Pod Insights Killer Stories with Harvey Guillén The Idaho Four Pt. 1 (with J. Reuben Appelman) About this episode In the early morning hours of November 13, 2022, four students at the University of Idaho were murdered in their off-campus home. The shocking brutality of the murders garnered media attention while police searched for the killer. But for author and private investigator J. Reuben Appelman, the story was personal: his own daughter was a student at the same college as the victims. And he wanted to know about the people behind the story. Who were Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Ethan Chapin, and Xana Kernodle in life?
Keep up with us on Instagram @serialkillerspodcast. J.’s book, While Idaho Slept: The Hunt For Answers in the Murders of Four College Students, is available now.
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Transcript 5,770 words · 10 speakers
0:04 Speaker 00 One of my goals was to tell
0:09 Speaker 00 the beautiful story of these victims and to memorialize them in that way and to not exploit some of the weaknesses that they might have had that we all have. I think everything that I say is colored with a big heart, you know?
0:25 Speaker 01 Welcome to Serial Killers, a Spotify podcast. Every Monday, we bring you the true crime stories that stand out. I'm Janice Morgan. We'd love to hear from you. Follow us on Instagram at Serial Killers Podcast and share your thoughts on this week's episode. Or if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and leave a comment. To help us tell today's story, we interviewed Jay Rubin Appleman, a private investigator and author. His most recent book covers the 2022 murders of Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogan, Zana Cornotl, and Ethan Chapin in their Moscow, Idaho home. We're so grateful he could share his expertise. This episode includes discussions of murder. Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen.
1:10 Speaker 01 Stay with us.
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2:44 Speaker 00 When you live in Idaho, there's only a couple of million people here, if that. You know, all of the communities are pretty much linked. Many tentacles in Boise reach to North Idaho and Moscow, where the University of Idaho is. And it really feels to most people in anywhere in Idaho that this happened in our backyard.
3:02 Speaker 01 That's Jay Rubin Appelman. He's been many things: a poet, a private investigator, and he's the author of the book While Idaho Slept: The Hunt for Answers in the Murders of Four College Students.
3:14 Speaker 00 I didn't set out to write this book. I didn't say, oh, cool, these murders happened. Let's just jump on this book, right? That's not what happened at all. I felt a deep amount of pain and curiosity and just strong feelings that I should be there in that space, sharing that space with the people who were suffering.
3:33 Speaker 01 That space is Moscow, home to the University of Idaho. It's small, it's quiet and rural, it's under the radar. Most Americans have probably never heard of it. But that changes in 2022 when it becomes a household name.
3:51 Speaker 01 On the evening of November 12, Kaylee Gonzalez and Madison Mogen go out to Corner Club, a bar popular with students, their childhood best friends, roommates and seniors at the University of Idaho. They're soaking up the dwindling amount of time they have together. At the end of the semester, Kaylee will graduate early and travel Europe for a month. In February, she'll start a new job in Austin, Texas. It will be the first time they won't live in the same town since they were pre-teens. At Corner Club, they bump into Jack, Kaylee's on-again, off-again boyfriend. At this point, they're off, but still cordial. Kaylee and Maddie leave the bar after 1 a.m. and are seen on surveillance cameras walking down Main Street gossiping.
4:35 Speaker 01 They stop at a local food truck, order pasta, and talk with classmates while they wait for their food. Late-night snacks secured, they get a ride home to 1122 King Road. They arrive just before 2 a.m. Meanwhile, Xana Kernodle attends a party with her boyfriend, Ethan Chapin, at the Sigma Chi frat house. They end their night around 1:45 a.m. and settle in for the night in Xana's room, one floor below Kaylee and Maddie in the King Road residence. Two other roommates, Dylan and Bethany, have been home since around 1 a.m. and are already sleeping by the time their roommates arrive. At 2:26 a.m., Kaylee and Maddie are still awake on the third floor.
