WHILE IDAHO SLEPT-J. Reuben Appelman

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and views. While a reticent Moscow Police department, the FBI, and the Idaho State Police search for the killer, unending conjecture and countless theories blazed online in chat rooms and

platforms from Reddit and YouTube to Facebook and TikTok. For more than a month, the clash of armchair investigators in law enforcement professionals raged until a suspect, the twenty eight year old PhD candidates studying criminology, was arrested at his family home twenty five hundred miles away in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania on the day before New Year's Eve.

While Idaho Slept is a thought provoking literary chronicle of a small town murder investigation blistering beneath the unceasing light of international interests. As traditional investigators, citizen sleuths, and the true crime meetia acted, sometimes together, often in conflict, to uncover the truth.

the nature of homicide investigations permanently changed? Rising above the sensational? While Idaho Slept illuminates the intrinsic connection between today's media, citizen sluice, our societal mania for murder tales and an important public's insatiable appetite for spectacle as never before. Running beneath the pulse of the story is a heartbreaking narrative of the people we love, the dreams we all share,

and the uncertain time left for sharing them. The book that we're featuring this evening is While Idaho Slept, The Hunt for Answers in the Murders of four college students, with my special guest journalists and author Jay Rubin Appleman. Welcome back to the program, and thank you very much for this interview. Jay Ruben Appleman.

going to be able to read it. I'm glad that the audience that has been following this case will have something more whole to grasp onto, and they'll get to meet the victims in a better way than they've had in little blips and blurbs across mainstream media for the last ten months or so. This will be a richer, more compassionate, more full story of I think of what occurred and who these people were, and I think that's important. So yeah, I appreciate your sentiment. Also, thank you so much.

really are small things in that area. What North Idaho is mostly about is sort of spiritual, faithful, heartfelt people who work hard and love each other and take care of each other in the landscape is a beautiful landscape. That is the stuff that Hollywood draws from in its Western films, things like that. I am familiar with Moscow, Idaho on multiple levels. I've lived in Idaho for twenty

five years. I've been working as a private investigator for a decade, and many of my cases have brought me up to North Idaho, Moscow area, Lewiston, which is nearby places like that, and I've worked up there many times.

I have a child who went to the University of Idaho graduated from there just a few years before these victims were slain, and having visited during those school years, I can say that during the school session, the University of Idaho session, it's a thriving, sort of bustling little village that is really rich culturally, where old school Idahoans who have lived there for maybe four or five generations in that area, mingled very freely with the liberals who

come to school there. Sometimes there's a large LGBTQ population. There's a large sort of hipster gym rat population, as I call, people drinking fancy coffees and stuff. But they're sitting next right next to the old cowboys who sort of landed there four generations go, or I should say, the ancestors of the old cowboys. And it's a very interesting dynamic up there when school is out of session, which is when I I've done most of my PI

work up there. In the summers, it's a very very sleepy sort of hamlet of a place that is really uniquely comfortable feeling for one of those small places. It doesn't have that sort of rough edge that a lot of really small places have, even in the summer when it's sleepy and there's only you know, twelve or fifteen thousand people there. In some of those small towns that you go to, especially in the West, there's the air of coldness that was sort of bred into social interactions,

you know, But not in Moscow. Moscow is a very friendly place. And I ended up writing this story not because I was chasing a true crime. Du jour or something like that. That is not how I work. I write about things that matter to me, cases that somehow touched me. The first one in the kill Jar. I wrote about those murders because they happened virtually in my backyard and the outside of Detroit when I was growing up. That case affected me deeply on a sort of spiritual

and psychological level. And same now with the University of Idaha murders. I mean, it's not just my personal connection to the place, but where I live in Boise, Idah, five hours south, there are hundreds of people that I know who have personal connections to either the victims or the surviving too, or to Moscow in general, or the

University of Idaho. You can't walk around where I live and not know somebody who went to school there or knew one of the victims, or whose family friends are in contact with one of the survivors or I mean, it's just it's a very palpable in the air sort of case here. And so when Albert Collins chose me to do this book, I mean that was really why, because of my personal connection to the state, my personal

connection to the community, and things like that. So I know that area very well, very tied to that area through multiple tentacles, so to speak, and it's a beautiful place.

