An Idaho judge has ruled that prosecutors must turn over “a portion” of the genetic genealogy evidence used to link a 29-year-old man to the killings of four University of Idaho students in 2022.
The suspect, who is not being named by The Daily Wire due to a policy on mass killers, has been arguing with the court to have prosecutors turn over investigative genetic genealogy (IGG) for months. Last week, District Court Judge John Judge ordered prosecutors to turn over some of that evidence, Newsweek reported.
“The court has now completed its review of the information provided by the state and orders the state to discover to the defense a portion of the IGG information,” Judge ruled, according to the outlet. “The specific material to be provided is set forth in a sealed order to protect the privacy of the IGG information, including individuals on the family tree.”
The suspect’s attorneys are seeking to discredit the DNA evidence, which linked the suspect to the crimes.
The suspect has been charged with four counts of murder and one count of burglary relating to the killing of Ethan Chapin, 20; Kaylee Goncalves, 21; Xana Kernodle, 20; and Madison Mogen, 21, in the early morning hours of November 13, 2022, in the college town of Moscow.
Prosecutors have argued that they didn’t need to turn over detailed information about how genetic genealogy was used to link the suspect to the crimes since a DNA sample provided by the suspect directly matched DNA found on a knife sheath found at the crime scene. The genetic genealogy wouldn’t be used at trial, prosecutors argued.
Once police had their suspect, they tracked him to his parents’ house in Pennsylvania and collected garbage from the trash cans outside. They obtained DNA that partially matched the DNA collected from the knife sheath, indicating they had the DNA of the suspect’s father. Collecting DNA from the suspect later directly linked him to the sheath. The sheath was found on a bed next to Goncalves and Mogen’s bodies, partially under one of them. The type of knife the sheath held would have been consistent with the knife used to murder the four victims.
Anne Taylor, the defense attorney, has repeatedly argued that the prosecution had not provided full DNA information from the crime, CBS News reported.
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“They have provided full DNA discovery for the sheath, the knife sheath, but not the other three unidentified male DNA samples,” she told the judge in August, referring to DNA from three men she said was found at the off-campus residence in Moscow, Idaho.
Prosecutors countered at the time by saying they had turned over everything they had.
“We have given the defense everything that we have received from the lab. They’ve asked for DNA work-ups on other people. To the extent that they don’t have them, they weren’t done,” Latah County Prosecuting Attorney Bill Thompson argued. “We can’t produce something that doesn’t exist.”
In July, the suspect’s defense attorneys claimed that their client’s DNA may have been planted at the scene by police but could not explain why he would have been targeted for the crime.
In a June court filing, the suspect’s other attorney, Jay Weston Logsdon, filed a motion objecting to the prosecutor’s attempts to avoid turning over a detailed breakdown of how authorities used genetic genealogy to link the accused to the murders. Logsdon wrote in the motion that investigators found DNA from three other men in the off-campus residence where Chapin, Goncalves, Kernodle, and Mogen, were murdered. DNA from two men was found inside the house, while DNA from a third man was found outside the home on a glove, the filing says, according to Inside Edition.
None of the three reported samples match the suspect’s DNA, though it is unknown when this particular DNA was left at the home, which was the location of frequent parties.
The suspect and his attorney say these DNA samples were never run through the national DNA database to find a match.