The lab-leak theory of COVID’s origin has always been a little squirrelly. If SARS-CoV-2 really did begin infecting humans in a research setting, the evidence that got left behind is mostly of the cloak-and-dagger type: confirmations from anonymous government officials about vague conclusions drawn in classified documents, for example; or leaked materials that lay out hypothetical research projects; or information gleaned from who-knows-where that certain people came down with who-knows-what disease at some crucial moment. In short, it’s all been messy human stuff, the bits and bobs of intelligence analysis. Simple-seeming facts emerge from a dark matter of sources and methods.

So it goes again. The latest major revelation in this line emerged this week. Taken at face value, it’s extraordinary: Ben Hu, a high-level researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and two colleagues, Yu Ping and Yan Zhu, could have been the first people on the planet to be infected with SARS-CoV-2, according to anonymous sources cited first in the newsletter Public and then in The Wall Street Journal. These proposed patient SARS-CoV-zeroes aren’t merely employees of the virology institute; they’re central figures in the very sort of research that lab-leak investigators have been scrutinizing since the start of the pandemic. Their names appear on crucial papers related to the discovery of new, SARS-related coronaviruses in bats, and subsequent experimentation on those viruses. (The Journal reached out to the three researchers, but they did not respond.)

Is this the “smoking gun,” at last, as many now insist? Has the Case of the Missing COVID Origin finally been solved? If it’s true these were the very first infected people, then their professional activities mean they almost certainly caught the virus in the lab, not a market stall full of marmots and raccoon dogs. The origins debate has from the start revolved around a pair of dueling “coincidences.” The fact that the pandemic just happened to take off at a wet market suggests that the virus spilled over into humans from animals for sale there. But the fact that it also just happened to take off not too far away from one of the world’s leading bat-coronavirus labs suggests the opposite. This week’s information seems to tip the balance very heavily toward the latter interpretation.

[Read: If the lab-leak theory is right, what’s next?]

The only problem is, we don’t know whether the latest revelations can be trusted, or to what extent. The newly reported facts appear to stem from a single item of intelligence, furnished by a foreign source, that has bounced around inside the U.S. government since sometime in 2020. Over the past two and a half years, the full description of the sickened workers in Wuhan has been revealed with excruciating slowness, in sedimenting clauses, through well-timed leaks. This glacial striptease has finally reached its end, but is the underlying information even true? Until that question can be answered (which could be never), the origins debate will be stuck exactly where it’s been for many months: always moving forward, never quite arriving.

The story of these sickened workers has been in the public domain, one way or another, since the start of 2021. Officials in the Trump administration’s State Department, reportedly determined to go public with their findings, put out a fact sheet about various events and circumstances at the Wuhan Institute of Virology around the beginning of the pandemic. Included was a quick description of alleged illnesses among the staff. The fact sheet didn’t name the sickened scientists or what they did inside the lab, or when exactly their illnesses occurred. It didn’t specify their symptoms, nor did it say how many scientists had gotten sick. If you boiled it down, the fact sheet’s revelations could be paraphrased like this:

Several researchers at WIV became ill with respiratory symptoms in autumn 2019.

That vague stub did little to budge consensus views. The lab-leak theory had been preemptively “debunked” in early 2020, and broad disregard of the idea—contempt of it, really—hadn’t yet abated. The day before the State Department fact sheet was released, a team of 17 international experts dispatched by the World Health Organization arrived in Wuhan to conduct (with the help of Chinese scientists) a comprehensive study of the pandemic’s origins. By the time of their return in February 2021, they’d come out with their conclusions: The lab-leak theory was “extremely unlikely” to be true, they said.

The next month, while the WHO team was preparing to release its final report, further details of the sick-researchers story began to trickle out. In a panel discussion of COVID origins and then in an interview with the Daily Mail, David Asher, a former State Department investigator who’s now a senior fellow at a conservative think tank, filled in a few more specifics, including that the researchers had been working in a coronavirus laboratory and that the wife of one of them later died. The intel had arrived from a foreign government, he said. Now the facts that were revealed could be summarized like so:

Three coronavirus researchers at WIV became severely ill with respiratory symptoms in the second week of November 2019.

Pressure for a more serious appraisal of the lab-leak theory grew throughout that spring. In May 2021, more than a dozen prominent virologists and biosafety experts published a letter in the journal Science calling for “a proper investigation” of the matter. A week later, The Wall Street Journal published a leak from anonymous current and former U.S. officials: According to a “previously undisclosed US intelligence report,” the paper said, the sickened researchers had been treated for their sickness at a hospital. In other words, they probably weren’t suffering from common colds. This new aspect of the narrative was making headlines now, like this:

Three coronavirus researchers at WIV became severely ill with respiratory symptoms in the second week of November 2019 and sought hospital care.

