Oh As.

I was so frantic that morning and scared death, not knowing what had happened.

And when I made then I'm a one call, I couldn't even get out the words.

And from then on I don't remember a thing.

It was like my brain wiped that whole memory.

That was the worst day of my life, and I know it always will be.

The murders of four college students in Moscow, Idaho, shocked the community and set off a desperate man hunt for the killer.

It was a brutal crime, and investigators found surprisingly little evidence at the scene.

Authorities didn't know who they were searching for or why the lives of the two surviving roommates had been spared.

But there was one big clue left behind.

Police found a key piece of evidence with the killers DNA, but it wasn't leading them to a suspect.

Meanwhile, it seems like whoever did this was trying to stay one step ahead of investigators.

This is America's crime Lab.

I'm Alan Lance Lesser.

This is Part two of the Idaho student murder case.

If you missed part one, please go back and listen.

I'm here with producer Catherine Fanalosa and listening to the words of Bethany, one of those surviving roommates, just now you can feel the pain, Yeah.

You really can.

And police recently really bodycam footage of the first responding officer.

I watched it a few days ago, and Allen, I'm not even sure how to describe it.

It's just absolutely heartbreaking, and honestly, it's painful to watch.

But I think it also helped me understand the complete confusion of that day.

I mean, it's easy for someone to hear about the murders on the news or read about them and walk away with completely wrong assumptions.

Yeah, I can imagine that day.

You just feel like, is this even real?

And they're just college kids.

They don't know what's going on.

When the surviving roommates Bethany and Dylan and their friends call nine one one, I mean they're calling to say that one of their roommates is unresponsive and they're talking about Xana, right, And so when the officer is responding to this call, that's really what he thinks he's going for.

You know, maybe like college sudents have partied too much.

I don't know, maybe someone needs to be taken to the hospital to like get their stomach pumped, you know what I mean.

Yeah, So he's driving there and he's listening to country music.

He pulls up to the house by himself, and he sees the circle of friends standing outside in the cold.

It's November thirteenth, twenty twenty two.

There are little patches of snow around.

Dylan.

The roommate is standing barefoot.

She's got it looks like either pajama pants or sweatpants on and a T shirt.

Some of the friends standing there are in shorts.

The officer pulls up and he, you know, is like, what's going on?

Where's the unresponsive person?

They say, inside, So he goes inside and he climbs to the second floor, where the kitchen and living room are and two bedrooms.

And as he gets to the top of the stars, he sees Xanna lying on the floor of her bedroom.

Ethan's in the bed and it's clear by the amount of blood that's around both of them that there's been a horrible crime.

You can hear the officer, like his breathing starts to become kind of choppy.

You can almost like feel his heartbeat like just thumping.

Another officer arrives and he's climbing the stairs to the second floor and they're speaking to each other almost didn't half sentences, you know.

The first officers basically like, dude, slow down, we've got something.

I think two fatalities.

Now officers start coming in and it's pretty quiet.

They go through the home with their weapons drawn and they're essentially trying to make sure no one else is there.

They climb the stairs to the third floor, where Maddie and Kayley's rooms are, and the first officer who arrived at the scene, as he gets to the top of the stairs, he's speechless.

I mean, it's like you can feel the horror of what he's seeing.

The first officer goes back outside to interview Dylan, the roommate, and she's trying to recount what happened last night.

You'll remember that Dylan and Bethany are nineteen.

They're the youngest of this group, and they're self proclaimed scaredy cats, like they're known to get freaked out over small things, but this time it's real and they're just completely disoriented.

And Dylan says, you know, I'm not really sure what's real and maybe what was a dream.

Yeah, I can see how she's just terrified, in total shock.

But this is where we get some key new information about what actually happened that night, and it's really some of our first clues as to who murdered these four students.

So Dylan tells the officer she and Bethany were up watching Vampire Diaries when Mattie and Kaylee came home from the bar.

You know, they were at the Corner Club and they all hang out.

They eat some mac and cheese, take some selfies, and then Mattie and Bethany take Kaylee's dog Murphy out back to pee before bed.

