When the Night Comes Falling 42:14

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It's such a harrowing account, and it's so well written, and hearing you speak about it now, I can't imagine the level of emotional regulation a human would have to have to be in the car with your own parent, knowing that the police are looking for you, the world is looking for you, and your car has been identified. And until the trial, I'd like to think that when the night comes falling is the best source of information to what really happened.

This is The Idaho Massacre, a production of KT Studios and iHeartRadio. Season 2, Episode 5, When the Night Comes Falling, a requiem for the Idaho student murders. I'm Courtney Armstrong, a producer at KT Studios with Stephanie Lidecker and Gabe Castillo. With the gag order firmly in place, reporting and fact-finding has been difficult and often nontraditional.

But even given those restraints, a pivotal new book has emerged, written by Howard Bloom. The Kirkus Review says it, quote, "...thoughtfully probes into the motives of key players in this intriguing yet profoundly unsettling story."

The book shares the months leading up to the murders of Zanna Kernodle, her boyfriend Ethan Chapin, Madison Mogan, and Kaylee Gonsalves. Bone-chilling Brian Koberger details emerge. Did the accused killer of the four University of Idaho students have a deadly obsession with one of the victims? Chilling revelations about the murders are detailed in When the Night Comes Falling.

Stephanie and I sat down with Howard Bloom to discuss his book, which just came out on June 25th. We started out by asking him to provide a bit of context to his career. ♪

When I finished graduate school at Stanford, I came out and worked at the Village Voice for a little bit. And then I was hired by the New York Times and I was there for about 12 years, 12 and a half years as an investigative reporter. I was nominated for two Pulitzer's by the Times and won a lot of awards.

Then I went on and I've done 16 books, many bestsellers, wrote for Vanity Fair for a couple of decades, and won magazine awards. So I've been doing this, knocking on doors, trying to put together stories, trying to get readers interested in what I hope are compelling, true narratives. How did you land on the title? It was an intriguing title.

Well, when the night comes falling, I'm a big Bob Dylan fan. When the night comes falling from the sky is a Bob Dylan song that always sort of plays in my head and

You're a dark night in Moscow. I remember walking the streets of Moscow, walking right down King Road. And I sort of struck by that song. I could hear that song sort of playing in my head. Your letters burning in the fireplace and when the night comes falling from the sky. And I thought, well, falling from the sky is a little too much. So just when the night comes falling, I'm

I remember being out in front of the murder house not long after it happened, and they just walled it up with a plywood wall in front of it. I was thinking to myself, well, was that to keep people from breaking in, or was that to keep the demons inside to lock it up?

And then suddenly I'm caught in a cone of light from nowhere. It startles me. And I figured, well, what's it like when the night comes falling? And the cone of light was from a security car that had been parked at Caddy Corner. It was black and the night was dark to the murder house. And they were just checking on me. An officer called out, be careful, it's icy out there. And I said, thank you, officer. And I went on my way, but...

And sort of being surprised out there, I could almost imagine what it's like to be awoken in from your sleep in that house. Let someone say, there's someone here. And then you feel like the night comes falling from the sky.

Can you just describe how did you start to follow this story and what was your reporting like? I understand there were trips to Idaho, Pennsylvania, hundreds of interviews. Right. I first really heard about the story in any detail around the Thanksgiving table up in Connecticut just days after the murder. People started talking about it and I hadn't paid too much attention to it. And the more they talked about it, I was pretty...

Pretty interesting. It was a murder filled with perplexities. Nothing was known.

And I thought this might be an interesting story to investigate. I called up Graydon Carter or emailed him, who ran Airmail. And I said, Graydon, who I've worked for for a while at Vanity Fair and is an old acquaintance and a wonderful editor. I said, you know, I'd like to go out there. What do you guys think? And he and Alexandra Stanley, who run Airmail, said, sure, go on out there. And I said, I don't know what I'll find, but

"Go ahead, knock on doors." So I put on my reporters, French coat, go out, knock on doors. And I was there for a couple of days and I figured, I had no idea that I was gonna write a piece or even certainly not a book, but I thought I'd solve the case. This was when no one knew who the suspect was. And I figured it out, the house is sort of in this gully around it. And most of the fancier houses,

nearby that area were members of this local church group, the Christ Church Kirkus group. And they had had some problems with the community. Their deacon had gone to jail for pedophilia. There are members of young women in the group had posted videos complaining about sexual harassment, sex crimes, whatever.

