Idaho
The Gross Spectacle of Murder Fandom
The reporters arrived in news vans and satellite trucks that trundled down King Road and colonized parking spots outside the crime scene. TV producers crowded into the Corner Club, chatting up students for tips and gossip, mispronouncing the town’s name—Mos-cow, they kept calling it, not Moss-coe. Nancy Grace, the cable-news host famously obsessed with morbid crimes, set up a table right outside the victims’ house so she could gesture at the building on air while speculating about the last sound they heard before dying. The story was irresistible: Four University of Idaho students brutally stabbed to death in the middle of the night. The killer still at large. No suspects. Motive unknown.
Then the sleuths came. TikTok detectives, true-crime podcasters—they descended on the town with theories to float and suspects to investigate. They rifled through the victims’ digital lives, hunting for clues that might crack the case. In niche Facebook groups, they shared their findings. Did a history professor plot the murders in a jealous rage? Was the nearby fraternity involved? What about that hoodie-clad guy on a Twitch livestream standing behind two of the victims at a food truck?
Days passed without an arrest, then weeks. Frightened students fled the campus. The local police, overwhelmed with tips, begged the public to stop calling with unvetted information. But people just kept coming. “Dark tourists” arrived to take pictures of the house where the murders happened, and post them for bragging rights in their Reddit forums. Someone turned up outside the police line with ghost-hunting equipment to commune with the victims’ spirits. A TikToker with about 100,000 followers tried to identify the killer with tarot cards.
The distinction between professional reporters and clout-chasing cranks blurred into one unwieldy mass of noise and disruption and fearmongering. Locals turned bitterly on all of it, treating the press like hostile occupiers. They hung signs to mess with TV reporters’ live shots—FUCK YOU NANCY GRACE, read one—and posted notes on their doors begging journalists to go away. One local bar owner publicly fantasized about punching reporters in the face.
As the search for the killer dragged on and rumors spread unchecked, the friendly little college town seemed to harden and crack. People were scared, and suspicious of one another. The press couldn’t be trusted; neither could the police. Locals installed security systems and took out restraining orders. They bought guns.
A suspect was arrested six weeks after the murders, but by then it almost didn’t matter. The sleuthing couldn’t stop now. People were too dug in, too invested in their pet hunches and favorite suspects. Some questioned whether the police had the wrong man; some floated potential accomplices. Conspiracy theories lingered, and so did the unease.
Don Anderson, a retired high-school teacher who’d lived in Moscow most of his life, couldn’t believe how different everything felt. In some ways, the frenzy that followed the murders was just as disruptive to the community as the crime itself. Before all this, he said, nobody locked their doors. Now everybody was on edge—including him. One day in February, someone called the police claiming that they planned to go into Moscow High School and start shooting. Police quickly figured out it was a hoax—the call wasn’t even coming from Idaho—but Anderson found himself speculating about the motive behind the threat. Was it a prank by some outsider obsessed with the murders? A sinister warning of more violence to come? Was the town just a permanent magnet for voyeurs and creeps now—synonymous with the worst thing that had ever happened there?
“I’m beginning to wonder,” Anderson told me, “if we’re ever going to be the same.”
When I arrived in Moscow in February, the initial media circus had passed. Bryan Kohberger had been arrested six weeks earlier for the murders of four students—Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle, and Ethan Chapin—and the judge had placed a gag order on everyone involved in the case. The news trucks would return once the trial got under way, but for now things were relatively quiet. (Kohberger chose not to enter a plea last month, in effect pleading not guilty.)
I’d been drawn to the town, like everyone else, by the eerie facts of the murders and the still-eerier profile of the suspect, a former criminology student at nearby Washington State University. The details already in circulation were chilling. A car resembling Kohberger’s white Hyundai Elantra could be seen on surveillance videos driving by the house several times shortly before the attacks. Police linked his DNA to a leather knife sheath left on a bed, and his phone history suggested that he’d been near the house 12 times in the preceding months. Once I got to Moscow, however, I found myself fixating less on the crime than on its aftermath—the wreckage left behind when the media and the sleuths had cleared out.
Located on Idaho’s eastern border, Moscow is known around the state for a certain mountain-hippie vibe. Students joke that the town is permanently “stuck in the ’70s.” It has a lively folk-dance scene and an independent theater that shows classic horror films. Main Street is lined with brown-brick buildings that house quirky small businesses including Ampersand, a purveyor of boutique olive oil, and the Breakfast Club, known for its “world-famous cinnamon roll pancakes.”