5:17 Speaker 01 Over the next 26 minutes, Kaylee calls her ex-boyfriend Jack seven times. Maddie calls him three times. All of the calls go unanswered. At 4 a.m., a food-delivery order arrives for Xana. Around the same time, Dylan wakes up to a sound. Her bedroom's on the second floor, and she thinks Kaylee, on the third floor, must be playing with her golden doodle Murphy. Before she can doze off again, she hears a voice. It sounds like Kaylee says, "There's someone here." Dylan opens her bedroom door and sticks her head out, but there's no one around. Then she hears crying, this time coming from Xana's room. A male voice says to Xana something to the effect of, "It's okay, I'm going to help
6:01 Speaker 01 you." At 4:17 a.m., a security camera picks up voices, or maybe cries, then a loud thud and a dog barking.
6:13 Speaker 01 Dylan hears crying again. She opens her bedroom door and sees a man. He's wearing black clothing and a mask that covers his nose and mouth. He's around five foot 10 with bushy eyebrows and he's walking right towards her. Dylan freezes as she watches the man leave the house through the kitchen sliding glass door. She steps back into her room, locks the door, and heads to sleep. When Dylan and Bethany wake up the next morning, they call friends over to the house. They're not sure what happened the previous night, but they know they need help. Someone calls 911 and by noon, police discover the bodies of the four students. Kaylee and Maddie are found in Maddie's bedroom.
6:56 Speaker 01 Ethan and Xana are found in Xana's bedroom. In an instant, the quiet village gets very loud. National reporters swarm the King Roadhouse. TMZ places phone calls to locals. Fox News parks their vans outside residents' homes. The Corner Club is publicly scrutinized. There are seemingly more reporters than students in Moscow. Over the next several weeks, around 25 to 40% of University of Idaho attendees return to their hometowns in fear. Jay Rubin Appelman is one of the people drawn there in the wake of the murders. But the thing about Jay is that he isn't just there for the story. He has a personal connection to the town.
7:37 Speaker 00 My daughter went to the University of Idaho. I'd been up there a number of times, visiting. I'd also been working up in North Idaho, which is five hours from where I am based in Boise, and became familiar with the communities and had a great appreciation for that place. And I have many friends whose children go to the University of Idaho. I have many friends who went to the University of Idaho. I'm not traditionally a true crime sleuth necessarily. I just ended up writing two books about cases that mattered to me a lot.
8:07 Speaker 01 Jay's first book, The Kill Jar, covers the Oakland County child killings. Between February 1976 and March 1977, four children were kidnapped, murdered, and left near roadways in Detroit, Michigan, where Jay grew up. The investigation was, at the time, one of the largest in United States history. Despite its scale, the murders remain unsolved.
8:30 Speaker 00 The murders that I wrote about in The Kill Jar happened in basically my neighborhood, you could say. The four kids were killed. And at the same time, somebody tried to abduct me. I was roughly the same age as those kids. And I got away, but nothing happened to me. But I grew up wondering if the person who tried to abduct me was the same person who had killed these other kids, who had been abducted and held in captivity and eventually murdered. And when the internet happened, basically, I had research at my fingertips and I started researching the case. But it was because it mattered to me.
9:04 Speaker 01 It mattered so much to Jay. He spent 10 years researching and writing the book.
9:10 Speaker 00 In the process of that, I kept bringing my notes and murder files and stuff to local coffee shops to work on the book and ended up meeting a private investigator who did not tell me that that's what she was at first, but kept asking me questions about what I was working on and eventually poached me to come work for the firm that she was working at as a P.I. And I learned to become private investigator, basically toward the end of writing The Kill Jar.
9:35 Speaker 01 When Jay became a private investigator, it wasn't exactly what you'd think. He wasn't busting people in affairs or hunting down criminals. For the first five years of his career, he worked insurance fraud cases. Say someone has an accident at work. Maybe they slip and fall. They start having shoulder pains, so they file a claim with their insurance to get their medical treatment paid for or garner lost wages. If the insurance company suspects fraud, they'll send out an investigator, someone like Jay, to see if the employee is being honest about their injury. Are they presenting the injury to be worse than it actually is? Did an injury even happen? Jay visited their houses to make a determination. And the face-to-face interviewing skills he learned on the job became crucial in his later work.