So I thought, well, maybe someone from this group was involved. Maybe it was of a sexual nature. So I tried to track down the minister, Doug Wilson, of the group. And he's not returning my calls. So intrepidly, I go to the church parking lot.

And I corner him, and he's very gracious. He's a very charismatic, wonderfully articulate man. I disagree with everything he says, but he's a very impressive figure. And he very graciously invites me into his office.

And he's talking to me, we're sitting in almost catty corner in a room, and he's telling me the problems that they're having in the town with the local officials. He talks about a war with the police because of COVID restrictions, et cetera, et cetera. And I suddenly realized I'm trying to solve this case and I'm in a room with this man.

as gracious as he is, he hasn't been vaccinated. It's the height of the pandemic and there are no windows. And two days later, I didn't solve the case, but I was stuck in Moscow with COVID. So that was my introduction to all this. Then on my second trip, though, I began to investigate more and trips to Pennsylvania and to Washington state. And I realized

there was a compelling story here and i started writing the pieces for airmail i eventually wrote seven pieces what i thought was is there a book here is there a larger story to tell there you know everyone realizes there hasn't been a trial but was there a story with a beginning a middle and an end i realized there was very much

The identification, the hunting down, the solving of the mystery towards the suspect Koberger is a fascinating story as well as the story of the individuals involved. And I found a way, I believe, to structure the narrative in a coherent and compelling and engrossing way along, based around the road trip that Koberger takes with

with his father, this trip across country. And my narrative inspiration, you know, pretentiously was "The Odyssey," you know, this long 10 year journey by Odysseus. Well, here I have just a five day journey, but it was to me rather compelling as Brian and his father make this cross country trip and hanging over the entire journey is the father coming to terms in his mind with whether or not, oh my gosh,

my son be actually involved in the murder of these four young people. That to me was a dramatic moment. And I use that to go back and forth in time to tell this tale. Structurally, I think it works beautifully. Thank you. On that five-day drive, can you talk us through it a little bit? I had not realized that the FBI were so uncoordinated with the ground officers. Can you just describe the details of that?

What happens is around December 11th, and this is one of the revelations in this book, the FBI working in Quantico has deciphered the genetic genealogy to make Kohlberger a person of interest.

They built out the family tree and at the end of the father's branch, they found Brian Kober. They don't share this information with the local Moscow task force. Why do they not do this? Well, the most generous explanation would be

that they're not sure investigative genetic genealogy is not allowed into courts, they don't want to prejudice the case, they want to make sure the task force connects all the dots, he's just a person of interest. That's a generous explanation. A more cynical explanation is that the FBI wanted to get all the credit for solving the case.

They didn't want to share it with the local authorities. They wanted to become officers of the G-men who solved this great mystery which the whole nation is fixated on. Whatever reason, when the Kohlbergers leave, the FBI is following them. But the FBI wants the Kohlbergers to get out of town first before they get directly on their tail. And they don't want the Moscow police to know, and they also don't want the Kohlbergers to know. Meanwhile, Brian...

Koberger picks a route and he's not going the straightest, the quickest distance between two points is a straight line. He's not going that way. He's going down to Colorado. His dad had already marked it out. And so he's taking this different route because arguably he's trying to evade anyone following him. He's trying to take invasive actions.

This change of route from what the father had previously planned and mapped out before he came out there leads to tensions. And Brian is extremely volatile. And his father realizes he's caught his son in a bit of a mood. And he's seen Brian's moods before. So his usual reaction is, whoa, he steps back. He doesn't want to get too close to this situation.

submarine volcano. So father is in this car. The FBI is following. They have vehicles on the road. They have a Cessna above like a hawk waiting to swoop down at the right moment when they can put the pieces together. And meanwhile,

The father is slowly, slowly putting pieces together in his mind. Four people were murdered just 10 miles from where his son is living. His son is in this highly agitated state. The father was concerned enough about his son to make the trip out there to accompany him.

And they just happen to be sitting shoulder to shoulder in a white Hyundai Elantra, which is the precise car the authorities have announced they're looking for in this murder. So the father is, of course, suspicious.

