When the Night Comes Falling

The defense team, however, whispers excitedly that the case against Kohberger is much less substantial than it appears. The DNA from the knife sheath, they point out, is “touch DNA,” just 30 or so skin cells, which is much less reliable than DNA from blood or semen. There are ways, they argue, that the genetic match with Kohberger could be the result of contamination. (Due to a history of “false positives,” touch DNA is more commonly used to exonerate suspects than to prosecute them.) Moreover, the police cannot definitively place Kohberger in the “suspect car,” since the car video does not show the driver’s face or license plate; added to which, the FBI was dismayingly slow in settling on a year for the car, which will look bad in court. The cell tower data is no more conclusive, since the pings of Kohberger’s phone arguably put him only within a 13-mile radius of the murder scene. The (vague) description of the killer by Dylan Mortensen, who admitted being in “shock,” lacks the specificity of compelling testimony. What’s more, the murderer’s knife, black clothes, and mask have not been found. A compelling motive, too, seems missing, along with any proven connection between Kohberger and the residents of the murder house. Heartened by the holes in the evidence, the defense begins to hammer away at the prosecutors’ whole scenario, questioning whether a mere grad student with no history of violence could have dispatched the four, “fit” victims within a scant eight minutes, escaping without a bruise or a scratch and leaving not a trace of blood in his getaway car. Casting about for an alternative scenario, the defense cites the DNA of three other (unidentified) males that were found in or near the house after the murders. In view of this, they suggest, Dylan Mortensen’s mysterious, seven-hour delay in calling the police could have a darker significance than mere shock: namely drugs.

It’s not lost on the defense that three of the victims’ parents (Xana’s mother and Maddie’s father and stepmother) have rap sheets for substance use; in fact, Kohberger’s lawyer Anne Taylor briefly represented Xana’s mother on one of these charges. Pursuing this angle, the defense focuses on two local drug dealers, Emma Bailey and Demetrius Robinson, who were arrested in March 2023 for selling a fatal dose of fentanyl-laced cocaine to a University of Idaho student. Robinson’s lengthy rap sheet includes some violent offenses, though not murder: second-degree assault, second-degree rape, and a physical assault on a business partner. Emma Bailey, 14 years younger than her boyfriend, has no history of violence, but (according to her mother) has lived on and off with Robinson for five years, “in fear” of his “violent mood swings and hair-raising threats of what would happen to her family if she ever left him” (186). The Idaho police, in fact, suspect the couple of trafficking cocaine and other narcotics between Seattle and the campuses of WSU and the U of I. Indeed, according to local gossip (though others have denied it), the couple did a “lively business” pushing drugs on Greek Row at both colleges. As Kohberger’s defense team digs steadily into the seedy demimonde of collegiate drug use and its violent enforcers, they wonder if the unexplained savagery of the murders on King Road could be connected.

Delving into the “cutthroat intrigue” of the illicit drug trade, which stretches all the way from China and Mexico into “seemingly wholesome all-American counties and college towns,” the defense team looks up Sheriff Brett Myers, head of the Quad Cities Drug Task Force (188). He tells them that he often pressures frat boys and other students who have been arrested on minor drug charges to infiltrate the cartels as “double agents.” He admits the extreme danger of these assignments but shrugs it off as necessary. Asked point-blank if the victims in Moscow may have been wrapped up in this sort of “intrigue,” he says only that it’s “not improbable.”

Seeking to fill out their alterative scenario, the defense tries to establish a link between Bailey and Robinson and the murder house. They learn that Ashlin Couch, the resident who moved out of the house after only a couple of days, followed Bailey on Instagram. They are not alone in searching for connections: In the days following Kohberger’s arrest, the police questioned hundreds of students about him and tried to determine if (among other things) any of the murder victims were present at the pool party that Kohberger attended in August. They found no indication of this; nor has any evidence emerged that Emma Bailey was at the party, where she might have met Kohberger. Nor can any connection be found, however tenuous, between the house on King Road and drug dealers; indeed, a major problem with the defense’s alternative scenario is that absolutely no drug paraphernalia was discovered in the murder house, nor any trace of drugs in the victims’ bodies.