Bethany comes back in and she goes down to her room.

Her bedroom's on the first floor, and then at some point Maddie asked Bethany if she brought Murphy in because she can't find the dog.

Bethany's like, no, I don't have him, and she goes to bed.

Dylan also goes to bed.

Her bedroom's on the second floor, and at some point both Dylan and Bethany hear a loud noise.

But Ashley Jennings, who's a senior deputy in the Leyta County Prosecutor's Office, says this also wasn't unusual.

This is a house.

The walls are pretty thin.

There's a lot of noise.

There's you know, five six people in the house, if not more at any time, arriving at different hours.

Always a lot of noise, and it's a pretty noisy area of town.

Now, it kind of sounds like maybe Kayleie and Matty have gone up to their bedrooms on the third floor and they're dancing or they're playing with their dog.

Dylan falls back asleep.

But she was woken by something.

I don't know that she's able to fully articulate what the noise was.

She hears a voice, but she believes she hears someone say someone's here.

Oh my god.

She calls out, asking, you know, Kaylee, Mattie, something.

Doesn't hear anything, and she looks out in the hallway and she doesn't see anyone.

So she immediately goes back behind her bedroom door locks it continues to kind of stand there and listen, and at some point hears a noise like someone coming down the stairway which is right outside her bedroom.

Now, the roommates they all wear Doc Martins.

You know, there's like heavy soled shoes.

Yeah, and so she's not sure who it is, but she thinks it's one of her roommates running down the stairs in Doc Martin's.

Then she hears Murphy Kaylee's dog barking, which is a little weird because he's not typically a barker.

So Dylan, of course thinks this is just like all the other times that you know, she's heard something and kind of, you know, freaks herself out, and so she's just standing there and listening, tries to figure out what's going on.

At some point, she hears some movement on the stairway right outside her door, loud movement.

She hears some more voices.

She hears someone crying, and then she hears a man's voice that she doesn't recognize say you're going to be okay.

I'm going to help you.

And she thinks maybe the crying is coming from the bathroom in the hallway, but she's not quite sure.

Dylan says the guy's voice, he didn't say that in like a nice way, it's more and she says a weird tone, spooky.

So now she's really kind of freaked out.

Yeah, and she starts calling all of her roommates.

She's calling Kayley, she's calling Mattie, Xanna, No one's answering.

She opens her door again.

She sees a man dressed in all black with a black ski mask covering his face.

All she can see is just the eyes and nose area with what she describes as kind of bushy eyebrows.

And he walks right past her and she freezes and he looks at her.

She thinks he's maybe like five ten six feet tall, and she describes him built like a basketball player, like he's athletic but skinny.

What a terrifying moment.

I mean, this is out of an actual horror movie.

Would wonder if I was having a dream or something.

And the other thing I should say that's running through her mind is that maybe this is a prank.

Yeah, I mean, if you're living near the frats, that would probably make a lot more sense.

And the person walks past her bedroom and exits out that backslider kitchen area which is right outside her bedroom.

She ducks back in her room, locks the door.

She calls Bethany, her roommate, who answers the phone.

They're kind of discussing, like did you hear that?

What do you think's going on?

We live in Moscow, We live in a same community.

Their mind does not go to something as tragic as what occurred.

Yeah, also because I feel like the media has picked up on this idea that quite often it's someone you know or it's someone close to you.

If you see someone walking through this guy in a ski mask, I mean definitely I would be scared, But also I wouldn't necessarily jump to he's murdered a bunch of people in my house and he's leaving.

But as had occurred in the past, you know, they kind of talk to each other, they calm each other down, and then they go, Okay, well let's be together.

Bethany says, well, look, come down to my room.

You know, it's better than being being up there alone.

So Dylan runs out of her room and as she leaves her room, she can see Xana lying on the floor.

Now, you know, they had all been partying that night.

She's thinking, maybe Xana just like passed out on the floor.

She's sort of like sleeping off the night.

Yeah, your mind, thankfully wouldn't go there to the worst scenario, so their mine didn't.

Ailen.