10:21 Speaker 00 And a lot of what happens is you go and you sit in their living room, you talk to them for two hours, you have like a list of questions. But a lot of what you're really doing is observing the scene, you know. But when you, when you sit face to face with people who are A, probably originally suffering from some sort of injury and B, also trying to like draw it out a little bit so that they don't get kicked back to work because it really is difficult to go back to work with, with an injury that you have to heal. There's a lot of life and, life and death situations for a lot of these people. It wasn't all broken shoulders or whatever. A lot of these people were on traumatic brain injury leave. You learn a lot about people face to face like that when it's, when it's really important to them that you not only believe them, but they slide in a little untruth sometimes. And you learn to pick up on those untruths.
11:04 Speaker 00 And if I had had those skills when writing The Kill Jailer, it would have been very helpful as well.
11:09 Speaker 01 parsing out truth from lies isn't the only thing Jay has unlocked in his time as a private investigator. He's also gained access to a host of different databases, things that come in handy when he starts researching and writing while Idaho slept.
11:23 Speaker 00 Aside from skills, one thing that would have saved me years of my life is the access to databases that I have. Right now I can look at a license plates, let's for example, and say who's driving that car, right? But I can, so I can run the plates, as they say in the movies. But from those plates, you know, you get everything. You get an entire history if you want. I have no access to those kind of backdoor database things that police and PIs and stuff have. So I was just doing it all with, a lot of manual labor went into figuring out connections and things. Right now I can just do that in about maybe 30 or 40 minutes versus, versus maybe two weeks or a month.
12:04 Speaker 01 When the news of the Idaho murders breaks, Jay feels he can finally put those skills to use. But while the world is asking who is the killer, Jay is asking, who were the victims?
12:20 Speaker 05 Have you ever wondered how movements start? I'm Ashley C. Ford, host of Into the Mix, a Ben and Jerry's podcast about joy and justice. This season, we're talking to unexpected progressive heroes who found purpose in unexpected places. People like Marley Diaz, making sure every kid sees themselves in books. Kyle Mestef, a native skateboarder building a movement for kids nationwide. Joy Aladakun, whose music moves from protests to daily commute. Find out how they started something bigger than themselves and listen wherever you get your podcasts.
12:52 Speaker 06 It's me, the
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13:07 Speaker 06 Yeah, but I didn't mention that you can save up to 60% off hotels in the Priceline app.
13:13 Speaker 06 Fine, no one deals more deals than please stop. Touche.
13:20 Speaker 06 Priceline.
13:24 Speaker 01 On November 30th, 2022, hundreds of people gather at the University of Idaho for a candlelight vigil. It's been 17 days since four students were murdered in their home. The town is on edge. Police haven't given the public much information, so no one knows whether or not they're in danger. The once close-knit community becomes unraveled. Businesses close early, 911 calls surge and rumors infiltrate online forums. But tonight, illuminated by candles and cell phones, the people of Moscow come together to remember Ethan Chapin, Kaylee Goncalves, Zanna Kernodle and Matty Mogen. In the weeks after the murders,
14:08 Speaker 01 the families are repeatedly called upon to talk to police and the media. They found themselves thrust into a spotlight they never wanted. Once J. Rubin Appelman decides to write a book, he knows he too will need to speak with the families because his goal in writing while Idaho slept, he says, is to elevate public memory of the victims.
14:29 Speaker 00 I spent a lot of time trying to get details of the victims' lives from people who knew them closely. And basically, what that means is that you're trying to get information from people who are in the deepest, darkest spots in their lives, in their tumult of mourning and chaos and heartbreak. And we're talking about parents who had, who not only lost their children, but lost their children in such a violent way that it became relatively impossible to get any of them to talk to me for a very long time. And for good reason. Also, for good reason, since I was writing the book, it was important that I tried to talk to them,
15:14 Speaker 00 if for no other reason than to give them the opportunity to say whatever they wanted to say about their children.
