Original subtitles

Nobody could have foreseen

anything like this happening.

The cops go inside and the first thing they sense

is the smell of blood.

Why these four college students?

Why would he do this?

Ever since this happened,

I've locked my door every single night.

Why this terrible thing happened?

Why somebody could do something so awful?

Someone do this horrific crime

and they're still out there.

There's a crazy person out there with a knife.

Who knows when he's going to stop.

This person is still on the loose.

The fear was so visceral and real.

This house right here is where police found four bodies.

And later that day,

The University of Idaho confirmed

that they were U of I students.

Moscow is a college town,

so we have a very different demographic

than is present in the rest of the state.

We skew way younger.

We've got a lot of people in the 18 to 24/25-year-old range,

and then a lot of retirees,

a lot of people come here just because

of the college atmosphere we have.

There's a lot of culture, arts activities,

things that go with college towns.

And so a lot of people come here just for that and retire.

The mountains are surrounding, capped in snow.

The rivers are running wild and free, so to speak.

There's scent of sage in the air in summertime.

In the wintertime there's the smell of cinnamon

in all the coffee shops.

Very cosy kind of place.

The University of Idaho,

like many other universities in the United States,

has what we call a Greek system.

These are large houses that are in the middle of campus,

where students can pledge their allegiance

or decide to live on campus

At many universities we have the fraternities and sororities,

these big Greek houses.

For somebody who is actually in college,

what a fraternity or sorority means is this social circle.

They have lots of formals, social activities.

It's a really good way for students

to make friends right away.

Fraternities, sororities, houses.

It all means Greek life.

All these students were living on what we call Greek Row.

This street of all these giant houses.

Greek life is pretty strong on campus.

It's definitely the biggest of the housing communities.

The dorms socialise with each other

and the off campus people are together and that.

But I mean, frats and sororities are really,

they were the core of all of like the social events.

Any major event that was actually going to get students

there was organised by Greek Life.

There's always something going on every weekend night.

There's always parties and it's not animal House or anything.

There are rules and stuff, supposedly.

There was some article that came out ten years ago,

that named U Idaho the top party school in the nation,

so that gives you an idea.

As soon as you're initiated into the, the organisation,

you have this family who...

I mean, they call each other brothers and sisters.

Being there and being with everyone,

I mean, that's kind of my favourite part

about being in college was the community that we all had.

It sounded like the ultimate college experience.

Hi, my name is Xana Kernodle.

I'm a marketing major here at the University of Idaho.

Uh, this is actually King Street

where I've lived the past two years.

And I really like just hanging out with my friends all the time

and being super-involved

in school events and everything else.

So yeah, that's just a little bit about me

and I'm really excited to take on this course.

The King Road area is a stone's throw away from

the actual University of Idaho campus border.

It's a very popular area for

off-campus housing of college students.

They're all primarily rental homes

that college students typically reside in

due to its close location to the university.

At 1122 King Road,

there were a group of girls all living together.

There were five girls living in this house,

Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogan, Dylan Mortenson,

Bethany Funk, and Xana Kernodle.

Ethan Chapin was the boyfriend of Xana Kernodle.

And he was part of the Sigma Chi fraternity.

It really seemed like Xana and Ethan

had found the perfect match.

The King Road house,

it was really that kind of house

where they were coming and going.

The girls living in it,

and they had people coming and going from their house as well.

It sounded like a total revolving door.

All young, right in the middle of college.

I mean, they were partying with their friends,

but they were also going to class.

They were close to graduating.

They were getting all of their work done.

They were making plans for their future,

who they were going to be, where they were going to go.

When you're in college,

it feels like your whole life is ahead of you.

It feels like the beginning of the rest of your life.

You do feel that sense of safety,

like you're around so many other young people.

It's just one of those communities that

nothing bad can happen to you here.

In the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving break,

everything's on track, the students are doing great,

they're having fun.

They're excited about Thanksgiving break.

Kaylie's even set to graduate in like a month.

Everything's perfect.

And then everything changes.

It was Saturday in November, you know,

so it's a little too late for the farmers market,

but still, the shops were open.

Downtown's busy.

The town is alive with all the students biking around.

It's busy.

People come to visit their kids,

see how they're doing in college.