Then, as they drive across America, two things start to happen quickly by the second day of the trip. First, after the FBI loses them and then finds them again, the first thing that happens is there's a shooting right near Brian Koberger's university residence.

A Army veteran has taken two students hostage. He lets the students go. The SWAT team moves in. They can't talk him out of it, or the SWAT team acts arguably precipitously, and they shoot a veteran dead.

and father and the son get a an alert from the university about this and this triggers off more thoughts in his father's mind about the benevolence of the situation his son is is caught up in in that there's something wrong with being with the west and his son has been trapped in this oh my gosh and just as these thoughts are taking shape in his mind they see flashing lights and there's a

sheriff's deputy car in Indiana asking them to pull over. And this father at this point realizes, oh my gosh, everything I've been thinking about is quite possibly true, and this is some situation I'm in, and he doesn't know how to make this realization. But it turns out, both to the father's relief and to the FBI's relief, who's also watching this, they don't understand what's happening. This was just a traffic stop. They go off. Nine minutes later, the

The same thing happens. Once again, there's a traffic stop, this time by a state trooper. He pulls the car over. Again, it's a traffic infraction. But the father now can't

Can't help but feeling all his thoughts are becoming true. Everything he feared, every thought he was trying to repress is becoming closer and closer to reality, as if he's following footsteps in the snow and getting closer and closer to his destination of where they're going to lead. And he doesn't like where it's leading one bit.

And as his journey continues and as they arrive in Pennsylvania, the father is suddenly filled with a sort of dread that he can't quite articulate, but at the same moment, he knows what is happening. - It's such a harrowing account and it's so well-written and hearing you speak about it now,

It's me. It's so queasy. I can't imagine the level of emotional regulation a human would have to have to be in the car with your own parent, knowing that the police are looking for you, the world is looking for you, your car has been identified, and you're with somebody who knows you well. How do you keep that together? And we too have often speculated about what that car ride must have been like. You had an interesting point, and we had heard something similar too, about...

the early days of Brian moving into his apartment when he had actually made the move and that dad was sort of, you know, trying to, how we interpreted it was trying to make him some friends in and around the apartment complex. And just like you, that always sort of stuck in my head because it was two part. Either that means,

look, my son's been a little bit awkward his whole life and maybe has a difficult problem with meeting new friends and social cues, et cetera. So dad's in the habit of trying to create comfort for his son, knowing that it's hard for him to kind of acclimate. That's sort of touching and it kind of hurts to hear. Or does that also point to, I knew something was really seriously, dreadfully wrong with my son and I

we're hoping for the best here and he's off to the races and I'm going to try my best, but he's a grown man. You know, where do you put that? Yeah, it's sort of a little of both. I mean, you're, you're, you're right on. I agree with you very much. I mean,

The father, 68 years old, money is tight in the family. He's a janitor. They've gone bankrupt twice over the years. He still makes this cross-country trip in August with his son out to the university for the first time. Then he has to turn around and go again. And why does he do this? Because he's worried about what's going to happen to his son. How is his son going to fit in? He knows...

Brian is a square peg in every round hole he's been in life and he just doesn't know. And remember, you know, this is not a father driving a young kid off to college like maybe we did at one point. Brian is 28 years old. He's going to be teaching.

uh young kids he's a teaching assistant he's going for his doctorate and still the father feels he has to accompany him and as when he gets to uh washington state university one of the first things the father takes it upon himself to do they saw a neighbor in the elevator i think it was christopher martinez so one of the guys and he says you know you watch out for my son he's a hard time making friends anything you can do i'd appreciate it

and Martinez is a generous soul, and two days later he invites Kohlberger to a pool party. And this is Kohlberger's first entrance into the pool party that takes place in Moscow at a complex called, I think, The Grove in Moscow.

Brian goes to this pool party. And what happens at the pool party, I interviewed many of the people at the pool party, it's also sort of interesting. This is sort of news that hasn't been reported to set the scene for part of who Brian is and why a book like this can come out now before a trial, because I like to think I'm giving the readers insight into the characters in this story. Brian goes to this party, he's sitting on the edge of the pool talking to one of the guys,

and he sees these two young women, attractive women there in black two-piece bathing suits, and he goes up to one of them and just picks himself up without saying a word to the guy he's talking to, goes up and asks for her phone number, and he gets it.