Kaylee was sort of the I wouldn't say the troublemaker, but the spunky one of the group, and always a jokester, always pulling pranks, kind of life of the party type and always having fun, always smiling, kind of in control of her situation. You can see that in childhood. You can also see that as an adult when she's on police bodycam. Later we can talk about that, but she when police showed up to their college house for a noise complaint. You can tell that Kaylene was somebody who

could have been running your business. There could have been you know, she was definitely somebody who was the face of wherever she was. You know, she could take charge of a situation, She could take charge of herself. She could take charge of like I say, you could see she was going to be the face of a business someday or something like that. A big personality, very charismatic, like very well spoken. And her family was not what people think of when they think of North Idaho when

they're not from the area. They think of, oh, it's like lower income, or they say people from out of state people especially on the East and West coast, we think of blue collar as necessarily one of the requirements is sort of like a poor, uneducated things like that. She has a very whip smart family and very well to do for that area. You know, they live on in a beautiful house on a nice plot of land, and her family for all all that, everything we can find,

it really took care of her. She came from a very privileged but hardworking scenario, I could say that. And she was right about to graduate. In fact, she had already started moving out of the house and had what I could tell from all reports that she had only come back to spend the weekend with her roommates and show them a new vehicle she had purchased in. One of those roommates, Matt Maddey Mogan, was Kaylee's best friend

since very early on in early school years. I mean they were stuck together at the hips so to speak, and always doing everything with each other. Kaylee's family took Maddy Mogan on all their big trips that they would take to overseas or to cross the oceans, I should say,

and I'm just big big adventures that the family. Kaylee's family dragged Maddie on, and it was a friendship that looked from the outside if you were one of the kids who didn't get all that stuff like the big house and the adventures with family and the close knit family and the love between best friends and all that, you really noticed Kaylee and Maddie as something that was admirable and that you would have loved to have in your own life.

solid upbringing. I say in the book that they looked like the family looked like they were out of an Eddie Bauer catalogue, you know, And to a lot of people that means everything that appears Ethan really had, which was a good amount of family income, a great support at home, just the confidence of somebody who grew up with a lot. You know. He had a ton of confidence and carried a room with him, so to speak,

and knew how to work the room. And it's very interesting that he met up with Xanna Kernodle, who came from a somewhat opposite environment. Her mother was in and out of brief incarcerations because of drug issues, and that's a very sad thing. I'm not I'm not speaking disparagingly at all when I say that, but it's very clear that her mother had many many and continues to have many, many troubles with based on her addictions, and her father had a rough time in the beginning Santa's childhood, but

really is not that guy anymore. Is really just a brilliant beauty, seems to be a beautiful human being, hard working in the construction trades and built his own sort of contracting business. And Xanna did not live in poverty, but Xanna lived with the sort of emotional trauma and psychological trauma one can assume of having her birth mother have all these complications in their life and in her life and lived in the same areas. It's not as

if Zanna's mother was unseen. I mean, she was around and that area and was in a lot of suffering through a lot of trauma and turmoil based on her addictions. And that's what Xanna came from. It is is that history. And it's so interesting. It appears that when Xana and Ethan began dating, Xanna entered a world of a big family, big privilege, and she tiptoed through it, so to speak.

You know, it seems like the way any of us who didn't grow up with that and are sort of guests in that world it's an experience that is rich and sometimes can be overwhelming and sometimes beautiful. And it seemed like between the two of them had big dreams together and that they had great, great, big love for each other. And they appeared, from what everybody says, to have been a really beautiful, warm, loving couple. And it

seems to be happenstance. We won't know this until after the trial, but seems to be happenstance that Ethan was there that night. Based on what we know the slayings of these students, the suspect appears to have been somebody who would have been targeting women, not men. So Ethan was not a resident of that house at King Road where the other roommates, where he was a visitor staying the night with with Xana that night.

and there's the front door. Well the front door. Really it's unique because you walk in the front, but you have to go up to get to the kitchen. So I forget what they call that kind of house right now, but the basically the front door opens into what would normally be considered the basement of most houses, and that's a parent when you look at the house from the backside, where what appears to be the first floor is really the second. If you're only looking at it from the rear,

you only see two floors. You can tell that there's a third, but you only really are in contact with two floors. If you're only looking at it from the front, you see all three floors. And so it's a really unique situation in that way. Both floors in the back have points of egress. There's a sliding door you kind of walk up to the backside. If you were going around the back, you would walk up a little slope you would swing around, then you'd see a sliding glass

door that leads into the main living quarters. There's another on the second floor which has theoretically a point of egress, but there's no way down from it. It's just on a little balcony, so theoretically you could climb up to that fORCH or balcony and get through the slider on the very top floor, which is actually I said the second floor, but it's actually the second from the back when you're looking at from the back, but it's technically it's the third floor. Anyway. From the front, you walk

