Episode Details

The Goncalves family had argued that jurors in Bryan Kohberger’s case should have been allowed to visit 1122 King Road, the Moscow, Idaho, house where Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin were murdered. The family believed photographs, diagrams and video could never fully convey the layout of the home, the distances between rooms, the stairways, sight lines and the physical relationship between the bedrooms and common areas. From their perspective, those details could have mattered enormously once jurors were asked to evaluate the prosecution’s timeline, Dylan Mortensen’s account of seeing a masked man, the movement of the killer through the house and the defense’s inevitable challenges to how the State said the murders unfolded. Keeping the house standing, they argued, would have preserved the possibility that the judge could later decide a jury view was necessary.


That possibility disappeared when the University of Idaho moved forward with demolition of the house in December 2023, well before Kohberger ever went to trial. Prosecutors and defense attorneys had both indicated they did not object to the demolition after investigators conducted additional measurements, photographs, scans and other documentation of the property, but the Goncalves family strongly objected and publicly pleaded for the house to remain standing until the criminal case was finished. The university nevertheless demolished 1122 King Road on December 28, 2023, saying the building no longer served an investigative purpose and that removing it was part of the community’s effort to heal. The decision was irreversible: by the time the case progressed toward trial, jurors could no longer be taken through the actual crime scene even if a judge later concluded that seeing it firsthand would have been useful. For the Goncalves family, that was precisely the problem—they believed potentially important evidence had effectively been erased before anyone could know what questions would arise once the prosecution and defense finally presented their competing versions of what happened inside the house.


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