I'm gonna play you a statement from Bethany at the killer sentencing hearing.

She was too emotional to read it, so one of her friends did.

She explains what she was thinking the morning after the murders.

I thought that we were going to wake up and go upstairs see them and tell them how they had scared us, and that they were going to tease us about how we're constantly scaredy cats.

I make jokes about it, as we would go to Taco Bill like always.

But that's not what happened.

The next morning, Bethany and Dylan realized maybe it wasn't a prank.

Maybe something is very, very wrong.

I was so frantic that morning and scared death, not knowing what had happened.

And when I made then I'm a one call, I couldn't even get out the words, and from then on I don't remember a thing.

It was like my brain wiped that whole memory.

That was the worst day of my life, and I know it always will be.

Where are we on evidence?

I mean, I know the crucial piece of evidence is the leather knife sheath, which was found in the bed next to Maddie and Kaylee.

So we know that the Idaho State Crime Lab is able to pull DNA off of that knife sheath and very quickly develop a DNA profile and it's done in just a matter of days.

But when they upload the DNA profile to codis, there are no hits.

But it did reveal some important clue, so they know that the DNA belongs to just one person, and it's a man and aileen.

I can't express how chaotic and fast moving this case was.

Right from the start, Moscow police immediately start getting flooded with tips, The FBI is brought into help, and they actually set up a command post in the police parking lot.

David Middelman from authorm says this is all unfolding in the days leading up to Thanksgiving in twenty twenty.

Two, and there's just this tremendous pressure from the urgency that a bunch of kids were going home and potentially coming back to an unsafe environment.

They were struggling to identify a direction, a person of interest, the very scary situation.

There's also the problem that since the campus is emptying out as student's head home for the holiday, this includes people who might have key knowledge of the murders, and it might also include the actual killer.

I mean, with the excuse of leaving town to go somewhere else across the country for Thanksgiving.

Do they have any other evidence at this point they do.

Prosecutor Bill Thompson says, police canvas the neighborhood and they find surveillance video from surrounding houses and apartment buildings.

That footage showed a white sedan coming and going several times earlier that early morning.

Camera also showed that sedan that was identified as a Hyundai Elantra, leaving the area at a high rate of speed around four twenty or so that morning.

On November thirteenth of twenty twenty two.

In Moscow, police Captain Roger Lanier says they start to focus in on that white Hyundai Lantra and he makes a plea to the public for help.

We are confident that the occupant or occupants of that vehicle have information that's critical to this investigation.

Hey, maybe your neighbor has one of the garage that they don't drive very often.

Let us So far, we have a list of approximately twenty two thousand registered white Hondai laundriss that fit into our criteria that we're sorting through.

That's an awful lot of information, So the public can help us with that.

Okay, this is a college neighborhood.

So how do we know it doesn't belong to a neighbor or even like a car share driver.

Well, it's driving up and down King Road starting around three point thirty that morning, and it's odd.

I mean, it never stops to pick anyone up or drop someone off.

At one point, it drives past the apartment building next door, turns around and goes back by the King Road house.

Then it almost looks like it's looking for parking, but then it turns around again, drives back by the house, It makes a three point turn.

It's just its movements are really strange.

And then it passes by the house for a fourth time at four four in the morning.

That's sketchy.

While police are trying to hunt down that Hyundai Elantra, prosecutor Ashley Jennings says they also learned that before Xana was attacked, she had ordered food from Jack in the Box and it was delivered around four am.

Investigators have a theory that she was up during the same time, and it's possible while he was in the residence they made contact at some point, which is what ultimately led to help pursuing Sanna into her bedroom.

You mentioned that Xana had defensive wounds on her hands, so it would make sense if maybe she heard something on the third floor and went to investigate it or something.

Yeah, and the killer could have chased her down to her bedroom where he attacks her and her boyfriend Ethan, who was sleeping.

Police also find that at four seventeen, a security camera on a neighbor's house records some voices and a loud thud and then the sound of a dog barking.

The surveillance footage shows that that white Hyundai Elantra, which had been going up and down the street now is speeding away from the King Road house for the last time at four twenty.

