Ep. 2: The Aftermath

0:00This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the Name Your Price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. On Sunday morning, November 13th of last year, word began to spread that something awful might have happened inside the house on King Road. That someone or multiple people had been killed. Friends started to reach out to the five roommates who lived there, checking in, hoping this was all some wild campus rumor.

0:42We were like, OK, let's figure it out. Like, let's not panic, you know, we're going to make sure this is actually what happened. Katie, a close friend of the victims who you met in the last episode, remembers the moment she first realized the tragic news might be true. And I remember texting Kaylee.

1:09And seeing if she was okay. And she obviously didn't ever respond because it was in the morning.

1:23The victim's cell phones lit up with messages that would never be read. Authorities believe someone killed Kaylee Gonsalves, Madison Mogan, Zanna Kurnodal, and Ethan Chapin shortly after 4 a.m. that Sunday. But it would be nearly eight hours before anyone called 911.

1:51Here's what we've been able to piece together from our reporting. The two surviving roommates in the King Road home woke up to a quiet house. Their friend's cars were still outside, but they weren't replying to texts. We don't know if the surviving roommates tried to enter their rooms to check on them, but we do know the roommates contacted two other friends to come over and help. And at 11.58 a.m., a group of students made a call to 911. We still don't know who made the 911 call that day, but we do know that the 911 operator spoke to multiple individuals on the phone. Local public radio reporter Lauren Patterson had been house hunting that Sunday afternoon when she got the university's emergency text alert about a homicide and the warning to shelter in place.

2:42Instead, Lauren began chasing the story. Reportedly, the callers were trying to rouse a person they believed to be unconscious who wouldn't wake up. Police initially said the surviving roommates believed one of the second floor victims had passed out and wasn't waking up. But Ethan, Zanna, Maddie, and Kaylee had been brutally murdered. How could the call to 911 have been so far off? Well, my sources tell me that it was surprising how contained the crime scenes in the two bedrooms were. There was no trail of blood outside the rooms. No obvious signs of an attack. The cops show up, they walk into the residence, and that's when they find the two victims on the second floor and the two victims on the third floor.

3:33We know now that the victims sustained multiple stab wounds. Some had defensive wounds, too. Moscow police said this was the worst thing they'd ever seen, and the county coroner confirming there was a lot of blood. We don't know much more about the 911 call. Authorities refused to release the audio or the transcript or say who was on the call. In Idaho, law enforcement can choose not to release the 911 calls if authorities believe the information is crucial to the investigation. In an early press conference, the way police talked about the call was vague. The call originated from inside the residence and was made from the phone of one of the surviving roommates.

4:19But they wouldn't say who made the call. Was it one of the roommates or just someone using one of their phones? And why did it come in so many hours after the murders took place? I think a lot of people had the expectation that the roommates, their story was suspicious or it was odd. Hattie Ethereck was the editor-in-chief for the University of Idaho student newspaper at the time of the killings. she remembers the chatter among students. I think it did bring a lot of questions as to why didn't the roommates call earlier? Our conversations around it initially was just to be like, there is a gap here in the story.

4:56It's likely something that the police know, but we don't know yet. But it seems key to what is happening. Police have emphasized multiple times the surviving roommates were not involved in the murders. But they haven't provided many details beyond that. So if law enforcement had an explanation for that gap Hadi is talking about between the murders and the 911 call, it was another thing they weren't sharing. I'm Kena Whitworth, a correspondent with ABC News. There are lots of understandable reasons why police might not want to share much information in the initial phase of an investigation. But as far as families of the victims and community members were concerned, the silence created a vacuum that was quickly filled with speculation.

5:49Students talked to other students. Community members talked to other community members. News outlets, big and small, started bringing national attention to the case. International media seized on it, too. And before long, amateur internet sleuths turned this real-life mystery into a true crime whodunit. A mix of curiosity and belief that they could help crack the case. And for the small town of Moscow, living in the middle of this story, it was a second wave of trauma. This is The King Road Killings, Episode 2, The Aftermath.

6:34By Monday, the day after the murders, I was booking flights to Moscow and interviewing the town mayor over Zoom. Meanwhile, local journalists like Lauren Patterson were pursuing the story on the ground. Locals started talking. Was it guns? Was it drugs? Was someone heard something about a knife? We were just trying to figure out what was going on. As a local journalist, an alumni, someone who lives in Moscow, I wanted to get to the bottom of it right away. I went down to the police station around 11 a.m. I said, who can I talk to about this? We're trying to figure out what's going on. The nice ladies in the office, they said, oh, Officer Anthony Dallinger, he's been assigned to be the press contact for this, but he's not here right now.