The prosecution also faces a problem: Pastor Doug Wilson’s Christ Church, the biggest Christian congregation in Moscow. Still bitter about the city’s enforcement of COVID-19 mandates and (perhaps) the arrests of Kirkers for various sex offenses, Wilson has been using his pulpit to denounce the Moscow city government and police department as incompetent and corrupt. Years earlier, some of Wilson’s own relatives were penalized for joining COVID-19 protests, making his grudge a deeply personal one. The Kirkers constitute about half the city’s jury pool, raising the specter of ecclesial interference in the civil judicial system—right at the time of a high-profile murder case, perhaps the most notorious in Idaho’s history. Pastor Wilson has even alleged that any policemen who testify in the Kohberger trial will have a credibility problem: “After all, we know the officers have lied on the stand before” (193). This development comes as a surprising twist, in view of “the Redoubt’s” traditional reverence for law enforcement and swift, “eye-for-an-eye” justice.

A monologue in the mind of a grieving parent (presumably Steve Goncalves) rejects the bromide that “time heals all wounds,” asserting that the loss of a child never really lets go, leaving a deep, gnawing abyss that cannot be remedied by anger or vengeance. At best, the hope for justice offers an “armor” to keep you from screaming.

The arrest of a suspect brings little peace to Steve Goncalves, Kaylee’s heartbroken father. Beset with fears that the truth behind the murders is more complicated than the police acknowledge, Steve continues his sleuthing, now in the “rabbit holes” of the internet’s numberless theories. Worse, Bryan Kohberger’s trial has been indefinitely postponed, for what seems to Steve like frivolous reasons, and the judge’s gag order has made it nearly impossible for him to get reliable information on the case, or to share what he knows with others interested in the mystery. In the court-ordered vacuum of actual facts, “rumors, half-truths, and crackpot lies” have defiled the public narrative of his daughter’s death, adding to his misery (198). Though increasingly certain that Kohberger played some role in the murders, Steve is tortured by doubts that the grad student acted alone. As the one-year anniversary of his daughter’s murder comes and goes, Steve seeks his own answers, hiring a private detective to help him follow up on leads offered by (often dubious) online sources. Some of these “enticing” tips (a “jailhouse snitch,” or a revelatory new video purportedly taken on the night of the murders) turn out to be cruel hoaxes. Eventually his research, combined with common sense, allows him to discount several scenarios, including one touted by the defense. The theory that the slayings were a drug burn is “ludicrous,” he believes, for myriad reasons, among them the total lack of evidence that any of the victims used drugs, least of all from a street dealer. Also heartening are some of the “blue chip” contacts Steve makes, including a few within law enforcement and even the grand jury. From these sources, he learns that Kohberger apparently bought a dark-blue “work uniform” shortly before the murders and may also have purchased a KA-BAR knife. If true, their disappearance seems highly suspicious. It requires only a slight leap of imagination to picture Kohberger stripping off his bloody outer garments just after the murders, and tossing them (along with the mask, gloves, and knife) in a garbage bag in the trunk of his car, so as not to leave traces of blood in the vehicle. Steve also hears, from a friend of a member of the grand jury, a baffling rumor: Reportedly, the two surviving housemates, Dylan and Bethany, were fully awake during the murders, and were texting each other about the strange noises in the house.

During his inquiries, Steve hears that the authorities have a secret informant, someone who reached out to them through the tipline. Feeling, as a father of one of the victims, that he has a perfect right to speak to this individual, Steve tries repeatedly to contact them but is stopped (with threats of legal consequences) by the FBI, who has promised to guard the informant’s identity. Convinced that many troubling secrets of the case are being kept from the public, and that the trial may be years away, Steve feels consumed by a “raging, all-consuming anger” (203). Unable to take his private investigation any further, he focuses on “stony” vengeance instead, lending his public support to a house bill that would allow Kohberger to be executed by firing squad if the chemicals for lethal injection prove unavailable.

