Dad of Idaho murder victim shares update on efforts to get daughter's phone back from authorities
Nearly four years after Kaylee Goncalves was murdered, her family is still pressing authorities to give back her phone.
Kaylee, a 21-year-old University of Idaho student, was killed in November 2022.
Her father, Steve Goncalves, explained why getting the device back means so much to the family when he appeared on NewsNation Prime on Saturday.
“It has the last moments of her life, all photos we’ve never seen, videos we’ve never seen,” he said. “It’s her journal, you know, it’s her journal of her last moments on the planet. And if anybody, you know, deserves it, I think it’s us, and we’d like to get it back.”
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Kaylee’s convicted killer, Bryan Kohberger, admitted to murdering her and three of her friends. He is now attempting to withdraw from his plea deal, which the host raised alongside the family’s struggle to retrieve the phone.
Why hasn’t Kaylee Goncalves’ phone been returned?
The host asked Goncalves why authorities have not returned the phone, noting it is the only one still in their possession.
Goncalves said authorities have told the family they have come under ‘a lot of pressure’ from members of the true crime community who doubt how the process was handled.
“And so they want to use this phone as like a last-moment stand of finding some kind of connection that they weren’t able to establish beforehand,” he said.
The host acknowledged the family’s frustration before asking how they have tried to keep the phone’s data private.
Goncalves said the family has waged a legal fight, and that the county used a program called GrayKey and outsourced the process to a neighboring jurisdiction. He said the arrangement put the sensitive data at risk of becoming public.
“It was going to be a raw dump of Kaylee’s phone, which would have everything,” he said. “It would literally, you could restore that on a phone and have Kaylee’s phone as if it was—as if you took her phone.”
Can Bryan Kohberger take back his plea deal?
The host asked how the news of Kohberger’s attempt to exit the deal has affected the family. Goncalves said experts consider the withdrawal unlikely to succeed, but the family is preparing for the worst-case scenario and had hoped to avoid the process.
The host then asked whether the judicial process feels as though it is being dragged out.
“It’s almost like it feels like they’ve done everything to make it torture and to push us as long as they could to piecemeal,” he said.
He also criticized the continued sealing of court records long after the plea was entered.
“It just seems ridiculous, like the government wants to hide things from the general public,” he said.
UNILAD has approached Latah County Prosecutor's Office for comment.
Topics: True crime, Bryan Kohberger, Crime, US News
Thomas Bamford