Then, without almost breaking stride, he goes to her friend and asks her for her phone number. And he gets it too. And the guy who's watching him says, "Well, this guy's a player. He's a pretty cool dude." And Brian comes back and just leaves the party. I spoke with the two women involved. He never calls them. However, after his arrest, they began to rethink the events.

and they realized they were getting a lot of hang-up calls in the weeks following their giving their phone number to Brian at the party, and they hypothesized that perhaps this was Brian calling them but not having the nerve to initiate the conversation. And that's sort of the metaphor for the state he was in. He had taken himself so far. He'd made this

journey from this kid from a hardscrabble Pennsylvania community, from an overweight heroin addict to becoming a doctoral candidate at a

a very prestigious university, and he had turned his body into a fortress. He had greased his hair. He was looking good. He was in shape, hanging out at the pool. And yet he couldn't go to the next step of integrating his life into that of a normal 28-year-old, a normal guy who wanted to just meet people and have friends and have a social life. It was just an impossibility for him.

almost as though he mustered the courage and then couldn't follow through. So it took everything he had potentially. I've always sort of drawn a connection in my head. This is again, only in my head, between Brian and his sisters. And just this relationship he has with women is interesting given he grew up as the baby of women and was raised by older sisters. And by all accounts, we hear they're lovely and all of the above. And I was curious if you just had an opinion on that. I know the dad is a

primary focus. One of his sisters, who's a family psychologist, plays an interesting role in all this. After they get back to Pennsylvania, it's the Christmas holidays, the whole family is there. And I describe as the sister, the psychologist, sees a couple of things that give her pause. She sees Brian cleaning out his car meticulously, the same sort of white Hyundai Elantra that the police just happened to be looking for that was involved in a quadruple murder.

Then she sees Brian sorting his garbage, his personal garbage, into plastic Ziploc bags, walking out of the house, going down the hill, not to the family's garbage pails, but to the neighbor's garbage pails and putting them in. And, you know, these set her mind wandering and she realizes there's something seriously wrong and

And what seems impossible might very likely be true. My brother might be involved in these four murders. And she goes to confront the father and she says, "Dad, I think we have to face up to something. I think we might have a problem." And the father, who's been having all these thoughts all the way across America,

When he hears this, what does he do? He turns around and just leaves the room because it's too impossible. It means thinking the unthinkable. And yet, as I point out in my book, there's sort of an irony that the next scene comes from a Greek drama. And yet, when they identify the DNA on the button of the knife sheath, they don't identify it to Brian Kohlberger, they identify it to Michael Kohlberger. And then they realize,

that this is his son's DNA, the son of Michael Kohlberger's DNA is on that knife sheath. So in many ways, like a Greek drama, the hero of the Greek drama or the victim of the Greek drama always tries to escape his fate, but he can never can. He's always pulled back in. So is Michael Kohlberger. He's pulled back in. His fate is to, no matter how much he tries, not to be his reason for his son's downfall.

I hadn't heard that account of his one sister and then the other sister, the middle sister. She was an actress. And as you know, much has been made about this in a slasher movie back many, many years ago. But the plot line of that particular murder is that nine co-eds go out into the woods and only seven come back. And again, is that a direct connection? No, of course not. And I was just curious if you had heard any rumblings about that story.

I've heard the rumblings. I tried to connect the dots and I couldn't take it far. I tried to stick to what I could substantiate. I didn't want to

hypothesize more than was necessary about the course of events. I think because of the gag order, what this case needs is an injection of facts. You know, there's such a vacuum of people being able to find out what really happened. And I wanted to try to fill that vacuum with not fatuous speculation or even

vicious character assassinations, but I wanted to tell what happened. That gag order is particularly pernicious because the trial keeps on getting delayed and delayed and delayed. We have a town that's sort of been victimized by this. There's a lack of understanding. There's a lack of ability to move on. They can, you know, bulldoze the murder house. The university can take it down, but that really is

silly. You're not going to get rid of what happened that way. What you need is a sense of justice, a sense of a clear ending, and that perhaps can only be resolved in a trial. And until the trial, I'd like to think that, you know, when the night comes falling is the best source of information to what really happened. Let's stop here for a break. We'll be back in a moment.

