Captain Roger Lanier, the head of the twenty-four-officer Operations Division, had just taken his place at the head of the dining room table to enjoy Sunday lunch with his family when his cell phone rang. The roast was resting on the table, and he had been poised to pick up the carving knife, but he realized that if his sergeant was calling, he’d better answer. As things worked out, the captain would never get to have his lunch that day.
“It took me a second,” Lanier recalled, a sharp edge even weeks later to the memory. “I really had to think about what I had just heard. Four murders in Moscow, Idaho, was so out of character.”
But he knew, like every professional would, that he needed to get to work. In a murder case, delay only benefited the killer. A veteran cop, Lanier had spent more than twenty years on the force in nearby Lewiston before having been lured, six years earlier, to Moscow with a captain’s rank. After all his time on the job, he’d become a steady, avuncular presence. He never got flustered because, as he’d tell people, he had seen it all in his day. Until that Sunday.
He had a thousand questions he wanted to ask Gunderson, and yet he knew the only hope of finding answers would be to follow the previously established protocols. Dutifully, he gave the order to set up the perimeters of the crime scene, to bring in the forensic team, to summon the coroner. It was standard in a major case—and if four homicides wasn’t a major case, what was?—to alert the Idaho State Police, and he did that, too.
Moscow was the responsibility of the state’s District 2 Detective Office in Lewiston, the county seat and where he’d been on the job for two decades. He knew many of the state detectives; still, it was a difficult conversation.
His next call didn’t get easier. The university had to be informed. It was not just that four students had been brutally murdered. There was no way of knowing whether the killer—or killers—planned to strike again. The students needed to be warned and protected.
At 3:07 p.m., a distressingly long three hours after the trio of cops had entered the blood-soaked house, the University Office of Public Safety and Security sent a “Vandal Alert” email to the students and faculty: “Moscow PD investigating a homicide on King Rd. near campus. Suspect is not known at this time. Stay away from the area and shelter in place.” A “shelter in place” order mandated that people “take refuge in a room with no or few windows.”
At this point in the investigation, Lanier had been at the helm for hours and despite his marathon of activities, he still had no clue about a suspect, or why the murders had occurred. And, nearly just as upsetting, he had not yet been able to speak with his boss, James Fry, the chief of police.
THE CHIEF HAD BEEN GETTING death threats. There were six in all, a virulent collection of unsigned letters and barking phone messages vowing he’d be killed. And those missives were in addition to the tall pile of rude and scatological, albeit less murderous, emails and notes he had received.
The ostensible reason for the threats? He had ordered his officers to enforce the mayor’s and the city council’s coronavirus restrictions. People had received summonses for not wearing masks in public. Then at a defiantly maskless prayer vigil in the city hall parking lot, several of the more reverent in the open-air assembly had been cuffed and hauled off on Fry’s orders. His no-nonsense policing had made the chief a lot of enemies.
The municipal restriction ran counter to the libertarian spirit of many Idahoans. And Pastor Doug Wilson had added fuel to this fire. He had told his Christ Church parishioners that masks and vaccinations were counter to “God’s teachings.” But by the fateful November weekend when the murders occurred, Chief Fry had hoped that all the bad feelings that’d been simmering in the town over the past two years had, with the end of the pandemic controls, also largely slipped away. It was now a time of reconciliation; the Kirkers would even send the department Christmas cookies. (Yet when the chief thanked them on Facebook, several of the town’s die-hard liberals wrote a letter to the local paper fuming that he was kowtowing to the church group.)
The previous spring, Fry had passed on his chance to go on a prolonged elk hunt; he hadn’t felt right about leaving Moscow for too long. But he no longer had such qualms that fall. On November 12, Fry and his wife, Julie, had driven off to spend the weekend at a friend’s home nearly three hours away.
By the time Lanier had finally reached the chief, it was hours after the discovery of the bodies. And when Fry finally entered the home on King Road, it was dark outside—according to several dismayed accounts, close to 6:00 p.m. For some abstruse reason, he’d thought it important to go home first and change into his chief’s uniform. Possibly he hadn’t fully grasped the magnitude of the disaster. Or maybe, after nearly twenty-eight years as a Moscow cop, he felt the imprimatur of his uniform was integral to his ability to command.
What he saw that evening, he’d publicly say, “was the worst crime scene I’d ever seen.” To a friend, he’d be more revelatory: walking through the blood-drenched house had left him “physically and emotionally drained.” He was a father of two daughters who had attended the University of Idaho, and he himself had graduated from the university nearly three decades earlier. It was impossible, he said, not to feel a visceral tie to the victims and to their parents.
