I like your definition of a small town. (25 000). To me a small town is 600, Moscow US would be a city to us hicksters.
He He.
Yeah, Maricopa County, Arizona is almost 27 percent larger in area as the states of Rhode Island and Connecticut combined, and only about two or three-hundred thousand less in population. Maricopa County is about 62 percent of the population of the entire state of Arizona.
By way of comparison, Clark County, Nevada (i.e., the Las Vegas metropolitan area) is about 2.3 million people, and this comprises a whopping 74 percent of the population of the entire state of Nevada.
At over 4.4 million people, Maricopa County is larger than many countries, and it is in fact the fourth-most populous county in the United States.
So, yes, I do think Moscow, Idaho at about 25 thousand is a pretty small town. Practically everybody there is associated with the University on some level.
However, I have lived in small towns too.
When I was a teenager in the 1970s, I lived in Ucon, Idaho which has a population now of about 1,200 and in those days about 600, if I remember correctly. There was an elementary school that my sisters attended, a church, a post office, a service station, and a couple of convenience stores.
Ucon was established in 1883 as the town of Willow Creek, as it was just North of Willow Creek, a tributary of the Snake River. There is a dam called the Ririe Dam today on the actual Willow Creek just above the town that is about 253 feet high that was built in 1972. A similarly-sized dam called the Teton Dam burst in 1976 and flooded the college town of Rexburg. Fun times โ it was like a Vietnam War zone with Army helicopters everywhere. Anyway, I am not sure whose idea it was to change the town name from Willow Creek to Ucon (pronounced like Yukon), and I don't know what he word "Ucon" is supposed to mean.
Ucon is located near the Bonneville County Line and a few miles away from Rigby, Idaho โ just over four-thousand in population and the seat of Jefferson County. Rigby is where the American Television pioneer
Philo T. Farnsworth went to High School. Farnsworth is credited with inventing fully-electronic television or the "image dissector," and he won a crucial patent dispute with RCA by having his old Rigby High School teacher testify about Farnsworth's idea of the electronic scan or raster system that Farnsworth had conceptualized in diagrams for his teacher in the early 1920s from watching the way that Idaho farmers plowed their fields in rows.
About the serial killer Paul Ezra Rhoades โ in 1987, I worked in a Radio and Electronics shop in Idaho Falls, Idaho that shared space with a small grocery store, and when the convenience store clerks left I stayed a little later and closed and locked up the building. After closing, I sometimes used the radio shop for personal projects. But in the two or so hours that the convenience store was still open I would be alone and would man the checkout counter. Paul Ezra Rhoades lived just around the corner from the store and would come in to browse the magazine shelves and would squat down and rifle through the dirty books hoping not to be noticed. I did not know his name but I recognized him as a local and he was hard not to notice. He was a big and tall guy with stringy long dark hair, glasses, and sort of a chubby pear-shaped physique. He never said much and never gave me any trouble. I did not hassle him, whereas some of the other clerks might not have liked his going through the dirty books conspicuously. After awhile he would often times buy a case of beer and some cigarettes and leave.
In early 1987, a bunch of murders occurred where local convenience store clerks were killed, cigarettes and cash were taken, and the clerks were murdered and one girl was murdered after an attempted rape. I noticed the crime pattern and carried a concealed 1903 Model .380 Automatic Colt Pistol at all times. This is the type of pistol that John Dillinger carried except his was in .32 ACP, the small WWII German police cartridge. We also had a close-circuit TV system at the store since it had an electronic shop attached. This was pretty rare in those days, although the resolution of the VHS video tape that recorded the surveillance was not all that impressive.
I think Rhoades did not hit our store because it was too close to where he lived, and because we had a real TV surveillance system and not just dummy cameras. Also, I never tried to hassle him for browsing the dirty books late at night, although this would have gotten him booted out of the store earlier in the day. We got a lot of dumb truck drivers in the store who needed to have their CB radios repaired, plus the usual late-night drunks, so I had my fill of tossing people out and calling the cops. I usually drove home about the time that the bars closed, and as a result, I nearly always wound up getting pulled over by the cops, so it was very important to have all of zee papers in order โ license, registration, proof of insurance.
Anyway, the community panic really set in when a local school teacher got kidnapped from the parking lot of an Albertsons, robbed, raped, murdered, and dumped early in the morning. Even my Mom carried a gun during those days and I nearly got her a big trained "Timber Shepherd" police dog so that she would feel safer on their land just outside of town when my Dad needed to be away. He was a senior scientist working for Thiokol Chemical to redesign the solid-rocket-boosters on the Space Shuttle which had blown up the previous year.
The Bonneville County Sheriff was in charge of the investigation, and he was a dumb Democrat who did not like the idea of citizens getting permits to carry concealed weapons. A few years later, the laws were changed and this is allowed far more today. I was one of the first ones to get a concealed-carry permit when the laws changed in Idaho. Anyway, the Sheriff's department refused to say whether this was actually a serial killer or not. It was, and they knew it because Rhoades had used the same .38 caliber revolver for all of his crimes โ and that is how he was caught. I can understand why they did not want to share details of the investigation with the public, but they mostly just came across as clueless. In 1987, they had the killer's DNA, but DNA-typing was only just experimental and was not even used in his conviction.
