‘YOU COULD HEAR THE SOBS OF A WIDOW’: Inside Charlie Kirk’s Murder Trial

The following is an excerpt of Daily Signal Politics Editor Bradley Devlin’s interview with Ryan Helfenbein, a friend of Charlie Kirk who attended the preliminary hearings in the case against the accused assassin Tyler Robinson, for the “Signal Sitdown,” which premieres on the Daily Signal’s YouTube page at 6:30 a.m. EDT on July 16.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Bradley Devlin: Before we jump into the emotion of that day, the courtroom, the video evidence, the DNA, the controversy, tell us a little bit about your relationship with Charlie Kirk and Trinity Road. 

Ryan Helfenbein: Yeah. So I met Charlie Kirk in 2019. I’ve been at Liberty University for seven years and at the beginning we were working professionally with one another. 

He was the co-founder of the Standing for Freedom Center, which I’m the founding executive director of. I met him back then when he was about 24, almost 25 years old and got to know him over a period of several years. And Charlie has many friends. 

He was a stranger to almost no one. There are probably 1,000 people I could point to that on a daily, weekly, monthly basis that he was texting, that he was engaged in conversation, sharing Bible verses with. I was one of those guys. And we stopped working together in 2021 closely, but we remained friends. 

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We were at conferences together. He would appear on our podcast from time to time. And then, of course, every year I was involved in at least one, if not two, Turning Point events. And I’ve known him for a long time.

Erika Frantzve, that’s Erika Kirk’s maiden name. Erika I met in 2019 as well, and she was dating, wasn’t yet engaged to Charlie, but got to know her really well going all the way back then. 

And, in a way, a friend of the family having known them before they got married and then after they got married had interactions with them, for the past several years. And I’ll add this thing. I was with Charlie on September the 5th. 

That was the last time I saw him. I was in South Korea. We were both speaking at the same conference together. On September the 10th, when I was in a group text with many pastors and Charlie was in that group thread. I think the last thing I saw from him in that group thread was around September the 10th or September the 9th, something like that, September the 8th. 

But just asking for prayer, “Hey, I’m going to be on the road. I’m going to be going to these campuses. Hey, pray for me. Pray for my safety.” Of course, when somebody had, in that thread said shot had been fired at Utah Valley, I immediately had texted Erika Kirk and said, “I don’t know what’s happened, but sister, I’m praying for you, praying for God’s protection over you and over Charlie—just want you to know that.”  

And her response was, “I don’t know whether my husband is alive or dead right now.” And that was just a haunting thought. And so, I’ve walked through some of this with them. No one can know. It’s unimaginable to think what she had experienced. And I think there are people out there that do not have the best interests of everyone at heart. 

They’re malicious and they’re in it for themselves, rather narcissistic. And they’ve been peddling a lot of dangerous and reckless ideas that have no grounding or basis in reality or truth. So we can talk about some of those things. 

But I was invited by Erika just to come sit with the family, to be a friend, not to be some professional podcaster, a reporter, just a friend. 

And so I got to be there just to do that in support of her and the family. 

Bradley Devlin: So you were invited by Mrs. Erika Kirk to come to that courtroom in Utah. Liberty University is in Virginia. You had to make your way out there. Before we talk about what was presented in that room, set the scene for us. 

You get there, from what I’ve heard, the room is pretty small, there’s cameras and security all over the place. Take us to the point where you’re sitting in the pew. 

Ryan Helfenbein: There was a lot of security. You had to go past security gates. There’s a lot of things you’d have to leave back at the car or the hotel room in order to get in there. It’s a lot like TSA getting on a plane. And we assembled as a friends-and-family group in another room, and then at the appropriate time we were summoned into that room and filed in. 

And of course, it is a small room as you describe. Yes, heightened security on multiple sides, on both sides of the room armed security. There was county law enforcement there, but multiple in the room and then outside the room as well. As every trial goes, a public hearing, you have the prosecution, you have the defense, you have a victim representative. 

In this case, it’s Mrs. Kirk, and then all of her friends and her family with her. You have the defense team defending the accused, Tyler Robinson. So he is afforded the opportunity to also invite friends and family of himself to come. And so of course his parents were there, his brothers were there. 

There were other family members. I believe an uncle was there. The decorum in that room is very respectful. It’s very solemn. It’s quiet. You could hear a pin drop in the room. The tiniest crinkle of a wrapper sounds loud, right? When you shuffle in your seat and you hear the creak of the wood in the pew, it’s loud. 

When the judge comes in, we do all the things and the obligatory readings of different things about how decorum is conducted. 

Let me just say this. This is the part that’s unforgettable. When a testimony is offered, everyone is listening on bated breath. Everybody is waiting to hear what each witness has to say. Everybody’s waiting to see displayed on the screen that evidence.

Most people do not dare to speak or to whisper to their neighbor except when only absolutely necessary, and that’s because literally whoever’s sitting in front of you or behind you can hear everything you’re saying. 

It’s one of those things, it’s more quiet than a church, okay?

But here’s the most haunting thing, Bradley. It’s hearing the sobs of a widow, and there’s evidence, truth is being presented, the facts are coming out. But to hear a widow who’s sitting to your left just a few folks down from you, the haunting thing is to hear her cry. 

And it’s because she’s having to relive that experience. She’s having to see it. She’s gotta see it. This is part of what it is. She has a constitutional right in the state of Utah as a victim to see that evidence presented in that courtroom.