But even months after the murders, the town seemed traumatized. No one wanted to talk about the case, on the record or off. When I introduced myself as a reporter, people recoiled. My efforts to talk with the victims’ neighbors were met with exasperation and anger. At one door, I found a sign that read simply, WE HAVE NO STATEMENT. LEAVE US ALONE. Eventually I resorted to writing apologetic notes with my phone number and leaving them on windshields and doorsteps. Nobody called.
At the offices of the University of Idaho campus paper, The Argonaut, I found a masthead’s worth of student journalists glumly disillusioned with journalism. Months of unseemly behavior by a scoop-desperate press corps had dimmed their view of the profession. They’d seen cameramen hide in bushes on campus, and reporters try to sneak into dorms. They’d seen TV correspondents shout hostile questions at teenagers still processing their classmates’ deaths as if the kids were prevaricating politicians. In one notably unsavory episode, a tabloid photographer tracked down one of the roommates who’d survived the attack that night and took paparazzi-like photos at her parents’ house for the Daily Mail.
Abigail Spencer, a reporter for The Argonaut, told me that she was struggling to square the heroic stories she’d learned in journalism classes with the reporters who’d invaded her campus. “We’re taught they’re all Cronkite,” she said. “They’re not.”
Haadiya Tariq, who was the paper’s editor, told me the rude behavior had helped her understand the wider antipathy toward the press. “No wonder people hate you,” she sometimes found herself thinking. She was alarmed by the extent to which professional news outlets appeared to deliberately stoke the online ecosystem of conspiracy theories about the case. The TV-news bookers always seemed so nice and thoughtful when they were asking for interviews. But once the cameras turned on, Tariq told me, the questions were invariably aimed at getting her to theorize about the murders in a way that might get traction in the true-crime forums. Experiencing this had helped her understand why so much of the coverage felt “weird or inaccurate or sensational”: “It is 100 percent trying to feed the audience, which is the internet sleuths,” she told me. “That’s kind of the dirty secret I’m starting to realize.” Perhaps more disturbing than the vulturous reporters or the vortex of TikTok speculation was the way the media and the sleuths seemed to encourage and sustain each other—their priorities converging in a vicious ouroboros.
Meanwhile, some unlucky Moscow residents were still struggling to reassemble their lives after becoming main characters in murder-related conspiracy theories. Rebecca Scofield, a history professor at the University of Idaho, was suing the TikToker who’d accused her of plotting the students’ murders because of a (completely fabricated) love affair with Kaylee Goncalves. (The TikToker denied any wrongdoing, and police have said that Scofield was not a suspect.) Friends of a recently deceased Afghanistan veteran were fending off ghoulish speculation on social media that he was involved in the crime.
Jeremy Reagan, a law student who lived in the victims’ neighborhood, became a target when he gave a handful of TV interviews about the murders. Sleuths studied his body language and parsed his facial expressions.
“It reminds me of Ted Bundy when he would talk about murders,” one observed.
“Very disconcerting,” another said.
Soon, they started mining Reagan’s Facebook profile for clues. A bandage on his right hand was treated as especially incriminating—how did he cut himself? Same with a four-year-old Facebook post that mentioned a rave. “Guys at raves ‘chase women’ and ‘do drugs,’ many things to note,” one sleuth deduced. “The girls partied, he mentioned that. Did he try to party with them? Did he actually party with them? Was he turned down by them?’”
Reagan, hoping to clear his name, volunteered to take a DNA test. The police never named him as a suspect. But the online sleuths kept digging—even contacting his friends for intel—and the menacing messages from strangers kept piling up. Reagan started carrying a gun.
“Just having it on me gives that extra sense of security,” he said in a cable-news interview. “Especially now, where the cybersleuths may or may not come.”
As with every gruesome crime that attains “true crime” status, the Moscow case has been a career-maker for some people in the media. Three separate book projects are reportedly in the works. NewsNation, the upstart cable channel that launched in 2021, has seen record ratings for its wall-to-wall coverage; its lead reporter on the case, Brian Entin, has amassed half a million Twitter followers and been profiled in Vanity Fair.
