On November 13, 2022 death visited a house in Moscow, Idaho.
The house was home to five female University of Idaho students. It was also a well-known party house. Successive waves of fun-loving and exuberant young women had passed through the house. Naturally, they were accompanied by even bigger waves of fun-loving, exuberant young men and women looking for a place to drink, socialize and look for the kind of things that college students look for.
On the night of November 13, six people were in the house – the five residents and a boyfriend of one. Four of them never saw dawn. A little after 4 am, someone massacred three women and the boyfriend.
The two survivors, by and large, slept through the killings. One was woken up by some noise. She shouted for her housemates to keep it down. Things went silent. The young woman looked out her bedroom door to see a man walking – apparently nonchalantly – through the living room. He was wearing a mask. The woman closed her bedroom door and went back to bed. A stranger in the common area was not uncommon (it was, after all, a party house) and many people were still COVID conscious in late 2022.
When the two unmurdered women woke up late on a Saturday morning, they discovered their house had been turned into a charnel house. So much blood had been spilled that it was trickling down the outside wall beside the deck. The traumatized women called a few friends, who contacted the police.
Nothing like this had ever happened in Moscow, Idaho before. It was a town with a permanent population of about 15,000; numbers doubled during the academic year at the University of Idaho. The primary duties of the small police force were visiting party houses to tell drunken students to keep the noise down (the house where the murders occurred had been visited several times during the fall) and forlornly trying to enforce legal drinking age laws. The last murder had been seven years earlier. On the night of November 12/13, more people were murdered than the cumulative total since the end of the Vietnam War.
It was a huge story. Reporters and social media pundits converged on the town to demand answers and report on speculation. The police did not have much to tell them – and what they could have told, they did not tell. We’ll say more on that in a moment. Anyways, police immediately were subjected to huge amounts of criticism for not immediately solving the crime. But it is not as if they were not trying. The local police department was reinforced by hundreds of state police officers and FBI agents. While no stone was being left unturned, no accusation of police incompetence was being left unhurled.
Suddenly, seemingly out of the blue, on December 30, 2022 police announced an arrest had been made. In Pennsylvania.
Despite all the ink spilled and video broadcast about police inactivity and incompetence, it had only taken them 47 days to identify a suspect and gather enough evidence for an arrest. The case never went cold.
The Investigation and the Accused
The person arrested and charged was a guy named Byran Kohberger. He was a Ph.D. student in Criminology at the nearby Washington State University (WSU). It appeared that his area of research was investigating how serial killers got away with their crimes. I am a member of some criminologist Facebook groups. There was a lot of nervous and cautious commentary dancing around the question on everybody’s mind: “Had this guy started studying criminology to learn how to get away with murder?”
A recently published book called While Idaho Slept: The Hunt for Answers in the Murders of Four College Students, J. Reuben Appelman, outlines the 47 days of intense police work that solved the case.
We can characterize the investigation as pursuing two streams: looking for motive and looking at the crime scene.
The first was a dry hole. The second solved the case.
As they do in every homicide case, the police cast suspicious eyes at the victims and everyone associated with them. They found none of the standard motives that we have come to expect. There were no jealous boyfriends or abusive exes. No drug deals gone bad. No simmering, lingering quarrels. The people last seen with the victims in public could demonstrate they had gone different directions and were in different places at the time of the killings. The police could not solve the crime by looking at the victims and their lives – because nobody had any rational reason to kill any one of these four people, let alone all of them.
That left the investigation of the crime scene and the surrounding area. As documented by Appelman, there things led the police to Kohberger:
Closed Circuit TV (CCTV) surveillance cameras. Police obtained video from hundreds of CCTV cameras in the area and watched thousands of hours of (mostly nothing happening) video. They discovered that a white Hyundai Elantra was seen driving back and forth on the road in front of the house on the night of the murder. It then filmed leaving the scene in a hurry. A matching vehicle was seen at WSU. It belonged to Kohberger.