And there was a lot of those arguments were presented by the state because the defense, interestingly enough, and this is really important for any listener to understand, it was not that the prosecution was saying the evidence must not get out. 

It was the defense team saying, “We don’t want this evidence to get out there in the public because we don’t want to prejudice a potential jury pool.” The only reason you’d say that is because the evidence is so overwhelmingly damning. And yes, it’s not just these inanimate objects and crime scene photographs of just little things—like a screwdriver sitting on the ground or an empty holster. 

It goes beyond that. There’s another dimension where this is the husband you lost. This is the father to your children. His life was violently taken from him. You will not on this side of eternity, you will not see him again. And so, all of that culminated in that moment, the quiet room, people, in that environment. 

You could hear a pin drop, you could hear the crinkle of a wrapper, you could hear the sobs of a widow. 

And that’s what I will never forget. 

Bradley Devlin: Did you have any expectations about what you would learn that we didn’t already know beyond the ‘Bella Ciao’s’ on the bullets and the text messages and stuff like that? 

Ryan Helfenbein: Okay. So that’s a great question, and I’m probably going to give the answer you might not expect. Honestly, I have a day job. I’m a friend of the family. I’m somebody who has known Erika and Charlie for such a long time, but I do have a day job, right? I don’t spend a lot of time on social media. 

I have to have people tell me of the crazy things that are being said on social media. Life is really busy. I have a wife, I have four kids, I have a life in Virginia. This matters to me. I dropped everything to go. This matters to me. I’m not a paid contributor of Turning Point. 

I’m not getting paid for this interview. I’m not getting paid to go out there. This was my own personal trip. I took personal time to do it. I did it on my own dime.

But I didn’t have expectations, and the reason I didn’t have expectations, because I’m literally not attuned to the daily things that are happening, all the nonsense online. 

So I wasn’t automatically thinking, wow, like Egyptian planes and exploding microphones and all of that nonsense. I only learned about that, some of that stuff while I’m there because we’re having conversations in the room about some of the noise and the craziness, the lunatics online. 

So literally, Bradley, I’m going in with just an open mind. I want to hear all the evidence. I think, just reasonably, that the accused, they have the right man. Just because of all the state and federal agencies that have to sign on to this process, they don’t just pick people at random and put them on trial. 

That’s not how any of this works, right? So I’m going in with not a lot of expectation other than I’m going to hear some things.

Let me say what I did, to your question, just the big reality of all of this. There are so many layers. There’s other cases that you can go look, you could Google this, Grok it, if you will, where all that was needed was, maybe one eyewitness testimony, some kind of bloody thumbprint and the tire tracks, and this person gets convicted for murder. 

This is not that. This is the kind of case where, and soon enough we’ll probably have evidence of not only what the text messages were, but where the cellphone actually was geographically according to triangulation and GPS. There’s so many elements of this that are multilayered that are unmistakably clear. 

There’s an attorney. Her name is Andrea Burkhart. She wrote this the other day, and it was exactly as I had witnessed in the courtroom. You have a testimony that is from Lance Twiggs. You have people saying, “I don’t want to believe his testimony.” All right. Just believe his phone, okay? 

Because we know when the text messages are sent. We can prove that they were sent at such and such a time. We know what the Discord chat was. We know at what time that happened. We can prove all of that.

In his testimony, Lance says, yes, he did it. We can prove it by—based on the text. So if you don’t want to believe him, believe his cellphone. 

Those things comport with one another. But this is the other thing. In the text message and in the testimony of Lance Twiggs, Tyler is going back to the scene of the crime around midnight, a little bit after. 

So it would’ve been September the 11th, right? The day changes over. And he is looking for where he had placed his gun in the bushes. There is video that shows an approximately, there’s something that happens because they can see in this video that he ran over there. And so it looks like he dropped something there. They go look and search for it. 

Here’s the interesting thing. 

He says in the text message, also in the testimony of Lance Twiggs, the exact description of what that gun was. It was a Mauser 1938, 88-year-old rifle. It belonged to his grandfather. He, under the auspices of, “I’m borrowing it for a hunting trip,” he took that rifle to Utah Valley University. He describes exactly how he left it, that it was covered in a towel. 

Forensics show the DNA of both Lance Twiggs and prominently the DNA of Tyler Robinson on that towel. But he described in the text messages he needs—trying to find it, and in frustration he can’t.

Guess what? They uncovered it. They found it. They were able to look for it, find it, photograph it, submit it as evidence. 

It went into the chain of custody and all of that around, I think, 6:00 earlier that day. So it had been gone. It had been already removed from that spot six hours earlier. That thing was already gone. He realizes at that moment there’s no turning back. They have his rifle, and they are going to catch him because they know who, they’re going to be able to determine who that rifle belonged to. 

And so that was the moment. And then along, of course, his parents being able to identify him in those videos that was their son, and then Tyler in his own confession … Or excuse me, Lance in his own confession, Lance Twiggs saying, “Yeah, that looks like Tyler.” 

There’s so many layers to how all of these things connect, and the interesting thing is the defense couldn’t do anything. 

And they didn’t object to these things. The only thing they did was to say, “Your Honor, we don’t want to play certain aspects of this video.”

Now this is my summation of what they were saying, but because some people will construe it, Bradley, as a confession. And so they didn’t want to show all of that because it was so damning, so obvious, so clear, so incontrovertible that no one in their right mind would begin to doubt it. 

And they’re concerned now about the potential of tainting a jury pool. But there’s a lot of people that don’t pay attention to this evidence, including the ride-or-die people that have surrendered their own common sense to charlatans online.