Oh wow.

So assuming that these murders happened somewhere in that window.

Again, we don't know for sure if the car is related to what happened, but Xana had just eaten, so she was probably awake.

They think it's anywhere between four h four and four twenty.

That's just sixteen minutes.

There's another piece of video that police find.

So remember Kaylee and Maddy had gone to a local bar that night called the Corner Club, and after they leave the bar, they're hungry, so they go find food, and pretty much the only place that's open is a food truck called the grub Truck.

Now, the food truck has a live stream, you know, video of people standing in line waiting to order pick up their food.

And on this video you can see Kaylee and Maddie just hours before they were killed.

You can also see a guy in a white hoodie and he's standing a few feet behind the girls sort of looking at them, and as they get their food and leave, he trails off out of the view of the video camera.

Now, I mean, you can see how this could seem suspicious given what happens a few hours later, and pretty quickly random strangers are convinced that he is the killer.

They publish his name and address online.

But it turns out this guy had absolutely nothing to do with it.

I mean, he's just some random college student who's also looking for a late night snack.

You can see how an inn in person get swept up in misinformation that is so dangerous.

And literally like people are trying to investigate this case on their own.

So there's YouTubers pretending to be students to get on campus.

Oh, people are driving by the King Road House and like videoing and speculating on the spot where they think the killer entered the home.

Oh, they're fake Instagram accounts that pop up, Oh my gosh, and they start targeting other students on campus saying watch out, like you're next.

Oh my god, that's scary.

And I feel like, because we're so connected with cameras and social media and everything, it's like it's both a gift and a curse.

We get all this good information, we can fill out what happened that night and information about the crime.

But then also people's lives could be ruined if their names are dragged through the mud and they have nothing to do with it.

It's like, at least, can we respect some privacy of the victims.

God that pisses me off.

Yeah, And also think about all of those people like you know, the guy the grub truck, ex boyfriends, I mean, everyone who's put under the microscope and sort of considered possible suspects, right or wrong.

But that's also what's so interesting about this new DNA technology.

I mean, if it can locate whoever actually did this faster, you're potentially saving so many people from being put under the microscope unfairly.

So now police have some clues.

We know they're looking for a man, someone around six feet tall, skinny, with bushy eyebrows, the guy in the ski mask, and we know that there was this white Hyundai Lantra that was driving in the area right around the time of the murders.

And police are pretty confident that the leather knife sheath belongs to the killer, but so far that DNA evidence is a total dead end.

But they also know that DNA is their best chance to find out who did this, So it's incredibly frustrating.

It's like the truth is there, but they have to essentially crack the code.

And then just days before the Thanksgiving holiday, the Idaho State Police Forensic Services suggest that they try forensic genetic genealogy.

Maybe that would identify the male suspect from his DNA on the knife sheath.

We weren't having any luck up to that point.

On that Sunday night is when we first got the thought process of send the DNA sequencing out and see if we can't find some distant relative match that we can then start tracing down that family tree and see if we can't find somebody attached more closely to that DNA at that point.

In time, Moscow Police Captain Dustin Blaker was familiar with the basic idea of genetic genealogy.

He and his wife had recently done their own family tree, and he knew that the State Crime Lab worked with AUTHRAM using forensic genetic genealogy to help solve cold cases.

Yeah, but on an active homicide investigation, that seems like a whole different thing.

For myself some of the other investigators, that was all kind of new to us.

I think we were kind of like, Okay, legally, how is this supposed to work?

And how is all this going to play out?

In core.

Meanwhile, Kristin Middleman of AUTHRAM says she and her husband David, are at home watching the news.

The case was discussed on the news, and David and I got a phone call and they asked if we were willing to work a high profile case in real time.

David said, let me think about it and let me.

Call you back, and so he got off the phone and I said, why wouldn't we work this case?

David is nervous.

I mean, these murders are being splashed all over the news.

Author has been working on cold cases, but this would be one of the highest profile cases.

Yet, and I said, doesn't really matter.

Right, there are four kids that are dead and a perpetrator out there, and this is what we do.

