Episode Details

The State’s rebuttal to defense expert Matthew Noedel focused on challenging the significance of his conclusions about the absence of victim blood or other victim-linked biological material in Bryan Kohberger’s car and residence. Noedel had emphasized that investigators conducted an extensive search of Kohberger’s vehicle and apartment and did not find blood tied to Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle or Ethan Chapin. Prosecutors responded that the absence of detectable victim blood did not establish that Kohberger had not been inside the King Road house, nor did it prove that biological material could not have been removed, degraded or simply never transferred in a recoverable quantity. The rebuttal also cautioned against treating a negative finding as affirmative proof of innocence, arguing that forensic testing can establish what was detected in a particular sample but cannot necessarily reconstruct every transfer event that did or did not occur.

The State also pushed back on Noedel’s interpretation of secondary transfer and contamination issues, arguing that his report went beyond what the laboratory results could reliably support. Prosecutors stressed that transfer of DNA or blood is highly dependent on variables such as the amount of biological material present, the surfaces involved, subsequent cleaning, time, environmental conditions and the way evidence was handled. In other words, they argued that Noedel was using the lack of victim DNA in Kohberger’s vehicle and apartment to suggest a broader exculpatory conclusion that the science itself did not require. The rebuttal was therefore less about disputing the raw laboratory results and more about disputing the inference Noedel drew from them: everyone agreed that victim blood was not found in the car or apartment, but the State argued that this fact alone did not meaningfully exclude Kohberger from the murders or undermine the prosecution’s larger evidentiary case.


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030326+REDACTED+Exhibits+S-1+through+S-13+to+States+Amended+Supp+Resp+to+Rqst+for+Disc+RE+Expert+Testimony.pdf