A last mental monologue, presumably not an individual’s thoughts but a general (almost existential) statement on the ultimate unknowability of the truth, concludes that there will “never be an answer that makes sense” (207). All of our best, most rational tools—courtroom verdicts, psychologists, news reports, confessions, etc.—can never fully explain a particular human action or event; such as the tragedy that befell Moscow, Idaho, on November 13, 2022. This haunting void of knowledge, understanding, and “exculpation” leaves us “forever falling.”

The author underscores this feeling of limbo and emptiness by noting that the date of Kohberger’s trial has continually been pushed back; meanwhile, the murder house itself has been razed and removed, leaving not a trace. Blum goes on to argue that the trial, when it comes, can only fail to provide conclusive answers, since it will follow the usual protocol of pitting experts against each other—all butting their learned heads over the veracity and relevance of each piece of evidence—while truth languishes somewhere off in the middle distance. These “near-impenetrable” debates, no matter what verdict emerges, will never explain what happened to anyone’s satisfaction.

One evening in early spring, the author, gazing at the vacant lot where the murder house once stood, recalls his last visit to the scene of the crime, a cold night in December. Watching the gently falling snow slowly blanket the house, roads, and surrounding hills, he sensed that “[s]oon everything will be concealed. And everything will be forgotten” (209). Now, 18 months later, he feels that his epiphany was “terribly wrong,” that those victimized by this horrific tragedy will never find peace. Tormented by the mystery of why someone—anyone—would take the lives of these four ebullient youngsters, Blum puzzles whether it was done out of love or out of hate: two motives he can conceive of for such a senseless killing.

Acknowledging that we’ll probably never know the full truth, Blum shares his own opinion—that Bryan Kohberger was the lone murderer of the four victims. Though each piece of evidence, Blum believes, may seem inconclusive on its own, the sheer preponderance of it cannot, rationally, be shrugged off as coincidence. Furthermore, he believes that Madison Mogen was Bryan’s true target, and that the others were collateral damage, murdered solely because they were in Bryan’s way that night. As evidence, he cites that the killer went directly to the third floor, where Maddie slept, ignoring the two bedrooms on the second floor. As for Kaylee, she had moved out some weeks before and was in Maddie’s room only by chance that night. Blum theorizes that Bryan first met Maddie Mogen at the restaurant where she worked, the Mad Greek, whose menu offered the vegan food that he favored; from there, it was but a short step, for one of Bryan’s all-or-nothing intensity, to obsession, and then to murder. What drove him, then, were the twin demons of inferiority and arrogance: rage at the young, carefree ebullience that had always been denied him, and the arrogance of thinking that his superior intellect elevated him above right or wrong, and that he could get away with murder.

Blum states that his attempt to write the “definitive” account of the Idaho student murders was guided by two ambitions: to “go beyond” the facts of the news accounts, and, through use of the “storyteller’s art,” make the story’s principals “come alive,” like characters in a novel. However, the judicial gag order, and then the repeated postponement of the trial, somewhat hobbled his efforts. Many of his sources, of course, are anonymous, due to the legal implications of the gag order, but quite a few of them (he hints) are in law enforcement. Unable to reach either Michael Kohberger or Steve Goncalves, he was nonetheless able to access their thoughts and feelings through social media postings and by interviewing their friends and/or relatives. Blum conducted 324 interviews for his book, allowing him to write a “true story.” Additionally, to feel his way to the truth, he prefaces each of the five parts of his book with a literary device, a “thought dream” that surmises the inner thoughts of certain characters. These italicized introductions, which he uses sparingly, are “fictive constructs” meant to be taken metaphorically, not literally, as a way of “nudg[ing] the reader closer to the beating heart of the story” (219). In all other respects, he writes, he has “doggedly” obeyed “strict journalistic rules” in writing this nonfiction book (219).