New Docuseries Reveals the Untold Story of the Idaho Murders

Yahoo

12-06-2025

In the early morning of Nov. 13, 2022, four University of Idaho students were stabbed to death in their off campus home. Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Madison Mogen, 21, Xana Kernodle, 20, and Ethan Chapin, 20, were all members of the school's Greek life and beloved by their campus community, which turned the weeks after their murders into a frenzy of national media attention and online speculation surrounding one topic: The Idaho Murders.
Despite releasing little information about the investigative process, police in Moscow, Idaho eventually arrested primary suspect Bryan Kohberger, a 28-year-old criminology graduate student at Washington State University. Now, three years later, with Kohberger's trial finally set to begin in August after numerous delays, filmmakers Matthew Galkin and Liz Garbus are releasing a new Amazon docuseries taking an in depth look at how the people closest to the case dealt with their tragic losses and the media storm that followed them. One Night In Idaho: The College Murders premieres July 11 on Amazon Prime.
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Galkin and Garbus first began working on the project in the spring of 2023, doing outreach to the family members that led to a sit down meeting with the Chapin family. Both of the filmmakers are known for past projects that center around the ethical consideration of true crime — including using projects to highlight stories of people on the margins that can typically be ignored by the media and police. (Garbus is perhaps best known for her work on Netflix's Gone Girl: The Long Island Serial Killer — the story of how LISK escaped police capture by targeting young sex workers. Galkin is the director of Showtime miniseries Murder In Big Horn, a series centered on the disappearances and murders of indigenous women in Montana.) The trailer features several interviews from family members and friends closest to the Idaho victims, including the Chapin and Mogen families.
'I've never been involved in a documentary about a case this large and with this many sort of complicated aspects that converge,' Galkin tells Rolling Stone.
'Yeah,' Garbus agrees. 'The whole thing was on steroids in a way I've never seen.'
Because the Moscow Police Department gave the public little to no information during their investigation, the national media fury only intensified in online spaces like TikTok's true crime community. Videos about the murders received millions of views, comments, and shares across platforms, with true crime accounts publicly speculating about close friends or people who could have killed the students. Several publicly accused people of the crime, leaving dozens of Idaho students and close friends of victims fearing for their public safety and mental health. Galkin and Garbus tell Rolling Stone they were focused on telling a story that gave viewers an inside look at what was happening behind closed doors.
'In the first conversation with the Chapins, one of the things that truly struck me was their description of being swept up in this circus from the inside. All of the Tiktok videos and hypothesizing and having their son's name dragged through the mud unfairly, obviously, because none of [the conspiracy theories] turned out to be true,' Galkin says. 'I felt like we had never seen that story told from that perspective. Major crime in 2025 has all of these layers of attention and social media and speculation where that didn't exist a few decades ago, but now it's what all of these families have to deal with on a daily basis.'
For Garbus, the director says she was focused on unearthing the story that people had missed in the mayhem, avoid sensationalism, and instead giving the families of the victims a chance to tell the world who their loved one actually was — both as a form of memory and as an opportunity to possibly heal.
'What is the side that is untold?' she says. 'At the end of the day, these kids are victims. And their families deserve their stories to be told in fulsome, loving ways.'
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