When the Night Comes Falling

September 13, 2022: Captain Roger Lanier, the 26-year police veteran who led Moscow’s Operations Division, answers the call from Gunderson on Sunday about the murders. He immediately alerts the Idaho State Police, sees that the perimeters of the crime scene are secured, and summons the forensics team and coroner. Next, he makes the difficult decision to alert the people of Moscow that a killer may be at large. Three hours after the discovery of the four bodies, the University Office of Public Safety and Security sends out a “Vandal Alert” advising students and residents to “shelter in place.” Adding to Lanier’s difficulties is his inability to contact his boss James Fry, Moscow’s chief of police, who has taken the weekend off to vacation with a friend’s family almost three hours away. Chief Fry has had a tough couple of years, ever since the height of the coronavirus, when his strict enforcement of Moscow’s COVID-19 mask mandates and other restrictions earned him a “tall pile” of scurrilous, menacing letters and emails, including death threats. Much of this hysteria was whipped up by Doug Wilson, the pastor of Moscow’s powerful Christ Church, whose followers (known as “Kirkers”) answered his summons to protest the town’s COVID-19 restrictions as “counter” to God’s will.

Chief Fry finally arrives at the crime scene around 6:00 pm, over 13 hours after the murders. Himself an alumnus of U of I, with two daughters who also attended the university, Fry finds the blood-soaked house to be the “worst” crime scene of his long career. Recalling a class he took three years earlier at FBI headquarters at Quantico, Virginia, led by a member of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, Fry wonders if the unexplained murders could be the work of a serial killer. Knowing that the Moscow PD has never before handled a case like this, he contacts the FBI, who send a squad of special agents, eventually numbering about 40, including three members of the Behavioral Analysis Unit. Remarkably, in view of Fry’s fears that a serial killer may be on the loose, the police department chooses to avoid panic by issuing a bulletin that the murders were probably a “targeted attack” posing no “ongoing threat for community members” (104). In reality, the police know no such thing.

The new taskforce, comprising FBI agents and police investigators, meets for a briefing every morning at 7:00 am, though the FBI personnel mostly work separately, running their operations out of a van in the PD parking lot. The briefings are led by Moscow police corporal Brett Payne, who has some experience with complex forensics investigations. The taskforce concerns itself, first and foremost, with determining a motive for the crime. According to the investigators’ timeline, the murders occurred between 4:00 am and 4:20 am, and the murder weapon was a single long-bladed knife. There are no signs of forced entry, robbery, or sexual assault. Because the house was the site of many boisterous parties, there is a vast amount of DNA, hair, and fingerprint evidence to sift through. After two weeks, the investigators are still at a loss, with no idea how the killer got away without leaving evidence, why he chose those victims, or where the murder weapon might be. They do, however, have a crucial clue—unshared, thus far, with the media—a leather KA-BAR knife sheath discovered in the tangled, bloody sheets by Kaylee’s body, undoubtedly dropped by the killer during his struggle with Kaylee. Another fact they are keeping to themselves is Dylan Mortensen’s eyewitness description of the killer (lean and athletic, about 5’10”, bushy eyebrows). Casting a cloud on Dylan’s value as a witness, unfortunately, is her bizarre behavior on the night of the murders and afterward: Three times she opened her bedroom door that night, (presumably) alarmed by noises, dog barks, and voices—finally seeing a masked stranger stroll right past her to leave the house by the kitchen door—and not once did she check on her friends, let alone call police. It was not until around 11:00 am the next morning, seven hours after the murders, that she finally called a friend about her (vague) worries.

Finally, in frustration, Chief Fry asks the public for help, in effect turning the citizenry into “consulting detectives,” ideally in the mold of Sherlock Holmes. A PD press release calls for tips on “odd” events or observations involving the victims, and before long, over 20,000 messages have flooded in from all over the country, much of it gossip and crackpot speculation rather than Holmesian observations. Innocent boyfriends, frat boys, and professors are slandered, some publicly on social media. None of the information leads to anything, and finally Chief Fry reverses his public advisory about the lack of an ongoing threat, cautioning the public to remain “vigilant.”