in and it's it's an unusual space. You walk in and there are bedrooms to the left and right, and there's like a whottle hall kind of stairwell that takes you up to the main living quarters, and then there's another weird kind of misplaced stairwell kind of thing off to the side because there was an addition at some point to the house, and it's not exactly it doesn't appear that it would be entirely to code and new construction or anything like that, but it was maybe grandfathered

in through certain clauses or whatever. But there's a weird stairwell and it gets to the top floor. And on the top floor is where man which is technically the third floor, which is where Maddie and Kaylee had separate bedrooms. And on the second floor is the kitchen and living area. And to one side of that area was Xana Pernodle's bedroom, and to the other side of that area on the night of the murders was where Dylan Mortenson was sleeping.

She is surviving victim, survivor, survivor. I call her a surviving victim because she's still suffering through the horrors of this. And then on the bottom on the bottom was Bethany Funk, who was also a survivor of these crimes. But there are two ways of looking at the house. I want to state this again, because if you're looking at it

from the front, you see three floors. If you are looking at it from the back through a small either from immediately from the back or through a small small grove of woods to an area above that woods where cars to a nearby apartment complex can sometimes park. You would be looking down through the woods to the rear facing two stories. On the bottom would be a slider that is commonly used by the people who visited that

house to get into the house. And on the top would be a slider that went to Kaylee Gansolvez's bedroom. And there's no access to the top unless you climb, but there is access to the second again through that slider that was commonly used in knowing these students and their peers likely often unlocked because that's the way sliders are in these college houses oftentimes because people come and

go all the time. And the front door had a keypad, so if you didn't have the key code, or you didn't feel like typing in the key code or whatever, you could go around to the slimb up the little slope from the front and open that slider on the second floor. And that's what it appears a lot of people did.

just called Jack. They were there with Jack Showalter as well. And he's important because he later gets blamed for these crimes and it's a horrible thing because he had nothing to do with them. I'm I mentioned that because of the media presence that swarmed him, dogpiled onto him, the social media mobs and everything in this poor kid and his family were living in fear for quite a time after these murders. I have to drop him into this story for a second in case you get back to

that later and we can talk about him. But they were out drinking. They leave, Kaylie, Maddy leave with Jack so Walter, and they go to the Grub Truck, which is a local food truck. They're seen walking that night to the grub Truck. They're seen on exterior security camera footage from another business. They're talking. We can hear what they're saying. They're talking about some common thing that two

college girls would be talking about. And they then show up in live twitch feed from the grub truck whose owner has a twitch stream that shows video of what's going on at the grub truck. A cool idea to have live footage of your good truck. And because of that, we know what their actions were at the grub truck. They looked, they appeared to be intoxicated, and by the way they were moving and acting and talking and stuff.

And then they leave Jack Showalter behind and they take a ride share back home, and that ride share driver is the last person in the cerve public to have seen Kayleie and Maddie alive. They were seen at the grub truck. They were hanging out with Jack. Then the ride share driver takes them home, and that ride share driver and Jack Showalter have been cleared of any involvement

in these crimes. So at first they weren't though that people were looking at Jack, and they were looking at the ride share driver, looking at whoever they could look at. And the police tained alibis and cleared all these people. But those are the last moments of Kaylee and Maddy's life outside of that King Road residence. Same with Similarly, if I may Xana and Ethan were out that night, they were at a fraternity party at Ethan's fraternity Sigma Kai,

just down the road from the King Road residence. And I mean not just not on the same street, but as the crow flies a few hundred several hundred yards and that's it. But in fact, from the bluff, if you stood high enough on the bluff behind the King Road residence where these murders occurred, you could see the Sigma Kai fraternity house. So it's within I shot through some house, through some other houses and things like that.

But they were out that night as well, just the two of them hanging out with some friends, but they weren't out drinking at bars or anything like that. They came back to the residence around the same time as Kaylee and Mattie, which was sometime after two o'clock let's say, just for the purposes of this narrative here in this interview, but it's roughly around the time period, and the other roommates were home. Bethany and Dylan were home trying to

get some sleep as well. Eventually, and the only thing we really know about the activities of that night after everybody arrives home is that we know that Xana Kernodle was on TikTok briefly, or appeared to be on TikTok briefly. She may have just had the app open and so it maybe showed that she was on TikTok, but she might You can leave your Instagram app open and it shows people that you're on it, but you're not really

paying attention to it. We know that she ordered food like a door dash situation, and ordered food to the house. Food arrives around for a so they were up kind of late. We know that Dylan Mortenson, who was sleeping in the trying to sleep on the second floor, was awakened by some of this. Them coming home Kayley and Mattie upstairs making a little bit of noise. It seemed like, you know, so there was early morning hours with most people in the world are asleep, but these are college kids,

several of whom had been out drinking. There were plenty of college nights on my own where I didn't go to bed till four or four thirty. That's a normal thing if you don't come home from a bar until two thirty or so, and that's what was going on in this house. They were not having any kind of boisterous partying going on. They were settling in for the night, but it was very late. It was four in the morning by the time people were really settling down.