After all of this publicity, President Joe Biden ordered the intelligence community to redouble efforts to analyze the evidence. While that work was going on, the leaks kept coming. In a 12,000-word story for Vanity Fair, the investigative journalist Katherine Eban gave some backstory on the sick-research intelligence, claiming that it had been gathered in 2020 and then inexplicably file-drawered until State Department investigators rediscovered it. (One former senior official described this as a “holy shit” moment in an interview with Eban.) Her article contained another seemingly important detail, too: The sickened researchers were doing not simply coronavirus research, her sources told her, but the very sort of research that could produce amped-up versions of a pathogen—an approach known as “gain of function.” Later in the summer, Josh Rogin, a Washington Post columnist, added that, according to his unnamed sources, the sickened researchers had lost their sense of smell and developed ground-glass opacities in their lungs. By this point, in the middle of 2021, the expanded piece of intel amounted to the following:

Three gain-of-function coronavirus researchers at WIV became severely ill with COVID-like symptoms in the second week of November 2019 and sought hospital care.

The latest revelations are coming at just the moment when Republicans are lambasting the Biden administration for failing to declassify COVID-origins intelligence in accordance with a law that the president signed. The Sunday Times quoted an anonymous former State Department investigator who said they were “rock-solid confident” that the three sick researchers had been sick with COVID, because people as young as the researchers would rarely be hit so hard by a mere seasonal illness. A few days later, someone spilled the researchers’ names to Public. On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal matched the scoop, and it seemed that every detail of the once-secret information was now exposed:

Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu, three gain-of-function coronavirus researchers at WIV, became severely ill with COVID-like symptoms in the second week of November 2019 and sought hospital care.

However vivid this may sound, its credibility remains unknown. Did Hu, Ping, and Zhu really get sick, as the intel claims? If so, was it really COVID? Two years ago, the Journal cited two anonymous sources on this question: One, the Journal wrote, called the intelligence “potentially significant but still in need of further investigation and corroboration”; the other said it was “of exquisite quality” and “very precise.” Just this week, anonymous officials in the Biden administration told The New York Times that intelligence analysts had already “dismissed the evidence,” by August 2022, about the sickened workers at WIV for lack of relevance. Which secret source should be trusted to explain the significance of this secret intelligence? Readers are left to sort that out themselves.

[Read: Don’t fall for these lab-leak traps]

In the meantime, over the past two years, even as the sickened-worker intel was revealed, a very different sort of evidence was mounting, too. A new research paper, published just days after Eban’s feature in Vanity Fair, revealed that live wild animals, including raccoon dogs, had been for sale at the Huanan market in Wuhan shortly before the pandemic started. In early 2022, scientists put out two detailed analyses of early case patterns and viral genome data, which argued in favor of the animal-spillover theory. Another study involving many of the same researchers came out this past spring, noting the presence of genetic material from raccoon dogs in early samples from the market; its authors described their findings as providing strong evidence for an animal origin. But other scientists were quick to challenge the study’s importance. A further study of the same data by Chinese scientists made a point of not ruling out the hypothesis that the pandemic had started with a case of tainted frozen seafood; yet another study, released in May, argued that the original work provided no useful information whatsoever on the question of COVID’s origins.

So it goes with the animal-spillover theory. The evidence in favor has always been highly esoteric, knotted with data and interpretation. Scientific points are made—a particular run of viral nucleotides is a “smoking gun” for genetic engineering, one famous scholar said in 2021—and then they are re-argued and occasionally walked back. Long-hidden sample data from the market suddenly appear, and their meaning is subjected to vituperative, technical debate. If the evidence for a lab leak tends to come from messy human stuff, the evidence for animal spillover emerges from messy data. Simple-seeming claims are draped across a sprawl of numbers.

In this way, the origins question has broken down into a pair of rival theories that don’t—and can’t—ever fully interact. They’re based on different sorts of evidence, with different standards for evaluation and debate. Each story may be accruing new details—fresh intelligence about the goings-on at WIV, for example, or fresh genomic data from the market—but these are only filling out a picture that will never be complete. The two narratives have been moving forward on different tracks. Neither one is getting to its destination.

The former PM did not seek clearance from Parliament's ethics advisers to take up his new job.