So why would we ever turn this case away if the evidence is suitable?

And our daughter was a sophomore.

She just started her sophomore year in college when this happened, and so she was literally the age of those children.

We knew immediately how terrifying this must have been.

And I think that's when.

We really knew that we had to identify this guy.

Now, the Moscow police have never done this before, and Blaker is also nervous.

I mean, he knows how important this case is to his community.

So his colleague at the state Police says, look, why don't you go visit Authorm's lab for yourself and then decide if you want to give them the evidence.

He strongly suggested that we should take the sample ourself to Houston to the lab and make sure that we are comfortable with the way the lab was set up.

We felt that it needed to meet as far as normal standard testing and law enforcement.

So the chain of custody is all there, It's going to be protected, it's going to be locked up they're going to document the genome sequencing and everything like that.

So my agency, along with the prosecutors, we talked about it.

We decided that yes, this.

Was worth it, and before Captain Blaker knew it, he was on a plane from Idaho to Texas.

I left Boise around six o'clock that morning, flew straight to Houston with the DNA sample with me.

Then I was extremely nervous that I was going to screw the whole thing up.

Just before Thanksgiving, Captain Blaker with the Moscow Police Department is on his way to Athram with the key piece of DNA evidence.

I just carried it in just a very basic backpack with me so I could keep track of where it was at all times.

I'm nervous in the process of don't lose this, don't let this out of my sight, and then trying to make sure that I keep it intact.

So I want to make sure it's very protected.

I mean, we were kind of banking on this.

We knew that that Sheath was very vital to this case, and anything that we got off of it we all felt had to be our suspect.

I've always been I'm curious how a really high profile case like this unfolds.

I mean, everything is riding on the DNA evidence he's carrying, and they can't do anything to tip off the killer because what if he's still in the community.

The whole thing is wrapped in secrecy.

David and Kristen can't tell anyone they're involved.

I mean they can't even tell the lab technicians what case this is.

And they're even in the dark.

On the timing.

We didn't know when they would be arriving at the lab, so we were taking our holiday card photos.

We had all five kids with us.

We were all color coordinated.

So when we got the call that they had landed in Houston and we're about to arrive at the lab, I.

Told a photographer we have to go.

Meanwhile, Ethan Chapin, the young man killed in the King roadhouse, his family is trying to figure out how to get through the holiday.

Ethan was a triplet and his siblings Mazie and Hunter left campus immediately after the murders.

Stacy and his dad, Jim are obviously still in shock.

Because it is tough, you know, Oh boy, you sit down and at a place that you spend a lot of time with as a family and you sit at that table and you have an empty chair.

You know, we were eating tacos and not giving thanks because it didn't feel right.

Those are some tough times to get through.

Or a four person family now, but it's tough.

Yeah, Well, Ethan's family is struggling.

AUTHORM gets the green light to work the case and they call pretty much everyone into the lab.

It was Thanksgiving day and the profile was still running, and many of us had to cancel our plans and be here so that we could immediately start working on this day, immediately start the next step.

And so I remember, we couldn't talk about the case obviously that includes our families, and we had to say, sorry, we can't host Thanksgiving.

We have to move it to the weekend.

But here's where the case really starts to move, because DNA from the knife sheath starts to reveal some clues.

Even before we start the forensic genetic genealogy process.

We can learn a lot by just looking at the DNA markers.

This could be essentially the geographical localization of where their family is from or the origins to their family in Europe, in Asia, in Africa, and what are they learning We learned the person we're looking for has a largely European background and also has this unique bio geographical ancestry tide to Italy, and this eventually leads us to a multi generational American family in Pennsylvania.

That's a big break.

I mean to go from a totally unknown perpetrator to knowing this is someone with family in Pennsylvania and with Italian ancestry.

And police and Idaho are working to track down the white Houndai Lantra and Allen.

They notice something interesting from the surveillance footage.

They can see that the car doesn't have a front license plate.

Okay, and it turns out that Pennsylvania doesn't require a front license plate.

Interesting.

Now detectives are chasing down all of these clues.