As time passes and the investigation seems hopelessly stalled, Steve Goncalves, father of Kaylee, voices his grief and frustration to every reporter who contacts him. Feeling powerless in his reliance on the authorities, who seem out of their depth, he resolves to solve the case himself. About a year earlier, he remembers, Kaylee tried to solve the mystery of a local missing woman, whom she thought she had spotted at a Walmart. Inspired by his daughter’s selfless example, Steve Goncalves scours Kaylee’s cellphone for clues, carefully logging her calls, texts, and contacts to reconstruct her and Maddie’s last hours, all of which he passes on to the police. Finding that both girls had called Kaylee’s ex-boyfriend Jack DuCoeur repeatedly the last night of their lives, Steven subjects Jack to a “physical inspection,” photographing his bare arms and torso (all devoid of bruises and scratches) and sharing the photos with police. He also tracks down friends of the victims and knocks on the doors of neighbors, searching for any possible clue the police might have missed. Most of all, for his own peace of mind, he needs to know why the murders happened. To this end, he reaches out to Olivia Vitale, a self-styled “citizen reporter” who commands a huge following.

A few years earlier, Olivia Vitale, a 22-year-old Florida real estate agent devoid of “any formal journalistic training or experience, […] hitched a ride on the comet tail of the zooming true-crime business” (117), making a splash for herself by crafting dishy TikTok and YouTube videos about notorious real-life murders. Since then, she has built up a fanbase of tens of millions of viewers for her true-crime series, “Chronicles of Olivia.” When Steve Goncalves reaches out to her with an email, Olivia, already enthralled by the Moscow case, at first doubts its authenticity; soon, however, she and Steve are corresponding frequently. The Goncalves family (Steve, his wife Kristi, and their daughter Alivea) grant her a filmed interview in their living room, a coveted scoop. “Citizen reporters,” part of a “new breed” of journalists, have become an internet phenomenon—a very profitable one, since the most popular of these amateur true-crime videos generate a lot of revenue through ads and donations. With this kind of exposure and remuneration, of course, come risks: Sydney (“Brat”) Norton, another social media journalist superstar, was notoriously hoodwinked by a supposed King Road neighbor who offered her fake “surveillance footage” of the night of the massacre. The Goncalves’ hour-long interview with Olivia Vitale begins stiffly but soon pivots to the family’s loving reminisces about Kaylee, and concludes with Steve’s plea to Olivia’s millions of viewers to help him complete the job that the official investigators seem to have failed. “It takes a whole community” to solve a case like this, he says, warning the unknown killer that “we’re coming for you” (121).

The killer’s (fictional) voice returns for another soliloquy, telling himself that he “screwed up” by leaving the sheath behind at the murder scene. He blames the shock and excitement of physical violence for this, quoting the boxer Mike Tyson. Nevertheless, he consoles himself that he understands better than most about what “science” can prove: “Science is smart. But you’re smarter” (125).

As the national media converges on Moscow, demanding updates about the case’s progress, the investigators have methodically exhausted all of their best leads: The victims’ acquaintances all seem to have solid alibis. In desperation, they consider other possibilities, such as female suspects, registered sex offenders, white supremacists, and a couple of random hotheads who have been threatening locals. The investigators make another appeal to the public, a more specific one, asking for surveillance camera footage of the neighborhood from the night of the massacre. Propitiously, a gas station just off King Road provides them with video footage of a white car speeding away around 4:30 am, just after the murders. The images are very grainy, but by November 19, a preliminary analysis identifies it as a 2019-2023 Nissan Sentra. (However, this identification turns out to be premature.) Meanwhile, video from a roof-mounted camera on Linda Lane, about a third of a mile from the murder house, reveals what appears to be the same white car, again racing away at “breakneck” speed around 4:20 am. However, this footage, taken from a different angle, raises doubts that the car is a Nissan Altima.