7:17But we'll print you off the press release. So they printed me off the press release. I got his number. I called it. No answer. Lauren kept calling. And I actually got him on the phone. And he said, well, we're not doing any press interviews. And I was really shocked. I just didn't know what to say. I just couldn't believe that this was happening in our town and we weren't getting any answers. Now, I've covered a lot of crime stories in my career. It's not unusual for police to be guarded about what they're working on. There can be good reasons to withhold information from the media and the public.

7:53Like police not wanting to tip off a perpetrator about what evidence they have. Here's how Captain Dollinger explains the department's strategy. This investigation is ongoing. Our ultimate goal is to make sure that we have a successful prosecution. And if that means that we have to withhold some information or more or less hold our cards tight to our chest, we're going to have to do that. But I've also been on stories where law enforcement will use the media to help them pursue a lead. We can report a suspect description, a vehicle description, and reach millions of viewers in an instant. But here, we had very little to go on.

8:33Sure, law enforcement was issuing a press release here and there, but they didn't hold a news conference until three days after the murders. And overall, the information was extremely limited in the early days of the investigation.

8:49One thing police did share early on is that they believed the King Road killings were an isolated and targeted attack. The police tried to reassure the community that everyone was safe, telling them there was no ongoing threat. But they didn't say why they thought it was a targeted attack, which led to a lot of questions. I talked to students who didn't feel safe on campus, including Katie and another friend of the victims you met in the last episode, Ava. News is starting to come out Monday. Classes are still in session. What's going on on campus? We all left. We couldn't get out of there fast enough.

9:32Monday morning, came around, and we left. It was a ghost town. Yeah. And I think people were scared. We were all scared. There was no information, and it was... You had no answers. Right. These fears were something I asked Moscow Mayor Art Betke about. I think we're all set if you are. Okay. I arrived in Moscow Tuesday night, November 15th, two days after the murders. The mayor kept City Hall open so my producer and I could meet him for an interview. Spell your first and last name for everybody. No, Art Betke, A-R-T-B-E. City Hall is an old courthouse, really traditional dark wood paneling. They hold city council meetings in one of the old courtrooms.

10:22And that's where we set up our cameras. We were the only television network the mayor spoke with early on. You have a quiet college town. Hasn't seen a homicide in seven years. You said the biggest issues you deal with are stolen bikes, keyed cars. And now you have four dead college students and a police department that won't talk, which is allowing people to speculate wildly and become very fearful. People are leaving town. They're so scared. Yep. It's true. And personally, I trust our police department implicitly. I've worked with them for a number of years, and I trust what they're doing and have confidence in their conclusion that this is a unique circumstance.

11:10This was targeted and unique. And therefore, I don't have any worries myself about what else is going on. Targeted attack. It's a phrase that will come up over and over again in this case. At this point, the police hadn't explained why they thought the killings had been targeted, but the mayor did. A fascinating detail no other news outlet had gotten. His explanation went like this. The crime took place around four in the morning, and then eight hours passed with no other incidents. That's why police believe there was no further threat. If the killer wanted to continue harming others, why wouldn't they have taken the opportunity before anyone was on the hunt for them?

12:00It is not of any hazard to the rest of the people in town. Nobody else has anything to worry about. But when police chief James Fry held his first press conference on Wednesday, again, three days after the murders. So at this time, I'm going to open it up to some questions. It started to feel like he was going back on this initial statement that the community was safe when he was pressed by reporters. Over the past couple of days, the information that we've been getting is there is not a threat to the public. And earlier I heard you say you can't be sure that there is no threat. I just want to clarify what your stance is on that at this time.

12:40So we did believe we still believe it's a targeted attack. But the reality is, is there's still a person out there who committed four horrible, horrible crimes. So I think we got to go back to there is a threat out there still, possibly. We don't know. We don't believe it's going to be to anybody else. But we all have to be aware of our surroundings and make sure that we're watching out for each other. It was a whiplash for Moscow and people tracking the story. We didn't get a lot of information in that press conference or the one that followed. We asked that only one question is asked per person, please.

13:19Even though reporters had lots of questions for Moscow PD. Have you looked into the social media accounts of all the different victims? Have you seen any sort of threats made to any of the individuals? Do you know who were the actual targets of the killings? Was the killer the 911 caller? Do you guys have any idea if the killer is still within the community, or are you looking outside the community for the killer? And officials responded to a lot of these questions and my questions with similar answers. That would all be part of the investigation, so I can't release any information. We're looking at everything that we can look at.

