn’t positive, but it looks similar to Kohberger’s.

He’s fairly certain from his own research that Kohberger showed up at the UI cafeteria. And that he was looking up restaurants with vegan options in the area. There’s only one: the Mad Greek, where Maddie and Xana worked.

So how can Thompson say there was no stalking?

“Maybe there’s some rule” around the term stalking, Steve reasons, where “you have to physically communicate. I don’t know…

But I do believe that these victims were selected.

I think he picked them and he monitored them.

He studied them. He hunted them. And every father and mother’s understanding [is that] he stalked them. ”

Meanwhile, in court, he’s got to sit through more mind-numbingly technical testimony from Sy Ray, a cell phone geolocation-data analyst, who says, essentially, there’s stuff missing from the record, and the missing data—about “2 to 3 percent” of the location data from Kohberger’s phone—could be important.

Steve figures he knows a heck of a lot more about cell phone data than this guy. What they should be getting into, Steve thinks, is the trial date.

And Kohberger’s alibi.

In April, Taylor filed papers saying that Kohberger would use an alibi defense.

She wrote that Kohberger “was out driving in the early morning hours of November 13, 2022, as he often did to hike and run and/or see the moon and stars. He drove throughout the area south of Pullman, Washington, west of Moscow, Idaho, including Wawawai Park.”

“What kind of half-baked alibi is that?” Steve said. “I mean, stargazing? Give me a break.”

Why doesn’t Thompson try to get it thrown out as evidence? Steve doesn’t get it. Not least because on the night of the murders, he’s discovered, there was very little visibility.

The hearing ends with the state getting nowhere, as far as he can see. The afternoon session—to talk further about the IGG—is closed.

Steve hears through the grapevine that during the closed sessions, the judge reams out Taylor.

He would have liked to see that.

For the moment, he and Kristi use the only leverage they have: the media.

They issue a statement.

Wasn’t this hearing supposed to address a motion to compel discovery?

How did it evolve into an attack on the probable cause affidavit, the prosecution’s witnesses, training records, and their evidence-gathering techniques?

The court needs to take control of the case and the attorneys involved.

As long as the Court continues to entertain anything and everything at every hearing, the delay will never end.