John and Lauren Matthias knew right away that the Moscow murders would be a big story for them. The Las Vegas–based couple hosts a popular true-crime podcast called Hidden—he’s a forensic psychologist; she’s a former TV reporter—and they have a strong grasp on which cases will pop. The key here, John told me, is that the case began with an “unsub” (police lingo for an unidentified subject of an investigation). “There was a mystery to be solved,” John said. “Nobody knew who the suspect was, there was a huge amount of uncertainty, and people want to play the role of Sherlock Holmes.”
The grisly murders also exploited some of the most basic human fears. “The idea of a group of people asleep in their home at night being attacked randomly … it’s literally a nightmare,” John said.
At its root, the couple believes, true-crime sleuthing is about the psychological desire to bring order where there is none, to make sense of a world that seems scary. “The mind wants the world to make sense,” John told me. “We’re constantly looking for patterns even when they don’t exist. There’s a lot of research that shows that we don’t like things to be random or uncertain.”
Lauren acknowledged that she doesn’t adhere to the same journalistic standards she did when she was a reporter. She indulges in conjecture; she tries to meet her audience where it is. “I never portray myself as the podcaster who’s going to solve it, or has the answers,” she told me. “I become just like my listeners: ‘None of us know. Let’s talk about it. Let’s speculate together. Let’s find clues together.’”
There are times when she feels uncomfortable with the more fever-swampy aspects of this ecosystem. The rush to turn random people into suspects and then demonize them, the lack of accountability when a theory is debunked—it can feel a little gross. “I’ve been a network reporter,” Lauren told me. “And here I am in this really bizarre true-crime community trying to find my footing as a professional.”
But the Matthiases also bristle at the lack of respect they get from mainstream news outlets. They note that they were the first to discover a years-old internet forum in which Kohberger had discussed suffering from “visual snow syndrome”—a disorder associated with depression, anxiety, and insomnia. Rather than crediting their scoop, CNN used a TikTok video of Lauren discussing the story to illustrate the irresponsibility of online sleuths. (When The New York Times eventually “broke” the “visual snow” story, CNN featured the paper’s reporting.)
The appetite for coverage of cases like this one, Lauren told me, is not fizzling out anytime soon. She sees their podcast as a force for good: “We either need to embrace this and be respectful, responsible voices in this community, or watch it become a bigger volcano.”
There are dozens of Facebook groups dedicated to unpacking the Moscow murders. The largest has more than 222,000 members. When I joined the group, several weeks after Kohberger’s arrest, I expected the forum to be quiet. The case was in a holding pattern—what would the murder hobbyists even have to talk about? This was, it turned out, deeply naive.
The group was buzzing. There were chat threads for people to speculate about Kohberger’s motive; there were chat threads for people convinced that Kohberger didn’t do it. A large contingent of members was busy building the case that a Mexican drug cartel was involved. (One key piece of evidence: an image from Google Maps that showed shoes hanging from power lines in the victims’ neighborhood, a purported sign of drug activity—though a quick Google search reveals that shoes can also be a memorial for someone who’s died.) Others latched on to a stray comment made by Kaylee Goncalves’s father about how she’d researched child trafficking. Had Kaylee gotten herself crosswise with a powerful child-trafficking ring? How deep did this go?
Groups like this one invariably attract a fair number of weirdos. Kohberger himself was reportedly known to hang out in crime-related forums, identifying himself as a criminology student; some people have even speculated that anonymous Reddit comments posing theories about the Idaho murders came from Kohberger himself.
But there was something else about the Facebook chatter that unnerved me. While the content wasn’t explicitly political, the group’s mode of thinking bore a striking resemblance to the hives of conspiracism and paranoia that have infected American civic life.
Here was a group of like-minded people clustered in a strange corner of the internet, developing a vocabulary, forming a shared worldview, inventing new storylines to help make sense of the world. Villains were conjured from thin air and elaborate backstories attached to them. Galaxy-brain pattern-finding provided the narrative satisfaction that reality could not. How different, in essence, was this universe from the one inhabited by anti-vaxxers or 9/11 truthers or Pizzagate enthusiasts? Are they not animated by the same urge that animates crime obsessives—to impose order on chaos, to gamify unpredictable, actual life? As John Matthias pointed out to me, “When you have an environment of fear and uncertainty, you tend to get this type of rampant speculation that’s divorced from evidence.”
