According to recent court documents, Kohberger filed a petition to withdraw his guilty plea and challenge his conviction, claiming that he was “convinced to falsely confess” by “ineffective assistance of counsel.” Once I was able to actually read his filing, I genuinely wanted to just laugh,” she told Vanity Fair the day after Kohberger’s petition to take back his guilty plea. As part of his guilty plea, Kohberger avoided a high-profile quadruple murder trial and the inevitable social media fervor that would come with it. Almost seven weeks after the crime, genetic genealogy linked DNA on a knife sheath to Kohberger, a PhD student in criminology at nearby Washington State University. Now, Kohberger says he was coerced into a confession, reopening a wound from which Alivea and the rest of the victims’ families had tried to heal.