15:22 Speaker 01 Eventually, Jay talks to one close family member or a friend of each of the victims and the parent of one of the survivors. He doesn't get as much time with them as he would like, so he turns to social media to fill in the gaps. Jay doesn't find anything scandalous or shocking in the profiles. In fact, what strikes him is the lack of sordid details, which feels more devastatingly human.
15:47 Speaker 00 What I found interesting when I did that was looking all the way back to like junior high with Maddie and Kaylee, talking to each other, I mean, in comments. Maddie might post a picture, or Kaylee might post a picture, and then one of them would comment on it to the other. And that's what I found really interesting, the comments they made to each other, how they interacted with each other. One instance that I talk about in the book, like, "Why was your mom calling my mom?" One of them said in one of the comments. And as a parent, it was really touching to me. It chokes me up a lot to think about those things. And you learn, I learned so much about them from their social, not the details that people could exploit. You know, I'm not interested in doing that. But the details that make them human and heartbreakingly common.
16:32 Speaker 00 You know, just kids having fun and trying to be happy and trying to figure shit out.
16:38 Speaker 01 Jay compiled everything he learned from social media and the victims' loved ones into a portrait of four bright, ambitious young people. Kaylee Goncalves was born in June 2001 in California, but her family moved to Coeur d'Alene, Idaho when she was a year old. She loved to design her clothes and mystery novels. That developed into an interest in true crime. After Kaylee's murder, her father Steve reached out to her favorite true crime YouTuber to spread awareness. Kaylee was the third of five children, but, as her family puts it, "the day she met Madison Mogen was the same day they gained a sixth sibling," which was perfect for only child Madison, who went by Maddie.
17:21 Speaker 01 Born in May 2001 in Eugene, Oregon, she moved to Coeur d'Alene as a toddler. Her parents divorced soon after, but Maddie remained close with her mom, dad, and stepdad. Maddie was a hard worker. She often held multiple jobs at once, yet still made time for her friends and family. She doted on her younger cousins and saw live music with her father. She excelled academically, so in sixth grade, Maddie enrolled in the prestigious Coeur d'Alene Charter Academy, where she met Kaylee. They became best friends, inseparable. Maddie practically moved into the Goncalves home, even joining their family vacations. Like Mary-Kate and Ashley, or Bonnie and Clyde, their names were always said together, identities intertwined.
18:06 Speaker 01 That's why, after their 2019 high school graduation, both chose to attend the University of Idaho. They joined sororities, but this is where they diverged. Kaylee pledged Alpha Phi, while Maddie joined Pi Beta Phi. Still, they remained best friends and thrived individually. Kaylee majored in general studies and quickly got on track to graduate early. Maddie was a marketing major and made the dean's list every semester. She was named the director of PR and marketing for Pi Beta Phi. During her freshman year, she met a student named Jake. They had their first date on Valentine's Day 2021, and became an official couple in April.
18:47 Speaker 01 Maddie also became close with Xana Kernodle, one of her sorority sisters and coworkers at a restaurant in downtown Moscow. Xana was born in July 2002 and grew up in Post Falls, Idaho alongside her sister Jasmine, who everyone thought was her twin despite the two-year age difference. She was an athletic standout, a talented gymnast who was also on her high school's track, volleyball, and soccer teams. Childhood wasn't easy. Xana's parents, Cara and Jeff, both struggled with drug addiction. At a young age, Jasmine and Xana were sent to live with their aunt. Eventually, Jeff turned his life around and welcomed his daughters back into his home.
19:28 Speaker 01 Xana persevered, which Jay attributes to her heart, joy, and embrace of life. She graduated from high school in 2020 and enrolled in the University of Idaho as a marketing major. She joined Pi Beta Phi and nurtured her friendships, becoming the "responsible mom" of her friend group. And she fell in love. Ethan Chapin was Xana's first boyfriend. He'd grown up in Mount Vernon, Washington, and he loved soccer and basketball. His entire family was active. They kayaked in the Dominican Republic and surfed in Mexico. His mother Stacy remembered Ethan, a triplet, as the comedian of the family. He was always smiling or laughing and loved to dance to country music.