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Stephanie and I continue our conversation with Howard Bloom, author of When the Night Comes Falling, Requiem for the Idaho Student Murders. I asked him about Doug Wilson, the head of the Christ Church in town, who had been feuding with local law enforcement and alleging, for his own reasons, that people shouldn't believe the police. To me, it seems like it would behoove the prosecution to also be in favor of a change of venue.

I think the defense is shooting themselves in the foot if they try to move the trial out of Moscow because of Doug Wilson. I mean, I sat in a room with him and he told me, I will tell my parishioners anytime a Moscow police officer gets on the stand, you have every reason to be skeptical because he's lied about us in the courtroom. So there's no reason to believe that he won't lie about Brian Koberk.

So you have to realize who the jury pool is going to be. A lot of people associated with the university will be just eliminated. There are people who have too much knowledge or preconceived notions about the case. And then that leaves the members of Doug Wilson's church, 2,000 people. Every one of them will be skeptical about anything the prosecution says. So I think it's

it's really odd that the prosecution is fighting the move from Latah County of the case. And I think it's even harder that the defense is trying to move it. And the only reason I can think that the defense is trying to go along with this is because it's part of the strategy that's undermined everything they've done since the beginning. And that strategy is one of delay, delay and more delay. You know, lawyers have a, a,

of wisdom they say when you have the facts you pound the facts when you don't have the facts you pound the table and there sure has been a lot of table pounding by the defense there's been a rat-a-tat-tat of motion after motion after motion just really to buy time i mean look what they've come up it's been nearly two years and they finally have released their expanded alibi the alibi was it turned out to be as we all know well at four in the morning on a freezing night

Brian Kohlberg was out by himself in this wilderness park where there were no witnesses, of course, except the animals, no cell towers. And he was staring on this frosty night at the stars and the freezing cold. Just happened when the murders occurred.

And we had to wait two years to hear that without any substantiating information or operative evidence. And yet this has been dragging on and on. So I think this is a sort of a specious argument the defense is giving. Ann Taylor is a smart attorney. She's doing what she has to do with the cards she's been dealt.

I think it's a mistake to move out of Moscow. And maybe she thinks she's just buying time again and that move, the change of venue will never be approved. And then she'll breathe a sigh of relief. So what I was actually going to ask you about, and this is going back to your saying, you know, how because of the gag order, there has been kind of a dearth of facts where otherwise there would be, and there has been so much conjecture. So in your book was something that was,

We have been just wondering about, which is sort of placement in the house, and specifically that the dog was in the other bedroom of Maddie and Kaylee. Either I missed it or we couldn't find it in the affidavit. So I'm just curious, how did those facts come to clarity, if you can share?

According to law enforcement, I think it's been pretty well established that the dog Murphy, he was in Kaylee's bedroom and Kaylee was in with Maddie. And that's why they left him in there. And the dog is howling ferociously. I mean, it's as if he can smell the blood and he's in a state you can hear it on some of the surveillance tapes, the dog just, you know, barking wildly. It's

It's horrific to listen to. You know, all these moments are extremely dramatic and I try to do justice to them without exploiting them in the book. And it's a delicate balance because

The scenes are so gripping and yet so sad. And while there is a TV series going to be made for my book, you don't want to exploit it. You don't want to exploit the drama, but you want to do it in a factual way that conveys to people the horror of it. So it's a thin line.

a delicate balance and a challenge for a writer and a reporter. I thought it was so well executed in that regard. And to Courtney's point, always imagined for ourselves, like what was the order that night and who was happening upon whom and why? And, you know, were they eating takeout? And you know how dogs get around takeout. They get kind of ferocious and they want food. So you put them in the other room or was the dog in the room? You know, Maddie Mogan working out

the restaurants, we had sort of always heard that and thought that that was a potential connection. And obviously, as you know, Zana worked there as well at the Mad Greek. And then we were never able to substantiate that. So is that the connective tissue? That's a pretty big bombshell.

Yeah. As I've been able to put it together, Kohlberger would go to the mad Greek. He saw Maddie there. There's no evidence, none, I want to emphasize this, that he ever even spoke a word to Maddie. But for whatever reason, her beauty, her exuberance, her vitality, just her blonde good looks somehow fixated, he fixated on that.