at the moment of the murders. Everybody who has looked into that has said, we can only guess she was sleeping, because that's all we found out is she slept through it right, and that appears to be what the police documents indicate as well as all reporting. Dylan Mortenson, on

the other hand, heard several things. She was trying to get to bed, and this is all based on police documentation and other verification of from different sources that I reported on the case early, things like that, who's opened to police or whatnot. Dylan Mortenson was trying to get to bed. She heard what appeared to be what sounded like Kaylee and Kaylee's dog sort of rough housing a

little bit. Murphy is his name. I was forgetting the dog's nady briefly, which which was heartbreaking, I mean, because I love dogs. Cayley was it sounded like she was googing off with Murphy and Maddie and Dylan yelled up stairs like hey, basically, can you guys keep it down? She didn't get any response. She heard barking from Murphy,

and then she tried to go back to sleep. Shortly thereafter, she heard some more sort of unst I would say, uncertain, not unfamiliar, like you know, there's there's scuffling, or there's something's going on or whatever. But you know, in a college house you don't think much about that stuff. You just think people are making noise and you wish, you

wish they'd shut up. So she heard some kind of more of that, and then she heard she heard what appears to have been Kaylee saying someone's here and it and she also then shortly after heard from and that was all from upstairs from her, and then down the hall from her where Zanna and Ethan stayed. Shortly after, she heard some version of someone crying, which she thought was she assumed was Xanna crying. And then she heard some version of it's okay, I'm going to help you,

coming from a male voice. Now she did not say it. Does not say in the police documents that she heard Ethan say it, but just a male voice, but she did not say it wasn't Ethan either. She basically from what we can gather from the police documents, from the investigative documents, that she she was not specific in those documents or the police intentionally left that out of their documents, whether or not she was specific, But that doesn't seem to be the case, and the police have no reason

to have left that out intentionally. But that's very interesting because she heard somebody say some version of it's okay, I'm going to help you, and then shortly after that, she becomes slightly concerned, not necessarily about any kind of violent crime occurring, but she can't sleep. There's weird things that she's hearing. She doesn't know what's going on. She opens her bedroom door, and she looks out the door and she sees, well, she had already previously looked out

the door, saw nothing. She does it again, and she sees a man dressed in black with a covering over his face, black covering over his face, walking toward her, but toward her also happens to be the route to exit the house. And you know, he's not walking into her room, so to speaks, tucking in the direction toward her, and he passes her, and he goes out the slider, and this is on the second floor, and something unusual occurs. She doesn't know if we don't know anyway, if she

believes he has seen her or not. She says that she just sort of stood there, like the police say, frozen in a fear type of state. But it appears that the police are phrasing that for her. It's not even quotes. They don't say in the police documents Dylan said she was. They don't say Dylan said she was frozen in fear, and they don't say Dylan said, quote

I was frozen in fear. Quote. It is written as such that the police could have been paraphrasing what she said basically, though the paraphrases that she stood frozen, she didn't know what was going on. There's this man leaving the house. She describes him as having bushy eyebrows, being Caucasian, you know, being slightly athletic in build, but not muscular or anything like that. And well, she goes back to bed.

This is very unusual to most people, because if you don't know who this person is in your house and you've heard weird sounds, you would tend to think that this was an intruder. However, several factors have come into play before this one. We've all just lived through two years of COVID at that time, and people wearing masks all the time on their faces, right, and there's a very unusual time in the world and where masks have become more commonplace than any other time that we've lived through.

