Steve Goncalves says his slain daughter’s phone holds the last trace of her life, and authorities still refuse to give it back.
The father of Kaylee Goncalves, 21, appeared on NewsNation Prime on Saturday to detail the family’s four-year struggle to recover the device from investigators. Kaylee was one of four University of Idaho students murdered in November 2022. Her convicted killer, Bryan Kohberger, admitted to the killings but is now attempting to withdraw from his plea deal.
Goncalves told the host that retrieving the phone carries deep emotional weight for the family. “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.”
The host noted that Kaylee’s phone remains the only one of the four victims’ devices still in police possession. Goncalves explained that authorities have told the family they face sustained pressure from true crime community members who question how the investigation 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.
Beyond the delay in returning the device, Goncalves described an active legal battle to protect its contents from public exposure. He said Latah County utilized a program called GrayKey and outsourced the data extraction to a neighboring jurisdiction, a move he said endangered the privacy of Kaylee’s personal information.
“It was going to be a raw dump of Kaylee’s phone, which would have everything,” he explained. “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.”
The interview also addressed Kohberger’s recent legal maneuver. The host asked how the family’s attempt to exit his plea agreement has affected them. Goncalves responded that while experts consider the withdrawal unlikely to succeed, the family is bracing for the worst-case scenario after having hoped to avoid further proceedings.
The conversation turned to the broader pace of the judicial process. Goncalves did not mince words about the family’s experience. “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 directed particular criticism at the ongoing sealing of court records, even after Kohberger entered his plea. “It just seems ridiculous, like the government wants to hide things from the general public,” he added.
Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin were stabbed to death in an off-campus rental home in Moscow, Idaho, in the early hours of November 13, 2022. The killings shocked the small college town and drew intense national media coverage. Authorities arrested Kohberger, a criminology Ph.D. Student at nearby Washington State University, more than a month later. He was linked to the scene through DNA evidence found on a knife sheath left beneath one victim’s body, along with cell phone data and surveillance footage tracking his movements that night.