On November 13, 2022, four students from the University of Idaho—Ethan Chapin, Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle, and Madison Mogen—were found dead in the house that the latter three rented near campus. Each had been stabbed, seemingly in bed. Two other students lived in the house, and were apparently in their rooms that night; they were unharmed.
From the public’s standpoint, the case had few leads at first: an unknown assailant, an unknown motive. Law-enforcement officials in the college town of Moscow, Idaho, initially offered the public little information about the evidence they were gathering in their investigation. Into that void came a frenzy of public speculation—and, soon enough, public accusation. The familiar alchemy set in: The real crime, as the weeks dragged on, became a “true crime”; the murders, as people discussed them and analyzed them and competed to solve them, became a grim form of interactive entertainment.
Baseless rumors spread online, as people with no connection to the slain students tried to make sense of a senseless crime. They blamed not only an assailant, or several of them, but also drugs, vengeance, bullying, more. They dove deep into the students’ TikToks and Instagram feeds, looking for clues. They scripted the students’ lives, and their deaths. As the weeks passed, their numbers grew. A Facebook group dedicated to discussing—and speculating about—the murders currently has more than 230,000 members. Subreddits dedicated to the same have more than 100,000 members each. Their posts range from the minutely forensic—analyses of autopsy reports and the knife allegedly used in the killings—to the broadly theoretical. (One post, riffing on a blind item from DeuxMoi, wondered aloud whether Kim Kardashian will get involved in the case.)
Many of the members who offered their theories—and who continue to offer them—likely mean well. Amateur sleuths helped reveal the identities of some of the Golden State serial killer’s victims; the mother of Gabby Petito, who was killed in 2021, has praised the many people who, scouring social media for clues, played a crucial role in solving her daughter’s murder. But the search for crowdsourced justice, in the Idaho murders, tended to thwart justice itself. It complicated the on-the-ground investigation, and, as groundless accusations flew, it created more victims. With remarkable ease, some people’s pain became other people’s puzzle.
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Theories about the murders read, sometimes, as fan fiction. On TikTok and Facebook and YouTube, people pointed fingers, based on strong hunches and seemingly no evidence—accusations that were then amplified by others. Soon enough, the fantastical theories crept into real people’s lives. Posters turned on the two housemates who had been unharmed. (They “must know more than they are letting on,” one video caption put it.) They turned their gaze toward the owner of a food truck that two of the students had stopped at before going home on the night of the killings. (“Possible stalker??” one sleuth wondered.) Law-enforcement officers, investigating the real crime as the “true” one played out online, eliminated both the housemates and the truck owner, among others, as suspects. The Moscow Police Department’s website now has a “Rumor Control” section, a remarkable modification of its FAQ section that tries to combat some of the swirling misinformation. Among the questions the section answers are “Who is NOT believed to be involved?,” “What resources are being used to investigate this murder?,” and “Are reports of skinned dogs related to this murder?” (They are not.)
“Everyone wants something crazier out of this. It has to get crazier,” one of the sleuths who provided information about Gabby Petito’s case says in a documentary that premiered months after her murder. The key word in the woman’s comment is not crazier; it’s wants. The amateur detectives in the Petito case may certainly have been motivated by generosity and outrage and a drive for justice. But they were also gaining from their participation in it: followers, likes, the fickle currencies of the content economy.
The speculation about the Idaho murders took on a similar frenzy. To read through all the theories—or to scroll, or to watch—is to sense appropriation at play: People were not merely trying to solve the case, but trying to claim the tragedy for themselves. (“Please stop turning these poor kids into your identity,” a recent Reddit post pleaded. It was upvoted more than 2,200 times.) The baseless—at times fanciful—speculation continued despite investigators’ repeated attempts to quell it. The rumors were adding chaos to their investigation, they said. They were bringing more trauma to people in mourning.
In their attempts to fact-check innuendo, official investigators have faced that most powerful of foes: the trending topic. The murders—having very particular types of victims, and especially horrifying circumstances—quickly became matters of national interest. That made them, also, matters of incentive for content creators. On YouTube, Vanity Fair’s Delia Cai pointed out, the top news clips that address the murders have more than 1 million views each. On TikTok, videos claiming a connection to the murders—#idahocase, #idahocaseupdate, #idahokiller—now have, in total, more than 400 million views. These true-crime takes on the real crime have no obligation to fairness or evidence. Content, in the eyeball economy, is tautological. When attention is its own reward, the tantalizing take is more valuable than the true one. This is the dull tragedy underlying the acute one: The murders did numbers.
As strangers wrote themselves into the story—competing, as one expert put it, “to make a connection or uncover a secret, often for the likes, shares, clicks and attention”—they created more grief. Some of the victims’ friends and classmates, as they mourned, began receiving death threats. People posted the names and pictures of those who knew the victims, accusing them of vague connections to the crime. (The posters typically kept themselves anonymous.) A YouTuber analyzed the “red flags” allegedly represented by Kaylee Goncalves’s ex-boyfriend—resulting in, his aunt told the New York Post, a compounded trauma: mourning the loss of the woman he’d dated for five years, and reckoning with the fact that “half of America” assumed him to be a murderer. He has been ruled out as a suspect by law-enforcement officers. But the speculation will remain—spun by posters armed with hunches, and made permanent in the archives.
And so, in the name of finding justice, many lost their humanity. They treated real people as characters in a procedural that aired not on their TVs, but on their phones and computers—CSI or Law & Order, playing out in real time. And they treated the characters, in turn, as texts to be read and analyzed and vilified. People eager to make big finds scoured the obituaries of other University of Idaho students who had died in recent years, attempting to connect their deaths to the murders. The father of one of those students asked them to stop trying to link his own child’s death to these other dead kids.
But the sleuths kept going—even when, on December 30, police arrested Bryan Kohberger, a 28-year-old doctoral student at Washington State, just down the road from Moscow. Kohberger had been studying criminology. Charged with four counts of murder and one count of burglary, he is currently being held in Idaho without bail. His counsel has said that he is “eager to be exonerated.” Investigators have cited cellphone data, surveillance footage, and DNA samples among the evidence that they will use, they say, to connect him to the crime. Earlier this week, authorities prosecuting the case released a 49-page document detailing the facts gathered over weeks of investigation. Some of the information resembles the internet’s theories. Much of it does not.
The crime procedural is a uniquely formulaic genre. One of its essential elements is the cathartic conclusion: the big reveal, the shocking twist. This story will very likely have no such payoff for the audience. Kohberger will be prosecuted, and may or may not be found guilty. Prosecutors will rely on evidence, detailed and dull, to make their case. Meanwhile, the speculation will continue—despite the arrest, and despite the harm done to people who, authorities have said, have no connection to the case. Shortly after the murders, the TikToker Ashley Guillard claimed to have solved the case. The killings were ordered, she announced, by a history professor at the University of Idaho. (In fact, by the chair of its history department.) Guillard shared a picture of the professor in videos that have been viewed more than 2 million times. Guillard says she gleaned her conclusion from a deck of tarot cards, and has held firm to her presumption of the professor’s guilt, though the official investigation has ruled her out as a suspect. But Guillard has been defiant in the face of the facts. She will keep on, she told The Washington Post—even now that the professor has brought a defamation suit against her, citing harm to her reputation and fears for her safety. “I’m going to keep posting,” Guillard said. “I’m not taking anything down.”