Netflix director claims timing of Bryan Kohberger’s guilty plea change request is ‘no coincidence’

The director of the new three-part Netflix documentary about the Idaho Murders has spoken out and claimed Bryan Kohberger’s request to change his guilty plea at this time is “no coincidence”. 

Netflix’s The Idaho Murders: College Nightmare arrived in July and tells the shocking story of four University of Idaho college students who were murdered in November 2022. Madison Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, Ethan Chapin, and Xana Kernodle, were fatally stabbed at their home in Moscow, and their killer Bryan Kohberger is currently behind bars. 

Kohberger was sentenced to four consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole plus 10 years after taking a plea deal and pleading guilty to the murders. In court,the judge asked “Are you pleading guilty because you are guilty?” and he confidently replied: “Yes.”

However, on 27th July 2026, just days before the Netflix documentary was released, Kohberger said he wanted to withdraw his guilty plea in a statement to New York Times. “My actual innocence is my truth, and the plea, hinged on by false promises and blatant disinformation, MUST be withdrawn,” he said. 

Credit: Netflix

Two days later, on 29th July, he filed a handwritten petition from the Idaho Maximum Security Prison to withdraw his guilty plea. Prosecutors haven’t responded yet, but Joe Berlinger, the executive producer of The Idaho Murders: College Nightmare, thinks the timing of his statement is no accident.

He told Newsweek he thinks Kohberger made the decision to file a petition after the trailer came out in mid-July, to put the attention back on him.

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“There’s a certain amount of time you have to make that challenge and that clock was starting to run out but I think the timing is no coincidence,” he said. “Netflix trailers get wide pickup… All of a sudden, he’s protesting his plea deal.

“The classic killer like this, they do it because they feel so insignificant in life. This is a way of gaining significance and being talked about.”

Berlinger made a very conscious decision to focus the Netflix documentary on the victims, not Kohberger. “Right from the get-go, we wanted to focus on the victims and we did not reach out to the family,” he said. “We did not want to hear from Kohberger’s family.

“The goal here was to really celebrate the lives of these people and instead of focusing on the killer, we want viewers to recognise just how tragic the robbing of these lives were, and to celebrate who they were in life, not just in death.”

The Idaho Murders: College Nightmare is available on Netflix now. For all the latest Netflix news and drops, like The Holy Church of Netflix on Facebook. 

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