So one, he's wearing a mask, but that's not necessarily that unusual. And two, this was a college party house. Basically, everything we've learned about this house, it indicates that there were people coming and going at all times, all the time, and it not only was a party house for them, but it had been a part party house in previous iterations. So this was a house near the university, and there are a lot of people who are in the Greek

party system. I call it the party system, but it's basically there's a lot of partying in Greek social life at the universities and the fraternity and sorority social life. And this was a house pretty close to all that. It sleeps six, which means off and on for years. There were probably twelve because you know, most college students are dating somebody, there are parties going on, and you know,

all people coming and going all the time. Fact on multiple different occasions, three of them that I have and probably many many more over the years, but three. And in the months prior to the night of the murderers, police had showed up because it was a boisterous, loud scene. Neighbors were complaining, So there were all kinds of people

that these residents were used to seeing. We can assume that she just chalked it up to that, or she was suffering from some traumatic response, and we don't know how people are going to respond to what their sixth senses telling them, what the lizard brain is telling them.

She may have subconsciously understood something horrible had happened, but the trauma response was such that she basically closed the door and she went back to went back to bed, and nobody knew exactly what had happened until the survivors

woke up in the morning. In fact, Bethany is said to have never gone and seen it, but Dylan is said to have seen what had happened after and the residents of the house that were survivors called other people to come help them through this moment with their friends in the morning and stuff. We haven't talked about what happened. I'm just slipping to the fact that, like, it wasn't until about noon that the police actually showed up at the house, so full eight hours after the murders.

the sake of your listeners. They were murdered, stabbed to death, and several several hours later, Dylan Mortensen and her peers, who she has called to the house to help her through whatever scene she has discovered, they called the police, and the police show up. It's around noon, and they very I mean very quickly. It's apparent. I mean, there's blood everywhere in these areas where the students were killed. They find Katie and Maddie upstairs in the same bed together.

It does not mean that they would have gone to bed together to sleep. We don't know what they were doing in the same bed, but it appears that they'd fallen into the same bed together after a struggle and being murdered. Right, They could have been laid in the same bed together at that time. We could have jumped into the same bed together, you know, out of instinct

to get away from whatever was happening. We won't know exactly what they were doing there until after a trial, and presumably we may never know, but they were found in the same bed together a stab to death. Horrifically. One of them was stabbed what they call overkill. One was one was stabbed to a greater degree of viciousness and than the other. And they found a knife sheath to a hunting knife or survival knife known as a k bar knife. It's a marine issue knife ka dash bar,

and that's a very particular type of sheath. And they found that lane next to Matty Mugen, not positioned next to her on purpose, but as if it had been accidentally left behind. And they also then discovered Xanna and Ethan in Xana's bedroom also it appears in the doorway as well as in the bedroom, also brutally stabbed to death. You know, we're not talking a couple of a couple of sticks, you know, like like you see in a prison shanking where it's just you know, this was not

like that with a knife. The coroner described it as harrors and gashes and I'm just horrific violence. And they also the police also discovered community surrounding that house suffering through immense shock and terror. The students who they first interviewed had been on that scene were clearly traumatized by what had gone on. So that was basically what they discovered. They had no evidence at first other than this knife sheet, which is a big deal, but they didn't have any

other indicators of anything else. Later they found a latent footprint that they have included in their list of evidence. They later weeks later were able to pinpoint connections to DNA that was left on the knife sheet. So they have that evidence, and they have neighborhood security camera evidence showing a vehicle what became popular immediately online and not popular, but the infamous white Hyundai that was splattered internationally in

the media after they released that. They had that footage of a Hyundai that they believed to be associated with the crimes. And they also had very troubling me So a neighbor's security like door cam picked up audio of the inside of the King Road house at the time of the murders, and that audio it plays back some moaning sounds and what sounds as if a head were hitting the floor the way like its sack was described as a bowling ball hitting the floor. But that's basically

what a head sounds like when it's dropped. I don't mean a detached head, I mean when a person falls. That's what their head sounds like against the ground. You know that has a very heavy, solid thing. We don't think of that when we watch like boxing matches or mma matches because they fall into into canvas or in the octagon. But when a head hits a hard surface and when a person falls, it makes a very strong thud, and that audio is picked up on a neighboring security

camera is very troubling. But that also assisted them in inpointing the timeframe for the murders. So in the initial days, they had no clues as to why anybody would do this, who would do this, what it was, They didn't have anything, But little by little the police were able to piece together evidence that pointed them toward this suspect.