The detectives send the footage of the white car to FBI headquarters in Quantico, where an expensive new software developed for the Irregular Warfare Technical Support Directorate works to decipher its make, model, and year by comparing the blurry video to millions of images of cars. Eventually, the program conclusively identifies the “Suspect Vehicle” as a Hyundai Elantra. The date, however, remains less clear; first, the software gives it as 2011-2013, then as 2011-2016, eventually narrowing it to 2014-2016. The license plate and face of the driver, unfortunately, cannot be made out. Moreover, the investigators estimate that, in the vicinity surrounding Moscow, there are at least 22,000 cars matching that criteria. Nevertheless, the police issue a nationwide BOLO (Be On the Lookout) alerting the public and law enforcement that the driver of this car may have “critical information” about the case. Carelessly, the BOLO cites the first, incorrect estimate of the Hyundai’s year range (2011-2013) rather than the revised one (2014-2016). This will lead to complications down the road.

Four days later, police at Washington State University, just 10 miles from Moscow, finally begin looking for the Hyundai, and soon match its description to a vehicle registered to graduate student Bryan Kohberger. A patrol sergeant quickly locates the car and records its license plate number for the taskforce. However, Kohberger’s Elantra is a 2015, which doesn’t fit the BOLO’s (erroneous) year range, so the Moscow police pay it little attention. Instead, the task force follows a (seemingly) promising lead involving the previous owner of Kaylee’s newly purchased Range Rover. This turns out to be a dead end. Meanwhile, the key to the mystery—the report on Kohberger’s car—sits unnoticed in their files.

Seeking to leverage their sole lead (the Hyundai Elantra), the team sorts through the cellphone numbers that pinged local cell towers that night, hoping to match one to an owner of a white 2011-2016 Elantra. The search yields nothing, raising the possibility that the killer may have been smart enough to turn off his phone. Meanwhile, at the Idaho State Police Forensic Services Laboratory, the button snap of the killer’s KA-BAR sheath has yielded a promising clue: a single trace sample of male DNA. Regrettably, the “touch” DNA—which is from skin cells, as opposed to the more reliable blood DNA—contains less material than the usual specimens found at crime scenes (i.e., one hundred nanograms): about 20 cells in all, probably left by a finger that brushed the snap. Nevertheless, the lab derives a DNA profile from the sample and runs it through CODIS, the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, a database of over 20 million DNA profiles taken from felons, sex offenders, unidentified corpses, etc. CODIS does not yield a match, suggesting the killer has no criminal record. Undeterred, Matthew Gamette, director of the Idaho state forensics lab, decides to send the killer’s DNA to Othram, a Texas lab that specializes in IGG (investigative genetic genealogy), which utilizes public genetic databases to identify individuals by their DNA.

Othram, a state-of-the-art laboratory just north of Houston, was founded by Drs. David and Kristin Mittelman, a husband-and-wife team zealously committed to solving cold cases and exonerating innocent people through DNA. Their lab was mostly bankrolled through Charles Johnson, a businessman with ties to millionaire clients. However, with the rise of Donald Trump, Johnson’s far-right politics and racist statements (hitherto unknown by the Mittelmans) became national news, inflicting unforeseen damage to Othram’s humanitarian reputation. Diligently, the lab’s directors put these worries aside, devoting all their energies to building a DNA profile from the Moscow sample that can be uploaded to popular genetic genealogy services like GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA. These vast networks of family trees, compiled largely from DNA donated by individuals curious about their heritage and/or distant relatives, measure genetic ties through “centimorgans”: A score of 60 or more of these shared threads certifies a genetic relationship. Winnowing their way through thickets of family trees, the technicians are blasé, at first, when an initial link appears: the 1954 marriage of Michael Francis Kohberger Sr. to Henrietta Kathrine Votino in New York City. However, the discovery that this couple’s grandson, Bryan Kohberger, owns a white 2015 Hyundai Elantra and lives in Pullman, Washington—only 10 miles from the crime scene—clarifies things considerably.

