They hung signs to mess with TV reporters’ live shots- FUCK YOU NANCY GRACE, read one-and posted notes on their doors begging journalists to go away. Locals turned bitterly on all of it, treating the press like hostile occupiers. The distinction between professional reporters and clout-chasing cranks blurred into one unwieldy mass of noise and disruption and fearmongering. A TikToker with about 100,000 followers tried to identify the killer with tarot cards. Someone turned up outside the police line with ghost-hunting equipment to commune with the victims’ spirits. “Dark tourists” arrived to take pictures of the house where the murders happened, and post them for bragging rights in their Reddit forums. The local police, overwhelmed with tips, begged the public to stop calling with unvetted information. Did a history professor plot the murders in a jealous rage? Was the nearby fraternity involved? What about that hoodie-clad guy on a Twitch livestream standing behind two of the victims at a food truck?ĭays passed without an arrest, then weeks. In niche Facebook groups, they shared their findings. They rifled through the victims’ digital lives, hunting for clues that might crack the case. TikTok detectives, true-crime podcasters-they descended on the town with theories to float and suspects to investigate. The story was irresistible: Four University of Idaho students brutally stabbed to death in the middle of the night. Nancy Grace, the cable-news host famously obsessed with morbid crimes, set up a table right outside the victims’ house so she could gesture at the building on air while speculating about the last sound they heard before dying. TV producers crowded into the Corner Club, chatting up students for tips and gossip, mispronouncing the town’s name-Mos -cow, they kept calling it, not Moss-coe. T he reporters arrived in news vans and satellite trucks that trundled down King Road and colonized parking spots outside the crime scene. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday.
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