The reporters arrived in news vans and satellite trucks that trundled down King Road and colonized parking spots outside the crime scene. TV producers crowded into the Corner Club, chatting up students for tips and gossip, mispronouncing the town’s name—Mos-cow, they kept calling it, not Moss-coe. Nancy Grace, the cable-news host famously obsessed with morbid crimes, set up a table right outside the victims’ house so she could gesture at the building on air while speculating about the last sound they heard before dying. The story was irresistible: Four University of Idaho students brutally stabbed to death in the middle of the night. The killer still at large. No suspects. Motive unknown.

Then the sleuths came. TikTok detectives, true-crime podcasters—they descended on the town with theories to float and suspects to investigate. They rifled through the victims’ digital lives, hunting for clues that might crack the case. In niche Facebook groups, they shared their findings. Did a history professor plot the murders in a jealous rage? Was the nearby fraternity involved? What about that hoodie-clad guy on a Twitch livestream standing behind two of the victims at a food truck?

Days passed without an arrest, then weeks. Frightened students fled the campus. The local police, overwhelmed with tips, begged the public to stop calling with unvetted information. But people just kept coming. “Dark tourists” arrived to take pictures of the house where the murders happened, and post them for bragging rights in their Reddit forums. Someone turned up outside the police line with ghost-hunting equipment to commune with the victims’ spirits. A TikToker with about 100,000 followers tried to identify the killer with tarot cards.

The distinction between professional reporters and clout-chasing cranks blurred into one unwieldy mass of noise and disruption and fearmongering. Locals turned bitterly on all of it, treating the press like hostile occupiers. They hung signs to mess with TV reporters’ live shots—FUCK YOU NANCY GRACE, read one—and posted notes on their doors begging journalists to go away. One local bar owner publicly fantasized about punching reporters in the face.

As the search for the killer dragged on and rumors spread unchecked, the friendly little college town seemed to harden and crack. People were scared, and suspicious of one another. The press couldn’t be trusted; neither could the police. Locals installed security systems and took out restraining orders. They bought guns.

A suspect was arrested six weeks after the murders, but by then it almost didn’t matter. The sleuthing couldn’t stop now. People were too dug in, too invested in their pet hunches and favorite suspects. Some questioned whether the police had the wrong man; some floated potential accomplices. Conspiracy theories lingered, and so did the unease.

[From the March 2023 issue: Megan Garber on how America’s constant need for entertainment blurred the line between fiction and reality]

Don Anderson, a retired high-school teacher who’d lived in Moscow most of his life, couldn’t believe how different everything felt. In some ways, the frenzy that followed the murders was just as disruptive to the community as the crime itself. Before all this, he said, nobody locked their doors. Now everybody was on edge—including him. One day in February, someone called the police claiming that they planned to go into Moscow High School and start shooting. Police quickly figured out it was a hoax—the call wasn’t even coming from Idaho—but Anderson found himself speculating about the motive behind the threat. Was it a prank by some outsider obsessed with the murders? A sinister warning of more violence to come? Was the town just a permanent magnet for voyeurs and creeps now—synonymous with the worst thing that had ever happened there?

“I’m beginning to wonder,” Anderson told me, “if we’re ever going to be the same.”

When I arrived in Moscow in February, the initial media circus had passed. Bryan Kohberger had been arrested six weeks earlier for the murders of four students—Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle, and Ethan Chapin—and the judge had placed a gag order on everyone involved in the case. The news trucks would return once the trial got under way, but for now things were relatively quiet. (Kohberger chose not to enter a plea last month, in effect pleading not guilty.)

I’d been drawn to the town, like everyone else, by the eerie facts of the murders and the still-eerier profile of the suspect, a former criminology student at nearby Washington State University. The details already in circulation were chilling. A car resembling Kohberger’s white Hyundai Elantra could be seen on surveillance videos driving by the house several times shortly before the attacks. Police linked his DNA to a leather knife sheath left on a bed, and his phone history suggested that he’d been near the house 12 times in the preceding months. Once I got to Moscow, however, I found myself fixating less on the crime than on its aftermath—the wreckage left behind when the media and the sleuths had cleared out.

Located on Idaho’s eastern border, Moscow is known around the state for a certain mountain-hippie vibe. Students joke that the town is permanently “stuck in the ’70s.” It has a lively folk-dance scene and an independent theater that shows classic horror films. Main Street is lined with brown-brick buildings that house quirky small businesses including Ampersand, a purveyor of boutique olive oil, and the Breakfast Club, known for its “world-famous cinnamon roll pancakes.”

But even months after the murders, the town seemed traumatized. No one wanted to talk about the case, on the record or off. When I introduced myself as a reporter, people recoiled. My efforts to talk with the victims’ neighbors were met with exasperation and anger. At one door, I found a sign that read simply, WE HAVE NO STATEMENT. LEAVE US ALONE. Eventually I resorted to writing apologetic notes with my phone number and leaving them on windshields and doorsteps. Nobody called.

