How Money and Corruption Obstruct Criminal Justice | A Conversation with Vicky Ward

and the book is about all of the schisms in our society. We'll also talk this afternoon a little bit about Jeffrey Epstein, because Vicky Ward has investigated that case. And when we talk about class in America, when you talk about power in America, when you talk about accountability in America, it seems that Jeffrey Epstein's hand keeps reaching

up from the grave. And so as we get the conversation started, Vicky, what is at the core what drew you to this case that makes you want to go so deep into such a very very dark story.

Court on the conservative side. And it was very, very interesting, but it took me a very long time. I'd spent two years thinking about originalism and sort of one key constitutional legal theory. And I'm the mom of twin sons who are now twenty two. In November of twenty twenty two,

when the murders happened, they were both in college. And so there was something about the photograph of the four victims in Moscow, Idaho, these beautiful four college kids, that really just stayed with me because these kids were so ordinary, it could have been any of our kids. And I kind of couldn't get that photograph out of my head.

And as my kids then came home for Thanksgiving and later then for Christmas and they still had no clue who had done this unspeakable saying, I kept wondering about those kids' families. I was also very drawn by the pictures of the news of Moscow, this little town in Idaho I'd never heard of, but as you said, incredibly bucolic, picture perfect small American town, jarringly at odds with the

tragedy really of what had happened. And then when they arrested on the other side of the country in Pennsylvania, much closer to where I live in New York, this criminology PhD student, you know, something about the fact that he was also a college student was interesting to me, and I did wonder and the mother of young adult sons, what it was that could have driven him, someone who had overcome heroin addiction as a teenager and obviously overcome

considerable sort of personal difficulty, to then get into a PhD program at a prestigious university, Washington State University, and then go out blow it all up, and go out and commit these unspeakable crimes. There was something about that, and it all felt It felt in contrast to thinking about the Supreme Court. It felt very gritty and very real and very tangible, and I was sort of mulling

all this aloud. I've worked with James Patterson before on podcasts Only Enough on Epstein related podcasts, and he phoned me up and said, I hear you're interested in writing a book about these murders and something about them, he said.

Spoke to him as well, and we both agreed that there's something about it felt reminiscent of In Cold Blood by Truman Capoti, which is I think a book that had both left a searing impression on both of us, and we agreed that if we were going to do this, we were going to write a book that would feel personal, it would feel emotional. We wanted readers to know the

four victims Maddie Kayley's Anna An Ethan. We wanted them, readers to feel what the day to day of their lives were like, what their different personalities were, and we wanted readers to feel like they were there in Moscow when these murders happened. And we wanted readers to sort of feel the awful ripple effect that happens when something like this happens on and how the friends and the families are affected, yes, but also how the coroner is affected,

the police chief, the mayor, the local journalist. People sort of maybe six degrees away. I mean in this case, you know, one of the local business owners almost went bust because of the true crime mania that developed in the wake of the of the murders. There was all this online speculation and we get into that, you know, just how harmful this was. We get into the fact that there was a political divide in the town at

the time of the murders. It's this is a liberal college town, but there is a conservative church in Moscow which has four thousand members. The town has only got a population of twenty four thousand. The church is very rich, up a lot of main street. It's leader who is you know, talks a lot for the book. A stated

mission is to evangelize this town. And at the time of the murders, lawsuits were flying between the church and the police and civic leaders because various arrests have been made of church members during COVID because they'd refused to

wear masks and other reasons. So it was very helpful for the church politically when the police appeared in the eyes of the American media to look like the Keystone Cops for six weeks, when the police initially said nothing after these murders had happened, and then there was a drum beat of criticism online and elsewhere, like why are

they saying nothing? There could be a murderer roaming around and this you know, this played into the hands of the church who thought it could be very, very helpful for us if the police screw up. So that you know, there is all of this in the book. It's not just about a terrible crime that happens in the middle of the night, but it is about that too.

at at at best? How how do you how do you think about that that presence of of evil And as you cover this, you are bringing it close to you in a in a lot of different ways. Talk talk about that.

sense of things, and often you can't. And so it's about I have to balance my curiosity and wanting to understand and hoping that by going out and getting as much understanding as I can about Brian Coburger, that there will be something in that that is revelatory and helpful and tells us something about the broader cultural moment that we are in. And I do think that his story, just the bits we do know, are helpful in that regard.