And he was a man, as I've said, who's prone to obsessions. He measured out his life in obsessions, whether it was heroin or kicking heroin, whether it was losing 125 pounds and building his body back up, becoming from this mediocre student to becoming a graduate teaching assistant at a great university. He had all these large arcs in his life. And for some reason, Matty,

became his fixation. And just like the girls at the pool party, he could fixate on it, but he could not take the next step. He could not involve himself in any realistic, communable way in her life. And then her presence became not something that was

an astonishment to him, but rather a rebuke. And this rebuke gnawed and gnawed at him until he tried to, felt that the demons that were pursuing him, the only way he could live in this world, and here I'm hypothesizing, was to get rid of Maddie, to get rid of what was causing him such distress. The pain was so hard. And yet,

He still tries to fight it. As I said earlier, when he goes to the house three times, each one of those three trips is an attempt first to go to the house and then to get away until he finally crosses the line that's dividing the idea and the reality and he succumbs to the demons inside him and he becomes the monster I believe that he was fated to be. You could really feel that tension as it's described of the "do I go there, do I pull back?"

I had a follow-up question on that. And do we know that Kohlberger or, you know, he's presumed innocent, of course, as is anyone until they go to trial. Do we know that Maddie and Kaylee's room was visited first by the murderer? Yes, that's what the authorities believe. And, you know, he doesn't go into the room with the dog. He goes right inside.

into Maddie's room and then he's surprised, I believe, to find Kelly there too. And this is also, it's been said, it's been reported that the wounds that Kelly receives are much more ferocious. And I think the reason for this is not just that she fights back, he's surprised to see her and he sees his carefully imagined plan is now going awry.

And he's lashing out at anger at her, at himself, and his plan falling apart. And in this state of intense mental and physical activity, he just leaves the knife sheath behind and his carefully laid out plan is already undone in the first moments. And I think, as I said, after the murder of Maddie, the three other murders that follow are grim, horrific, collateral damage.

You mentioned something that had escaped me, which was the way the coroner described the different wounds on the different people. It was interesting. Is there anything you wanted to say about, they're not discrepancies, they're different words, but they're very different words that are used.

They're very different words and that points out two things, I think. The level of sophistication or lack of sophistication of the coroner, she rather, has now given ammunition that will be used by the defense to raise doubts. I mean, all the defense has to do is raise doubts with the jury. And the second, how hard it's going to be

to, while I believe Kohlberger is guilty, how hard it will be to make the case. There's the dialectics of a courtroom, which basically every expert you bring in, you can bring in a counter expert. So you can have someone say, "Touched DNA is the gold standard. It never fails." You can find someone else who will point out, "Well, that's not so fast. Touched DNA is really not that great." And in case law after case law after case law, we've had to impugn it.

and on and on and on. And this coroner's report is going to raise more questions. I think they're legitimate answers, but it's up to a skilled attorney to phrase the questions in a way that they will resonate in the juror's mind. And I think they've handed them one that can knock out of the park perhaps. - You bring up the level of sophistication of the small town, which

It was really interesting how when you had laid it out that Moscow police, the entire department, had 37 members and yet the, quote, backup of the FBI were 40 members. And the FBI brought in their separate, their own trailer. They had their own sort of offices to keep them separate from the Moscow cops in the parking lot of the police headquarters building. Interestingly about the police headquarters building,

It's about 100 yards from where the Brian Kober was at the pool party. It's right at the bottom of that hill that you go up to get to the Grove. You know, when he drove by that first night, he was literally driving by the police headquarters and Chief Brian's window. Just the way things intersect, such as that, such as the pool party, and I won't give away how you bring in sort of the pool party in the end unless you want to speak about the potential other leads.

I don't want to give away too much of the book. One of the things I tried to construct was a pretty suspenseful, almost mystery story. And I don't want to ruin the mystery for readers. I like them to be able to sit down. It's not a long book. It would seem to take forever to write. And I think I'd like people to get caught up in the experience of reading it and follow the mystery along with me as I was writing it.

Let's stop here for another break. We'll be back in a moment.

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Stephanie and I continue our conversation with Pulitzer Prize-nominated author Howard Bloom, whose in-depth reporting prompted him to write the book When the Night Comes Falling, A Requiem for the Idaho Student Murders. ♪

Not to put words in your mouth, but, you know, all of our hearts are with the friends and families, obviously, of the beautiful victims. And obviously the town is kind of trying to heal, I would imagine. Was there any takeaway just from being there and sort of being in that beehive during this critical time?