It seemed like any other normal weekend that Moscow's ever had.

The beautiful golden leaves have started to fall

all over campus.

The days are getting shorter.

It's getting darker earlier, but it's football season.

The Vandal football team, very big.

It's a big culture here.

On November 12th,

the University of Idaho football team

had a football game against UC Davis.

So we as officers, I actually worked that football game.

It was a normal typical Saturday night for our college.

I mean, there were different parties up on campus.

A lot of the kids who go to the games or just attend

the university on game day, they have a tendency to party.

They go to different functions where they drink.

They just hang out

well before the game, whether it's at houses,

fraternities or sororities

or tailgating in the parking lot up at our stadium.

And so it's just a normal typical day.

At the end of the game, the fog had rolled in,

the temperature had dropped a little bit

and it was just kind of eerie.

I remember walking out of the dome just going,

huh, this is kind of weird.

You know, this kind of has a weird feeling to it.

That evening,

all the roommates had been hanging out.

Kaylee, who had actually already graduated and moved out,

had come to town to show off her new car to her roommates.

They were all hanging out,

and they're smiling, and they all look very happy.

And Kaylee had posted that saying

that these were her people

and she was grateful for her people.

That photo is embedded into everyone's memory

because it was the last photo they all took together.

They made plans to go out that evening.

There was a formal at the Sigma Chi fraternity

that Ethan attended with his sister.

His girlfriend at the time, Xana Kernodle, came with him.

Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves

went out to the Corner Club,

a well-known sports bar

right at the end of Main Street in Moscow,

where a lot of the Greek students hang out.

They had a good time there.

They were there until the early morning hours.

Once that concluded, they walked down to the,

more of the central area of town

near what we call Friendship Square,

where a food truck named the Grub Truck

was, is commonly posted for the early morning hours

to capture the individuals who were leaving

the drinking establishments

so they can get a bite to eat before they go home.

And that's exactly what Kaylee and Madison did.

They went there and, and ordered food

and then were given a ride home back to the King Street home.

Xana and Ethan were over at Ethan's fraternity.

He was a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity,

which is,

you could see from the King Street house,

you could see the Sigma Chi house.

It's that close.

It's almost a stone's throw away.

They had been over there for a function

and also returned back to the home

in the early morning hours of the 13th.

They all stayed up together too.

They were talking in Kaylee's room

before they went their separate ways.

The two other roommates,

Bethany Funk and Dylan Mortenson,

they had also gone out that night,

but they had come home earlier than the rest

and said that they had just gone to bed.

And it seemed like a regular night.

Kaylee and Madison went to bed

and Ethan also went to bed.

The last person that we know that was awake was Xana.

She had been scrolling on her phone

and had ordered a DoorDash order of food,

which arrived on the 4:00 hour.

Dylan Mortenson,

she awoke a couple times to weird noises.

She thought that she had heard Kaylee's dog, Murphy, whining

and then somebody crying.

She opened her door,

She didn't really see anything.

Then she heard noises again.

Woke up.

She was tired.

She heard some thumping around.

She heard someone running

and say, "I think someone's here."

And then she heard a male voice say,

"It's okay, I'm gonna to help you."

Dylan, knowing that her house is a revolving door

and knowing that Xana's boyfriend was probably over.

Or maybe Jack was over or Jake,

the other two girls boyfriends,

thought nothing of it.

Dylan went back to sleep

until she heard one more thing that made her get up.

She saw a man dressed in black with a mask covering his face,

showing only his eyes and bushy eyebrows

walking toward her.

He was kind of a taller,

skinnier build man.

She shut her door.

She was frozen in fear.

She locked her door.

She heard him leave

out the glass sliding door in the kitchen.

She had no idea what was going on.

Frantic calling the roommates, they didn't answer.

She called Bethany downstairs.

She runs downstairs with Bethany.

They're panicking, they're calling their roommates.

No one's answering.

I saw some guy in the house.

Looked like he was wearing a black ski mask.

He was tall.

She said, what is going on?

They're texting back and forth.

Bethany says, run down here.

Come stay with me.

They're like, we're gonna figure out

what's going on in the morning,

but we're going to try not to worry right now.

Remember, this is a party house.

How many times does your friend have some guy over

who just kind of slunk out?

Nothing ever happens in Moscow.