20:11 Speaker 01 The Chapin triplets all enrolled at the University of Idaho in August 2021. Ethan and his brother joined Sigma Chi, while their sister joined Kappa Alpha Theta. Ethan's friends often found him at the fraternity house shooting hoops in the driveway. Ethan started dating Xana during his freshman year, and by summer 2022, she was joining the Chapins on their family vacations. In August, Ethan, Xana, Kaylee, and Maddie returned to Moscow for the fall semester. And their paths led all four to the same place: 1122 King Road.
20:48 Speaker 01 Just south of the University of Idaho, two adjoining cul-de-sacs are lined with houses and apartments, rented mostly by students looking to live off-campus. The streets are within eyesight of Greek Rho, so many of those renters are members of the school's sororities and fraternities. One of the dwellings is a gray, six-bedroom, three-bathroom house located at 1122 King Road. The three-story home was built into a hillside and has a unique design.
21:16 Speaker 00 I describe it sometimes as being shaped kind of like a Jenga stack. It doesn't look like it was, it's supposed to be built that way.
21:23 Speaker 01 In June 2022, six students signed a lease to the house. One of the renters moved out shortly before the November murders. That left Matty, Kaylee, Xana, and their two other roommates, Bethany and Dylan. Xana's boyfriend Ethan was a frequent guest. The home had a long history as a party house, and the new tenants kept up that reputation. On weekends, college students poured in and out of the house, drank beer on the deck, and blasted music. The front door was located at the end of a driveway, big enough for six cars, with extra room for guests and partygoers. Bethany lived on the first floor, Xana and Dylan on the second, and Kaylee and Matty on the third. On the second floor,
22:07 Speaker 01 the kitchen's sliding glass door, often left unlocked, led to a concrete patio. While researching the book, Jay never goes into the house. It's blocked off with police tape, but he spends a lot of time in the neighborhood. And he notices something eerie.
22:25 Speaker 00 The back of the house has this little wooded area. And beyond that little wooded area, there is a parking platform. And I parked up there many times on that little, that little raised parking bluff. And through, from that platform, you could easily look through that small wooded area, which is only about 30 or 40 or 50 feet of woods, directly into the second floor of King Road, where the kitchen and living room, living area were, as well as directly into the windows of the third floor, where Kaylee Goncalves and Madison Mogen, two of the victims, lived. Well, I was sitting up there just two weeks ago on that bluff in my car, doing some research for, for something, and...
23:08 Speaker 00 All around me, the lights in the kitchens, like in the apartments, and there's a few other houses that are in front of the King Road House. I could see people walking past the windows. And it occurred to me, you know, this is what the perpetrator saw whenever he wanted to.
23:24 Speaker 01 Now, law enforcement is tasked with finding that perpetrator, who he is, where he came from, why he targeted that house specifically. Violent crime is rare in Moscow. Usually, the small police force investigates things like petty theft or burglary. There hasn't been a homicide in the city in seven years. And this time, the entire country is watching.
23:53 Speaker 05 Have you ever wondered how movements start? I'm Ashley C. Ford, host of Into the Mix, a Ben & Jerry's podcast about joy and justice. This season, we're talking to unexpected progressive heroes who found purpose in unexpected places. People like Marley Diaz, making sure every kid sees themselves in books. Kyle Mestef, a native skateboarder building a movement for kids nationwide. Joy Aladakun, whose music moves from protests to daily commute. Find out how they started something bigger than themselves and listen wherever you get your podcasts.
24:25 Speaker 06 It's me, the
24:29 Speaker 06 We don't need the jingle twice. Stop it. This is about vacation inflation and how Priceline negotiates amazing deals on hotels, flights, and rental cars.
24:40 Speaker 06 Yeah, but I didn't mention that you can save up to 60% off hotels in the Priceline app.