At the offices of the University of Idaho campus paper, The Argonaut, I found a masthead’s worth of student journalists glumly disillusioned with journalism. Months of unseemly behavior by a scoop-desperate press corps had dimmed their view of the profession. They’d seen cameramen hide in bushes on campus, and reporters try to sneak into dorms. They’d seen TV correspondents shout hostile questions at teenagers still processing their classmates’ deaths as if the kids were prevaricating politicians. In one notably unsavory episode, a tabloid photographer tracked down one of the roommates who’d survived the attack that night and took paparazzi-like photos at her parents’ house for the Daily Mail.

Abigail Spencer, a reporter for The Argonaut, told me that she was struggling to square the heroic stories she’d learned in journalism classes with the reporters who’d invaded her campus. “We’re taught they’re all Cronkite,” she said. “They’re not.”

Haadiya Tariq, who was the paper’s editor, told me the rude behavior had helped her understand the wider antipathy toward the press. “No wonder people hate you,” she sometimes found herself thinking. She was alarmed by the extent to which professional news outlets appeared to deliberately stoke the online ecosystem of conspiracy theories about the case. The TV-news bookers always seemed so nice and thoughtful when they were asking for interviews. But once the cameras turned on, Tariq told me, the questions were invariably aimed at getting her to theorize about the murders in a way that might get traction in the true-crime forums. Experiencing this had helped her understand why so much of the coverage felt “weird or inaccurate or sensational”: “It is 100 percent trying to feed the audience, which is the internet sleuths,” she told me. “That’s kind of the dirty secret I’m starting to realize.” Perhaps more disturbing than the vulturous reporters or the vortex of TikTok speculation was the way the media and the sleuths seemed to encourage and sustain each other—their priorities converging in a vicious ouroboros.

Meanwhile, some unlucky Moscow residents were still struggling to reassemble their lives after becoming main characters in murder-related conspiracy theories. Rebecca Scofield, a history professor at the University of Idaho, was suing the TikToker who’d accused her of plotting the students’ murders because of a (completely fabricated) love affair with Kaylee Goncalves. (The TikToker denied any wrongdoing, and police have said that Scofield was not a suspect.) Friends of a recently deceased Afghanistan veteran were fending off ghoulish speculation on social media that he was involved in the crime.

Jeremy Reagan, a law student who lived in the victims’ neighborhood, became a target when he gave a handful of TV interviews about the murders. Sleuths studied his body language and parsed his facial expressions.

“It reminds me of Ted Bundy when he would talk about murders,” one observed.

“Very disconcerting,” another said.

Soon, they started mining Reagan’s Facebook profile for clues. A bandage on his right hand was treated as especially incriminating—how did he cut himself? Same with a four-year-old Facebook post that mentioned a rave. “Guys at raves ‘chase women’ and ‘do drugs,’ many things to note,” one sleuth deduced. “The girls partied, he mentioned that. Did he try to party with them? Did he actually party with them? Was he turned down by them?’”

Reagan, hoping to clear his name, volunteered to take a DNA test. The police never named him as a suspect. But the online sleuths kept digging—even contacting his friends for intel—and the menacing messages from strangers kept piling up. Reagan started carrying a gun.

“Just having it on me gives that extra sense of security,” he said in a cable-news interview. “Especially now, where the cybersleuths may or may not come.”

Illustration by Zoë Van Dijk

As with every gruesome crime that attains “true crime” status, the Moscow case has been a career-maker for some people in the media. Three separate book projects are reportedly in the works. NewsNation, the upstart cable channel that launched in 2021, has seen record ratings for its wall-to-wall coverage; its lead reporter on the case, Brian Entin, has amassed half a million Twitter followers and been profiled in Vanity Fair.

John and Lauren Matthias knew right away that the Moscow murders would be a big story for them. The Las Vegas–based couple hosts a popular true-crime podcast called Hidden—he’s a forensic psychologist; she’s a former TV reporter—and they have a strong grasp on which cases will pop. The key here, John told me, is that the case began with an “unsub” (police lingo for an unidentified subject of an investigation). “There was a mystery to be solved,” John said. “Nobody knew who the suspect was, there was a huge amount of uncertainty, and people want to play the role of Sherlock Holmes.”

The grisly murders also exploited some of the most basic human fears. “The idea of a group of people asleep in their home at night being attacked randomly … it’s literally a nightmare,” John said.

At its root, the couple believes, true-crime sleuthing is about the psychological desire to bring order where there is none, to make sense of a world that seems scary. “The mind wants the world to make sense,” John told me. “We’re constantly looking for patterns even when they don’t exist. There’s a lot of research that shows that we don’t like things to be random or uncertain.”