DNA. The police found the sheath of a K-Bar military knife on the crime scene. It had male DNA on it. There was no matching DNA in the justice system data banks, but the police gave the profile to family ancestry DNA companies. They reported the DNA came from the Kohberger family tree. Later, the police obtained a discarded coffee cup used by Kohberger’s father. DNA analysis said the crime-scene DNA came from a son of Kohberger’s father. Kohberger had no brothers.
Cell phone location tracking. This was put together after the CCTV and DNA evidence pointed the finger at Kohberger. His cell phone provider gave the police (in response to warrants) data on the movements of Kohberger’s cell phone. Before the murders, Kohberger made several trips in which he drove past the house where the murders later occurred. On the night of the murders, Kohberger’s phone started travelling towards the house. It was then turned off, so tracking ended. A few hours later, the phone was turned on again. It was travelling on a route from Moscow towards Kohberger’s home. Later in the morning, the phone again travelled from Kohberger’s home to the crime scene and back. Police inferred that Kohberger had been scouting the location and then wanted to see what happened.
That was the crux of the case at the time Kohberger was arrested. Appelbaum reports that some additional evidence has been found post-arrest, but that is irrelevant for our purposes. What we can say is:
It seems like a pretty impressive piece of police work, and
If Kohberger is guilty, he would likely have gotten away with the crime thirty years ago. The CCTV, DNA, and cell phone evidence would not have been available to investigators.
One other point. If Kohberger was guilty, police were dealing with a very sophisticated, forensically aware killer. If guilty, he put a lot of thought and effort into evading detection. For example, when arrested in Pennsylvania, he was putting his own coffee cups in baggies for disposal separate from his family’s trash. In the event police were watching, he was not going to carelessly give them a sample of his DNA.
Police are almost always blamed if they do not catch killers. This reflexive accusing the cops of indifference or incompetence when an investigation seems stalled overlooks how hard some killers work to avoid detection. If clues are not found, it is often because they were not there to be found.
Publicity and Homicide Investigations
I came across Appelman's book while browsing the shelves of the Chapter’s bookstore in Regina. I was surprised to see it, since I (correctly) believed that Kohberger’s trial had not occurred. The publication of a book on the case seemed early. A true crime book of this nature, at this point in the legal proceedings, would likely not appear in Canada.
I have to confess that I had mixed emotions to the book. I have some misgivings about it. This is not the result of the book’s quality. Appelman did an excellent job in a short period of time. The book is well researched and well written. It is a good book.
Further, Appelman is clearly conscious of the ethical issues inherent in the book and does his level best to deal with them ethically.
But I am still a bit troubled.
The first issue is timing.
Appelman does a really good job of describing the excellent police work that went into the identification of Kohberger as the suspect. These sections of the book are a fascinating look at a complex and sophisticated investigation.
Here’s my first concern.
Appelman convinced me that Kohberger is guilty.
Now, it does not matter that he convinced me that the guy is guilty. I will never serve on an Idaho jury. I will never have anything to do with Kohberger or the case. But it will matter for some people. My guess is that the book will be a best seller in Idaho (as it deserves to be based on the quality of the book). Most people reading the book will be convinced that Kohberger is guilty. This could make jury selection even more difficult than it would normally be. The book could help create jury members who enter the case predisposed to convict. If Kohberger is innocent, the book could contribute to a wrongful conviction.
But that is not the main reason that parts of the book made me uncomfortable.
Here’s my more important concern.
I now know things that I should not know about the victims, the members of their families, and people who were close to the case but in no way involved in the murders. I now know, for example, about the addictions problems of the mother of one of the victims – along with an understanding of her arrest record.
Quite frankly, it is none of my business.
Again, it does not matter that I know this stuff. I’ll never meet the woman. But people in her community will meet her. Publicity about the difficulties in her life so far will harm her ability to live the rest of it.
