People say time heals all wounds. They tell you you’ll get over it.
But they’ve never buried their child.
That stays with you. It works on you. It sinks in deep and never lets go.
Solace? Not a chance.
But still you try. You discover anger. You vow vengeance.
But it doesn’t help, and you know it. It’s not enough.
It’s the armor you’ve put on to keep from constantly screaming.
What was Steve Goncalves to make of all this? If he allowed himself simply to be led by his broken heart, then he could sit back, breathe a comforting sigh of relief, and rejoice that the authorities had gotten their man. He could at last hope to find a measure of peace.
Or could he? For as events unexpectedly began to play out, the arrest brought him neither a sense of resignation nor one of acceptance. And most certainly not calm. Instead, new nagging questions arose, and in their wake new resentments flourished. Time to think, Steve was learning, was always dangerous.
The stories about an extraordinary courtroom upset in the making had made their way to him, too. And as he followed what he was hearing about the case the defense had been so assiduously building, as he scoured the Internet and discovered a rabble of often-intriguing theories, he grew concerned. It was a world of startling new information; if he stood still, the case would pass him by. He felt assailed.
And soon it was as if his old anger, his often-shared doubts about the competence of the police, their half measures and failures, had never left. All his old suspicions had broken loose and risen up in him once more. And to do nothing would be a betrayal of his steely vow: “I’m telling you right now, we’re coming for you.”
Yet, it wasn’t simply vanity, the belief that one middle-aged guy with only a background in IT could get to the bottom of things. Rather, he explained to a friend, it was, in part, a new red-hot anger that propelled him forward. He was furious that the trial had been postponed indefinitely; the prosecution’s latest cavalier suggestion was that the proceedings should take place when the local high school was not in session to ensure that the anticipated courthouse traffic wouldn’t interfere with the school buses, but whether that meant this summer or the next remained anybody’s guess. And making the delay even more unconscionable, Steve felt, was the draconian gag order that severely limited what the law-enforcement authorities, the lawyers, and the families of the victims could publicly say about the case. It was not just that he deemed this restriction a violation of his fundamental constitutional rights. Rather, the paucity of reputable intelligence had created a vacuum that’s been filled by rumors, half-truths, and crackpot lies.
Steve needed answers, not rumors. And he was sedulous. He remained determined to make sure the authorities had arrested the right man. This, he confided to a friend he had reached out to in his despair, was a large part of what kept him up at night, staring sleepless at the ceiling. For while he had grown increasingly convinced that Kohberger was involved in the crime, Steve remained open to the possibility, he had explained, that there were more perpetrators in the house on King Road on the night his daughter and her friends were killed.
And with this possibility, a new dread took hold—a rising consternation that if he waited passively for the cops finally to share what they had managed to uncover, it might be too late. The remaining unidentified perpetrators—if they did indeed exist—would have escaped.
AND SO ALTHOUGH MORE THAN a year had passed since the arrest of Bryan Kohberger in Pennsylvania, Steve had plowed on. It had not been an easygoing adventure, or always fruitful. Early on, for a cruel example, an enticing tip came his way from a source he described in a text he sent to a friend as “a jailhouse snitch.” It was a convict’s tale, something supposedly overheard in the prison yard, that offered to tie up all the loose ends of the case. Spurred on by that promise, both Steve and the private detective he had hired fanned out with their inquiries into several states. Steve was energized by the possibility that he was on the verge of accomplishing what the professionals had failed to do: he’d get the whole story.
But after an exhausting, time-consuming probe, it was clear it had been nothing more than an elaborate con, a malicious scheme to squeeze some money out of a grieving family’s misery. The experience was demoralizing.
Yet Steve persevered, only to be conned again. A grainy lightbulb cam video of the King Road neighborhood came his way that proved Kohberger wasn’t the lone killer. It was only after he went to considerable expense and hired a professional videographer to examine the recording that he conceded it was a fake.
Then there was his decision to leak a time-stamped video of another vehicle tearing away from the street adjacent to the murder house just before dawn on the morning of November 13 to one of the true-crime Internet sites. His logic was that it was very possibly significant evidence; it needed widespread scrutiny. But this video, too, was also ultimately deemed irrelevant, and in the end his tangential role in its dissemination became an embarrassment.
All of this folly brought Steve to two unwavering conclusions.
One: theories suggesting that a drug ring had been involved were ludicrous. “No pro is going to rough up someone not knowing who all is in the house,” he texted one of the new confederates he had befriended while looking for knowledgeable allies on the Internet. There were, he pointed out, usually only three girls in the King Road house; his daughter, who had completed all her coursework and would graduate in January, had just come down to Moscow for the weekend on a whim to show Maddie her new Range Rover. “Explain to me how a hit man missed Ethan and Kaylee’s new car.” A professional, he argued, would have been daunted by the presence of two additional people in the house.
As for the rumors of a drug deal gone bad being the underlying motive, Steve considered it a nonstarter. Although the complete autopsy had not been released, he had been told by the authorities that the toxicity reports on all four of the victims established that they had no drugs in their systems. Besides, if they’d wanted to score some pot, there was no need to get involved with a street dealer. “The kids,” he objected, “could go down a street and in eight miles there was a store” where they could easily make a buy (despite the fact that marijuana remained illegal in Idaho). “Kristi [his wife] went with them once to check it out,” he texted to his new confidant.