Yes, I think healing is impossible for the town until there is a trial, until there is a verdict. And I think the town will always be suspicious. I think you can knock down, bulldoze all the murder houses that you want, and yet the demons will still be unleashed. And yet there also is a history of savagery in that town. I mean, I found a book that was written in 1945 by a woman by Carol Ryan, whose grandfather was a town doctor.

and he was just shot in cold blood. And she writes about the savage forces that are at bay in this town. It's still a wild Western place. Every police officer now has an emblem, a shoulder patch on his police uniform, and it shows the clock tower in town. The clock tower is set

149 I think it is and that was the hour of the day where we knew Bill who was a police officer there was shot and killed by a deranged gunman who also killed a church deacon. There's been a very

very many unexplained outbursts of violence in the town. There's a task force been looking into child pornography in the town. There's large drug use. It's a pretty place, but it's a deceptive place. And it's a town almost...

on the verge, as one of the lawyers in town told me, of a civil war. Because on one side you have this right-wing church group that wants to create what they call a theocracy, where Moscow is the capital of the American redoubt. This redoubt is a conservative nation. And on the other side, you have one of the most liberal universities in the state, a party school, the first ranked party school in all of Idaho.

These two cultures, these two values clash. And you can see it when you walk down Main Street. On one side of Main Street are the old businesses that are owned by the Christ Church Kirkers. On the other side are the, you know, freewheeling bars and places where kids hang out. And there's also a really good Italian restaurant opposite the Kirker Church. It's really good.

dichotomous nature really does come to life. I have a specific question. You mentioned that Kaylee's father was going through Kaylee's phone in an effort to understandably get to the bottom of what happened with his daughter. Why didn't authorities have her phone? Well,

Cayley's father is an interesting character in this whole story. I never interviewed him, but I spoke to a lot of people who spoke with him. He's made lots of public statements. And to my mind, he's in many ways a hero. I mean, he's someone who refuses, refuses to let his daughter's death become a cold case. He refuses to accept things at face value. And he wants to get on to

to the bottom of things. And there's something very valiant, very heroic. He's like a figure from Shakespeare who just wants to keep on going and find out what's happening. At the same time, while he's doing this, he's also in many ways destroying his ability to get over these events. He's caught up in it. He's now

I think angry with my book, I'm not quite sure why, actually breaks my heart. The last person I would want to do is insult him. How can you impugn any action taken by

a man who lost his daughter, the father of three. My heart goes out to him, a man who has to say to reporters, you send your girl off to college and she comes back to you in an urn. That kind of statement is heartbreaking. And a man who stares into the camera when he's being interviewed and says,

to the killer who's out there, I am coming for you. He's making a promise to the killer and a promise to himself. So in that way, I think he's a hero and his actions are heroic. And I'm just sorry he's not happy about the way he's portrayed. I tried to, I think, do it respectfully and with dignity. But I treated his daughter with dignity too. And that was, if I didn't,

I certainly apologize for that because these kids were just wonderful young people. And to not have the chance to live out their lives and to be what they were going to be, it's just unfair. The heavens were just not fair to them. - I've seen so much footage of Mr. Gonsalves

I think I speak on behalf of anyone who's been following this case. We are rallying for every parent and every family member to get justice. And it's true when he does speak into the camera, you feel it like a dagger in your own heart. So, yeah, you know, collectively, I think we can all agree that for every parent who's gone through a nightmare like this and then to them specifically, there's no words really.

I appreciate your giving the time and I hope people will read the book on two levels. One, as this suspense story that's a police drama. And secondly, as a character study of

In some ways, two fathers who become victims of this whole drama. Michael Koberger, Steve Donclavis, both of them get caught up in events that are just unimaginable, larger than lives, and are impossible to deal with, and yet they have to deal with the impossible. There's a tension in this entire book, and even as I go around talking about it, talking about things that don't make sense and yet happened.

More on that next time. For more information on the case and relevant photos, follow us on Instagram at kt underscore studios. The Idaho Massacre is produced by Stephanie Leidegger, Gabriel Castillo, and me, Courtney Armstrong. Editing and sound design by Jeff Twaugh.

Music by Jared Aston. The Idaho Masker is a production of KT Studios and iHeartRadio. For more podcasts like this, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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