You know, I knew nothing about the quote unquote in cell movement, the involuntary celibate movement that a lot of antisocial young men stuck on their phones who've been rejected by women increasingly are very familiar with. You know, my

sons know all about the insult movement. I didn't, So I think, you know, it was helpful for me at least, and I suspect for many other people, maybe of my age, you know, who don't know anything about it, to understand at least what the forces are on the internet that our kids are being exposed to.

I mean, people don't physically go out in the way they maybe did thirty years ago, because you meet people on your phone when you get rejected, having not actually moved from your desk. And there is a large growing movement among young men who've never experienced, never had sex with a woman. That's what you never even touch to women. They tend to congregate on the sort of dark corners of the Internet.

what this is. What you said is, this is somebody who is sitting isolated to begin with, trying to make a digital connection through the means by which young people meet, which is online, and they are perpetually rejected through whatever that digital persona is, whatever their images, whatever their words is. However they present themselves to the world, and that connection, that ability to step outside of that isolation is denied

them for for whatever reason. Do I do? I did I describe that accurately?

That was interesting, interesting for me to learn. I was interested to learn that he had been exposed to this video when he was an undergraduate, when he was doing his master's degree actually in psychology at the Sales University in Pennsylvania. I was interested to learn that he'd watched these videos made by this guy, Elliott Roger, who in twenty fourteen was a college student on the West Coast out in Santa Barbara and who had also been rejected and you know, never had sex with women. It was

a sort of social outcast. And Elliott Roger had written a memoir of his sad life and he'd made these videos. He was a privileged kid sitting in his BMW with the son setting behind him at the Santa Barbara Hills, saying that he was now going to go out and take his revenge on the sorority women who've rejected him. And he sent this video to his therapist, who sent it to his mother minutes before he went out and killed a large number of people, injured others, and finally

killed himself. This was something that Brian Coburger knew all about and that you know that his fellow classmates talked to me about and he was also so much I found.

were left guessing. But James Fry, the police chief, did say to me that, you know, recently after the book came out and when the gag order around this case was lifted, that he was frustrated by the lack of transparency from Washington State University, which is where Brian Coburger goes for his PhD. And had this case gone to trial, the victims' families had always told me they really wanted to know what the red flags were in Coburger's behavior

on the campus of Washington State University, because that has remained a black box. And in the book, I think we do lift a veil on some of that, and you do see that by the time he gets there, he is a full blown misogynist and that is why, and it's is heinous views of women and it's treatment

of women that lead him to blow up. He's the funding of his PhD. You know, he's got a teaching position, which is how he's able to pay for his PhD. And by the time the murders happened, he has been called in before the administration at Washington State University so often that you know, it's clear he's about to be fired.

And this is all because of the way he speaks to women and interrupts them, he grades them poorly, but he also follows one of them out to her car, creeping her out, and he's you know, there's this scene in the book where a guy who's in his class they call it a cohort, makes the mistake of getting a lift from Coburger where and Coburg events to him in the car about women and says, you know, I could have any woman I want if I walked into a bar or any social gathering, I could you know,

I could pick up any woman. Do what I want with that, And he then goes on to say that he believes, you know, he has a nineteen seventies sort of view of what women's role should be in the world, that women belong in the bedroom and the kitchen. They have no business in his mind doing college degrees. And so, you know, this classmate of fits listens to all of

this with increasing kind of horror. And by the week before the murders, this same classmate, guy called Ben Roberts is it's so troubled by Coburger's appearance, so clear to him that the guy is there's something terribly wrong. Then he starts to type out what they call a care form that is supposed to go to the administration anonymously, and you know, tragically, you know, he looks up at Coburger again and he thinks, you know, there's something so