The rest of the town of Moscow woke up,

went back to school or back to their day jobs

and completely unsuspecting,

feeling that same feeling of I'm safe.

Everything's fine.

That harmony of the town.

Except that something absolutely awful had happened.

Nobody could have foreseen anything like this.

There's multiple people talking on the phone.

One of the voices says to the dispatcher,

we don't know what's going on.

The nature of the call was just an unconscious person.

And so our officers,

that was the initial information that they had

and that's what they responded to

until they got on scene.

Immediately upon entering the house,

the cops know that this is a scene of carnage.

They can smell it in the air.

There's blood soaking into the carpet,

soaking into the mattresses, blood on the walls.

There's spatter.

There's all kinds of things that you would expect

if you were watching TV and saw a crime scene.

But these guys know from intimate experience

that this is a horror show.

Quite frankly, at that moment,

I was completely full of adrenaline.

A horrific scene,

something that I'll never forget.

They see Kaylee and Maddie had been butchered.

They're in bed together, clothed,

soaking into each other's blood.

Maddie Mogen, who's been slashed across her face,

stabbed in multiple places.

Kaylee Goncalves is so disfigured

by what is clearly a series of dozens of stab wounds.

Blunt force trauma to her face.

Also signs of asphyxiation.

She is so beyond what is necessary to murder somebody,

they call this overkill,

and usually they associate overkill with rage.

They go down the hall on the second floor.

They see Xana and Ethan had been butchered.

Xana

has been stabbed over 50 times.

Lots of defensive wounds.

It's clear that she was awake.

It's clear that she had begun to eat

her Jack in the Box from DoorDash,

and was met by the perpetrator on his way out of the house.

She's stabbed all over the place.

The only way that could have happened

in the way that her stab wounds display

is if she had been struggling,

fighting for her life,

which leads to an extremely prolonged death for her.

Her boyfriend, Ethan Chapin, is found with his jugular slit

and other areas of his body slashed,

but he's in bed.

It seems clear to the cops that Ethan had been asleep

when he was murdered.

This is a scene of carnage.

They were just young college kids

going to school to get an education

and go out and enjoy their lives.

They were all very social.

They, they enjoyed friends and good times.

And I know Kaylee and Maddie grew up together.

They were very, very close.

Extremely close.

Maddie Mogen was an extension of Kaylee Goncalves family.

Spent all kinds of time with them on family vacations

and after school hangouts and doing homework together

and going to dinner with the Goncalves.

Maddie was from,

I guess what people would say was a broken family,

but that might be a little dramatic.

Her family was around,

but she was just very attached to the Goncalves family,

and Kaylee was from a large family of multiple siblings,

father who really sort of got down to business

and took care of things.

His family was well established

and Madison Mogen was a part of that.

They were described as Maddie, kind, sweet,

Kaylee adventurous, outgoing,

Xana, a friend to everybody.

And then there is Ethan Chapin.

Ethan and Xana were dating.

People liked them together a lot.

Ethan was just this kind, hard-working kid.

He was a triplet.

It really seemed like Xana and Ethan had found

the perfect match in each other.

And that's what everybody said.

Everybody who was around them.

And you saw the pictures and the videos of them

hugging each other, being on the couch together,

eating together like

they were just together and the perfect couple.

And they were so in love.

All of Xana's friends said that

she was always the single friend.

They never expected that Xana would find anybody like Ethan,

that she would fall head over heels for.

I mean, it was just like a Romeo and Juliet romance.

It's just so horrifically sad that this occurred.

It was very, very vicious.

Multiple stab wounds to all of the victims.

Not just simple clean one stab wound or something.

There was, there was multiple stab wounds, multiple cuts,

and a lot of them on each of the victims.

One of the first things we try and find, a point of entry.

How do we feel that the suspect entered the residence?

So we're always looking.

We looked at every door and window that we could find

to say, okay, did the person come through this door?

Did they come through a window?

Um, and this scene specifically, um, the rear slider,

the sliding glass door that was out of the kitchen was open,

so then we knew we needed to process it.

When they did process it,

they found lots of smudged fingerprints

because I don't think we got any viable prints

off of that window.

We're looking for a weapon.

What is the murder weapon?

Is it still here in the house?