As early as December 11, 2022, the FBI identifies Bryan Kohberger as a suspect in the four murders. Mysteriously, they choose not to share this crucial information with the Idaho police, their close partners in the taskforce. Whether they hoard this news as a way of providing a “control”—i.e., to see if the police can find their own way to the grad student—or because they want all the glory for themselves, remains unknown. In any case, the detectives need much more evidence against Kohberger before he can be charged: An IGG link, though a valuable first step, has never won a conviction on its own. For the time being, the FBI resolve not to let the suspect out of their sight. On December 12, 2022, when Bryan Kohberger and his father begin their long drive from Washington to Pennsylvania, multiple FBI vehicles track them, including a fixed-wing airplane. Again, the Idaho police are kept completely in the dark.

Overly cautious not to alert the suspect, the FBI’s “hatbox operation” (their multipronged surveillance force) almost loses him. Assuming that Kohberger will follow the most direct route home, the trackers at first keep their distance, but by day’s end he is nowhere to be seen—having plotted a strange, roundabout route through Colorado. Luckily, an ALPR (automatic license plate reader) in Loma, Colorado, picks him up, and the hatbox is back on track. Soon, however, the trackers are “stunned” when an Idaho police squad car pulls the Kohbergers over. If the Idaho police, somehow learning about the DNA link, have decided to arrest Bryan—before more evidence can be gathered—the whole case could fall apart. Worse, the suspect could be armed and desperate. So, when the patrolman finally allows the Kohbergers to continue their trip, the relief is palpable—until the car is stopped again only minutes later, this time by a state trooper. Michael Kohberger, plagued by a “sense of dread” about his son (146), feels on the verge of panic. As he later told relatives, he doubts the two stops are a coincidence. Nervously, he distracts himself by rambling to the trooper about the shootout in Pullman, just as he did at the first stop. The officer, perplexed by this, merely warns Bryan to stop tailgating other vehicles. Bryan’s “icy calm” during the encounter makes his father wonder about him; gradually, Michael begins to “put a name” to his terrible fears (148). The FBI surveillance team is mystified as well, debating whether the two stops could really have been for tailgating.

On December 16, as snow blankets the hills and valleys, the Kohbergers finally enter Albrightsville, Pennsylvania, and drive into their gated community. The FBI, after the two close calls of the traffic stops, finally inform the Idaho police that they have a suspect. They also inform the Pennsylvania authorities, since they may need all the help they can get. Finally given Bryan Kohberger’s name, Corporal Payne of the Moscow PD studies the suspect’s photo and description; his height, build, and bushy eyebrows all (roughly) match the description Dylan Mortensen gave of the murderer. By chance, the police also have Kohberger’s cellphone number, acquired during a traffic stop in August, and Payne checks it against the list of numbers that pinged the cellphone towers near King Road around the time of the murders. Finding no match, he acquires a history of Kohberger’s phone activity that night from AT&T and maps a disturbing “narrative”: At 2:47 am (an hour and a half before the murders), the suspect left his home in Pullman, whereupon his phone abruptly dropped off the grid, possibly turned off; then, at 4:48 am, about a half hour after the murders, the phone “pinged back to life” (152), heading south from Moscow. After a “circuitous” route back to Pullman, the phone pinged at nearly 5:30 am, around the same time a surveillance camera in Pullman caught the mysterious white Elantra returning to the WSU campus.

This seems to be the same car that, in the Moscow surveillance video, passes the murder house slowly and repeatedly from 3:30 am to 4:00 am, disappears around 4:04 am, then “hightails” it out of Moscow at 4:20 am. Moreover, Kohberger’s phone returned to Moscow the next morning around 9:00 am, pinging “like crazy” on a cell tower near King Road—as if returning to the scene of the crime. As for the two hours of phone silence from about 2:50 am to 4:48 am, this may constitute a “negative fact”—a suspicious absence—since many perpetrators are known to turn their phones off before committing crimes, so as not to leave a trail. Weakening this promising narrative is the fact that cellphones’ location histories, as tracked by the cell towers, are far from exact; the towers’ range of service can cover 12 to 14 miles. For Payne, however, the many pieces of the puzzle are finally falling together.

