Murder in Idaho
Murder in Idaho
A new book on the murders in Moscow, Idaho, is a superficial rendition, at best.
When the Night Comes Falling: Requiem for the Idaho Student Murders, Howard Blum, Harper, 240 pages
My lifelong home, the Palouse region that straddles the center of the Washington–Idaho border, is a fertile farmland most notable for containing the country’s two geographically closest land grant universities, Washington State University (my alma mater) and the University of Idaho. The region’s second largest city, Moscow, was known among religious conservatives and their enemies as the home of Christ Church and its controversial pastor Douglas Wilson. Not a lot usually happens here, and we all like it that way.
Unfortunately, in 2022, something did happen: On November 13, four University of Idaho students were murdered, putting Moscow on the map in the worst way. This brutal crime was the subject of intense interest and online speculation. In the real world, it brought a small army of investigators and journalists to the region. Among the latter was veteran investigative journalist Howard Blum, who has recently published the book When the Night Comes Falling. While the story deserves to be told, this text is superficial, poorly organized, and fails to faithfully portray the setting where the story takes place.
According to the author, When the Night Comes Falling seeks to tell the story of the murders through the “long journey home” that accused killer Bryan Kohberger made with his father from Pullman, Washington, to the family’s home in Pennsylvania for Christmas break. He says this structure is inspired by The Odyssey, but it is more of a poor imitation of In Cold Blood without the talent Capote showed in making Holcomb, Kansas, come alive. Making the journey central to the narrative is also an interesting choice since the author has persistent problems with geography, making easily verifiable errors including his claim that the Pullman-Moscow Regional Airport is in Idaho. This is particularly troublesome because the proximity of locations is key to understanding the story, especially as Kohberger, a WSU student, allegedly crossed from a non-death penalty state into a death penalty state to commit the crime.
Blum seeks to portray Moscow as a dark and dangerous place. “Down deep, pretty Moscow was pretty poison,” he writes. Though there has been occasional violence, Moscow usually has no greater “darkness” than knuckleheaded kids getting into trouble, which made this case all the more shocking to the public. There had not been a murder of any kind in Moscow since 2015, and that was a man who went on a shooting spree at multiple locations, killing three people. The last real mystery of this caliber was the murder and dismemberment of University of Idaho student Kristin David in 1981, which was linked to a series of unsolved murders and disappearances in the nearby Lewiston-Clarkston Valley (though no arrest was made, the long-time suspect was named in a recent TV documentary). Neither of these cases is mentioned, even in a section devoted to listing notable instances of violence in Moscow.
The extremely low rates of violent crime in this area made the day these murders were discovered unforgettable to everyone who lives here. I was grocery shopping in Moscow that morning, as it happened in the time after the students were murdered but before their deaths were reported. No one knew what to make of the story about a 911 call about an unconscious person, and the police arrived to find four bodies; according to Blum this was due to a persistent dispatcher shortage leading to dispatchers making vague reports. Initially, many people believed the deaths could have been caused by a fentanyl overdose. It was impossible to convince the commenting public of the unlikelihood of this, given the rapidity with which that happens, variations in tolerance, and the fact that it is usually the result of the drugs being cut unevenly. A less outlandish explanation was that there had been a gas leak. Violence was barely considered as the possible cause of four deaths.
Speculation on the case was rampant, with just one example being an unfortunate young man who was caught on CCTV with the girls, whom many in the public decided was the likely killer. It was made worse by the public relations failures of the Moscow Police Department, which ultimately led to a gag order being put over the case. Incredibly, the police claimed there was no threat to the public, which Blum makes clear was not based on anything. This area is usually so safe that few lock their doors at night—I didn’t own a key to my own home for years—but until a suspect was caught many began to sleep next to their guns. Finally, days later, the police admitted that, though the attack appeared “targeted,” obviously anyone who would commit a quadruple homicide was a danger to the public. The police excused their earlier claim by saying they wanted to avoid panic.
