Reviewed by Michael Washburn
When the Night Comes Falling: A Requiem for the Idaho Student Murders
By Howard Blum
Harper
June 2024, Hardcover, 240 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0063349285
The saying that people live life forward but must understand it in retrospect is an unstated theme of veteran crime writer Howard Blum’s When the Night Comes Falling: A Requiem for the Idaho Student Murders. His account of the massacre of four young people and the long investigation that followed brings to light procedural and technical missteps that readers might have thought police forces had figured out how to avoid. On one level, this is a sensationalistic book—in the acknowledgments, Blum exults in having gotten a screen deal—yet it is also a primer for penological, forensic, and judicial personnel seeking to refine their practices and steer clear of the pitfalls that drew out the efforts to nab a mass murderer, adding insult to injury for the victims’ families. Reading this chilling work, it grows clear just how ineffective modern law enforcement agencies, which devote increasing amounts of their limited time to diversity and sensitivity training rather than job-related skills, have become.
After the slayings of Madison Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle, and Ethan Chapin in a rented house on King Road in Moscow, Idaho, in November 2022, investigators turned to video footage of the area around the crime scene in the hope of finding some kind, any kind, of clue. Footage from a gas station’s camera offered a glimpse of a white car heading toward the students’ home in the small hours of the morning, right around the estimated time of the murders. It will surprise readers to learn that authorities misidentified not only the year but the make of the vehicle clearly shown in the video. First they thought that the suspect came and left and scene in a Nissan Sentra produced somewhere between 2019 and 2023. Later, with help from FBI experts in Quantico, Virginia, they came around to a correct identification of the car as a Hyundai Elantra, but the FBI got the year wrong multiple times. First they said it was a 2011 to 2013 model, then said it must have rolled out sometime between 2011 and 2016, then closed the window to 2014 to 2016.
The deluge of errors led the Moscow police department to issue a nationwide “be on the lookout” (BOLO) alert concerning a 2011 to 2013 white Hyundai Elantra, when in point of fact the suspect they were looking for, Bryan Kohberger, drove a 2015 version. The delays in naming the model and narrowing down leads drastically set back the search and undoubtedly gave Kohberger time to destroy precious evidence.
The mistakes did not end there. With Kohberger finally on their radar as a suspect, the Moscow police and the FBI failed to coordinate their efforts with cops in other jurisdictions. Many of us recall seeing clips of one of two incidents in which an officer on the highway east of Indianapolis spoke to the suspect and his father Michael after pulling them over and warned them not to tailgate other vehicles. And some of us may have thought that these traffic stops were a ruse, that the authorities were playing a sly cat-and-mouse game with the suspect, biding their time, keeping their eye on him, subtly turning up pressure until he broke down or they decided to swoop in and arrest him.
Reading Blum’s account, it becomes clear how slipshod and uncoordinated were the efforts of federal and state police. The feds were indeed tracking the Kohbergers as they made their jaunt from Pullman, Washington, to the family home in Pennsylvania, but the cops on the highway who made the two stops were acting purely on their own. Getting pulled over not once but twice, Blum writes, could easily have told Kohberger, however inadvertently, that what he believed to have been a perfect murder had not come off so cleanly after all. Blum describes the feds’ anxiety that the suspect might have taken further steps to wipe out evidence, fled and gone incognito, or, in the worst case scenario, attacked one or both of the cops. In both instances, those tracking the father-and-son road trip decided to suck it up, stand down, and hope that Kohberger, whom they had reason to believe had already killed four people, did not react like a cornered animal. Things could have gone far, far worse. The Indiana cops are lucky to be alive. This all comes off as far from a smooth, well-planned investigation.
When the authorities decided to move in and arrest Kohberger in the middle of the night at the home in Albrightsville, Pennsylvania, they erred on the side of using too much force rather than too little. Blum describes the assembly and deployment of an army of heavily armed officers trained to make lots of noise and terrify a suspect who might have thoughts of resisting arrest. But the failure to anticipate a locked gate barring the way to the cluster of homes where the Kohbergers lived again resulted in long delays. The police had stunningly little knowledge of the lay of the land in their own jurisdiction. Some officers in the van, Blum relates, were in favor of plowing right through the gate even if it raised a ruckus. By sheer luck, one of the cops in the convoy sent to nab the murderer knew someone in the area who was able to come and unlock the gate, and the invaders got through without Kohberger realizing what was afoot until they reached the home.
While Kohberger’s arrest brought deep relief to many, efforts to indict him and set the date for a trial have been, in Blum’s telling, a comedy of errors. He questions whether a fair trial is possible in the jurisdiction where the killings occurred, and not just for the reasons you might think. Of course many people in the area are hungry for justice, but another factor works in the opposite direction—potentially in the suspected killer’s favor.
When the Night Comes Falling details severe, long-festering tensions between the police in the Moscow-Pullman area and the devotees of a religious figure named Doug Wilson and his Christ Church. According to Blum, the two thousand or so “Kirkers,” as they call themselves, who look to Wilson for guidance account for as much as half of all prospective jurors in the region not affiliated with the University of Idaho. Some of the Kirkers and their leader, he suggests, despise the local police for breaking up and making arrests at a pray-in during the pandemic. The men and women praying, you see, had not been wearing masks, making themselves public enemy number one in the eyes of progressives. The police also busted Kirkers for putting anti-lockdown stickers on a lamppost.
Those targeted include the son and two grandsons of Wilson, who has told his parishioners that local cops are liars. They are sure to remember this counsel when the trial of Bryan Kohberger gets underway. Here is one more consequence of the excesses of zeal toward those who stood up for civil liberties during the pandemic and questioned some of the more extreme Covid-19 measures that crimped people’s existence and made nearly everyone miserable.
About the reviewer: Michael Washburn is the author of The Uprooted and Other Stories, When We’re Grownups, and Stranger, Stranger. His short story “Confessions of a Spook” won Causeway Lit’s 2018 fiction contest, and another of his stories, “In the Flyover State,” was named a Distinguished Mystery Story of 2014 by Best American Mystery Stories.