off about this guy. If he ever finds out it's me who's sending in this form, there could be trouble. That's something I don't need. So he deletes it and doesn't send it, which, obviously, given what Coburger then went out and did in Moscow, is very troubling. But I bring up the Elliott Roger comparison. We don't know that they are connected, but there are parallels that are at least interesting. Elliot Roger in twenty fourteen went back and

forth between two college House and Isla Vista. We're going and Elliott Roger in his book, and Brian Coburger lived in Pullman in Washington State where Washington State University is, which is a ten minute drive from Moscow, Idaho, so there's that similarity. There is also the fact that Elliott Roger wrote in his book that a woman he was

specifically had in mind, she wasn't in the end. One of his victims was a childhood friend called Maddie, and the one of the victims one of Coburger's victims was Madison Maddie Mogan, whose nickname was Maddie, and most of the families of all four victims and the friends believe that Maddie Mogan was actually Coburger's intended target, not the other three, because that it was her bedroom that he

went to on the night of the murders. He would have had no way of knowing that he would find her best friend there with her, because she had already left the house days before, and she was only happened

to be there by complete chants. And it was Maddie Mogan's bedroom you could see from the road if you parked your car at the back of the house, which is what the police believe that he did twelve times between August and the night of the murders, and you would have been you could see Maddie Mgen through the window putting on her makeup or curling her hair, and anyone would have known it was her room because her name Maddie was spelled out in the window. So those

are the parallels. But you're right when you know your original question, what's it like confronting this darkness?

about really bad people. I mean, I think Brian Coburger is is unmitigated evil in a way I'm not sure I've ever seen before. Actually, but what But but the flip side of that is that I think the you know what, the book, So the book shows the very worst of humanity. I also think it shows the best of humanity. And I did find that the people of Moscow, you know, were extraordinarily welcoming.

to show evil. Does that make sense?

later mass killing. And I wondered if you had any awareness, if there was any connection between you're in the combine killers and any type of adoration, any of followership on that connection.

more research into. I'm actually going to have dinner next week with Catherine Ramsland, the criminologist, who is the who is the professor who showed the Elliott Roger video to Coburger. She's got to be very careful about what she can say to me about Coburger because of fur per restrictions, but she can talk to me more generally about Elliott Roger and about all the other murderers that she taught her class about. So that's something that I, you know, want to look into more.

hardship and obscurity to now he's a household name. And what I do know about his teenage is suggests to me he's a deeply manipulative, clever individual. I mean, I say that, you know, there's in the book, there's this scene where he phones up his best friend's mother when his best friend has been arrested. They both become heroin addicts. His best friend, Jeremy has been arrested for the first time for drugs possession and is in jail, and Coburger

phones out the mother and says, I'm so sorry. You know, when are you going to see him? I'd like to come to So she tells him what we're going tomorrow At eleven whatever time, and she and her husband arrived at the jail. There's no sign of Coburger. But when they get back to her house, they can see they've been burgled, they've been robbed, and she knows immediately who it is. So Coburger used and years later, when he's in rehab he can't. He appears in her kitchen to apologize,

which he understands is one of the steps. You know, a tonament, they ask you to take it in rehab. But I mean, that's a he was a very you know, he's thought this through, I mean, and and and were it not for the knife sheath, one mistake, he might well have got away with this. Actually, so there is

a perform you know. So I think I want to know if this was all, this was this, this was what he wanted, I mean, and I and the fear, the fear, the fear that the Gonzalvez family has and the reason they didn't want a plea deal and I've been vocally upset about that and would have preferred to see this go to trial, is that their fear is Yes, he's now looked up in jail without parole for the rest of his life. But he still has the possibility of telling his story, which gives him the power of

controlling the narrative. And you know, they've got instinct and I suspect they're right, is that that's what he wanted all along. I mean, this has given him a platform and a spotlight that he never had, and so I think, you know, I feel very sorry for the Gunzalbas family. I do understand their concerns. I mean, there would have

been issues had the thing gone trial. There's always a risk that their trials don't necessarily go the way people expect, and they would have been years and years of appeals or you know, had he been convicted. I mean, but I do understand that their worry is that now, in the current situation, he has the ability to regain control of the story of what happened to their daughter. And that's a horrifying thought to.

conceivable level. But this is a real life nightmare and you have had the courage to look into it, to cover it, to seek out the truth around it, and to report on it with James Patterson and the book is called The Idaho Four where with Vicky Ward investigates.

