Latest news with #CollegeMurders


The Guardian
12-07-2025
- The Guardian
‘It became a game to people': how online sleuths grew obsessed with the Idaho murders
On the morning of 13 November 2022, Hunter Johnson and Emily Alandt, two students at the University of Idaho in Moscow, answered an odd phone call. Their friend Dylan Mortensen, who lived just a few houses away, heard strange noises during the night and was scared. Her four upstairs roommates weren't answering their phones – could they come over and check on things? Johnson and Alandt weren't particularly concerned, Moscow being a quiet college town of unlocked doors, until they reached 1122 King Road. The usually boisterous residence, the node of a sprawling friend group, was eerily quiet. Johnson proceeded up the stairs and into the bedroom where his best friend, Ethan Chapin, 20, was staying over with his girlfriend, Xana Kernodle, also 20. Then, to spare the others the trauma of a ghastly sight, he told the girls to call 911 for an 'unconscious individual'. By now, the clinical facts of the University of Idaho murders, as they have become known, have been published and republished, dissected to death online and seared into the consciousness of even casual news consumers. So One Night in Idaho: The College Murders, a new Amazon docuseries that includes, for the first time, extensive interviews with Johnson, Alandt and other close friends and family, takes a different approach – not a chronology of the murders of Chapin, Kernodle and her roommates, Madison Mogen, 21 and Kaylee Goncalves, 21, but how the crime and its nuclear fallout landed on their loved ones. How much confusion ensued in the hours after the 911 call, as more and more friends, including Chapin's fellow triplets, Hunter and Maizie, gathered outside the house, while police searched and said nothing; the group got confirmation that their friends had died not from officers on the scene, but from a campus shelter-in-place alert to their phones. 'In the crime genre, the majority of those are told through the lens of an investigator or law enforcement or a journalist,' Matthew Galkin, co-director of the series with Liz Garbus, said. 'We wanted to flip the script with this one because we felt like that was the part of the story that hadn't been told yet.' Plenty of other stories were – within hours of the discovery, the four murders made international news. Reporters from outlets around the country descended on the small, formerly quiet community in the northern Idaho panhandle. The house at 1122 King Road became not only an active crime scene but a grim tourist attraction, drawing amateur sleuths and true crime enthusiasts who posted photos of blood dripping down the house's foundation. The tragedy was catnip for widespread attention – four photogenic, white, very online kids whose public social media profiles provided ample material for amateur sleuths; the group posed and posted classically college photos, all tangled together before a football game, the day before they were brutally stabbed to death. Authorities revealed next to no information – no leads, no suspected motive, no known connections to a killer at large. Plenty of space for sideline conjecture, or as Galkin put it, 'a perfect storm for that kind of social media scrutiny'. The first two episodes of the series relive those horrific initial six weeks for friends and family, as they were bombarded with media requests, unsolicited direct messages or accusations of murder themselves, on top of unimaginable grief. Anonymous websites argued that Johnson – the kid that found his best friend murdered — was the killer, based on his friends' social media snippets. Amateur sleuths snuck into classes and dorms. Others tried to access the house, still roped off with caution tape. 'All of a sudden there are blueprints of the house and people are making 3D models,' Galkin said. 'It just became almost like a game to people.' For those close to the victims, so-called Reddit detectives and anonymous DMs threatening retribution were just as scary as the fact that the real killer was still at large. 'I was once again fearing for my life but for a completely different reason,' Daniel Berriochoa, Chapin's fraternity brother and one of the last people to see him alive, recalls in the series. Direct threats aside, 'I don't think the majority of people were malicious in what they were doing. I certainly think there was a legitimate desire to solve this,' said Galkin. But the naming of suspects in public went 'haywire' – 'these people aren't law enforcement. They're not lawyers. They have no right to pick people they don't know and accuse them of horrific crimes and then just sit back and watch it all happen.' Six weeks after the murders, authorities arrested Bryan Kohberger, a 28-year-old criminology student at Washington State University, a 15-minute drive over the border from Idaho's campus, at his parents' house in Pennsylvania. According to a probable cause affidavit, investigators found him based on DNA evidence from the button of a knife sheath left at the scene. One would think an arrest would tamp down speculation, but new questions only fueled it – why did he do it? How did he know the victims? Why did he leave two – Mortensen and Bethany Funke – unscathed? It was at this point that Galkin and Garbus entered the picture and began speaking with families about telling their side of the story. As with Garbus's recent series on the Gilgo Beach serial killer, there would be hard rules: 'We go by facts. We do nothing salacious. We do nothing gratuitous,' said Galkin. There would be no blood, no bodies, just recreations of the victims' rooms as they would have existed prior. 