Today, a prolific serial killer like Ted Bundy would not have lasted long because his DNA would have been identified or tied to past crimes. Today, all convicted felons must have their DNA profile registered in the CODIS crime database. And all unidentified DNA from crime scenes goes into this database as well in case they get a future hit or elimination prospect when the database is expanded.
In the Kohberger case, they had the presumed killer's DNA from his touching the button snap on the sheath for a USMC-style Ka-Bar knife which was left at the murder scene. OOPS. The knife itself has still not been found and was probably dumped. But the presumed killer's DNA was not in the database and neither was Kohberger's.
So what happened was they had door bell surveillance video from the neighborhood showing a white Hyundai Elantra at about the right time in question. All the police had to do was check the University parking permits at Moscow, ID and Pullman, WA for a car like that and they got Kohberger's name from nearby WSU.
The assailant was described by surviving witness Dylan Mortensen as wearing all black with a mask that covered his mouth and nose and that he had bushy eyebrows. Evidently he did not see her and just walked past on his way out. The prevailing theory in the media is that Kaylee Goncalves was the intended target since her wounds were the most savage, and the other three students were probably just collateral damage.
Xana Kernodle was still awake because she had ordered Jack in the Box fast food from a Door Dash delivery car at 4 AM, almost literally minutes before the killer showed up. She was on the second floor using social media from her cell phone when the murders began and the dog started barking upstairs, and her probably coming out of her room to investigate. Xana's body was supposedly found on the floor while friend Ethan must have been killed in bed. Blood from this room ran across the floor and dripped down the outside wall. The other surviving roommate was downstairs and probably slept through the whole thing.
My theory is that Dylan, the surviving girl on the second floor, was scared by the black-clad intruder walking past her room as she looked out the door; she froze, he left, and then she locked her door, but did not really know anything was wrong so simply went back to bed. She is probably very lucky that he just did not see her and that she remained dumbstruck and fazed as he was leaving the house. After killing four people in just a few minutes, when he probably intended to kill just the one, he no doubt wanted to get the heck out of there. And cell tower pings show that he returned to the crime scene early that morning with his car, but nobody had even reported the crime until around Noon when the surviving two girls woke up.
So basically, they have a Washington State University PhD criminology student with a white Hyundai Elantra, and whose driver's license photo shows "bushy eyebrows." Then they pull his cell phone records from the carrier and it shows that he was driving around, but at the time of the murders he had switched off his phone so it would not ping any nearby towers. That is mighty suspicious.
A few weeks later, it is Winter break and Bryan Kohberger meets his Dad who flew out West to join him for a Father-Son drive in the car back home to Pennsylvania (a very LONG drive). Bryan had to update his car registration from Pennsylvania to Washington shortly after the murders, but that is probably just because his tags were about to expire. He basically takes Interstate-70 East through Colorado and his car's plate is recorded by highway traffic cameras. He is routinely stopped by the Indiana Highway Patrol a couple of times on I-70 on the long way home to Pennsylvania for the holidays. I find it hard to believe that the Indiana Highway Patrol knew that Kohberger was a suspect of any kind because each officer was alone during the stops and not taking any precautions or even doing a very good job documenting anything with their Go-Pro cameras. They did not notice any cuts on Kohberger's hands in any case.
In Pennsylvania, the FBI goes through his Dad's home trash and gets his Dad's DNA, which shows that he is closely related to whomever touched the button on the knife sheath that was found next to the body of Madison Mogen in Idaho. That is enough to issue a probable-cause warrant to arrest Bryan Kohberger and extradite him back to Latah County, Idaho to stand trial. They are able to get a full DNA profile from him upon arrest.
I have read the probable-cause affidavit and I think they likely have much more evidence that they are not telling us about. Kohberger cleaned the Elantra vehicle before it was seized by the police, but there will likely be much that he missed, maybe fibers or hairs or even blood from the crime scene. Also, if the motive really was to kill just one of the girls, the police will likely find some indication of stalking from social media or telephone records, even if the obsession went only one-way. The victims really come across as party girls or social butterflies, so there will be a LOT that can be tracked down, and we have not been privy to very much of the investigation so far.
A lot of people are raising the alarm about sending your personal DNA to ancestry databases โ but these do not share your DNA with law enforcement without your permission. Also, they did not really need to do a deep dive into the metadata of Kohberger's cell phone without a search warrant, just check for what nearby cell towers were pinged at that quiet time on a Sunday morning, and to canvas the houses and businesses in the neighborhood that might have surveillance cameras. Kohberger having his phone switched off when the murders were occurring and then back on again during the getaway is very suspicious.
Idaho is a Death Penalty State and they will almost certainly ask for this unless Kohberger takes a guilty plea or something. Idaho does not have the Insanity Defense. A change-of-venue is not likely to help him very much either.
Kohberger seems to only have been marginally more organized than a so-called "disorganized serial killer" like Paul Ezra Rhoades, or another "disorganized" murderer from Idaho named
James Edward Wood, a creepy necrophiliac who in 1993 raped and killed an eleven-year-old newspaper girl from Pocatello, who was the cousin of the weatherman at the TV station where I worked. I don't remember exactly how Wood was caught but he was very sloppy and it only took about a week. Wood was given the death penalty but he died in prison of natural causes in 2004. Idaho State University, where I went to school, is in Pocatello. The three largest cities in Idaho are Boise, the capital, Idaho Falls, and Pocatello. People sometimes did not lock their doors in the 1970s, but they sure do now.