Devotees of the Moscow case would no doubt push back on this notion. They might argue that their hobby is benign—that they’re just killing time on the internet, indulging in a bit of frivolous speculation for fun. But the consequences of this kind of conspiracy thinking are never contained to their virtual communities. They dribble out into real-life communities, where real people are affected.
Two weeks after I left Moscow, the University of Idaho announced that it planned to demolish the gray house at 1122 King Road. The house sits halfway up a hill, surrounded by squat apartment buildings and unassuming homes. Before the murders, it was known as a hub of off-campus social activity. The roommates liked to throw parties, and local police had responded to several noise complaints. On the day I visited, there were still signs of before. A Christmas wreath hung on the door; strings of lights dangled above the back patio.
The question of what to do with the house had been a subject of debate in town. It was still a crime scene at the moment, but some locals wanted to see it restored and preserved in honor of the victims. These students had good times in that house, the argument went—why let their memories be overshadowed by the murders?
But there was a bleak reality to contend with. As long as the house was standing, it seemed, an unnerving stream of sightseers and sleuths would continue to turn up in the neighborhood. There was no going back.
Idaho
'This is a game-changer.' New indoor soccer facility set to open in east Idaho – East Idaho News
The following is a news release from Portneuf Valley Soccer Club.
POCATELLO — Portneuf Valley Soccer Club is proud to announce the finalization of a four-field indoor soccer facility in Pocatello.
At just over 120,000 square feet, this facility will be the largest of its kind in Idaho. Beyond housing four fields, the complex will serve as the new headquarters for PVSC, featuring administrative offices, a merchandise store, classrooms, and more.
“This facility is a game-changer for soccer in Eastern Idaho,” said Cristie Stone, President of PVSC. “It’s a testament to the vision and commitment of our club, our partners, and the community. We’re investing in our players and are determined to raise the bar of soccer in Idaho.”
PVSC is making a significant investment to enhance the facility’s infrastructure which includes installation of high-quality turf on all four fields, procurement of equipment and technology, upgrades to restrooms, office spaces, and other amenities.
“This facility is phase 1 of a 3-phase strategic development program that will see PVSC become the Number 1 club in the state,” said Paul Baker, who led the development efforts. “We are focused on building a community where our athletes can thrive, families can connect, and the sport we love can continue to grow in eastern Idaho.”
PVSC’s growth ambitions don’t stop here. In addition to the facility, the club will be investing in the professional development of 5 full-time professional coaching staff who will focus on enhancing Youth Development and Competitive programs.
The facility is set to open its doors for a soft opening in January with an official opening ceremony scheduled for early February, offering a transformative space for the soccer community to participate in events, tournaments and leagues.
As PVSC is a 501C3 Non Profit, the club is asking local businesses and families to support the clubs efforts through advertising and sponsorships. Information is available on their website: www.pvscunited.com.
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Idaho
Project Pinecone aims to recover Idaho’s forests after Wapiti Fire • Utah News Dispatch
One organization is aiming to help forest managers recover the trees lost in one of Idaho’s most devastating fires this summer.
On Nov. 3, the nonprofit Daughters of the American Revolution launched a fundraising campaign to raise money to help restore scorched south and central Idaho forests.
The Wapiti Fire, which began on July 24 by a lightning strike two miles southwest of Grandjean, spanned about 130,000 acres across the Boise National Forest, Sawtooth National Forest and the Salmon-Challis National Forest.
Coined Project Pinecone, the funds raised will be used to hire professional tree climbers for the Sawtooth National Forest who will pick pinecones off trees to harvest mature seeds that will be used to grow and eventually replant trees back into the Sawtooth National Forest.
As of Monday, the Project Pinecone had raised a total of $11,500, including cash and check donations outside of the PayPal fundraiser, lead organizer Janice Beller said.
Beller is the Idaho state leader of the nonprofit. Like others in the organization, she is a descendant of someone who participated in the American Revolution. Conservation is important to the organization and important to her as a fifth generation Idahoan, she told the Idaho Capital Sun.
“Stanley is one of my favorite places in the world, and it has been in my family for years — literally generations,” she said. “When Stanley burned this summer, it just broke my heart and really had a kind of a profound impact on many members within Daughters of the American Revolution.”