'We can have people tell us the story and infer visually what happened, but you don't have to go there.' Though grounded in first-hand experiences, the series stays attuned to larger forces – online speculation, the ongoing information vacuum from authorities after a court's gag order, and Kohberger's potential links to hyper-misogynistic incel ('involuntary celibate') ideology. The latter half of the series speculates that Kohberger posted creepy questions about the murders – which hand did he use? Did he shower at the house after? – in a large true crime Facebook group as 'Pappa Rodger', perhaps in a nod to 'incel hero' Elliot Rodger, who killed six and injured 14 during a murderous rampage in California in 2014. Rodger targeted an Alpha Phi sorority house and left behind manifestos and videos railing against women who rejected him. Goncalves was a member of Alpha Phi at the University of Idaho, while Kernodle and Mogen were members of Pi Beta Phi. The question undergirding all this attention remains: why? 'We went as far as we could possibly go with answering that question without having actual facts because there was no process of discovery and there was no trial,' said Galkin. But based on what has been revealed, 'I don't believe that it was a completely random act of violence,' he said. 'He didn't just pick four strangers. I feel like there was at least one of them that he had tracked at least somewhat.' Whatever evidence investigators found of Kohberger's intentions, or any connection to the victims, remains an open question that may never be answered. Earlier this month, Kohberger pleaded guilty to all four murders, thus avoiding a long-delayed trial scheduled for next month as well as the death penalty. He will spend the rest of his life in prison without parole, pending a judge's acceptance of the deal later this month. The deal, a week before the series aired, 'caught us all off guard', Galkin said. 'There were some grumblings that it was possible, but I didn't actually think it would happen.' Immediately, some loved ones vehemently opposed it; in a statement, the Goncalves family, who did not participate in the series, said they were 'beyond furious' at a 'very unexpected decision' they did not consider to be justice. Others who did – including the Chapins and Mogen's mother and stepfather – expressed support, relieved not to endure the trauma of a long trial with graphic evidence and the possibility that Kohberger walked free. 'We can actually put this behind us and not have these future dates and future things that we don't want to have to be at, that we shouldn't have to be at, that have to do with this terrible person,' Mogen's father, Ben, told CBS. 'We get to just think about the rest of lives and have to try and figure out how to do it without Maddie and the rest of the kids.' Galkin and Garbus added a title card explaining the outcome at the end of the final episode, though it does not change its focus: remembering how the four victims lived, in the words of the people who actually knew them. Mogen was sweet, quiet and slyly funny with her distinctive dance moves; Goncalves was ambitious and sparkly; 'DJ Xan' Kernodle insisted on bringing her MacBook computer everywhere to play her music; Chapin never missed an opportunity to make people laugh. And for Galkin and Garbus, to offer a true crime series that warns against the obsession with true crimes concerning real people. 'There is a time and a place for amateur sleuthing. But there's also a human toll,' said Galkin. 'Hopefully, this series allows you to look in their eyes and just understand what this is doing to people. Maybe people might think twice before they do this on the next enormous crime story.' One Night in Idaho: The College Murders is now available on Amazon Prime Video


Daily Mail
11-07-2025
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Idaho murder victim's parents' heartbreaking final moments with kids before Bryan Kohberger ripped them away
The parents of Idaho murders victim Ethan Chapin have revealed their heartbreak after having the 'most amazing weekend' with their children - only for their world to be ripped apart seven days later. Stacy and Jim Chapin spoke out in Prime Video's new four-part docuseries 'One Night in Idaho: The College Murders' about the final moments they shared as a family with their son and his triplet siblings Maizie and Hunter, just days before Ethan, his girlfriend Xana Kernodle and two friends Kaylee Goncalves and Madison Mogen were murdered by Bryan Kohberger. In a clip from the series, exclusively obtained by the Daily Mail, the parents reveal how - in that moment - they felt so proud of their children that they 'literally high-fived each other' and told themselves 'we've done it.' 'We've done it. We're good,' Jim says. 'And that's such a huge satisfaction as a parent you feel. 'And then to have it taken away in seven days. It was very short-lived.' The weekend of November 5, 2022, was parents weekend at the University of Idaho where Ethan, Maizie and Hunter were all in their second year of college. The Chapins went to Moscow, Idaho, to spend time with their children and recall seeing how much they were all 'starting to adult.' 'It was the most amazing weekend,' Stacy says proudly. 'We could tell that Ethan was serious with Xana,' she adds. Jim adds: 'It was so fun. You could just see where they were starting to adult.' Gut-wrenching photos capture that happy moment in time, with the family-of-five beaming, arms around each other as they pose in University of Idaho 'Vandals' caps and shirts. Other photos from that weekend show a smiling Kernodle enjoying the weekend with her boyfriend's family. The Chapins look back fondly on the moment they left Moscow on the morning of Sunday November 6, 2022, to head back home. 'We left Sunday morning and literally as we were driving out of town Jim and I - and I mean this - we literally high fived each other,' Stacy says. 