Two: “there are some crazy-ass people who are really crazy” who were trying to elbow their way into the case with deliberate misinformation.
BUT NOT ALL OF STEVE’S investigative efforts have been in vain. He had assembled some blue-chip sources that, he revealed to several friends, included an FBI agent in the St. Louis office, who had shared his personal email so that his bosses in the bureau wouldn’t learn that he was communicating with Steve; a handful of additional sympathetic law enforcement officers; and, most helpful of all, a conduit to two of the grand jurors who had been on the panel that had voted to indict Bryan Kohberger. And in the process, he had compiled some startling revelations, hard-won information that he triumphantly disclosed to his newfound Internet associates:
Kohberger had purchased a dark blue Dickies long-sleeved work uniform at the Walmart in Pullman, Washington, not long before the murders, Steve had learned. The authorities had a copy of the $49.99 receipt, and they also now had a theory to explain how Kohberger had managed to escape from the crime scene without a scratch and without leaving an incriminating drop of blood in his getaway car or his apartment: he had worn the work uniform during the murders, and then had disrobed before he got behind the wheel of his Hyundai Elantra for his circuitous drive back to his apartment. Perhaps, the authorities hypothesized, he had stuffed the work suit into a plastic garbage bag and then shoved it into his trunk.
Only there was no sign of the Dickies outfit. The police had looked high and low, but they couldn’t find it, just as they couldn’t locate the murder weapon. It was rumored in the press that they had a receipt for a Ka-Bar knife he had purchased online, months before the killings, but as for the actual knife, it, too, had seemingly vanished. And as long as these two crucial pieces of evidence remained unavailable, Steve could only wonder with a swelling apprehension what a jury would make of their absence.
Even more troubling, if true, was what Steve had learned from people who had spoken to members of the grand jury who had been presented with the prosecution’s case. It centered on the alleged behavior of the two roommates who had miraculously survived the night unscathed. How, he had long wondered, could they have slept, blissfully unaware, in the aftermath of the savage predawn stabbing murders of four of their friends in a narrow house with paper-thin walls?
Now he had an answer—perhaps. Steve had been told that the two survivors allegedly had not only been awake while the killings had taken place but that they had heard everything. More astonishingly, his grand-jury sources alleged that the two girls had been texting each other as the murderer methodically went from one room to the next.
The possibility that two people had a sense of the horror while it occurred and had not acted, calling neither friends nor 911, left Steve floored. No less confounding, they had, if his sources were as knowledgeable as he believed, then let hour after hour after hour tick away before they finally decided to summon friends. It added an entirely new band of mystery to a crime that was encircled by so many unanswered questions.
In the aftermath of this startling intelligence, Steve felt he had no choice but to intensify his efforts. And in that dogged process, he came to believe that the government must have a protected source, an informant who could provide testimony that would tighten the screws that held together the case against Kohberger. Steve was determined to talk to this individual. He did not want to wait for a distant trial to get the knowledge he needed. For his peace of mind, he needed relief now.
And after some digging, he grew convinced he had the informant in his sights. He was preparing to reach out to this individual, to get right in his face and confront him. He would explain that he was empowered by a father’s natural right to understand fully the last moments of his daughter’s life. It was his duty. This was an argument, he felt, that no one could reject. At last he would know the whole story of what had really happened to Kaylee. And why.
But before he could make his move, before he could get in a room and have a heart-to-heart talk with the witness, he was unexpectedly stopped in his tracks—by the FBI.
The bureau, Steve informed people, had sent an official letter to his attorney in Moscow, Shanon Gray, warning that if there were any attempts to contact the individual Steve had been pursuing, there would be legal consequences. The witness had originally reached out to the authorities through a tip line that promised to protect the identities of anyone volunteering information, and the bureau had to honor that commitment. Further, the letter made clear with an intimidating fixity, the fact that Steve was the father of one of the victims gave him no dispensation from the legal consequences that accompany tampering with a government witness.
Stymied, Steve skulked away. The promise of a real understanding was out there, yet still beyond his grasp. Racked by frustration and despair, all he could do was send a disheartened text to one of his fellow Internet detectives: “There is so much more to this than is in the media.”
MEMORIES ARE DRAWN FROM THE past. Dreams, however, are part of an idealized vision of what the world might become. They hold the future.
And now thwarted in his sleuthing, still staring with bitterness at hard mysteries he cannot crack, Steve has expanded his focus. Driven by memories of his daughter, he has found an alternative summons. A call to another sort of action. If he cannot conduct the investigation he feels he must, then he will at least ensure that at some distant appointed time there will be a measure of justice.
On the Goncalves Family Page on Facebook, Steve, his wife, and his daughter Alivea, along with other relatives, appear in hoodies displaying a stony message: #JUSTICEFORKAYLEE, HOUSE BILL 186, SHOTS FIRED. The Idaho State Legislature Bill 186, passed last March after Kohberger’s indictment, affirmed that if the chemicals required for an intravenous execution were unavailable, a death sentence could be fulfilled by a firing squad.
It was an unforgiving promise, and Steve had pledged his support. And with this allegiance, he had become another victim, another innocent sucked down into the swirling vortex of the hostile, destructive force that had been set loose in the aftermath of that terrible November night in Moscow.
His future was now a raging, all-consuming anger.