On Kaylee's bed,

where Kaylee and Maddie had both been killed,

laying next to Maddie is a tan sheath for a Ka-Bar knife.

The officer starts talking to the kids.

He's really nice, compassionate.

He's trying to get them blankets.

I mean, it's cold, it's freezing outside,

and he's asking them questions.

What happened last night?

So Dylan recounts what she saw that she heard bumping around.

Bethany also talks about,

you know, what she saw and heard.

She heard some bumping around,

but they're not allowed back in the house at this point.

They start putting caution tape all across the King Road house.

So these kids are standing outside on the street

in their pyjamas.

It's really intense.

They're crying.

They're trying to make sense of what's going on.

At this point too early on,

they didn't even know that their friends were dead upstairs.

That day, I knew I was going to be meeting with Haadiya,

my editor-in-chief for the paper.

We were going to get coffee, so I picked her up.

And she lived at the university student apartments

on that street that leads you to King Road.

So you had a clear visual of that bend that goes down there.

And so I remember pulling in.

At King Road there was a lot of police presence,

um, caution tape, officers walking around.

It just felt like something was off.

But we were following our typical procedures, you know,

covering crime, see what we can find out.

And that's when we get the first notification

of the Vandal alert.

The information being shared publicly about this event

occurred relatively quickly.

I recall being on scene in front of the residence,

and I heard the group of college age individuals

that were nearby.

I heard phones going off,

and then a very strong emotional reaction

to whatever had just occurred on their phone.

And we found out that the University of Idaho

has their own mass notification system

to notify their student bodies

of major events or security safety issues.

So what had happened was the university had sent out a,

what they call a Vandal alert

that went to all the cell phones and devices of the students

and stated that the Moscow police

were on scene on King Road

investigating a quadruple homicide.

So the news that this was not anything but a murder scene

was broken very, very quickly to the community.

Me and my friends had gone out the night before.

We had the same night that, you know,

every other person who went to the game did.

That was one of the more shocking things

is that the night before was really

one of the best nights of my college experience.

I never felt closer to the community

and to my friends and everything.

So waking up the next morning,

I woke up a little later in the day

to quite a few messages on my phone.

It was about halfway home

and a text comes in and said,

there's been a homicide with four victims on campus,

and that's all the news we got.

Unthinkable.

I was at home when I heard.

My husband was teaching at the University of Idaho.

Kaylee Goncalves had been one of his students the year before.

So my husband texted me.

He said, "There's a homicide in town!!"

I'm like, what?

What is going on?

So he gets home from being with his friend

and he says, "do you want to go to the house?"

I said, "Absolutely, we got to go, let's go."

They said stay away from the area.

I'm getting my car, I'm going.

I drive in the street before King Road,

and there's a turn that goes right up a hill.

So we turn up that hill, I park my car and we get out

and I can see over the whole King Road neighbourhood

from that vantage point.

And I see the cops are

canvassing this entire neighbourhood.

I couldn't believe it.

He said, "Do you want to go up to the house?"

And I actually said, "No, I want to let the police work."

I mean, this is my town.

This sort of stuff doesn't happen around here.

So I said, "No, let's just stay away."

I will get more information tomorrow.

But again, the rumour mill started churning

because there was a lack of information.

It just created this void

and people just started speculating.

A lot of that speculation was occurring

with folks that had YouTube channels and the like.

At first, I remember a huge rumour was

that it was some type of drug deal gone wrong,

and that just didn't make sense to me.

And I remember that was a huge rumour flowing around

students and even reporters,

and I couldn't fathom that that was what had happened.

I didn't believe it.

And I think that maybe at the time,

people wanted to believe that it was a drug deal gone bad

because the alternative was so much worse.

It was difficult to deal with because

it just created another level of noise

around the investigation.

And as the communications team,

we instigated a rumour control aspect

to our, to our communications to the public.

So we would meet every morning

and talk about what we had learned.

We had other entities and third-party vendors

assisting us with this,

but keeping an eye on what was being said,

what was being spread across the internet

in regard to speculation of this case,

and we were identifying the primary rumours, as it were,

of the day, that were being spread

and doing our best to debunk those with the community

and continually having that communication that

if the information that you're receiving

had not come from the Moscow Police Department,

it's not accurate, it's not vetted information.