'We've done it.' Jim recalls the 'huge satisfaction they felt in that moment' - before it was 'taken away' from them just one week later: 'It was very short-lived.' 'You're supposed to raise your kids so that they fly,' Stacy says. Her eyes brim with tears as she adds: 'And we'd literally had a weekend of that… one week.' It was exactly one week later when - in the early hours of Sunday November 13, 2022 - Kohberger went on his murderous rampage. The 30-year-old criminology PhD student at Washington State University broke into the off-campus student home at 1122 King Road that Kernodle, Mogen and Goncalves shared with two other roommates Bethany Funke and Dylan Mortensen. At around 4am, Kohberger entered the three-story home and went straight up to Mogen's room on the third floor, Latah County Prosecutor Bill Thompson said during the killer's plea hearing last week. There, he found Mogen and her best friend Goncalves sleeping in the same bed, stabbing both of them to death. On his way back downstairs or on leaving the property, he encountered Kernodle on the second floor, who was still awake and had just received a DoorDash food order. He fatally attacked her with the knife and then also murdered Chapin who was sleeping in her bed. Kohberger then left through the back sliding door on the second story of the property, passing Mortensen who had been woken by the noise and peeked around her bedroom door. Mortensen and Funke - whose bedroom was on the first floor - were the only survivors. Terrified after seeing a masked man inside the home, Mortensen and Funke desperately tried to call and text their friends but got no response. Ultimately, Mortensen ran down to Funke's room on the first floor where they both stayed until daylight. Around eight hours later, when they still couldn't get in touch with the four victims, they called their friends Hunter Johnson, Emily Alandt and Josie Lauteren over to check the home. Johnson found the bodies of his best friends Chapin and Kernodle, and a haunting 911 call was placed by the students. In the Prime Video series, Hunter Chapin also spoke out about the devastating moment he learned of his brother's murder from his friends - and then had to break the news to his family. It was around midday when he said he was woken by one of his Sigma Chi frat brothers 'shaking me' and saying there was police over at the King Road home. At first, he thought nothing of it. 'Okay, that's probably normal. There's more noise complaints there than anywhere else on campus,' he recalls thinking. But when he walked over to the home and saw several of their friends outside, he knew something terrible had happened. 'So I was walking over to the King Road house and I saw a group of people sitting on the ground and it's all the people that I have been hanging out with,' he says. 'And they all just had this look on their face when I walked up like the world had ended.' His friends struggled to break the news to him that they had found his brother dead. 'I'm like 'what the hell's going on. Like where's Ethan?' And they're like 'Ethan's not here anymore,'' he says. Hunter remembers asking: 'What do you mean Ethan's not here anymore? Like where did he go?' When they told him 'your brother's dead,' he says he thought it 'can't be true.' 'I didn't even know how to respond to it as it's just so unreal that someone I had spent almost every minute of my life with… I just don't know,' he says, breaking down mid-sentence. Hunter then had to break the devastating news to his family members. First, he called Maizie - telling her to immediately get someone to drop her off at the home. 'I just knew,' she says, remembering the gut feeling she had as she made her way to the property. When he then called his mom, she was at the grocery store. Stacy recalls her son repeatedly telling her 'Ethan's not here' and 'Ethan and Xana are not here' as he couldn't bring himself to say the words that he was dead. 'They're not on this earth anymore,' he told her. Stacy abandoned her shopping cart and left the store, calling her husband Jim and racing to Moscow together. Another six weeks passed before Kohberger was arrested at his parents' home in the Poconos region of Pennsylvania - where he had returned for the holidays. During that time, he finished out his semester at WSU where he had embarked on a PhD in criminology. He also meticulously scrubbed his Pullman, Washington, apartment and his car - the white Hyundai Elantra he had driven to and from the crime scene - clean of evidence. Investigators tracked him down, however, after he left a KaBar leather knife sheath next to Mogen's body at the scene. Through Investigative Genetic Genealogy, the FBI managed to trace DNA on the sheath to Kohberger. His motive for the murders still remains a mystery, with Kohberger having no known connection to any of the victims or their friends. Prosecutors believe Kohberger did not intend to kill all four victims that night - but did intend to kill and had planned his attack for months, buying a KaBar knife from Amazon to use as his murder weapon in March 2022. After two years of protesting his innocence, the 30-year-old criminology PhD student finally confessed last week to the murders as part of a plea deal to save himself from the death penalty. Under the terms of the plea deal, Kohberger will be sentenced to life without the possibility of parole and will also never have a chance to appeal his conviction or sentence. The plea deal divided the victims' families with the Chapin and Mogen families supporting it and the Goncalves and Kernodle families opposing it. For the Chapins, the hearing on July 2 where Kohberger changed his plea marked the first time they attended one of his court appearances - as a show of support for the agreement. Now, the families of the victims will be given the opportunity to deliver impact statements at his sentencing hearing on July 23.