Lauren acknowledged that she doesn’t adhere to the same journalistic standards she did when she was a reporter. She indulges in conjecture; she tries to meet her audience where it is. “I never portray myself as the podcaster who’s going to solve it, or has the answers,” she told me. “I become just like my listeners: ‘None of us know. Let’s talk about it. Let’s speculate together. Let’s find clues together.’”

There are times when she feels uncomfortable with the more fever-swampy aspects of this ecosystem. The rush to turn random people into suspects and then demonize them, the lack of accountability when a theory is debunked—it can feel a little gross. “I’ve been a network reporter,” Lauren told me. “And here I am in this really bizarre true-crime community trying to find my footing as a professional.”

But the Matthiases also bristle at the lack of respect they get from mainstream news outlets. They note that they were the first to discover a years-old internet forum in which Kohberger had discussed suffering from “visual snow syndrome”—a disorder associated with depression, anxiety, and insomnia. Rather than crediting their scoop, CNN used a TikTok video of Lauren discussing the story to illustrate the irresponsibility of online sleuths. (When The New York Times eventually “broke” the “visual snow” story, CNN featured the paper’s reporting.)

The appetite for coverage of cases like this one, Lauren told me, is not fizzling out anytime soon. She sees their podcast as a force for good: “We either need to embrace this and be respectful, responsible voices in this community, or watch it become a bigger volcano.”

There are dozens of Facebook groups dedicated to unpacking the Moscow murders. The largest has more than 222,000 members. When I joined the group, several weeks after Kohberger’s arrest, I expected the forum to be quiet. The case was in a holding pattern—what would the murder hobbyists even have to talk about? This was, it turned out, deeply naive.

The group was buzzing. There were chat threads for people to speculate about Kohberger’s motive; there were chat threads for people convinced that Kohberger didn’t do it. A large contingent of members was busy building the case that a Mexican drug cartel was involved. (One key piece of evidence: an image from Google Maps that showed shoes hanging from power lines in the victims’ neighborhood, a purported sign of drug activity—though a quick Google search reveals that shoes can also be a memorial for someone who’s died.) Others latched on to a stray comment made by Kaylee Goncalves’s father about how she’d researched child trafficking. Had Kaylee gotten herself crosswise with a powerful child-trafficking ring? How deep did this go?

Groups like this one invariably attract a fair number of weirdos. Kohberger himself was reportedly known to hang out in crime-related forums, identifying himself as a criminology student; some people have even speculated that anonymous Reddit comments posing theories about the Idaho murders came from Kohberger himself.

But there was something else about the Facebook chatter that unnerved me. While the content wasn’t explicitly political, the group’s mode of thinking bore a striking resemblance to the hives of conspiracism and paranoia that have infected American civic life.

Here was a group of like-minded people clustered in a strange corner of the internet, developing a vocabulary, forming a shared worldview, inventing new storylines to help make sense of the world. Villains were conjured from thin air and elaborate backstories attached to them. Galaxy-brain pattern-finding provided the narrative satisfaction that reality could not. How different, in essence, was this universe from the one inhabited by anti-vaxxers or 9/11 truthers or Pizzagate enthusiasts? Are they not animated by the same urge that animates crime obsessives—to impose order on chaos, to gamify unpredictable, actual life? As John Matthias pointed out to me, “When you have an environment of fear and uncertainty, you tend to get this type of rampant speculation that’s divorced from evidence.”

Devotees of the Moscow case would no doubt push back on this notion. They might argue that their hobby is benign—that they’re just killing time on the internet, indulging in a bit of frivolous speculation for fun. But the consequences of this kind of conspiracy thinking are never contained to their virtual communities. They dribble out into real-life communities, where real people are affected.

Two weeks after I left Moscow, the University of Idaho announced that it planned to demolish the gray house at 1122 King Road. The house sits halfway up a hill, surrounded by squat apartment buildings and unassuming homes. Before the murders, it was known as a hub of off-campus social activity. The roommates liked to throw parties, and local police had responded to several noise complaints. On the day I visited, there were still signs of before. A Christmas wreath hung on the door; strings of lights dangled above the back patio.

The question of what to do with the house had been a subject of debate in town. It was still a crime scene at the moment, but some locals wanted to see it restored and preserved in honor of the victims. These students had good times in that house, the argument went—why let their memories be overshadowed by the murders?

But there was a bleak reality to contend with. As long as the house was standing, it seemed, an unnerving stream of sightseers and sleuths would continue to turn up in the neighborhood. There was no going back.