24:46 Speaker 06 Fine. No one deals more deals than Please stop. Touche.
24:53 Speaker 06 Priceline.
24:58 Speaker 01 Moscow, Idaho, is in the northern part of the state, just across the border from Washington. It's remote, around 300 miles from the state capital of Boise. According to Jay, you don't end up in the village by accident.
25:13 Speaker 00 Moscow sits in a very large sort of valley between low foothills leading to mountains. To get there, you go through really rugged mountain terrain, though. So although it's not necessarily rugged in its appearance, to get there from anywhere with more than a few thousand people, you have to go through very high mountain elevations,
25:38 Speaker 00 roaring rivers, deep forests, just like in the movies where you see Idaho or Montana or something.
25:44 Speaker 01 Driving into the village, you're greeted by a sign. Welcome to Moscow, heart of the arts. The town started collecting public art in the 80s and now houses murals, sculptures, and paintings. Even the utility boxes and bus shelters are adorned with artist designs. As Jay describes it, downtown is picturesque and quaint. In the winter, people ditch their cars in favor of skiing down Main Street to do their shopping and dining.
26:11 Speaker 00 I just found the people very welcoming. I had always found them to be that. And especially now, I feel like after spending so much time up there, this is a place that I would consider moving to.
26:24 Speaker 01 But in the days following the murders of four University of Idaho students, the warm and welcoming town Jay describes isn't what's being painted in the media.
26:33 Speaker 00 So Idaho, when this case first broke, you know, caught a lot of flak from mainstream media. A lot of people saying, oh, well, this podunk chief of police, will he be able to handle it? Or these wackadoo North Idahoans, you know, what are they going through? What are they thinking? You know, there was a lot of disparaging, sort of undertone to a lot of what was being said in the first weeks.
26:55 Speaker 01 Jay says Moscow's then-chief of police, James Fry, is more experienced than some outlets portray him to be. He's had FBI training, and the case is personal. He's lived in the village for more than 35 years. He's just as shocked as anyone that this kind of violence could happen in his town. Jay says this makes the chief more dedicated than most. It's like he's solving the murder of a family member. Fry, who later retired in 2024, immediately brings on the help of the FBI and Idaho State Police. They are capable of solving this crime, but it won't be easy. The perpetrator killed four people in less than 30 minutes. He seemed to disappear just as quickly as he'd arrived.
27:38 Speaker 01 There's no witnesses, leads, or suspects. And while officials can conclude the victims were stabbed, it's unclear what murder weapon was used, or where it is now. And why would someone kill four college students in their home? Nothing seems to be missing, so the motive doesn't appear to be a burglary gone wrong. There's no sign of forced entry. Was it someone the victims knew? The dozens of journalists that have moved into Moscow are asking the same questions, and Chief Fry can sense the media is getting restless. He starts holding daily press conferences to provide as many answers as he can, but he only creates more questions. The first conference is on November 16th, three days after the murders.
28:22 Speaker 01 Chief Fry tears up on the podium as he tells a crowded room there's no murder weapon and no suspects. The murders appear to be an isolated targeted attack. But he can't say who was targeted or why. And worst of all, the killer is still out there. Police can't say whether or not there's a threat to the public. Many locals aren't satisfied with the lack of answers. And they're scared. Just two days prior, police had released a statement telling the community they're not in danger. Now Chief Fry seems to be walking that back. Authorities make a plea to the public. Send surveillance footage, tips, leads, anything that might help them track down the killer.
29:06 Speaker 01 Six days after the murder, police have received over 600 tips and conducted 90 interviews. It's more than they expected because within hours of the murders of Kaylee, Maddie, Ethan, and Xana, their faces had appeared on national news outlets and social media posts. People on Reddit analyzed surveillance videos from the food truck Kaylee and Maddie went to before their deaths. Eagle-eyed TikTokers tried to identify a friend they talked to at the food truck. People baselessly speculated, maybe he had something to do with it. Maybe it was Kaylee's ex-Jack. Perhaps even one of the surviving roommates. It's a result of what Jay calls "a changing landscape in true crime."