The Guardian
11-07-2025
- The Guardian
‘It became a game to people': how online sleuths grew obsessed with the Idaho murders
On the morning of 13 November 2022, Hunter Johnson and Emily Alandt, two students at the University of Idaho in Moscow, answered an odd phone call. Their friend Dylan Mortensen, who lived just a few houses away, heard strange noises during the night and was scared. Her four upstairs roommates weren't answering their phones – could they come over and check on things? Johnson and Alandt weren't particularly concerned, Moscow being a quiet college town of unlocked doors, until they reached 1122 King Road. The usually boisterous residence, the node of a sprawling friend group, was eerily quiet. Johnson proceeded up the stairs and into the bedroom where his best friend, Ethan Chapin, 20, was staying over with his girlfriend, Xana Kernodle, also 20. Then, to spare the others the trauma of a ghastly sight, he told the girls to call 911 for an 'unconscious individual'. By now, the clinical facts of the University of Idaho murders, as they have become known, have been published and republished, dissected to death online and seared into the consciousness of even casual news consumers. So One Night in Idaho: The College Murders, a new Amazon docuseries that includes, for the first time, extensive interviews with Johnson, Alandt and other close friends and family, takes a different approach – not a chronology of the murders of Chapin, Kernodle and her roommates, Madison Mogen, 21 and Kaylee Goncalves, 21, but how the crime and its nuclear fallout landed on their loved ones. How much confusion ensued in the hours after the 911 call, as more and more friends, including Chapin's fellow triplets, Hunter and Maizie, gathered outside the house, while police searched and said nothing; the group got confirmation that their friends had died not from officers on the scene, but from a campus shelter-in-place alert to their phones. 'In the crime genre, the majority of those are told through the lens of an investigator or law enforcement or a journalist,' Matthew Galkin, co-director of the series with Liz Garbus, said. 'We wanted to flip the script with this one because we felt like that was the part of the story that hadn't been told yet.' Plenty of other stories were – within hours of the discovery, the four murders made international news. Reporters from outlets around the country descended on the small, formerly quiet community in the northern Idaho panhandle. The house at 1122 King Road became not only an active crime scene but a grim tourist attraction, drawing amateur sleuths and true crime enthusiasts who posted photos of blood dripping down the house's foundation. The tragedy was catnip for widespread attention – four photogenic, white, very online kids whose public social media profiles provided ample material for amateur sleuths; the group posed and posted classically college photos, all tangled together before a football game, the day before they were brutally stabbed to death. Authorities revealed next to no information – no leads, no suspected motive, no known connections to a killer at large. Plenty of space for sideline conjecture, or as Galkin put it, 'a perfect storm for that kind of social media scrutiny'. The first two episodes of the series relive those horrific initial six weeks for friends and family, as they were bombarded with media requests, unsolicited direct messages or accusations of murder themselves, on top of unimaginable grief. Anonymous websites argued that Johnson – the kid that found his best friend murdered — was the killer, based on his friends' social media snippets. Amateur sleuths snuck into classes and dorms. Others tried to access the house, still roped off with caution tape. 'All of a sudden there are blueprints of the house and people are making 3D models,' Galkin said. 'It just became almost like a game to people.' For those close to the victims, so-called Reddit detectives and anonymous DMs threatening retribution were just as scary as the fact that the real killer was still at large. 