13:55I'm not going to divulge that either. That's part of our investigation. We're not able to say at this point in time due to our investigation. But it was hard to know. Were the police just guarding information to protect their case? Or did they just not know much? When I talked with one of the victim's families in late November, they were getting worried. Here's Steve Gonsalves, Kaylee's dad. We're finding out that, you know, sometimes these cases do go cold. And that's a major concern for you, right? It's a serious concern. So Steve told me he felt like he had to keep doing media interviews to keep public attention and pressure on the case.

14:33I don't want to be in this seat. I don't want to be around these cameras. I don't want to do any of this. I mean, I talked to myself out of like three different ways not to be here today. You know, I was hoping I got pulled over so I could just say, got pulled over, I'm not going to be able to make it. But I will help all these family members find some way to keep this story going. Steve reportedly told the New York Post in December that he feared the Moscow police were inexperienced. And he said, I don't want anyone making mistakes in my child's case. He said he decided to work with private investigators to do the job he felt police couldn't do.

15:14But Steve said that he'd love for police to prove him wrong and catch his daughter's killer. That if the police prevailed, he said, I'll apologize. I'll come out and say these guys had amazing DNA or some evidence and good for them. I stick up for the officers and everybody involved in this. But the fact that when there's so much speculation because there is no information, There's that void and there's that gap that it gets filled with a lot of times nonsense and rumors and false narratives. Nonsense, rumors, false narratives. That's exactly what began swirling around Moscow and across the Internet as the investigation stretched on.

16:09We just walked into the office of the Argonaut, and it's set up like any newsroom I've really ever been in, except they have this nice little seating area, turquoise couch included. Just this May, about six months after the murders, I went to the U of I student-run newspaper, the Argonaut, to meet Hadia Thurick. You heard from her earlier in the episode. Hadia was a senior at the time and the paper's editor-in-chief. We met in the Argonauts' newsroom, which is slightly larger than a classroom, with mint green walls. Oh wait, there's a bunch of awards on someone's desk. Oh, these are all from 2020, 2019.

16:47The Argonaut has been a reliable news source for students and the community for a long time. And when the King Road murders happened, the paper became an even more important news source. And Hadia has really led the charge on coverage of the murders, asking questions at press conferences, getting interviews with law enforcement, students, and victims' families. I'm holding one of the papers, actually. It went out on May 4th. And the two articles on the front page are written by Hadia. And Hadia has a unique perspective as a student journalist here. She has a window into journalism ethics and practices.

17:29but she also has insight into what all the media coverage felt like as a student and a community member. This is the story that everyone in this country was talking about and watching and here you are leading the student newspaper at the University of Idaho. What was that like? Very, very odd position to be in because day one I was treating this with the same importance I treat any story up here. And with a high importance, you know, that is how we cover our news here. We're, you know, here for the community first. And that's how we started off. And then I realized, oh, wow, there's a lot more going on to this coming in from the outside eyes on us.

18:13Lots of outside eyes were on Moscow. There was the national media, big and small, reputable outlets, not-so-reputable outlets, and there was a groundswell of speculation online, on social media sites like Facebook, Reddit, and TikTok. People began to suspect that everything bad that had ever happened around Moscow or in the region was somehow related to the murders. Somebody died of a drug overdose. Maybe the Moscow victims OD'd too. Two people stabbed at night in Oregon in 2021. That must have been the same killer. A dog is found skinned and murdered a couple months before the King Road killings.

18:57It has to be related. Authorities had to say time and time again, these incidents were not related. But because the police didn't offer much information for weeks, true crime fans and internet sleuths stepped into that void. They started, quote, investigating from afar and came up with their own suspects with little or no evidence. At this point, I feel like everyone in Moscow knows someone who is wrongfully accused. Like, I know two people that, like, I knew before. Because one of our old reporters at the Argonaut, they're, like, commenting on posts being like, that's him, he did it. I'm looking, people are posting his full name online, tweeting at his mom.

19:42He had to go fully private on all socials. I also know another student in like the film department that happened to as well. Tabloids elevated unfounded theories like the idea that a neighbor was involved in the murders or that the killer used chloroform on the victims. 24-hour cable outlet NewsNation broadcast theories from both experts and non-experts, including a San Quentin death row inmate speculating, as someone with a criminal mind, about how these murders could have happened. And they asked victims' families to theorize about who the killer might be. Here's a NewsNation reporter interviewing Kaylee's parents and sister Olivia in early December.

20:30Is there anyone that you have a weird feeling about that the girls knew or that comes to mind? Yeah, I would say not in the immediate circle by any means, but a few of the names that have been circulating around, I think it's hard not to kind of, you know, dig into this. And I don't know how much of that is just because we have so little information from law enforcement and how much of it really is, you know, a sister or a father's intuition. Can you elaborate at all? You don't have to give a name. One of the victims, Ethan Chapin, belonged to the Sigma Chi fraternity, which was steps away from the King Road house.