29:47 Speaker 00 That it might be a symbolic sort of case, that no case after this would go without millions of eyeballs on it.
29:56 Speaker 01 Jay says the media attention had its pros and cons. On one hand, civilians helped do a lot of footwork for the police.
30:04 Speaker 00 So, we saw in the Moscow case, millions of social media followers of this case, sort of taking up arms and calling in tips that they had found from data mining, or, I mean, they're, it was very, in some ways, very savvy. You know, you had people like on day three, looking at the public Venmo transactions of these victims and stuff. You're like, "I didn't, I wouldn't have thought of that. That's very smart."
30:29 Speaker 01 The media attention puts pressure on investigators. So do the families of the victims. Kaylee's father, Steve Goncalves, hires private investigators. He questions police experience. He gets information from the coroner's office. He and other friends and relatives of the victims pressure law enforcement to be more transparent about the investigation. But Steve and other family members also have to dodge rumors. Suggestions that their children were drug dealers or in gambling debt. Those rumors also end up in the tip lines.
31:01 Speaker 00 Mixed in with that were thousands of tips that were based on nothing, basically, and overwhelming the tip lines. And these tips are not just like somebody calling up. We think of tips as like, "I think you should look at this guy Brian down the road." That's not what all the tips are. A lot of the tips were digital assets. Clips from YouTube or TikTok or wherever, being sent to the FBI.
31:26 Speaker 01 Jay says the volume of tips was so large, authorities parked a digital processing trailer at the police department. They brought on dozens of agents to sift through the data.
31:36 Speaker 00 With that call for eyeballs comes a lot of people who are not necessarily seasoned investigators or having any kind of investigative acumen, submitting tips to tip lines and then overwhelming those tip lines. That's a real strain on an investigation if you don't have the resources.
31:55 Speaker 01 The constant scrutiny wears on the police, the families, and the town of Moscow itself.
32:01 Speaker 00 Now you have all these tourists, as the security guard called them, coming to the site. And the communities are struggling with this. Like, they want this case to be over with because they want resolution to the crimes, but they also want people to leave them alone. And even today, people are still knocking on the doors of neighbors, wanting to get stories. Newscasters are setting up their tripods in front of the house still because it's a natural backdrop when you're covering this story. And this has an effect on the neighborhood. People don't want to be reminded every single day of this case that people that are living there. But not only that, they don't necessarily like, like, national news media personalities seeing them in their pajamas when they carry out the garbage to the blue dumpster.
32:45 Speaker 01 By the end of November, the community has grown weary of the media, the rumors, the lack of transparency from the police, and the need for justice for the Idaho Four. On December 7, Moscow Police Department puts out a press release asking for more tips. This time, they're looking for the driver of a white Hyundai Elantra that was seen near King Road in the early morning hours before the murders. They also say they still don't have a suspect. But as it turns out, they know a lot more than they're letting on.
33:25 Speaker 01 Thank you for listening to Serial Killers. We're here with an episode every Monday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at Serial Killers Podcast. And if you're tuning in on Spotify, swipe up and give us your thoughts. A big thanks to our guest, Jay Rubin-Appelman. His book While Idaho Slept is available now. This episode was written and produced by Chelsea Wood, edited by Mickey Taylor, fact-checked by Lori Siegel, and sound designed by Kelly Gary. I'm your host, Janice Morgan.
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34:22 Speaker 08 You just have to know where to look.
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34:28 Speaker 09 Para los grandes, para los chicos, para los bajos y los altos, los pacifistas, los valientes, para los optimistas y los pesimistas, los que valoran lo de adentro, para los que están lejos, los que no vende lejos, y los que no vende cerca, para los introvertidos y los extrovertidos, para los que piensan y los que hacen, para los que nos mostraron el camino. Coca-Cola para todos. Compra una Coca-Cola en una tienda cerca de usted.
Previous The Hook Man Next The Idaho Four Pt. 2 (with Kayna Whitworth) Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated