San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Demolish a crime scene before the trial?
At the house where four University of Idaho students were killed last year, sheets of plywood cover the windows. A temporary fence surrounds the yard. Security guards, posted in a blue trailer, keep watch 24 hours a day.
And yet, for a university trying to erase the remnants of a tragedy that cast a terrifying shadow over the past academic year, the house on a hillside near campus remains uncomfortably conspicuous — visible from nearby fraternity houses and sought out as a photo spot by true-crime aficionados from around the country. University officials hope to demolish it before a new class of students arrives in August.
But the plan has distressed some family members of the four students killed, who worry that the house could be vital to the prosecution of the man accused of the killings, and to a jury’s understanding of how the four students could have been slaughtered in bedrooms on the second and third floors without alerting two other roommates in the house. They have pressed the university to hold off on any demolition.
“What’s best for the case is for us to take caution and protect what the jury may possibly want to wrap their heads around,” Steve Goncalves, the father of one of the victims, Kaylee Goncalves, said of the university’s announcement.
The parents of Ethan Chapin, another one of the victims, said the situation was difficult, with no easy answers. On one hand, they agree with Steve Goncalves that demolishing the home this summer “feels very early,” said Ethan Chapin’s mother, Stacy. But she noted that their two other children — they were triplets — are still students at the University of Idaho, and one of them has a room that looks out toward the house, providing a constant reminder.
“Our kids have to walk past that house every day,” Stacy
Chapin said. “The kids, they need to heal. The university needs to heal. And the community.”
The house in Idaho joins a growing roster of notorious properties around the country whose fates have become the subject of complex legal and ethical debates as communities try to decide what, if anything, should remain in the aftermath of a mass murder.
In Newtown, Conn., the Sandy Hook Elementary School building was razed and rebuilt after the 2012 mass shooting that left 26 people dead. In Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers last year, the school district has similar plans to demolish the school and build a new one.
Other communities have left such crime scenes intact. The large hunting estate in South Carolina where Alex Murdaugh’s wife and younger son were killed in 2021 was sold for $3.9 million just weeks after Murdaugh, a prominent lawyer, was convicted of murdering them. Students in Santa Fe, Texas, returned within weeks to the
high school where a gunman killed 10 people in 2018.
And while some residents called for demolishing the movie theater in Aurora, Colo., that was the site of a mass shooting in 2012, it was instead renamed, remodeled and reopened within six months.
The case in Idaho is not the only one where some have advocated leaving the crime scene standing for jurors. The classroom building in Parkland, Fla., where a gunman killed 17 students and staff members five years ago is still standing, fenced off from where students attend classes in adjacent buildings. Jurors visited the abandoned building last year during the sentencing trial for the gunman, making their way past shards of glass, walls riddled with bullet holes and floors still smeared with blood.
After the acquittal last week of a school resource officer who failed to confront the gunman — the last criminal case stemming from the shootings — school officials said they now planned to proceed with demolition. But first, authorities began allowing
victims’ relatives to walk the building’s hallways this week for the first time since the shooting, if they wanted to.
Jurors visited the Murdaugh crime scene in Islandton, S. C., during Murdaugh’s trial this year. They spent about an hour walking around the area where the victims were shot, including a shed and feed room. Similarly, when novelist Michael Peterson was on trial in 2003, accused of killing his wife, jurors were given a chance to examine the stairwell where she died in their home. The house remains standing, although it has been sold several times since Peterson’s trial, including at one point to a man who describes himself as a “clairvoyant medium.”
The stabbings in Idaho on Nov. 13 left four students dead: Kaylee Goncalves, 21; Madison Mogen, 21; Xana Kernodle, 20; and Ethan Chapin, 20. Their bodies were not discovered for hours, and a suspect was not identified for weeks. Investigators ultimately arrested Bryan Kohberger, a doctoral student in criminology at nearby Washington State University, in late December.
Jodi Walker, a University of Idaho spokesperson, said that the house, in the middle of a student housing area, has been a constant reminder of what transpired there. She said officials were also considering the needs of all the students and staff members on campus when they made the decision to demolish the structure.
“This is another step toward healing,” she said. “It’s definitely a balancing act.”
Last week, trucks pulled up to the house to begin removing the former residents’ belongings, a process that could take several weeks. Demolition was set to begin soon after.
But some family members of the victims say that with the trial not scheduled until October, it is too soon to destroy the site of the killings.
Shanon Gray, a lawyer representing the Goncalves family, said jurors may need to see the house to understand how noise traveled in the building and how a killer could move through the home’s unusual six-bedroom layout.
He argued that the university was rushing to demolish it because it wanted to leave the tragedy behind before fully dealing with it.
“It’s for the University of Idaho, trying to tell everybody to hurry up and forget this ever happened,” he said.
Members of Mogen’s family and Kernodle’s family also want to see the home preserved until the criminal case is resolved, Gray said.
For Steve Goncalves, the house holds a deeply personal meaning, both as a place where his daughter had many of her life’s best moments and as a symbol of how he believes the community failed to keep her and her friends safe. But the more immediate issue now, he said, is preserving it to ensure there is accountability for the killings. Tearing the house down, he said, will not make the nightmare that happened there go away.
“It’s just going to be a freaking hole in the ground,” he said. “Is that somehow better?”