Change my mind: Searching for reality in Charlie Kirk’s murder case

PROVO, Utah — There were three of them that first day, milling about outside Utah’s Fourth District Courthouse, after failing to secure one of the 14 seats reserved inside for the public. I had taken to calling them the Freedom Ladies; named for their shirts and other merch emblazoned with the word freedom, like the one conservative activist Charlie Kirk had been wearing when he was killed last September at a debate event.

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We agreed to stick to first names as they didn’t trust the mainstream media and said they didn’t know how I’d spin what they would tell me. The Freedom Ladies — Brandy, Jamie, and Hayley, Utahns in their 40s — had each been in the crowd at Utah Valley University, watching Kirk speak when he was shot.

“We’re trauma sisters,” Brandy told me, wrapping her arm around Jamie.

They had driven to Provo this week for the preliminary hearing of Tyler Robinson, the 23-year-old the state has charged with Kirk’s murder. They were there, Jamie told me, looking for answers. The government’s story just didn’t sit right with them: that Robinson found Kirk’s right-wing politics hateful, and so drove 250 miles with his grandfather’s WWII-era rifle and a bunch of bullets etched with internet memes, climbed onto a campus rooftop and shot Kirk in the neck.

Prosecutors would spend the week laying out that case in a small fourth-floor courtroom, using DNA evidence, surveillance video, and several confessions the state alleges Robinson made, to ask a judge to send the case to trial. Robinson has yet to enter a plea.

Outside, the Freedom Ladies — part of a small, passionate crowd of lookie-loos, true-crime junkies, Charlie Kirk fans, and conspiracist creators — were weighing alternative narratives, assembled mostly online, that were unfounded yet felt to them somehow more true: that Robinson had been set up, a patsy in conspiracist speak; or that Kirk’s own organization, Turning Point USA, was involved in his death; or that Israel, perhaps, was pulling the strings. The one thing nearly everyone I spoke to seemed to agree on was that Erika Kirk, Charlie’s widow, was somehow involved — suspect at best. 

“She’s evil,” Jamie said of Charlie Kirk’s widow. 

Rarely do I get to spend a week around people who traffic in conspiracy theories as they’re shown, up close, evidence that flies in the face of their beliefs. While the state made its early case against Robinson, I watched from the jury box, alongside a dozen other reporters who’d landed media seats. And when I wasn’t in the courtroom, I was with the believers: waiting out in the middle of the night beside people camped in the public line, talking during breaks to the members of the public who’d made it inside, trailing conspiracist creators as they lingered in the parking lot after court. I was also searching for an answer to a question of my own: What would change someone’s mind?

* * *

Almost immediately following Charlie Kirk’s killing, the conspiracy theories began. Since the 2012 massacre of school children at Sandy Hook Elementary School, it’s become expected in the face of mass tragedy or high profile shootings that a cadre of fabulists will deny the event outright and spin up a narrative to counter the official ones. But Kirk’s killing widened the audience of people who were willing to believe such things well beyond the usual fringe, to elected officials, popular right-wing influencers, and Kirk’s closest friends and allies. 

Candace Owens, a former Turning Point employee and friend of Kirk, has since led the conspiratorial charge. Less than a week after his death — days after Robinson turned himself in and was arrested for the murder, authorities said — Owens branded herself an investigative journalist and set out on her next crusade: finding out who really killed Charlie Kirk.

Early episodes of her popular online show included “Charlie Kirk Shooting Suspect Charged. Something Isn’t Right…” and “Who Ordered The Hit On Charlie Kirk?”

Owens had been clawing her way back to the spotlight after she was fired by The Daily Wire for veering from culture-war podcasting into open antisemitism and conspiracist content, including a ham-fisted deep dive into the debunked theory that the first lady of France is secretly a man. With the Kirk investigation, Owens’ YouTube audience grew fourfold overnight; her channel now has over six million followers.

Since September, Owens’ theories about Kirk’s death have expanded, and she and much of her rabid audience have decided that the case against Robinson is rigged. Across thousands of podcast episodes and online posts, a network of conspiracist creators — with Owens at the top — has implicated state prosecutors, federal agencies, foreign governments, and TPUSA in a plot against Robinson.

“I know this is controversial,” Brooke Johnson, an Orem native and Utah Valley University graduate, told me around 2 a.m. as she waited in the overnight line for one of the 14 public courtroom seats, “but there are certain questions that Candace has asked that need to be answered.”

Owens dismissed the court proceedings before they began.

“Today the Tyler Robinson show trial begins,” she posted. 

But a preliminary hearing is not a trial. It exists to determine whether the state has enough evidence to move a case forward to trial. And for five days, prosecutors tried to prove it, one exhibit and witness at a time. I watched them from two perspectives: one focused on the evidence and another on what the far-out internet, led by Owens, would make of it. 

The state’s first witness was a campus police officer who had been working an overtime shift on the day Kirk spoke. Officer Christopher Bagley said he saw Kirk being shot, recognized the sound of a rifle, and climbed to the roof of a building with a clean line of sight down onto the stage, where he found a screwdriver and a disturbance in the gravel: the distinct impression, he said, of someone laid out flat, in “sniper position.” 

Prosecutors showed video from campus surveillance cameras they said tracked Robinson — a young man with a slim build and a baseball cap pulled far down onto his brow — as he moved across campus four separate times that day: in his car, arriving in a maroon shirt and shorts, leaving and then returning on foot in different clothes, walking with a heavy limp to conceal a long gun. In the foot age the state played in court, a young man climbs a stairwell, crosses a walkway, rolls over a railing onto the roof, drops into position, and, after the shot that killed Kirk, runs back across the roof and disappears off campus and into the trees. 

Online conspiracists claim the videos showed nothing; they were too blurry, shot too far away. They had been doctored by authorities, some said. Others posited that the videos had been engineered on purpose, using decoys who looked just enough like Robinson to frame him. 

“This is a psyop for the general public,” wrote Jose “Chille” DeCastro under his X account Project Constitution, a self-described YouTube cop watcher turned Kirk conspiracist creator who has been cited by Owens on her show. “The feds and their media lapdogs are trying to convince people this blurry, unidentifiable footage proves Tyler did it.”

Sgt. Jennifer Faumuina of the Utah Department of Public Safety testified that she oversaw the securing of the crime scene and the evidence. Prosecutors showed photos of a rifle wrapped in a towel and stuffed behind a tree near campus, and a spent .30-06 cartridge case — the brass from a fired round — alongside three unfired bullets, each engraved with a message. They showed photos of the same kind of ammunition recovered in a search of Robinson’s home, along with paper targets and a round from his bedroom etched with the words “test shot.” And they showed results of DNA testing that linked Robinson to the screwdriver found on the roof, the towel, the rifle and to a tool prosecutors say Robinson used to scratch the messages into the bullets.

Some online conspiracists have pushed an unfounded theory and framed the rifle as a distraction from the real murder weapon: Kirk’s microphone. 

“We don’t know what Robinson’s actual role was, but Charlie was taken out by an exploding lav mic,” offered Stew Peters, a well-known antisemitic conspiracy theorist. 

Then there were the alleged confessions. The state presented evidence – text messages, a group chat, a physical note, and testimony – that they claim shows Robinson repeatedly confessing to the killing.

“I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk and I’m going to take it,” Robinson allegedly wrote in a note to his boyfriend and roommate, Lance Twiggs.