kept reporting on this constantly. They're seeing their numbers skyrocket, and dozens and dozens of out of state reporters flocked in with camera crews, hundreds of cyber sleuths flocked in, hundreds of thousands of cyber slus online were paying attention. Millions of people were clicking on every article that popped up. The media that couldn't even keep up with the demand

for content about this case. Because of that, they kept pressuring the police department to give them information, and Chief Fry, who was the chief of police of Moscow Police Department, was just bombarded with media. I mean, you would have thought this was the most famous cop in America. You know, it was just insanity, and he was forced to have daily press more almost daily press conferences. It seemed like he was forced to the Moscow Police department website gave

near daily updates on the progress of the case. There were social media sleuths starting to say, oh, Chief Fry in the Moscow Police depar and are way over their head. They'll never handle this case. This should be taken over by the FBI. Because of that, the mainstream media was saying that, I mean, we had people reporting from CNN and Fox and NBC and wherever big big media reports from questioning whether or not the Moscow Police Department could

handle it well. In the meantime, it wasn't just the thirty seven member of Moscow Police Department that was doing this, and Chief Fry was a smart guy. He immediately called him the Ido State Police, which handles big, big, big murder cases like any other state in the country. Unfortunately, that's the society we live in. The Ido State Police

and the FBI were called in. The FBI committed dozens of members to the task force to assist, so Chief Fry was not just Podam Chief Fry, and as the world saw him, I mean, he had all the resources of the State Police and the FBI assisting in this investigation, and he was forced to really walk a sort of tricking line between giving information just enough to the public so they'd stop bother the basically, and the police department so that they could do their work asking for help

from the that same public for leads and tips, and hold onto the leads and tips that were substantive and

not telling anybody about them. So when they some six weeks later or whatever it was, when they arrest the suspect, Brian Koberger, it appears to have been out of the blue because Chief Fry and his team and Brett Payne under him did exactly what they were supposed to do as police, which is hold onto the investigative details so that when they have substantive leads, they can follow those leads without a scaring off a suspect be getting those

leads diluted or those that information diluted somehow or changed or altered or twisted by the public, and so they can focus on what they do best, which is what they've been hired to do and what they've been trained to do their whole lives is solve crimes. What they were forced to do is act as a liaison between the insecurities and trauma and fears of a public and the details of the case in some ways, and that's not exactly what police are supposed to do. And I

think they did it exactly right. They worked day and night tirelessly. They were photographed by I mean they were they were We're talking about a police department that had paparazzi camped outside its windows, you know, shooting photographs of them through the windows while they're working on this case. While the scene was being processed. We had crime scene investigators in full hasmad suit and whatever with paparazzi shooting pictures of them through the windows of the of the house.

I mean, this was a This was a really stressful situation for police to work in and when what the world sees as backwoods North Idaho, they pulled it off spectacularly. And it's one of the focuses of the book. A huge focuses the interplay between social media saluthing the traditional police investigators and how we expect crime investigations to be played out in the future. When we have YouTubers and podcasters and TikTokers diving into those crime scenes to get

their next bit of content, it becomes very complicated. On the one hand, shows like yours and writers like me. We bring to light stories that people should hear, because otherwise those stories go without a voice. On the other hand, there are people like some TikTokers were showing up at the crime scene to do TikTok dances in front of the crime scene, and that's clearly gone too far right in terms of not only decorum, but in terms of

getting in way of investigative processes. You and I are not putting on our best suits and shiny shoes and tap dancing in front of the door of a murder scene. Theoretically, we're telling stories that matter, but the tide is turning on that a little bit, and that's a very complicated place for police departments to be.

I mean, we're talking about Moscow is practically at the border, so you know, ten to fifteen minutes away is a PhD student in criminology and a teaching assistant, a professor you could say, because he would run his own courses or run sections of his course in criminology as well criminal justice in criminology. So a very unique character for being a suspect in this type of horrific murder. This is a guy who studies crime, and he grew up

in the Poconos in Pennsylvania. He had somewhat troubled youth. He was an outsider in many other ways. He did not underseem to understand how to interact with women young women. When he was a student, he was rejected often by the popular social classes he studied. Tried to study law enforcement when he was in high school. There was a tech school version of his school as well, and you could take these tech school classes instead of your regular classes.

