One Night in Idaho: The College Murders takes us back to the fateful day when a horrific incident shook the entire United States of America. Four students were found murdered in an apartment, and nobody had any clue who the perpetrator could be. I would like to say here that apart from the testimonies of the parents, the docuseries didn’t present anything of value in addition to the already existing information on the internet. There was no point in creating a 4-episode docuseries when they could easily have summed it all up, and quite effectively so, in much less time. That said, let’s find out what happened on that fateful day and what recent developments have been made.
What happened in Idaho?
On 13th November 2022, the lives of four families were turned upside down when they got the news that their children, who were staying around the University of Idaho campus, had been murdered by an anonymous killer. Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle, Madison Mogen (aka Maddie), and Kaylee Goncalves were in the same house on that fateful night. Apart from them, there were two other girls staying there, Bethany Funke and Dylan Mortensen. The night before, the University of Idaho students had gone out to party, and they had come home around 2 am in the morning. Later that night, a man wearing a black mask, who was driving a Hyundai Elantra, stopped in front of their house, and after a few minutes, Bethany started to hear some strange noises from the floor above her. She was horrified when she spotted a shadowy figure roaming in their house. Once the man left, Bethany called up Dylan and moved into her room since both of them felt their lives were in danger. In the morning, they contacted their friends and called them over, telling them that their roommates were not answering their calls. It was a student named Hunter Johnson, who was a part of the friend group, who had entered the room and found out that 4 of his friends had been brutally stabbed. So basically, about 7-8 hours after the murders happened, a call was made to the police, who arrived at the scene and collected all the evidence that was there. Ethan was a triplet, and his other two siblings were also in the same university. It was Ethan’s brother, Hunter, who made a call to his parents and told them about what had happened. Stacey Chapin, Ethan’s mother, was at the grocery store at that point in time, and she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Similarly, Karen and Scott, Maddie’s parents, went into a state of shock when they realized that their daughter had been killed by a psychopath.
All the future plans that the parents had for their kids were shattered in that very moment. What had happened in Moscow, Idaho, became national news, and soon, from journalists to conspiracy theorists, everybody started to pour into the town. The kids who had survived didn’t feel safe sticking around in that same house when they knew that a predator was on the prowl. Moreover, the police had had no leads for a very long period of time since they couldn’t ascertain what could have been the motive behind the murders.
How was the killer caught?
Firstly, suspicion was cast on the residents of the house who had survived. The reason why they were looked at as suspects was that they hadn’t called 911 until 7-8 hours had passed. Also, the conspiracy theorists didn’t help anybody’s cause, and they floated baseless speculation that became the talk of the town and made the lives of the people in question a living hell. According to one theory, it was Hunter Johnson, a very close friend of the victims, who had murdered the students. People started talking about him on social media, and he just couldn’t understand how people could be so naive and foolish. I mean, true crime podcasters connected dots that didn’t even exist, and then once the people caught a whiff of it, it spread like wildfire. I believe that the first breakthrough that the authorities got was in the form of a DNA sample procured from the sheath of the knife that had been used to kill the students. That’s when Bryan Kohberger, a 28-year-old PhD student from Washington State University, came into the limelight. After the police procured his call records from the night of the murder, accompanied by the results of the DNA tests, they were sure that he was their man. On the night of the murder, Kohberger was circling around the same area in his white Hyundai. Kohberger had no apparent motive to kill those students: he didn’t know them, he didn’t have any animosity towards them, and probably before that day he hadn’t even heard of them.
He had refused to plead guilty to the crimes, and so his case was scheduled to go on trial in July 2025. Kohberger’s lawyer tried to use various tactics to change the location of the trial from Idaho. The real reason was that they didn’t want their client to be sentenced to death. Idaho is one of those states in the US that hasn’t abolished capital punishment yet. But their request was turned down by the court. This is the point where the Amazon Prime series ended, but a major development took place on 2nd July 2025 (almost a week before the release of the series) that changed the entire dynamics of the case.
Did Bryan Kohberger Plead Guilty?
The latest development in the case happened just a week before the release of the Amazon Prime series. Kohberger, who was being held in the Ada County Jail, pleaded guilty to his crimes. Obviously he did that to avoid the death penalty, as he would have known that there was no way he would be able to escape it. Though I am happy that the parents wouldn’t have to go through the entire torturous ordeal of sitting through the trial, what it also means is that we will never come to know his motive behind murdering those students. If the case had gone to trial, then through the cross-examination, the prosecutor would have extracted some kind of information from him. But I guess that’s not happening now. That said, Kohberger was dealing with some mental health issues. While growing up, he’d had suicidal thoughts, and he experienced a lack of emotion and minimal remorse. Probably that was why he just calmly sat during the initial court hearings and didn’t show any kind of regret or panic when the judges were questioning him. Kohberger also struggled with dissociative disorder, which I believe could be one of the main reasons behind him committing that terrible act. Also, he had a history of being bullied, and he had been diagnosed with autism in the past. What I think is that he didn’t know the victims personally, though probably at some point in time he might have crossed paths with some of them. He might have tracked their movements and then entered the house with the intention of killing them. I don’t think that he would have planned to kill all 4, but since they were all there, he wouldn’t have been able to control his predatory instincts. The man ruined the lives of four families who will take a lifetime to heal from the trauma. Moreover, the grief of losing their child, their brother, their sister, or their friend will stay with them forever.
Bryan Kohberger will be formally sentenced on the 23rd of this month, and I believe that he will, in all probability, receive a life sentence.