And I wanted to ask you if you had a sense of the journey down the rabbit hole, through the looking glass, the portal, stepping through the hatch, across the room, through the doorway, however you want to think about it, of a lonely boy finds that first thread and is welcomed into in cell culture? Is that a Is that a way to think about it? Is it a community

of in cells? And how yes? How how do if you're in the in cell community in the way that I like going fishing and when I when I feel that bite on the line right and I and I pull up the fishing pole right? What how does how does how does somebody from the in cell community know when they have a bite on the line in there and they're and they're pulling it up?

and by the way, don't women suck? And it's almost like you're in before you even know that you're in. Does that make sense? And you know this is I mean, I will say that, you know, I've been very glad to talk to both my sons in an open way. I mean, some of the hardest stuff was, you know, along the way writing the book. One of them in particular, would send me you know, hey, Mum, saw this online. You might want to take a look at it. And some of the material I couldn't watch for more than

thirty second that were deeply upsetting. But I'm glad that at least, you know, both my sons have had girlfriends. I mean, it's it's a false equivalence. But I'm very glad I've been able to have that conversation, and I will you know, it's opened my eyes I think to just how lonely a lot of kids are these days, and how as parents and as teachers in a way, we need to be as vigilant about that as we are about someone not doing well in school.

a society very much, but that he's just evil. He's a killer, and he, like some type of predator, found his way on that day. Or is it more complex than that? You have any sense of that because he is, like you said, retained the control and the power of his own story.

and broad display of you know, raw emotion. And for him to sit there seemingly utterly dispassionate and removed from the entire thing was I mean, the police chief used the word evil to me, that no empathy, no connective tissue to the rest of the human race at all, and you know the roots of that. You know, maybe loneliness is undoubtedly one factor, but that goes beyond I think that goes beyond emotions that most of us can understand.

I mean, he's in a place that I don't think you or I al most people can even get to and wouldn't want to.

the people of Moscow. I mean, by the end of it, as a sweepstake in the town that you know, perhaps I'll go back one day and join the Moscow Police Department as a detective, which I would very much like to do. But I have a few other things, you know, I have another book and stuff that I need to have a few other things taking up my time in New York right now. But it was, you know, that was that was the upside of all of this. And I really hope that the readers of the book, you know,

get that. I think you do. I think I think you fall in love with the Idaho fall You fall in love with the victims. You fall in love with their friends, their families, and and and you know, Jim and I j James Patterson. You know what we don't. Our job is just to tell the story and to tell their stories. We're not here to sit in judgment on any one.

One of the people, uh that I know who have who has read this book last night also compared it to the Joe McGuinness book Fatal Fatal Vision about the Fort Bragg murders, uh, committed by doctor Jeffrey McDonald back in nineteen back in nineteen seventy and that you know, there's so much unknown even to this day around why and you know, part of adult life in how very expedient culture is coming to the acceptance sometimes there is

no answer to that question of why. But when we look out at what's going on in the country, he

is not the only monster that walks amongst us. Another is a federal inmate who's incarcerated that you're familiar with, a privileged subject of his majesty, a privileged daughter of a British publisher who becomes Epstein's Jeffrey Epstein's accomplice his procure of girls, and Islay Maxwell is getting ready, from my reading of the situation, to walk out of federal prison by the hand of the of the President of the United States of America. How do you wrap your head around that?

billion dollars from the pension funds of his employees. So now that you have this extraordinary situation where Jeffrey Epstein died in strange circumstances, never paid the price for his sex crimes. Then Gilen Maxwell was convicted of being his procurer and accomplice. Now you know, I mean, it's it almost feels like it's just been the awaiting game from her perspective, right, the clock has ticked on and now and now she holds all the cards. She has the

leverage over Donald Trump. You know, he's got politically to give his base something. We know that she sat there for two days and gave Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche a hundred names, and swiftly, or very swiftly, on the heels of that, she's been moved to a cushy prison. So you know, I mean, I mean, now it's it's you know, I mean, you can sort of sit back

and you know how this blaze out. She'll something that will be politically useful to Donald Trump will be rolled out that she's given him, and she will and ex but she you know, she's a very very clever you know, she'll have done a deal. I mean, she's not going to have handed him information that will save his skin politically without having done a deal to save her skin.

