VSChristmas is coming, but a strange and decidedly un-festive vibe haunts the snowy university town of Moscow, Idaho. Locksmiths’ vans replaced traveling singers. Some residents ask for pepper spray or guns as Christmas gifts. Shops close early. Few people walk alone, especially at night.
More than a month after four local university students were inexplicably stabbed to death in the same house, the case remains unsolved and the killer, or killers, on the loose. Police have not named any suspects, found any murder weapons and offered no motive.
The streets of Moscow are uncomfortably empty, as are the classrooms of its largest employer, the University of Idaho. Many of the University’s 11,000 students left town immediately after the murders; others who left for Thanksgiving pointedly refused to return.
Moscow, a city of 25,000 near Idaho’s border with Washington state, is not used to crime. Residents tend not to lock their doors. Until November, there had been no homicide for seven years.
Now the area looks like a garrison. FBI investigators and state troopers, deployed to reinforce the 31 officers of the Moscow Police Department, are looking for clues. They have taken thousands of photographs and conducted more than 150 interviews, police say, but so far the case has been broad, not narrow.
Although describing the attack as “targeted”, Moscow Police Chief James Fry, Jr was forced to concede the possibility of greater danger. “We cannot say there is no threat to the community,” he told reporters.
Residents who normally live alone stay with friends. They lock the doors of the rooms as well as those outside.
An official from Tri-State Outfitters, a local store, declined to tell the Guardian whether arms sales had increased since the killings. Sporting goods and hardware stores in the area, however, confirm that police detectives have come to ask if they sell Ka-Bar style military knives.
The police were inundated with more than 5,000 tips, many of which were unfounded. Other tips – including one about the flayed corpse of a pet dog – were true but, according to police, unconnected to the killings.
Internet sleuths have exacerbated the wild rumours, Moscow police captain Roger Lanier said recently. The families of the victims have since been harassed and received death threats. The MoscowMurders Reddit forum already has more than 78,000 members.
“It’s kind of weird and kinda sad to be brought to light by this tragedy in our small town,” said 2019 University of Idaho graduate Bailey Kidd. Told Idaho statesman. “You can tell everyone is nervous.”
If Moscow seems eerily quiet, no place seems calmer or sadder than a pale, vinyl-walled house on King Road, not far from the fraternity and sorority houses of Greek Row. Until Sunday, November 13, the rented house had five occupants and was known to host parties.
That Sunday, police, responding to a report that someone was unresponsive, found the bodies of Ethan Chapin, 20, Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Xana Kernodle, 20, and Madison “Maddie” Mogen , 21 years old.
Goncalves, Kernodle and Mogen lived in the house; Chapin was dating Kernodle. All four attended the University of Idaho.
During the night, a person or persons murdered the four students, probably as they slept, with a large knife or sharp instrument. There were no signs of a break-in. Two other housemates, whom police do not consider to be suspects, slept through everything.
County Coroner Cathy Mabbutt said there was no evidence of a murder-suicide or sexual assault. She also said that some of the victims had defensive wounds indicating that they woke up and tried to fight back.
Built against a hill, the King Road house had an eccentric three-story design; the two surviving roommates slept on the first floor.
“I have no idea who could have done this or why they could have done this to Kaylee,” Kaylee Goncalves’ friend Jordyn Quesnell said. Told the New York Times. She and Goncalves planned to move to Austin, Texas next year and were excited to see more people beyond their native Idaho.
Goncalves, of Rathdrum, Idaho, had been friends with Mogen since sixth grade. Mogen, a marketing student from Coeur d’Alene, was helping a local restaurant create a social media plan. She and Kernodle were waitresses there.
Kernodle, who was born in Idaho but raised in Arizona, was independent-minded, her family said. She was “positive, funny and loved by everyone who met her”, her sister, Jazzmin Kernodle, Told the New York Times. “She made me such a proud big sister, and I wish I could have spent more time with her.”
Chapin was a high school basketball player from Washington State. He was a triplet and had spent part of the Saturday before his death with his siblings, who are also college students. “My kids are very grateful to have spent time with him,” said his mother, Stacy Chapin. Told the temperature. “He made everyone laugh. He was just the nicest person.
The victims were welded together. The day before they died, on Instagram, Goncalves posted a photo of them all together. Their friends and families have no idea why an ordinary Saturday night ended in such tragedy.
“I don’t want people to make assumptions about our kids,” Stacy Chapin Told Idaho statesman. “It wasn’t drugs and it certainly wasn’t a passion between those kids. Someone broke into the house.
Saturday started innocently with a University of Idaho football game – always a big event in a college town. Chapin and Kernodle later went to a fraternal evening, while Goncalves and Mogen visited a bar. All four returned home at 2 a.m.
Once home, Goncalves and Mogen made several phone calls to Goncalves’ ex-boyfriend who lived nearby, Jack DuCoeur, but he did not pick up.
DuCoeur was not named as a person of interest, and Goncalves’ family said she often called friends late at night. His older sister, Alivea Goncalves, said she and her family “stand 100 per cent behind Jack and know he had absolutely nothing to do with this”.
On Sunday, November 14, a resident of the house apparently called some friends, fearing another housemate might answer. It was only around noon that they called the police.
Police arrived to find people huddled around the house, crying. Inside there was ‘lots of blood’, the coroner said – so much so that a photograph of the house obtained by Fox News reportedly showed a trail of blood leak of an exterior wall.
News about the investigation’s drift has been sporadic.
Police are investigating reports that some of Goncalves’ friends had heard of a stalker, but have been unable to verify it so far. Police also looked into reports that someone with a knife threatened students on campus in September.
Last week, police said they were looking for information about a white Hyundai Elantra that was near the victims’ home when they died. The occupants of the car may have “critical information”, police said. They are also still processing DNA information from the crime scene.
Analyzing all of this could take weeks or even months. “Sent my daughter to college to get an education,” Goncalves’ father, Steve Goncalves, said recently. “She came back in a box.”
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