So it just felt like we were continually battling

this waves of information

that were completely false and speculative.

And these innocent victims,

they were just college students.

There was nothing obvious to the reason why

someone would want to harm them.

The description of that individual

was a male with bushy eyebrows

and was holding something in their hands,

and the roommate did say that they caught eyes,

locked eyes with the individual,

and in doing so, she closed her door and locked it.

Our biggest challenge was from day one

was this was a whodunit.

Where were they at at that point in time?

Are they going to commit another crime

or are they going to do this again?

This person is still on the loose.

The fear was so visceral and real.

What happened?

Why did this happen?

Is there a crazy person on the loose

who's going to come and visit me tonight

and stab me to death too?

The insecurity and questioning that went on through town

was ramping up rapidly.

The town felt like there was just this heavy fog over it

because again, we didn't know

who the person that did this was.

And everyone was on edge.

And also, you're dealing with the fact that

this even happened in Moscow.

And I remember I was doing a live shot

for the TV station I worked at,

and the anchor had asked me, well,

you're a Vandal alum, so how do you feel?

And that was like the first time I had ever cried on TV.

I just lost it.

I just, I tried to keep it together,

I couldn't.

This case turned into a gravy train for conspiracy theorists

because they're making money off of this.

I was watching these lunatics

go from 800 followers on Instagram

to 100,000 or whatever it was.

TikTok, YouTube.

They're getting thousands and thousands of followers.

They're making money off...

Maybe it was this person.

Maybe it was that person.

People were calling the Corner Club bar non-stop,

starting at eight in the morning.

The owner told me he just went in one day

and just took the phone off the wall

because he couldn't take it.

People were calling, trying to get the last names

of the bartenders that worked there.

I know so-and-so did it.

I mean, again, people were treating this as entertainment

and our town, our college,

you know, our university,

these students, their families were really suffering.

People were getting doxxed people were getting targeted,

innocent people.

Maybe it's the brother because remember, these were young

victims living out loud.

They're beautiful.

But their social media accounts, even to this day are public.

So people are going through them.

Who are their friends?

Everything from their Instagram posts to their TikToks

to their Venmo transactions,

taking it upon themselves to be Sherlock Holmes

and try to put together the mystery themselves

from their little smartphone.

And playing a game and this is people's lives.

And some of these kids just went home for break.

I mean, reporters were showing up

at their parents house in Boise.

Oh, talk to us about the killings.

Oh, it was so stressful for the students.

A lot of them were caught off guard or ambushed

when they were just trying to get their education

and move on with their lives as best as they can.

Heavy journalism and press attention didn't help at all

with the rumours or anything.

I saw a small business owners and faculty

and even other students were being accused

of being involved somehow

by people who didn't know what they were talking about.

And that just sort of comes from,

I don't know, all the attention without as many answers.

But by Wednesday, the police finally

were going to have a press conference.

November 16th.

They say, "We're going to tell people what's going on."

I'm in the back of the press conference.

There's cameras everywhere.

And I'm looking around.

There's journalists from the New York Times, from CNN,

from Fox, from MSNBC.

Why? Why are they here?

Why are they in my town?

I've never seen these people in my life.

What's going on?

And she asked the question to Chief Fry,

why, you know, shouldn't we be worried?

And he says, I guess we have to go back to

there is a threat to the community.

And boom, that's it.

That's the quote everybody runs with

because they've admitted, yeah, we don't have anybody.

We should probably be looking over our shoulder.

We did not have a suspect in custody.

It's, it's impossible not to have a community be on edge.

And especially with the university,

many individuals of the same age group as the victims,

many of them knew the victims.

The whole community was victimised by this crime.

They've kept the investigation close to their chest,

and most people leave those press conferences

feeling like they learned very little

and they start to badger in, on their, on their sites.

They start to badger the, the police force

and they start to badger the local authorities.

And they, they think, oh, these small-town yokels,

they don't know what the hell they're doing.

What was interesting is the police

were getting all kinds of criticism, right?

People are calling, harassing them.

You don't know what you're doing.

They're working overtime.

But also the community is being supportive,

bringing them food, cheering them on.

They're working overtime

through the holidays on this case,

and we're not seeing a lot of that police work

because they're keeping it very close to the chest.