So I mean, you know, I'm wait, I'm just expecting that at some point, you know, I'll wake up one morning and she'll be She'll have left the country and have been sent back to either France or England, or he'll commute his sentence. So there'll be something. There'll be something, and the victims will completely justifiably be stunned, shocked, appalled, and you know, a mockery will have been made of the United system, the United States justice system, and life goes on.

around the world. The idea, you know, it's sad that somebody like that doesn't think, oh I can I this is, you know, tragic, but I can build a life for myself and a career for myself with all these extraordinary privileges and tools. Instead, she thinks, I'm now dependent on a different man. I'm now dependent on this guy, Jeffrey Epstein, who's looking after me financially. So what do I need to do to you getting a paycheck from him and continue and make myself indispensable to him? And the answer

is bringing him children to traffic and abuse. I mean, that's just you know, that's not a victim. The story, I don't think. I don't think the story ends, and I'll tell you why, because because the questions about who's I think the scale of this is so enormous that one or two names alone won't do it. We don't know, you know, I mean Jeffrey Epstein's the source of Jeffrey Epstein's wealth is so opaque at this moment. And and you know, and I will the money is the source

of the power. And why did all these wealthy, unnamed people want to give so much money to a guy with no credentials? What was the hold over them? I mean, you're just You're talking about such an enormous amount of money, You're talking about so many international connections. I don't think a couple of names rolled out by the Justice Department is going to sufficiently answer the questions that people have

about Jeffrey Epstein. So, actually, why my worry is almost not dissimilar from the same that the Gonzalves family has about Brian Coburger than in a sense, Helen Maxwell has now got the power she has. She has She's able to tell the story that everyone wants to hear, But at what cost, At the cost of making an absolute mockery of the United States Justice Department.

there are Adolph Hikmans everywhere. They're all around us, but they're latent and harmless in democracies, but become deadly in an instant in a dictatorship of the left or right. My takeaway is it gave me my faith in democracy. I've a friend of mine who is a Democratic candidate for the Senate in Texas. He was the commander of the International Space Station. Spent two hundred teen ds and space looking down in eight billion of us with six

colleagues up there floating above the Earth. You know, ask them what is what is takeaway from the experience was, and it was the deep sense of connection that you can visibly see in the in the planet, which is a living organism and perfectly clear from from space. And so I wonder with you when when you when you go deep into these stories. Crow Burger Epstein, what is your takeaway from this type of reporting at the well, I know.

that tells us something important about the universal. And so you know, I think the battle for the control of the narrative is an important scene to think about when thinking about Gilen Maxwell, I mean to pull out from the day to day noise. And it's the same question

about Brian Coberger. I will you know, the flip side of this is, you know, and I've written about a lot of corrupt people over the decades at this point, and I will say this, you know, the flip side of it all is that in most instances there is.

It's you know, it's not readily apparent. But I think that one of the things that keeps me going is I think I do believe. I do believe that in the end people people's actions catch up to them.

up the fight, and that's good advice. Vicky Ward you can find here everybody at Vicky Ward investigates one of the best of the best, an investigative journalist, a truth seeker author, along with James Patterson, of the new book The Idaho Four, which goes deep into the Terrible murders, committed it to University in Moscow, Idaho and the colic college town, one of the most beautiful corners of the country.

Story of brutality and innocence lost, and so much more about what is happening in our country, beneath the surface and above it. But VICKI thank you so much for your time today. Really enjoyed the conversation and hope to see you again.