His mind was racing as he exited the murder house. He did not know how to begin to make sense of what he had just seen. He needed to find a path forward.
THREE YEARS EARLIER, FRY HAD been chosen to attend the ten-week course at the FBI’s National Academy in Quantico, Virginia. He was on the cusp of turning fifty, and the impending milestone, he’d confided to a close friend, had triggered a soul-searching. He’d wanted to prove that even as he was acknowledging the inevitability of his soon becoming a senior citizen, he was still the sort of cop who could break up a bar fight or strap on SWAT gear when some local went berserk and started shooting up the courthouse. A chief went to lunches at the Chamber of Commerce and played golf with the mayor. Fry wanted to show that in spite of his title, he had remained a cop’s cop. His friends called him “old-school,” and it was an appraisal that had always sat well with him.
It had, therefore, been very important to Fry to complete the 6.1-mile obstacle course at Quantico called “the Yellow Brick Road.” The signs nailed to the tree at the starting line read HURT, AGONY, and PAIN. There was climbing over walls, crawling under barbed wire, sloshing through streams, hauling up steep cliffs, and running full speed through rocky, winding trails. It was an unforgiving ordeal.
And Fry did it. The certificate he’d received in recognition of this accomplishment was displayed with pride across from his desk in headquarters.
But on that deeply perturbing evening in November he recalled another memory. A day or so before he’d taken on the Yellow Brick Road, he’d been to a class led by a member of the FBI Behavioral Science Unit. The lecturer had explained how the bureau had been able to get into the heads of killers. They had studied what made them kill, and how to catch them before they would kill again.
What if, Fry asked himself with sudden alarm, a serial killer had attacked the four students? What if it was only a matter of time before this maniac struck again? The entire Moscow PD was just thirty-seven officers, and he doubted that any of them had the expertise to handle the strange and unfamiliar places where, if his worst fears proved accurate, the hunt would take them.
Shaken by this thought, Chief Fry called the bureau and asked for their assistance. It was quickly arranged. A team of special agents, eventually about forty in total, would be arriving as soon as tomorrow. And as he had specifically requested, three members of the Behavioral Analysis Unit, two men and a woman, were also being dispatched.
Yet Fry was still not done, and now with the dawn of the new day, he realized there was something important he’d forgotten.
WHEN RAND WALKER GOT THE call, he was in his GMC pickup heading down the twisting seven-hundred-foot driveway that led from his house to the main road into town. He looked at the caller ID and figured he knew why the chief was calling first thing in the morning. His friend wanted to apologize.
A week or so earlier, Walker along with his band had been playing downtown at Bucer’s Coffeehouse & Pub. They performed ’70s cover songs—a lot of Eagles, a lot of Van Morrison, and their version of Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” was a get-out-of-your-seat showstopper. They had quite a die-hard following in northern Idaho. And the chief had promised to be there, only he never showed.
“No problem, Chief,” Walker began breezily. “I know you got plenty to do. You’ll catch us next time.”
“It’s something else,” Fry said curtly. “I need you to stand by.”
At once Walker understood that something awful had happened. A PhD with a private practice in Moscow, he also served as the department’s psychologist.
“Some of my young officers are gonna need your help,” Fry continued. Then he corrected himself. “Actually, it’s not just the young ones.”
IT WAS SURPRISING, THEN, THAT, despite the raw fears that had been shared with the FBI, the police department issued a series of statements deliberately crafted to reassure the public. On the same seemingly hopeless day when he first toured the crime scene, the official party line announced, “The Moscow Police does not believe there is an ongoing community risk based on information gathered during the preliminary investigation.” Then two days later, the department doubled down on this: “We determined early in the investigation that we do not believe there is an ongoing threat for community members. Evidence indicates that this was a targeted attack.”
Fry and his department, however, had no idea whether the community was at risk, or whether the killer might strike again on campus or elsewhere in town.
In his defense, perhaps Fry had come to believe that his lack of candor was a small sin when measured against the panic that would spread through campus and the town if he shared his uncertainty. That it was, in truth, anybody’s guess whether the killer would return and the body count of young students would increase.
Or, no less plausible, perhaps after staring at the red blood that had seeped through the floor of the murder house and had run down the building’s gray concrete foundation like crimson lightning bolts, he needed to believe that such a thing would not happen again. It was as much a comfort to himself as to anyone else.