#40: 1122 King Road - The True Story Of The Idaho Four Murders
On the night of November 12th, 2022, four University of Idaho seniors went out into the small college town they called home — and never came back. By the following afternoon, Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle, and Ethan Chapin had been stabbed to death in their beds, in a rental house just off campus, while two of their roommates slept undisturbed on the floor below.
The killer left no weapon. No fingerprints. No witnesses. He was inside the house for approximately fifteen minutes, and by the time the first officer arrived on scene, he had been gone for hours.
What followed was one of the most closely watched murder investigations in recent memory — unfolding in a town that had never needed to lock its doors, led by a small police department suddenly thrust under the glare of a national media circus, and complicated by a tidal wave of online speculation that destroyed innocent reputations and sent an entire university campus into a spiral of fear and paranoia.
The investigation would take six weeks, span two time zones, and hinge on a single piece of evidence so small it was almost invisible to the naked eye. And at the center of it all was a killer who had studied violence academically — who understood, better than most, exactly how cases like this got solved.
He almost got away with it.
Content warning: this episode contains detailed descriptions of violent crime and may not be suitable for all listeners.
