Stunning news out of Idaho.
Bryan Kohberger is set to take a plea deal on Wednesday, if the judge accepts it. Yes, he’ll go to jail for the rest of his life for the murders of Kaylee Goncalves, Maddie Mogen, Ethan Chapin and Xana Kernodle without appeal, but he gets to live rather than face a firing squad. And he may never fully explain to the families his hideous rationale.
The closest they’ll get to that is the reporting in The Idaho Four, which does detail Kohberger’s formative years, the misogynistic world he inhabited online, and his professional disastrous descent to the bottom in the weeks before the murders occurred.
Sources tell me it was the prosecutor, Bill Thompson, who put the offer on the table. My sources also add that Thompson, who graduated law school 45 years ago, may not have wanted to go through a grueling three month trial and he was concerned that a jury can be unpredictable.
But…
The four families of the victims have waited nearly three years for a trial in which they hoped they’d get answers. Three frustrating years during which they’ve learned very little about why and how their children were murdered in their beds…
The Goncalves family is furious about the turn of events and has said so on their Facebook page. I suspect the family of Maddie Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves’s best friend, feels similarly, and also the family of Xana Kernodle. Those three families have been in sync these past years when it comes to feeling under-supported and under-informed by the police and the prosecutors.
But the Goncalves family has been the most vocal. And I get why.
You’ll read in The Idaho Four just how badly the relationship went from the get-go. The family was huddled round the TV for Sunday afternoon football, when they could see from friends of Kaylee’s with cellphones that the King Road house she’d been staying in, had police tape around it. Clearly something terrible had happened. And yet it was a few hours before anyone knocked on their door with minimal information.
And so the tension began…
Steve Goncalves has felt so unsupported that only last week he told me that he felt a lot better talking to me on the phone, than talking to them…”You, at least, are always sympathetic,” he said.
I haven’t yet got hold of Stacy and Jim Chapin, Ethan’s parents, but I suspect their reaction is different. One of the themes in The Idaho Four is how the victims’ families reflect the political divisions in the Pacific North West. Moscow is a liberal college town, but Idaho is a deeply Republican state.
Here’s a passage from the book about the moment Jim and Stacy Chapin hear about the arrest of Bryan Kohberger:
They have no idea what his connection to Ethan is, and they are not interested in finding out. The bottom line is that their son is in a jar in their basement and nothing can change that.
But when Jim sees Kohberger’s face on the news, weirdly, it resonates. “He just looked like a bad guy . . . the long, drawn face . . . he just fit the picture that I had in my mind,” he said later.
Jim is glad they’ve got him. He wants this guy to pay. And he feels certain that he will, no matter what happens next.
“Stace will shoot me for saying this . . . but . . . there’s three ways you can look at it. He’s either going to go to jail for life or he is going to be put to death or he’s going to walk out the front door. And I’m okay with any one of them. Because the outcome for him is going to be the same.”
What he means is that Kohberger is not likely to survive even if he gets off. This is Idaho, after all.
“You really think Steve Goncalves,” Jim asked months later with a wry smile, “is going to sit back while he walks around freely?”
The answer is no.
Standby for more…
You are going to need to read The Idaho Four to get the definitive account of what happened and why.
You can pre-order it here.
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