21:07Ethan's frat brothers told me they'd have cameras in their faces the second they walked out of their door. You can see the fraternity president politely brushing off a reporter in an interview outside the house in December. But that's all I want to talk about right now because I actually have class here in like 15 minutes. News producers reportedly went to the homes of people that internet sleuths accused of being involved in the crime. And the surviving roommates were followed by photographers and hounded back in their hometowns like they were celebrities. Except they were famous only for their proximity to something terrible.

21:44Here's Hadia again. There were photos from some tabloidy news source of them running. just on a jog trying to get away from everything probably and just you know that that that stuff's harmful the poking the prodding the rumors yeah the media and internet frenzy also got in the way of building sources for me and hadia too i'm used to covering stories alongside other reporters competing for access to information and relationships with sources but this was different Some people were behaving poorly or not identifying themselves as media at all in order to gain access and information. Hadia says students even resisted doing interviews with her for the school paper because they were so jaded by the media.

22:34Do people hate the media here? Um, yeah, I would say so, yeah. I remember the first week I went on campus to do street interviews, like just grabbing students, taught them how they're feeling. And something I've done before, like a lot. I like doing it. I never had people be like kind of rude or like angry or upset with me approaching them. That never happened to me before. Even though I was saying like, yeah, I'm a student journalist. And I think a lot of people kind of replace their emotions into being angry at the media rather than mourning the tragedy because it's almost easier to deal with.

23:14But a lot of it is founded. A lot of the media handled it poorly. They were rude, unethical, et cetera. So now people don't want to talk to them. It's kind of what you get. Mm-hmm. since the early weeks of the investigation the police had warned the public about speculation advising them to rely on official channels for accurate information despite those warnings the rumor mill churned especially online true crime junkies binged the story facebook tiktok Reddit, they all became places that people would talk about the victims and their theories about who could have killed them. The true crime community did what it does best.

24:02They did some digging. The newest evidence coming out about this case shows me so much and my conspiracy theories are running. Obviously, I'm not a detective. I'm not a cop. I'm not an FBI, but I watch a lot of A forum on Reddit has over 100 ,000 members discussing the case. One group on Facebook has over 200 ,000 members. And on TikTok, videos with hashtags related to these murders have, in total, more than 400 million views. Some of the internet sleuthing has been hunting for clues. People sharing police reports, digging through the victim's social media, dissecting video like the grub truck Twitch feed that caught some of the last moments of Kaylee and Maddie's lives.

24:50People pieced together timelines. They drew up maps of the crime scene, even created virtual walkthroughs of the King Road house. These things got shared and reviewed hundreds of thousands of times. That kind of investigating might seem innocuous, But in some cases, the quote-unquote detective work went from neutral to unhelpful to harmful. Online true crime junkies who'd gotten obsessed with the story showed up in Moscow. There was one woman who called herself a concerned citizen and allegedly posed as a student reporter at an early press conference. Later, she came to court and started physically touching the Gonsalves family, sobbing.

25:37And the internet started coming up with its own suspects. For instance, law enforcement said repeatedly that the two surviving roommates had been cleared of suspicion. Still, the online harassment and accusations continued. Here's Hadia again. People are accusing these two college-age girls that they secretly murdered their friends in their own home. Like, it's ridiculous. and the reality is none of us know what we would do if we found our friends dead. Everyone seems to think they know what they would do, though. Neither of the roommates came back to the University of Idaho to finish out the school year, and we've heard from people who've talked to them since the murders who say they're afraid to leave their homes and that they struggle with survivor's guilt.

26:32The kind of obsession we've seen with this case happens with so many real-life murders. Think Gabby Petito, the travel blogger allegedly killed by her boyfriend in 2021. Or JonBenet Ramsey, the child beauty queen who was killed in 1996 at the age of six. People who were in no way connected to the victims or their loved ones get invested in the crime and take it upon themselves to help solve it. And in some cases, like Gabby Petito, crowdsourcing information, collecting tips, all of that can help investigators. Remember the Golden State Killer who began his spree in the 1970s? It was amateur sleuths and a public online genealogy database that helped law enforcement find the identity of the serial killer and make their arrest in 2018.

27:26But in this case, the King Road killings, it's possible combating Internet rumors wound up costing the police precious time. Law enforcement added a rumor control section to their website on the murders, and they warned the public that anyone engaging in threats of harassment, in person or online, could face criminal charges. For me, as a reporter, all this speculation became noise I had to cut through to get to the facts. I largely ignored the rumors, but still, I sometimes found myself having to actually make the call to authorities and say, I have to ask, what's going on with this or that rumor?