All along it had been hovering in the background. It was the jarring anomaly that largely went unspoken in the squeaky-clean biographies of the four victims that the press had served up. Nevertheless, it was a truth, as regrettable as it was potentially relevant, that three of the victims’ parents—Kernodle’s mom, Mogen’s stepmom, and Mogen’s dad—had been arrested on felony drug-possession charges. And even Steve Goncalves could be tarred by a similarly damning brush: his brother Nathan was serving time in jail for a drug-related murder.
From the onset, Anne Taylor, Kohberger’s lead legal aid attorney, had been aware of at least some of this history. She had been representing Cara Kernodle before promptly petitioning the court to be removed when offered the bigger challenge of representing the man accused of murdering Kernodle’s daughter. In the aftermath, sharp words had been exchanged in the press. Kernodle charged that she had been betrayed; Taylor shot back that she had simply been assigned the case and had never met Kernodle.
Still, four victims and three parents and one uncle with a history of drug arrests? What were the odds? Was it a strange coincidence? A sad commentary on contemporary American life? Or something more telling? Even a clue? In the hectic early days, it had become another of the many stray tidbits that the defense filed away and then promptly forgot. But as the case meandered slowly and tediously through the pretrial stage, a former University of Idaho frat president, a twenty-two-year-old journalism major in his junior year, died not once but twice in a single night. And in the aftermath of his tragic and needless demise, new avenues of speculation multiplied, spreading out in previously unexplored directions.
IT WAS SPRING BREAK, AND Caden Young was looking to score. He succeeded, only to pay with his life. That was the thumbnail history of events as detailed in the initial, terse news stories. But anyone taking the time to go through the voluminous pile of police reports, or conversing with either the detective who had caught the case or, equally elucidating, the legal aid lawyer who subsequently became involved, would latch on to a richer account. And one that added two new actors to the drama. They were a couple who quickly caught the Kohberger defense team’s rapt attention.
The penultimate day of Young’s brief life began with a decision to leave the apartment in Centralia, Washington, where he was visiting a onetime Alpha Kappa Lambda fraternity brother, Christopher O’Flaherty. After O’Flaherty had left for work, Young decided he’d take an Uber to Tacoma, where he would meet up with some friends who would drive him to Seattle. The next morning, at nearly 1:00 a.m., O’Flaherty, as he recalled the building drama, got a call from Young announcing that he was in the Harborview Hospital, in Seattle, and needed a lift home.
“Bro, what happened?” O’Flaherty asked with concern.
Young, with a matter-of-factness that left his friend astonished, recounted that he’d been partying that afternoon with friends in a room at a Seattle Holiday Inn and had snorted lines of cocaine apparently laced with fentanyl. Within moments his face went white, then blue, and suddenly everything turned completely black. “I was dead, bro,” was how Young, still dazed and bewildered by it all, explained with a hapless resignation.
An ambulance, however, had been summoned. Naloxone was administered. And the next thing Young remembered was waking up in a bed in the hospital. Alive. He was now being released, and he was hoping his old Alpha Kappa brother would come and get him.
At 2:00 a.m., O’Flaherty made his way to the hospital and retrieved his buddy. On the ride back to Centralia, he grew concerned because his passenger seemed “out of it,” nodding off frequently. But they nevertheless stopped at a Jack in the Box to grab burgers; Young had roused from his fog long enough to announce in an imploring voice that he was hungry.
Once back at O’Flaherty’s apartment, though, Young promptly crashed on the futon in his friend’s bedroom. And he was snoring something awful. O’Flaherty playfully recorded the racket on his phone; he thought they’d have a good laugh over it in the morning. But when he checked on his friend a bit later, there was a swirl of whitish vomit circling Caden’s mouth, and a frantic search for a pulse revealed nothing. When the medics arrived, it became official: Caden had suffered his second and final death.
It was all too common—another young life ravaged by fentanyl—and within days it might very well have become another dreadful statistic in a national body count that was climbing toward pandemic proportions. But then the police made two arrests in connection with Young’s death.
HURRYING TO ROOM 214 OF the Holiday Inn where Young had first overdosed, the police arrested Emma Bailey, twenty-two, of Moscow and Demetrius Robinson, thirty-six, of Tacoma just as the couple were about to leave. They were each charged with one count of conspiracy to commit a violation of the Uniform Controlled Substance Act—that is, they had allegedly supplied the student with lethal fentanyl-laced cocaine—and held on $100,000 bail. Pleading not guilty, but unable to post bail, they were shuffled off to the Lewis County jail.
