Murder of Nikki Kuhnhausen

Nikki Kuhnhausen was a 17-year-old transgender girl living in Vancouver, Washington. The Washington Court of Appeals places her encounter with David Bogdanov in the early hours of June 6, 2019. Nikki disappeared that morning. Her remains were found near Larch Mountain in Clark County in December 2019, and investigators determined that she had been killed.

Bogdanov was arrested later that month and tried in Clark County Superior Court. On August 27, 2021, a jury convicted him of second-degree murder and malicious harassment, Washington's hate-crime offense. He was sentenced in September 2021 to 234 months in prison for murder, with a concurrent term for malicious harassment. This account does not repeat degrading language attributed to him during the investigation.

On July 25, 2023, the Washington Court of Appeals otherwise affirmed the convictions and sentence but remanded for the limited purpose of striking community-custody supervision fees. The court's ruling therefore left the convictions standing while requiring that discrete correction. On December 5, 2023, the Washington Supreme Court denied review. Neither action is described as exhausting every conceivable later remedy.

Washington House Bill 1687, signed in 2020 and recorded in the Legislature's official bill history, limits the use of a victim's actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity as a defense to violent conduct. The law is commonly associated with Nikki's case. Its legislative history is context, not a substitute for the court records establishing the date, conviction, and appellate posture.