He was studying law enforcement. He at one point was a heroin addict. He seems like for a couple of years he struggled with with heroin addiction. He made inappropriate remarks to a lot of people. He was insecure and lonely. Then he became physically fit after kicking heroin, and or right around the same time, that's how he kicked heroin, I believe. But he became very physically fit. He became a runner. He was very heavy when he was younger. He lost like one hundred pounds or something like that

while he was still in high school. So when you're in high school and you have the ability to you have enough to lose that you can lose one hundred pounds. You were a big boy. And he lost one hundred pounds and his attitude about the world changed. He became more hard edged, more dedicated, more focused about what he wanted in his life. He eventually graduated from college. It took him a while. He went to some local schools

and he got his master's degree. His master's degree in criminology from the Sales University, where he studied briefly under a renowned professor who had worked with BTK Killer on a pung a book about the BTK killer and also many other books that she's written, just tons and tons of his writings and serial killers and mass murderers, and

Brian Coberger studied with her. He was said by one of his professors to have been brilliant, and he got into the PhD in criminology program at Washington State University and appeared to have turned his life around. He actually, before starting at the university, applied for an internship with the Poeme and Police Department, wanting to assist them in their forgetting the terminology right now because it's not in

front of me but they're basically they're digital forensics. So he believed, at least we can assess that he believed that he knew quite a bit about digital forensics, how to track people online and things like that. Interestingly enough,

it's digital forensics that led to his arrest. So if we believe that Brian Coberger was the perpetrator of these crimes, while he was supposedly an expert in crime, you know, getting a PhD in criminology and knowing a lot about digital forensics, it's very opposite of what appears to have happened. He left behind what appears to be quite a trail of digital evidence. However, prior to that, he was, you know,

he'd only done just a brief first semester. You know, his crimes occurred in November of co worker's first semester as a PhD student, and in that brief time there were many complaints about him from some of his students, from some of his peers, from other people on campus, or also after the fact, we learned that other people on both campuses at WSU and at University of Idam were quote creeped out by him. He appeared to have

a real strong problem with women. He made misogynist comments to the effect that women aren't a smart He was very anti LGBTQ. He was very upset by many things that to not fit his view of how the world should be, and many people associated him with that in cell movement, which is involuntary celibates, but which tend to be angry people. You don't call someone an in cell, they have to identify as that. To be that, it's

like belonging to a club. You know. He appeared to though, be striking out with women all the time, to be angry with women, to be disassociated, to be suffering from his visual snowstuff, to just things just kept getting worse and worse for him, even though he was physically fit now slightly you know, kind of a handsome guy and you look at him just you know, he looks like, you know, no different than a version of John F. Kennedy junior or something great hair, good physique, chiseled job.

But there was a there was a strange stare in his eyes that everybody commented on. He was always sort of lurking and staring. And you know, when the police arrested him over Christmas break, we didn't know any of this yet, but he had already been perminated from the university for pause. He had not been performing his duties as a as a instructor, and his funding for his PhD would have been tied to those duties as an instructor. So he was he likely lost his funding as a

PhD student, and he was on a downward spiral. He appeared to be doing great, but underneath it all, he was all falling apart on this guy. When they arrested him in Pennsylvania after tracing all this digital evidence they had on him, then hundreds and hundreds of tips came in about him from all these other people who said, man,

I had experiences with this guy. He creeped me out, and this and that, and there were lots of lots of people calling in about him to the FBI and state police and the Moscow police.

has been assessed as the time of murders. And it speeds out of the neighborhood right after the time of the murders. And this is all caught on neighbors security camera,

which is an amazing stroke of luck. So one thing that Brian Koberger, if he is the perpetrator, which it looks like he is, but one thing he should have assumed in that case, being a digital evidence type of expert, or even just a general student in criminology, or heck, even just somebody who watches TV, one thing he should have assumed is that there would be security cameras in the neighborhood and if you're going to kill the four people,

you don't drive your own car. What the defense will probably argue, as a side note, is that that's evidence that he wouldn't do it, because why would he have driven his own car if he's a PhD student in criminology, right, so they'll probably argue the opposite. You know, are you that for opposite reasons? However, police get this footage of a white Hondai sedan and they try and figure out

who this belongs to. Well, it doesn't have a front license plate on it, so what the only license plate they can see is what they could have seen would have been the front, but it's not there. The rear license plate is it's too obscure in the footage they

don't have a license plate on. Eventually, police in Washington discovered that in university housing for graduate students there is this white Hondai Elantra, and they track it to Brian Koborger based on the plates because everybody's out looking for a Hyundai. Now it takes weeks, but they track this to They've got thousands and thousands of Yndai Alantras to track. One of them happens to be a criminology student in

Washington State, right right nearby. And then they also pull records from cell phones that utilize tower that served the King Road residence, and Brian Coburger is his cell phone utilized the tower that services the King Road residence not just in general, but at the time of them surrounding the murders, okay, also at least a dozen occasions previously.