They've gone to the local stores that sell k bar knives and they get a list of who's bought one recently, but that leads nowhere.

They're also trying to contain just an absolute tornado of conspiracy theories and rumors, so police start holding a number of briefings.

This is Moscow Captain Roger Lanier.

I want to address several areas of speculation, conjecture, and misinformation.

That has circulated on social media platforms and otherwise.

We do not believe the following individuals are involved in this crime.

The two surviving roommates, a male scene at the Grub Truck food vendor downtown, specifically wearing a white hoodie, a private party who provided rides home to Kayley and Madison in the early morning hour of November thirteenth.

People think the surviving roommates are involved.

I mean, it's horrible.

The roommates come under just incredible scrutiny.

People attack them for not doing anything, like how could you not know there was a murderer in the house, and some people suggest they're somehow complicit.

This is what Bethany shared at the sentencing, and it's read by one of her friends.

I was grieving, numb, and unsure what had happened was even real, and at the same time, I was getting flooded with death threats and hateful messages from people who did not know me at all or know the dynamic of our friendship.

Social media made it so much worse.

The media harassed not just me but also my family.

People showed up at our house.

They called my phone, my parents' phones, and we were chased.

I honestly don't even know what to say.

It's like people forget that Bethany and Dylan are real people.

And it doesn't stop with the conspiracy theories.

I mean, the media wants the autopsies of the four students.

Ethan Chapin's mom, Stacy says, it feels like nothing is off limits.

We just got a call from the university that they're going after the transcripts of the kids and any infractions that they had at the university.

And where like you can, as a parent of a college kid, called the university and get your child's transcripts.

We don't have Ethan's transcripts.

Why does the media get to go after his transcripts?

I mean, yeah, you failed math?

Oh well, what they think should be their right to the information?

It is shocking.

Why do you need it?

Yeah?

Why does anybody need to know it?

Now?

I don't think anyone who hasn't lost a loved one in a horrific crime like this or in such a public way can really understand what they're going through.

I know we've talked about this privately, but I don't want to be part of the problem either.

And it makes you wonder where the line is.

Yeah, I mean there's the hope that by talking about what happened and how it affects people, and you know, obviously how this case is solved, it'll prevent it from happening again.

But also we don't want to re traumatize these families.

I will tell you that every day since November thirteenth, twenty twenty two, every single day, there has been something I don't want to call it a battle, just something that you are fighting, something you know, call from the FBI.

I had to photograph what was in his wallet.

I mean, I don't feel like it's anybody's business, but that feels like what's coming next.

And Authorom's really working around the clock.

I mean David, he basically moves into the lab to make sure that this is going as fast and efficiently as possible.

They're running their forensic genetic genealogy, and as soon as they're getting information, they're relaying it back to detectives.

We were able to tell the detectives that we believe that the family came from Pennsylvania.

They were able to narrow their search of white Hondai lantras with Pennsylvania plates and believe it or not, there were only a couple cars that had Pennsylvania plates that actually matched a description of the car scene At the crime scene.

That's pretty narrowed down.

But a few days after the murders, the killer does something to try and throw police off his tail.

Next time on America's.

Crime Lab, they wanted to point the finger at other people as being responsible for this, to try to point the finger at innocent third parties.

Is this real or are they really telling us the truth?

Finally have a name and someone to look at.

I will call you what you are, sociopath, psychopath, murderer.

And when those prison doors slams shout behind you, I hope that sound echoes in your heart for the rest of your meaningless days.

America's Crime Lab is produced by Rococo Punch for Kaleidoscope.

Erica Lance is our story editor and sound design is by David Woji.

Our producing team is Catherine Finalosa, Emily Foreman, and Jessica Albert.

Our executive producers are Kate Osborne, Mangesh Hattigadour and David and Kristin Middleman and from iHeart Katrina Norville and Ali Perry.

Special thanks to Connell Byrne will Pearson, Kerrie Lieberman, Nikki Etur, Nathan Atowski, John Burbank, and the entire team at athram i'm Alan Lance Lessor.

Thanks for listening.