'I was once again fearing for my life but for a completely different reason,' Daniel Berriochoa, Chapin's fraternity brother and one of the last people to see him alive, recalls in the series. Direct threats aside, 'I don't think the majority of people were malicious in what they were doing. I certainly think there was a legitimate desire to solve this,' said Galkin. But the naming of suspects in public went 'haywire' – 'these people aren't law enforcement. They're not lawyers. They have no right to pick people they don't know and accuse them of horrific crimes and then just sit back and watch it all happen.' Six weeks after the murders, authorities arrested Bryan Kohberger, a 28-year-old criminology student at Washington State University, a 15-minute drive over the border from Idaho's campus, at his parents' house in Pennsylvania. According to a probable cause affidavit, investigators found him based on DNA evidence from the button of a knife sheath left at the scene. One would think an arrest would tamp down speculation, but new questions only fueled it – why did he do it? How did he know the victims? Why did he leave two – Mortensen and Bethany Funke – unscathed? It was at this point that Galkin and Garbus entered the picture and began speaking with families about telling their side of the story. As with Garbus's recent series on the Gilgo Beach serial killer, there would be hard rules: 'We go by facts. We do nothing salacious. We do nothing gratuitous,' said Galkin. There would be no blood, no bodies, just recreations of the victims' rooms as they would have existed prior. 'We can have people tell us the story and infer visually what happened, but you don't have to go there.' Though grounded in first-hand experiences, the series stays attuned to larger forces – online speculation, the ongoing information vacuum from authorities after a court's gag order, and Kohberger's potential links to hyper-misogynistic incel ('involuntary celibate') ideology. The latter half of the series speculates that Kohberger posted creepy questions about the murders – which hand did he use? Did he shower at the house after? – in a large true crime Facebook group as 'Pappa Rodger', perhaps in a nod to 'incel hero' Elliot Rodger, who killed six and injured 14 during a murderous rampage in California in 2014. Rodger targeted an Alpha Phi sorority house and left behind manifestos and videos railing against women who rejected him. Goncalves was a member of Alpha Phi at the University of Idaho, while Kernodle and Mogen were members of Pi Beta Phi. The question undergirding all this attention remains: why? 'We went as far as we could possibly go with answering that question without having actual facts because there was no process of discovery and there was no trial,' said Galkin. But based on what has been revealed, 'I don't believe that it was a completely random act of violence,' he said. 'He didn't just pick four strangers. I feel like there was at least one of them that he had tracked at least somewhat.' Whatever evidence investigators found of Kohberger's intentions, or any connection to the victims, remains an open question that may never be answered. Earlier this month, Kohberger pleaded guilty to all four murders, thus avoiding a long-delayed trial scheduled for next month as well as the death penalty. He will spend the rest of his life in prison without parole, pending a judge's acceptance of the deal later this month. The deal, a week before the series aired, 'caught us all off guard', Galkin said. 'There were some grumblings that it was possible, but I didn't actually think it would happen.' Immediately, some loved ones vehemently opposed it; in a statement, the Goncalves family, who did not participate in the series, said they were 'beyond furious' at a 'very unexpected decision' they did not consider to be justice. Others who did – including the Chapins and Mogen's mother and stepfather – expressed support, relieved not to endure the trauma of a long trial with graphic evidence and the possibility that Kohberger walked free. 'We can actually put this behind us and not have these future dates and future things that we don't want to have to be at, that we shouldn't have to be at, that have to do with this terrible person,' Mogen's father, Ben, told CBS. 'We get to just think about the rest of lives and have to try and figure out how to do it without Maddie and the rest of the kids.' Galkin and Garbus added a title card explaining the outcome at the end of the final episode, though it does not change its focus: remembering how the four victims lived, in the words of the people who actually knew them. Mogen was sweet, quiet and slyly funny with her distinctive dance moves; Goncalves was ambitious and sparkly; 'DJ Xan' Kernodle insisted on bringing her MacBook computer everywhere to play her music; Chapin never missed an opportunity to make people laugh. And for Galkin and Garbus, to offer a true crime series that warns against the obsession with true crimes concerning real people. 'There is a time and a place for amateur sleuthing. But there's also a human toll,' said Galkin. 'Hopefully, this series allows you to look in their eyes and just understand what this is doing to people. Maybe people might think twice before they do this on the next enormous crime story.' One Night in Idaho: The College Murders is now available on Amazon Prime Video