That total included any police investigative work on the homicides, ISP spokesperson Aaron Snell, who relocated to Moscow to assist with public communications for most of the investigation, told the Statesman by phone. “It’s any expense that supports the work, the majority of which were indeed the travel and the forensics services — the testing.”

Those expenses exclude any costs to the FBI, which assisted with the case. As a matter of policy, the federal agency does not comment on how it pursues specific cases, including the associated costs, FBI regional spokesperson Sandra Barker said in an email to the Statesman.

Since 2021, the state has had a contract with Othram, a private lab in Texas, for forensic genetic testing services. Othram has helped Idaho solve three cold cases in that time and is assisting on other active cases, Matthew Gamette, ISP’s forensic lab services director, said in an email to the Statesman.

Law enforcement and prosecutors have never identified Othram by name for work on the Kohberger case, including investigative genetic genealogy, or IGG. But records the Statesman obtained revealed that Othram billed ISP $5,000 in November 2022 for the rushed service, which entailed submitting crime scene DNA to publicly accessible ancestry websites to develop suspect leads.

The FBI eventually took over the advanced police technique that has run into constitutional rights questions.

Latah County Prosecutor Bill Thompson acknowledged six months after Kohberger’s arrest that IGG was employed to initially lead detectives to him as the suspect. Police made no mention of IGG in the probable cause affidavit for Kohberger’s arrest.

Another invoice record detailed the costs of the autopsies. Latah County Coroner Cathy Mabbutt had the Spokane County Medical Examiner’s Officer conduct the examinations of the four victims, including toxicology. The four autopsies were considered “complex” because they required more time than a standard case, Mabbutt said in an email to the Statesman, and the total cost came to $9,600, according to an invoice dated three weeks after their deaths.

Early into the investigation, Gov. Brad Little pledged up to $1 million in emergency funds to backfill costs to ISP and the city police force for each agency’s dedication of expanded resources to the high-profile homicide case. Total reimbursements reached about $435,000 from the governor’s fund, between ISP and Moscow police, said Emily Callihan, Little’s spokesperson.

U of I takes brunt of costs

The U of I has taken on the greatest known financial burden to date from the quadruple-homicide. The university has spent more than $1.6 million on direct impacts from the deaths of the four students, university spokesperson Jodi Walker told the Statesman.

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