The pair spent two months and five days behind bars, and during that time law-enforcement investigators and the press kept digging. And what they unearthed grabbed the attention of the Kohberger defense team.
Robinson—or D, as he was widely known in the college towns of both Moscow, Idaho, and Pullman, Washington—had a dismaying rap sheet. “Extensive” was the adjective the local paper used to describe it. “Violent” was the modifier, though, that leaped up in the minds of the defense investigators.
Among the eyebrow-raising highlights: a fifteen-month prison sentence for second-degree assault in Pullman back in 2018; a second-degree rape investigation two years later; and then, in 2001, an arrest in Pullman for suspicion of possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver, and for allegedly assaulting a companion when their alleged partnership went south. While the drug case had fallen apart because of legal concerns provoked by an overly gungho search of a hotel room, the fourth-degree harassment charges stuck, and he served 151 days in jail. Also scattered about Robinson’s sheet were five charges for driving with a suspended license, one of which landed him in jail for five days; there was an outstanding arrest warrant for another.
As for Bailey, her record was more banal: a DUI arrest after she breezed through a red light in Pullman around 2:00 a.m. (There was an unintentionally amusing visual record of the aftermath: a police bodycam video of an obviously inebriated, yet indignant, Emma trying with impressive sincerity to convince the bemused cop that she hadn’t been out seriously drinking.)
Bailey’s mother, Kimberley, though, told a more plaintive and complicated story about her daughter in two lengthy telephone conversations that were recorded by the Centralia detectives investigating the sale of the lethal fentanyl-laced cocaine. As the mother shared the tale, her daughter was an innocent Moscow High graduate who had put in a disjointed year at the University of Idaho before hooking up with Robinson, fourteen years her senior, a charmer with his cornrows and tough-guy menace. And what a tumultuous five-year love story their romance had been!
Bailey, her mother said, had allegedly been living in fear of Robinson’s violent mood swings and hair-raising threats of what would happen to her family if she ever left him. There had been times, in fact, when Kimberley and her ex-husband had rushed to their daughter’s rescue after getting a teary distress call. They’d drive for hours and then covertly ferry Emma off while Robinson was sleeping the afternoon away. But each time, Bailey would run back to Robinson.
And there was more. When the cops dug deeper, they grew to suspect that the couple were very possibly dealing drugs they’d scored in Seattle to the local colleges in Pullman and Moscow. The detective’s incident report flatly stated, “There were investigations in other jurisdictions for Emma and Demetrius for narcotics trafficking.”
O’Flaherty told the cops that he’d first met Bailey when she’d come to Alpha Lambda Kappa parties to see if the brothers were interested in scoring some coke. He soon learned firsthand, however, that she was merely the engaging go-between. Robinson was the iron-fisted closer. He’d hand over the product and give you a look that made sure you paid. And this frat-boy account was not an outlier. Talk to students and ex-students in Moscow and Pullman who knew Bailey and Robinson and the response was a uniform chorus: the couple did a lively business dealing drugs along Greek Row.
Tanner Aspire, though, offered a different perspective. He was, he announced with an obvious pride, “D’s good buddy” and was planning to go into business with him. The business? Fish-farming, although the location was still up in the air. Colorado, or then again, maybe Montana. The goal, he explained, was to sell trout throughout the entire Midwest.
But all his airy business talk was just a prelude to the message he wanted to deliver. “Both Emma and D . . . would never deal drugs. And they never sold any cocaine to Caden.” He added with an unwavering conviction, “The worst you can say is that D has an anger-management problem. But D is getting it under control.”
“It’s a real love story,” he went on with force. “Where D goes, Emma goes.”
And the couple did in fact go off together. Just five days before the trial for supplying the lethal cocaine was to begin, a judge dismissed the case. Their legal aid lawyer had zeroed in on a technicality, but it was a very consequential one: “the question of prosecutorial jurisdiction.” Apparently they’d been scheduled to be tried in the county where the death had occurred, rather than where the cocaine had been originally ingested.
But their good fortune might be short-lived. The judge had dismissed the case “without prejudice.” That meant that it could be refiled in the same court of law if the authorities drafted a new and more carefully drawn indictment.
Was one in the works? All a Centralia detective who’d been involved in the case from the morning he’d found Young’s inert body would pointedly say was, “We’re not going to let this case disappear.”
And the detective was not alone. The case had not disappeared from the thoughts of the Kohberger defense team, either. It became the shovel the team used to dig deep into the possibility of narcotics trafficking along Greek Row. And the more they dug, the more they began to wonder with a hardening focus whether these furtive activities had played a part in four murders.