‘We have a lot of need for seed’: Sawtooth forester says
Beller said a member of her leadership team reached out to a Stanley forest ranger to ask how they could help restore the forest. That’s when she learned about the shortage in seeds at Lucky Peak Nursery, located off Highway 21 outside of Boise.
Nelson Mills, the timber and silviculture program manager for the Sawtooth National Forest, said his biggest challenge is that forest staff hasn’t collected enough its seeds to replenish its seed bank at Lucky Peak Nursery.
Forest service staff right now have enough seeds to cover 50 to 80 acres of trees suitable for the Stanley area at its nursery, Mills said. However, that is not nearly enough to recover the forest from the Wapiti Fire.
Mills said that wildfires are a natural part of the ecosystem, but catastrophic wildfires like the Wapiti Fire will require artificial tree restoration. Of the 130,000 acres that were burned in the Wapiti Fire, 485 acres have been identified as requiring immediate reforestation need because the seed bed was completely burnt, Mills said. When a more formal assessment is done this winter, forest staff will likely find more acres in need of seedling planting, he said.
In addition to the seed shortage, harvesting pinecones is a complicated, risky and expensive process, Mills said.
The main way to collect pinecone seeds is by hiring professional tree climbers for $2,500 a day. Equipped with harnesses and spurred boots, they climb trees between 75 and 120 feet tall to collect pinecones at the perfect ripeness.
Timing is crucial, as ripeness varies by species and elevation, typically occurring between mid-August to mid-September, Mills said. An unripe pinecone won’t have a viable embryo, an overripe pinecone opens and releases its seeds, and pinecones that have fallen on the ground have been exposed to mold — making the seeds unsuitable for use, he said.
The pinecones are then transferred to Lucky Peak Nursery where they are tested, processed, cleaned and sown to make baby lodgepole pines, ponderosa pines and Douglas firs.
Mills said Project Pinecone creates flexibility for foresters because it is not congressionally appropriated. If it’s not a good pinecone producing year, he said foresters can wait until the next year, or look at other species in a different area.
“Everybody is stepping up through all phases of this reforestation issue to make a solution and grow forests back specifically in the Stanley basin that was affected by the Wapiti Fire,” Mills said. “It is an amazing collaborative effort, and I am just so thankful that people want to get together and grow a forest ecosystem.”
Fundraiser to last until spring 2025
Beller said the fundraiser will last until May, when she plans to hold a ceremony to present the funds to the Stanley community and forest officials. She said she is encouraging individuals to donate, as it is tax deductible, and people who donate more than $10 will receive a wooden magnet with the project’s logo.
The total goal of the project is to raise $15,000, which would pay for six days of pinecone picking.
The fundraiser is partnering with Boise Cascade, which committed to a day’s worth of pinecone picking to the project.
“Boise Cascade’s roots run deep in the state of Idaho, and we are honored to contribute to this incredible project to help restore some of Idaho’s most cherished forest lands that were burned during the brutal fire season of summer 2024,” Boise Cascade Vice President of Human Resources and contributions committee chair Angella Broesch, told the Sun. “As one of the largest producers of wood products in North America and a leading wholesale distributor of building products in the U.S., our company is committed to contributing to responsible forestry practices and protecting our environment.”
Having surpassed the halfway point of its goal, Beller said the successful donations show how much people from Idaho and outside of Idaho care about the Stanley area.
“We’ve heard so many people say that it’s truly the heart of Idaho, and it means a great deal to them and their families,” Beller said. “So to see everybody come together and contribute even just a little to bring it back is very humbling.”
Idaho Capital Sun is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Idaho Capital Sun maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Christina Lords for questions: [email protected].
Idaho
A very wet holiday week lies ahead
After a short dry spell this past week, Idaho is gearing up for a wet holiday week ahead with plenty of precipitation to come.
It started off today with light snow falling in the mountains but not much making it to the valley floor in terms of rain. Tomorrow the Magic Valley will see some rain sweep through the region as a stray pattern will bring in early rain separate from the main systems later this week.
Monday night into Tuesday morning is wave #1, which will deliver precipitation to almost all of Idaho. Tuesday will see another wave pass through before things clear out just in time for Christmas Day.
Wednesday’s clear weather only lasts for a moment as more rain arrives on Thursday & Friday, with more to come next Saturday.
Happy Holidays everyone! Enjoy the season and stay dry this week!
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