The Idaho Four review – a disturbing, necessary portrait of a killer and his victims

The Guardian

20-07-2025

In the early hours of 13 November 2022 in an off-campus apartment in Moscow, Idaho, a masked assailant murdered four students. The dead, who would come to be known as the Idaho Four, were Kaylee Goncalves, Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle and Madison Mogen. Each was stabbed multiple times. The killer left a gruesome scene and the motive was not readily apparent.
Videos, cellphone records and solid detective work led law enforcement to Bryan Kohberger, a doctoral candidate at Washington State University. Arrested at his parents' home in Albrightsville, Pennsylvania, in late December, he was extradited back west.
Scheduled to be tried this August, Kohberger, 30, instead pleaded guilty to murder. Escaping the death penalty, he will in all likelihood serve four consecutive life sentences, an additional 10 years for burglary, and die in jail. Sentencing is set for 23 July.
An apparent embittered 'incel' – 'involuntary celibate' – and former heroin user, Kohberger signed a one-page confession, scant on details. He said he broke into the apartment but offered no reason for his crimes. An antisocial loner and video game fiend, he did not know his victims but may have met one of them, Mogen, at a restaurant.
With their book The Idaho Four, James Patterson and Vicky Ward have written perhaps the definitive account of the murders – a disturbing, necessary portrait of a killer and his victims.
Well-paced and well-written, their joint effort is a mesmerizing read and a great detective story, yet sadly all true. The prose is conversational and mellifluous. An array of facts, quotes and comments keep the reader's attention.
Patterson is an award-winning, best-selling author of thrillers and non-fiction who has co-authored three novels with Bill Clinton. Jared Kushner, a son-in-law of Donald Trump, claims to have taken an online MasterClass from Patterson and then 'batted out' 40,000 words of his memoir, Breaking History.
Ward is a former senior reporter at CNN and one-time HuffPost editor-at-large. Her previous books include The Liar's Ball, The Devil's Casino and Kushner, Inc. She has interviewed Trumpworld cast-outs, Michael Cohen and Anthony Scaramucci. She has turned an unflinching gaze at Jeffrey Epstein, the 47th president's one-time friend. For The Idaho Four, she interviewed more than 320 people, 'some many times'.
Kohberger left bread crumbs. His path to destruction appears to have been blazed by Elliot Rodger, a mass murderer from a 'wealthy family', the son of a 'well-known movie director' who killed six people and wounded 14 near the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2014.
Rodger, 22, was a virgin and 'furious about it', Patterson and Ward write. He plotted his 'day of retribution' for two years. He circulated a 137-page manifesto, airing his demons and frustrations. At the end of his spree, he killed himself. A martyr for a movement – and a role model for Kohberger – was born.
Kohberger learned of Rodger in grad school.
'No one knows that, like Rodger, Bryan is a virgin who hates women,' Ward and Patterson write.
'No one knows that Bryan copes with loneliness by immersing himself in video games. Like Rodger, he goes for night drives. Like Rodger, he visits the gun range. And, like Rodger, he goes to a local bar and tries to pick up women.'
In fall 2022, Kohberger took a brief ride from WSU in eastern Washington to Moscow, home to the University of Idaho. Walking into a restaurant, he spotted a blonde, blue-eyed waitress: Madison Mogen, Maddie for short.
'She's the epitome of the women who turned down Elliot Rodger,' Patterson and Ward write. 'Her name is Maddie, like Elliot's childhood friend Maddy, who grew into someone who ignored Rodger.'
'She comes over to ask what he'd like.
'He knows what he'd like.
'Her.'
Mogen's friends hypothesize that she spurned Kohberger's advances, so he began to stalk her.
Phone records add credence to the theory. Moscow police alleged that Kohberger was near Mogen's apartment at least a dozen times between late August 2022 and the murder, 'almost always late at night, cloaked in darkness'.
Until Kohberger was arrested, the ghost of Rodger continued to haunt. Two administrators of the University of Idaho – Case Discussion Facebook group began noticing strange posts from a member under an alias: Pappa Rodger.
'Of the evidence released, the murder weapon has been consistent as a large, fixed-blade knife,' the poster wrote. 'This leads me to believe they found the sheath. This evidence was released prior to autopsies.'
This was the first time anyone had publicly mentioned a sheath. Early in the investigation, Moscow's police chief shared the existence of the sheath with a senior member of the force. After Kohberger's arrest, 'Pappa Rodger' disappeared.
Earlier, Kohberger's classmates in a psychology program labeled him the 'Ghost,' Patterson and Ward report, because: 'There's something spooky about him.'
A professor, Dr Katherine Ramsland, told the class that psychopaths' brains are different from those of other people. By extension, 'the only way to cure a psychopath is to get him therapy at a very early stage, by around age four, and try to train his brain to change.'
Kohberger listened carefully – and took copious notes.
The Idaho Four is published in the US by Hachette