So they realized that in I'm paraphrasing this for sake of quickness for your listeners, it's a little bit more complicated, but they realized that Bryan Coberger, his cell phone anyway, had often been in the vicinity of the King Road residence, including on the night of the murders, and that a white Alantra belonged to him, which was also in the vicinity.

Other video footage in the area, from surveillance footage, security footage from other cameras, treat cams and nearby businesses and things like that, they were able to piece together that yes, Brian Coberger's own white Hundrei Elantra was in that area. Wasn't just a random Honday it was it appears to have been Brian Coberger's Yundai A Lantra and his cell in the air, so the defense could say, well it wasn't coberg Er, somebody took his cell in his car. However,

the DNA eventually matches to Brian Coberger. The DNA that is left beim in the knife sheet, so they have in terms of evidence, they have the DNA that's left on the NFE sheet beside mate Mogan it's touched DNA, and then they have his cell phone and his vehicle in the vicinity and another thing that they have interestingly enough to talk about, Well what he asked originally, like, you know, if he's so smart, why wasn't he smart

enough to leave his cell phone behind? We don't know the answer, but we do know that his cell phone was turned off at the exact time of the murders and then later turned back on. But does not have a pattern of turning off his cell phone at three in the morning, say, and turning it back on at five or two thirty in the morning and turning it back on at five. That's not what Brian Coberger does based on his cell phone records. So he actually turned off the phone, but he only but he brought it

with him. So when the phone comes back on again. He's far away from the crime scene, but he's traveling well. First of all, he returns home, his phone is on again. Then then later he's traveling with that phone to other locations south of the crime scene within an hour or so.

And in a sense, it appears that he's probably going out there, if he's the doer, he's probably going out there to bear get rid of evidence, get rid of the knife which they have not found, get rid of clothing that he might have been weared, things like that. But if he's the doer, then he wasn't smart enough to just leave his phone behind everywhere, Like his phone is basically giving them the GPS coordinates of everywhere he's not exactly the GPS coordinates, but more or less everywhere

he's been in that period surrounding the murderers. So they don't have it on the GPS coordinates. They have it based on the opinion of cell towers. But it's just very it's very complicated. It's spelled out very clearly in the book what is believed to have happened. But basically, this guy who claims to be a digital forensics type of specialist was captured through digital forensicks right now.

a state to allow the firing squad. But if Brian Coberger has found guilty in this death penalty case, it's very likely that with the current political climate and answers on criminal justice and in the state of Idaho, that he could face he could face death by firing squad eventually. That is something that the citizens of Idaho, many of them agree with in terms of the death penalty, and so that is something that might occur. This case now has been pushed out, was slated to begin October second.

My book comes out October third, but this case has been now pushed out indefinitely and we won't know all of this sort of intimate details of how something happened or didn't happen. I should say this, we don't know that Brian Coberger did this until he's convicted, until all the evidence. Right. I bring him up in the story because he's the alleged perpetrator, and he's he's who police

highlight in there in all of their narratives, and he's who. Sure, he's who's been charged, right, so you have to talk about it. But theoretically the prosecution will lay out much more evidence than what we know. Absolutely, they only had to show him to arrest him. They only had to make public small amount of everything. They could have five times as much on him, and we just don't.

behind the families. They had multiple memorials, they were live streamed watched by hundreds of thousands of people in the commencement ceremonies that in spring. Kaylee was going to graduate in December, but they waited till spring, and the spring commencements ceremonies at the end were very emotional and they presented posthumous degrees to Kaylie and Maddie in to family members accepted on their behalf. Ethan and Xanna received certificates some sort. They were not set to graduate yet they

were younger. But it also important to note was that another young woman had died during the school year. She received a posthumous degree as well, in her large family accepted on her behalf. She died of under other circumstances, and to me it really seem that, I mean, look, to be murdered viciously is a horrific thing, and to suffer through that as a family is horrific. It's horrific. It's the stuff of nightmares. But then we focused on

that all year. Everybody did. Everybody focused on that all year. And then to suddenly realize that another young woman had died who also had hopes and dreams for her future, and whose family also had raised her through that process of becoming an adult, finally, it really strikes a chord. It really drives home theig notion that none of us are forever, and there's no way to promise forever to

our loved ones. All we can do is live the life that we have in front of us day by day, hold on to it, promise our loved ones that they can do the same, and try to get the most we can out of this. You know, this time we have here, and it's a really heartbreaking reminder that, you know, when these things happen, we never wish this on anybody

or on ourselves. It's just it's horrific. But they are a reminder to live hard, love as much as you can and really enjoy the time you have here, because none of us will be here one hundred years from now.