It was around six weeks after the murders when Bryan Kohberger was arrested in Pennsylvania. My first reaction was to assume that, contrary to prior appearances, the investigation had been run competently by local police, whose confusing public relations were caused by having had a suspect the whole time. Blum does a good job of telling the real story: The FBI caught Kohberger through genealogical DNA databases; according to his sources, the Moscow Police Department had no meaningful role in identifying or arresting Kohberger and weren’t even kept in the loop. Despite this, for some reason Blum describes Moscow police chief James Fry as having “accomplished all he had set out to do” by flailing around until the FBI arrested a suspect.
It is both interesting and distressing to see so many people and places I know in a nationally released book about something so tragic. However, the text is superficial and doesn’t follow up on many referenced individuals. For example, the taxi driver who took the girls home is my cousin, who always worked the lucrative night shift driving drunk college students home from the bars. He stopped working as a taxi driver shortly after this happened, not wanting to deliver more kids to their deaths. Despite his being the last person to see them alive, Blum did not pursue this avenue at all, simply saying the girls called the taxi service recommended by their sorority. He also introduces the psychologist my parents made me go to as a child in some detail, only to say nothing more about him except that he was contracted by the police department and that the situation may have caused some officers psychological distress.
Blum briefly mentions the “half-baked” neighbor who kept giving interviews with his unique theories about the case. This man is a former co-worker of my wife. His story was that he was awake smoking marijuana and practicing juggling (he is an amateur “fire spinner”) at 3:30 a.m. the night of the murder and “may have heard something.” He became something of a sensation in online true crime circles because he is weird and many people found him suspicious. These interviews provided a lot of content that would have been interesting to readers, but they are not included in the book at all.
Most notable is that my wife is the favorite bartender of the professor for whom Kohberger was a teaching assistant. We had been hearing about him all semester. It had seemed like normal happy hour grumbling about work. When the arrest was made and the suspect was said to be a WSU criminology graduate student, it quickly clicked for me. I can verify that Blum is correct that Kohberger’s professor disliked him, though I spoke to him for this article and he told me the problem with Kohberger as a TA was never that he was a difficult or vicious grader, as the book states. It was that he used his position of authority to “try to get laid.” The women of the class had good enough instincts not to welcome such advances.
No story about Moscow would be complete without hand-wringing about Doug Wilson’s Christ Church. Blum promotes the narrative that it is a scary extremist organization attempting to take over Moscow and highlights a small number of sex abuse cases across multiple decades involving members of the large congregation. He then quotes an anonymous lawyer who says, “No ifs, ands, or buts, there’s a civil war getting ready to erupt in the streets of Moscow.” I don’t doubt that this is a real quote, but it’s also nonsense. The city’s liberals are obsessed with Christ Church, but you would hardly know the church exists if not for the liberals complaining about it. Nothing is about to erupt on the streets. It’s true that its members own a lot of businesses, but as Wilson pointed out in an essay in The American Conservative last year, isn’t that a positive contribution to Moscow? Moscow has a friendly, functional, and attractive downtown area, nothing like the tense picture painted in this text.
Blum later suggests that Christ Church members would not make appropriate jurors because Wilson suggested that they should keep an “open mind” and because of their own bad experiences with the Moscow police in the past, such as “a maskless public pray-in during the pandemic” that led to several arrests. What Blum fails to mention is that a court found that the city had violated the civil rights of those arrested individuals and awarded them $300,000; the reader is left instead with the impression that they were just being difficult and unreasonable. It’s strange that a New York man should fret about a north Idaho jury not being sufficiently deferential to the police, all the more so because one of the stronger aspects of the book is explaining the weakness of the DNA evidence against Kohberger.
When the Night Comes Falling informs readers of important aspects of the University of Idaho murders but has more weaknesses than strengths by a wide margin. One gets the feeling that the author is ready for retirement and this book never would have been published if not for the success of his prior work. Fans of the true crime genre and those who want to learn about this specific case would do better to look elsewhere.
As for the case itself, Bryan Kohberger is an American citizen and has a legal presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial by a jury of his peers. Judge John Judge recently approved the defense’s motion to move the case to Boise in hopes of finding a less involved jury. Personally, there is little doubt in my mind that Bryan Kohberger is guilty. The people of Idaho are out for blood. Largely in response to this case, the state legislature relegalized execution by firing squad if lethal injection chemicals are unavailable. By the needle or the bullet, he is probably going to be executed. God may forgive Bryan Kohberger, but the State of Idaho will not.
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