The next step on the agenda involves stealing the Kohbergers’ garbage to acquire a DNA sample. As if anticipating this, Bryan Kohberger, back home in Pennsylvania, has been sealing his personal trash into zip-lock bags and then stealthily depositing them in a neighbor’s trashcan in the dead of night. His older sister Melissa (the same sister whose phone he stole about 10 years earlier) has seen him do this; she has also watched him give his Hyundai a thorough cleaning while wearing surgical gloves. Trembling, she shares her dark suspicions with her father, who retreats into an agitated silence.

In late December, the FBI reaches out to the Pennsylvania State Police, who assemble an eight-person team to watch the Kohberger house; like Melissa, they take careful note of Bryan’s suspicious disposal of the family’s trash. On December 27, Trooper Brian Noll of the Criminal Investigations Division receives the green light to seize two bags of garbage from a trash can. Couriers rush the purloined garbage to a forensics lab in Meridian, Idaho, where technicians try but fail to match its DNA samples with that found on the killer’s knife sheath. However, a second analysis reveals that the genetic sample lifted from the trash belongs with a “conclusive 99.9998 certainty” to the father of the person who left his DNA on the sheath (158). A day later, on December 28, Brett Payne makes out an arrest warrant for Bryan Kohberger and hand-delivers it to a judge.

Owing to the risk of violence and/or flight by the suspect, authorities launch a “dynamic entry”—a late-night storming of the house—involving 16 “entry team” members and eight sharpshooters, all wearing military-grade body armor and packing heavy firepower: Glock .40s, HK MP5 submachine guns, and Remington 12-gauge shotguns. A couple of massive “extended body” vans speed them to Albrightsville, followed by a back-up contingent of state troopers; in all, the strike force numbers about 40 officers. However, the small army runs into an unexpected obstacle: the boom gates of the Kohbergers’ gated community, which require a code to be lifted. Luckily, one of the troopers knows someone who lives there and calls them for the code. At 1:30 am, with the shattering of windows and the terrifying boom of explosive charges, the entry team bursts into the Kohbergers’ clapboard house. They find Bryan Kohberger in the kitchen, caught in the act of stuffing his trash into zip-lock bags, surgical gloves on his hands.

In his preliminary questioning after his arrest, Bryan is “genial” and cooperative, happy to talk about the murders, which (he says) he’s naturally heard about, living only 10 miles away. Denying any involvement, he becomes more guarded as the detectives’ questions get more pointed, and eventually he asks for a lawyer. Since he can’t afford to pay for one, his case is assigned to Jason LaBar, the county’s chief public defender. Himself the father of a teenage girl, LaBar accepts the case with some trepidation. At the Monroe County Jail, LaBar meets his new client and is surprised at how “normal” he seems. Clarifying that he will only be representing Kohberger at the extradition hearing, he cautions him not to share any details about the case. Disarmingly calm, Kohberger insists on his innocence: “This is not who I am” (165). Back in Pullman, Washington, the police cautiously enter Kohberger’s apartment, unsure whether he has accomplices. Their search turns up no knife, black clothes, mask, or forensic evidence (blood, hairs, skin cells, etc.) from the crime scene. That same day, at a press conference in the Moscow City Hall, Chief Fry tearfully announces an arrest in the murders of Ethan, Xana, Madison, and Kaylee.

In Albrightsville, Michael and Maryann Kohberger receive a call from Katherine Ramsland, the esteemed forensic psychologist, who still remembers Bryan as one of her best students. Without rendering any opinion on their son’s guilt or innocence, she extends an offer to advise them on the case. The Kohbergers, traumatized by the police raid and the ongoing media frenzy, and grappling with their disturbing new reality, accept her offer with elation. Regarding the upcoming extradition hearing, Ramsland says she agrees with Bryan that it’s pointless to fight extradition back to Idaho, since it’s a losing battle, and would only delay Bryan’s efforts to clear his name. The Kohbergers, who originally wanted to fight extradition, are won over, and pass the news on to Bryan, who is “very excited” that his much-admired professor has interceded on his behalf. After the hearing, Bryan’s lawyer cautions the press that his client should be “presumed innocent until proven otherwise—not tried in the court of public opinion” (168).