The Idaho Four review – a disturbing, necessary portrait of a killer and his victims | Idaho

In The first hours of November 13, 2022 in an apartment outside campus in Moscow, Idaho, a masked attacker assassinated four students. The dead, who would come known as Idaho Four, were Kaylee Goncalves, Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle and Madison Mogen. Everyone has been stabbed several times. The killer left a horrible scene and the pattern was not easy.

Videos, mobile phone files and solid detective work carried out the application of the law in Bryan Kohberger, a doctoral student at the Washington State University. Arrested at his parents’ home in Albrightsville, Pennsylvania, at the end of December, he was extradited to the west.

Presented to be tried in August, Kohberger, 30, rather pleaded guilty of murder. By escaping the death penalty, he will purge, in all likelihood, four consecutive perpetuations, 10 years additional for burglary and die in prison. The conviction is set for July 23.

An apparent embittered “INCEL” – “involuntary” single ” – and the former heroin user, Kohberger has signed a confession of a page, few details. He said he had burst into the apartment but offered no reason for his crimes. An anti -social lonely lonely and video game, he did not know his victims but may have met one of them, Mogen, in a restaurant.

With their book The Idaho Four, James Patterson and Vicky Ward may have written the final story of the murders – a disturbing and necessary portrait of a killer and his victims.

Well to rhythm and well written, their joint effort is a fascinating reading and a great story of detective, but unfortunately all true. The prose is conversational and soft. A range of facts, quotes and comments keep the reader’s attention.

Patterson is a award-winning thrillers and non-fiction who co-wrote three novels with Bill Clinton. Jared Kushner, a son -in -law of Donald Trump, claims to have taken a masterclass online from Patterson, then “failed” 40,000 words from his memories, Breaking History.

Ward is a former senior journalist at CNN and a editor -in -chief of HuffPost. Her previous books include The Liar’s Ball, The Devil’s Casino and Kushner, Inc. she interviewed Trumpworld Casts, Michael Cohen and Anthony Scaramucci. She transformed a flawless look at Jeffrey Epstein, the only friend of the 47th president. For the Idaho oven, she interviewed more than 320 people, “sometimes”.

Kohberger left of bread crumbs. Its path to destruction seems to have been soaring by Elliot Rodger, a mass murderer of a “rich family”, the son of a “well -known director” who killed six people and injured 14 near the University of California in Santa Barbara in 2014.

Rodger, 22, was a virgin and “furious”, write Patterson and Ward. He plotted his “day of remuneration” for two years. He circulated a 137 -page manifesto, broadcasting his demons and his frustrations. At the end of his madness, he committed suicide. A martyr for a movement – and a model for Kohberger – was born.

Kohberger learned Rodger at the Higher School.

“No one knows that, like Rodger, Bryan is a virgin who hates women,” writes Ward and Patterson.

“No one knows that Bryan is on fire with loneliness by immersing himself in video games. Like Rodger, he goes for night readers. Like Rodger, he visits the firearms chain. And, like Rodger, he goes to a local bar and tries to collect women.”

In the fall of 2022, Kohberger made a brief journey of the WSU in eastern Washington in Moscow, which houses the Idaho University. Upon entering a restaurant, he spotted a blonde waitress with blue eyes: Madison Mogen, Maddie for short.

“She is the quintessence of women who refused Elliot Rodger,” writes Patterson and Ward. “His name is Maddie, like Elliot’s childhood friend, Maddy, who has become someone who ignored Rodger.”

“She comes to ask what he would like.

“He knows what he would like.

“Her.”

The friends of Mogène hypothesized that she pushed the advances of Kohberger, so he began to track it down.

Telephone records add credibility to theory. Moscow police allegedly alleged that Kohberger was near Mogen’s apartment at least a dozen times between the end of August 2022 and the murder, “almost always late, masked in the dark”.

Until Kohberger was arrested, the Rodger ghost continued to haunt. Two administrators of the Idaho University – Facebook discussion The Facebook group began to notice strange messages from a member under an alias: Pappa Rodger.

“Among the evidence released, the murder weapon was constant as a large fixed blade knife,” wrote the poster. “It brings me to believe that they found the sheath. This evidence was published before the autopsies. ”

It was the first time that someone publicly mentioned a sheath. At the start of the investigation, the Moscow police chief shared the existence of the sheath with a higher member of the Force. After the arrest of Kohberger, “Pappa Rodger” disappeared.

Earlier, Kohberger’s classmates in a psychology program labeled him the “ghost”, the report of Patterson and Ward, because: “There is something scary at home”.

A teacher, Dr. Katherine Ramsland, told the class that the brains of psychopaths were different from those of others. By extension, “the only way to heal a psychopath is to make him therapy at a very early stage, around the age of four, and to try to form his brain to change.”

Kohberger listened carefully – and took big notes.