And people on social media are going nuts about this case

and acting like it's some sort of game for them

instead of an active homicide investigation.

I can't imagine the strength of these parents to even...

How do you get out of bed the next day?

You know, they all handled it differently.

Some were a lot more quiet in the press.

Others, the Goncalves family, they got really loud.

They were going on the news, talking about it all the time.

Everybody handles grief differently.

But on November 30th, we had a vigil for these students.

This person is still on the loose.

We still have no suspect in custody.

If you're a community member

or a student who's experiencing this,

not only are you living in the nightmare,

but there's no escape.

You turn on the radio,

they're talking about the killings in Moscow.

You turn on the TV,

they're running footage non-stop of your college campus

talking about horror in Idaho.

These kids were like, we just want to be students.

We just want to worry about homework again.

We cannot escape this.

The pressure's coming from all over the place of,

why don't you have a suspect yet?

Why haven't you made an arrest yet?

Are they going to commit another crime,

or are they going to do this again very soon?

So those were the biggest unknowns that we were trying to

solve as quickly as we could

so that we can make sure our community was safe.

So we got the FBI involved,

our Federal Bureau of Investigations here in the US.

We had brought them in to help and assist with us.

So we now had the FBI, Idaho State Police

and the Moscow Police Department

all investigating this crime, all working together.

Everybody who got involved in this case

dropped everything they had going personally

through the holidays, through Christmas,

and did everything they could.

It was just the continual, um, daily grind.

Throughout this investigation we had two daily briefings,

one in the morning, one in the afternoon

with the entire investigative team.

We set up a tip line

where we were continually getting thousands of tips

from the community at large

that were looked at individually.

You're typically thinking this is an extreme crime of passion

when you're talking homicide by knife,

that is something that that is a very motivated individual

committing a homicide by knife.

As much as you hate to say it,

but it's not very personal to shoot somebody with a gun.

You know, you can just stand away,

you don't have to be up close,

but to be a knife, you've got to be up close,

personal and violent actions.

And it's a very, what we call emotional event.

So you're kind of looking at

somebody who has this motivation.

We knew when our investigators found the knife sheath

in Madison's room that that was going to be a...

large, if not the largest bit of evidence possible.

So when we did find that piece of evidence

that was hand-delivered down to the Idaho State Police Lab.

We also got a report back from our Idaho State lab

that there is a single point DNA sample that was found,

a single male sample

that was a very clean sample, wasn't contaminated.

There was only one person's DNA that they found on that sample

from touch DNA.

The news when we found out from the lab

that they had found single point male DNA

on the snap of that sheath

was a very big day for the investigation.

We knew we had the DNA on the person who did this.

Now it was just a matter of figuring out who they were.

At the same time,

we went out and sent the neighbourhood canvass team out,

just looking for who got cameras in the neighbourhood

and everything and trying to get footage.

We found video on one of the cameras close by

of a vehicle that piqued our interest.

We could see this white car

making multiple passes around the house.

It would come in, go back out, come in, come back out.

And it did that for about a half hour, up to an hour,

just constantly going back and forth, back and forth,

just making laps.

And then what really piqued our interest

is right around the time,

right around 4:00, 4:20 in the morning

when we feel that the homicides happened,

this car just takes off out of the neighbourhood,

almost hits a garbage can and takes off up a road

that we can still see on the camera,

heading south out of town,

really was like, okay, we need to figure out

what kind of car this is.

There's something with this car.

The FBI was able to look at the vehicle.

They had an expert.

They go to the technical details of the vehicle,

window shapes, measurements, stuff like this.

They were pretty sure that it was a

white Hyundai Elantra.

That Hyundai

fits exactly into the timeline of the murders.

The police make this public

that they're looking for a white Hyundai Elantra.

We had two main pieces of evidence

that we were working on at the exact same time

was the knife sheath and the DNA,

but also the vehicle from the video.

We understood that people wanted answers.

They wanted the person who did this to be caught.

The pressure was immense,

but we utilised that pressure

as even more motivation to keep grinding and keep working.

We walked in to this building every single day

and you could just feel it.

It was palpable.

Everyone was on the same page.

Everybody was on the same path of the mission.

We were going to solve this

and we were going to get justice for these victims

and their families.