Just as the police do when investigating a homicide, Kohberger starts with the lives of the victims. Motives, in both cases, are noble.
Police understand that most killers have some sort of relationship with the victim. A lot of homicides are solved by discovering who had motive to kill. Discovering this motive involves a forensic investigation of the victim’s life. This is a necessary, but ugly process. Every disreputable secret must be exposed because these often provide the key to unlocking the mystery. Family members, friends, and acquaintances of the victim are, in their moment of most intense grief, subjected to the very unpleasant experience of being treated as a suspect. Every aspect of their life is poked and prodded until the police become satisfied they are innocent of murder. In this process, the police will uncover a lot of secrets about people. Who is having an affair? Who has addictions problems? Who is not getting along with their spouse? Who committed a criminal offence twenty years earlier? In investigating the murder, police learn these secrets. It is an ugly, painful process. The only saving grace is that the police do not actually care about all this stuff except as it might relate to the murder. By and large, the police try to keep these secrets as private as possible.
The problem is that we – those for whom the investigation is a spectator sport – want to know these secrets. They are titillating. The provide fodder for gossip and speculation. We develop theories and speculate on who is guilty. We reach incredibly stupid conclusions based on fragments of real or imagined information.
In a case such as the murder of the four college students, the combination of the necessary unearthing of secrets and the public’s prurient desires for knowledge does a lot of damage. Appelman does a good job of documenting and describing the activities and effects of hundreds (yes hundreds) of people wanting to report and speculate about the case. Family members, in their hour of grief, had to go into hiding to escape the mob of inquisitors. People tangentially associated with the case – such as a bartender who served drinks to two of the victims earlier in the evening – became publicly identified as possible killers. Their lives and activities were examined, reported on, speculated about, and judged. The two women living in the house who survived the attack were subjected to extra-special treatment. How, the media and social media mob wanted to know, could they have just slept through the attacks? How come the killings were not reported until long after dawn? Why did they behave as they did? In this kind of examination, every explanation is second-guessed and deemed to be a clue – no, proof – of guilt.
It can get truly bizarre. Appelman tells of how one of the surviving housemates was pronounced as implicated in the killings. The evidence? A few weeks after the murders, the young woman was photographed walking to Starbucks while wearing short pants. This, said the so-called internet detectives – was highly suspicious. Who would wear short pants in Idaho in December except someone who might be a killer?
As a final demonstration of the absurdity of this activity, the woman in the picture was not the survivor. It was her sister.
So here is my point of queasiness about the book. Just as he did a great job describing the police investigation, Appelman does a great job of describing the media and social media piranha attack on those standing in the investigatory river.
But I wonder.
Was he doing the same thing, albeit in a much more restrained, accurate, principled way?
The first half of the book is a description of the lives of the victims. He explains what the path was that led them to be laying in the bed they were killed in, on the night of the killing. This includes, for example, detailed analysis of the young women’s levels of intoxication and behavior on preceding nights based on the bodycam recording of police officers visiting the house to order that parties get toned down.
But if the police theory of the crime is right (and it probably is), all of this had nothing to do with the people being murdered.
So why does the reader have to know about it?
The police invade the privacy of the victims for the noble motive of solving the crime. I think Appelman also has a noble motive. I think he is trying to show the humanity of the victims; to portray them as more than a prop in a whodunnit murder. I think he is trying to impress on the reader the nature of the tragedy of their premature, cruel, and pointless deaths. For me, the evidence for Appelman’s noble motive is the way he approached the subject. He is a long way distant from the sensationalistic garbage of many media commentators – both mainstream and social.
But not every noble motive leads to a good result. I am left wondering if Appelman’s noble motive has led him to swim in the same river as the piranha’s he so ably describes.
I don’t have a good, clean, decisive answer to this. So I am left brooding about it.
For my own book on homicide cases where the killer hid or destroyed the body of their victim, click here.
For my book on the “Mr. Big” investigative technique, click here.