None of us knows how we’d react if a killer appeared in our home in the middle of the night. That’s exactly what happened on November 13, 2022, to the “Idaho Four,” the college students murdered in their beds by Bryan Kohberger, then a PhD student in criminology. A new book, The Idaho Four: An American Tragedy, rekindles the lost lives of Kaylee Goncalves, Maddie Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin—by retracing their final days alongside the shattered realities of the innocent victims’ families, friends, and neighbors. This is much more than a true crime book. It’s a vivid exploration of the range of human response when faceless terror strikes. It’s a portrait of America in this polarized moment.
Priest Lake, Idaho
Summer 2022
It’s four p.m. and Ethan Chapin is finishing up his shift as a server at the Hill’s Resort restaurant, nestled on beautiful Priest Lake up in the Idaho mountains. The sparkling water with its snow- crested surroundings got its name from the Jesuit missionaries who once lived near there.
The Chapins have two homes, one in Mount Vernon, near Seattle, and a summerhouse on Priest Lake. His mom came here as a little girl, and he and his family have been coming here all his life. There’s nowhere Ethan would rather be.
He yells to Hunter, and the two head to his favorite place within his favorite place: the resort’s sand volleyball court, right on the shore, in front of the resort’s bar and restaurant. The community is tight. No one locks their doors. People call one another by their first names.
Ethan knocks on the door of cabin 101, which belongs to the Zylak family. It’s a running joke that the Zylaks are über-competitive. Ethan’s ideal matchup is the six Zylak kids versus everyone else. Whatever the numbers, he finds a way to make a game of it.
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University of Idaho students Kaylee Goncalves (second from left, at bottom), Madison Mogen (second from left, at top), Ethan Chapin (center), and Xana Kernodle (second from right) are the subjects of the new book The Idaho Four.
Once on the volleyball court, he strips off his shirt and takes his position. He and Hunter hit the ball back and forth over the net while a little crowd, including their parents, Jim and Stacy, and, this summer, Xana, gathers to watch the magnificent sight of Ethan in full athlete mode. He jumps, he sets, he dives, he spikes—a mythic Greek god in action.
Ethan made varsity basketball as a high- school freshman, but COVID restrictions deprived him of crucial competitive seasons that would have prepped him to play at the college level.
Over the summer, the Chapin triplets worked at Hill’s Resort, which was full to bursting with people wanting a rural escape. This time together made the trio realize that they wanted to attend the same college, and they needed it to be east of the mountains. And they wanted to be involved in Greek life, to keep the small family feeling that they were used to at home.
UI was an easy decision. WSU felt vast when they visited. By comparison, Greek Row at UI felt so small and bucolic, it was like a private school.
Their mom, Stacy, a former school principal and a Greek life alum at the University of Puget Sound, was relieved that her children would experience the safety net and type of community that had been such a welcome part of her own college years.
Now, as Stacy watches her son leap around on the volleyball court, she’s filled with pride. UI has been exactly the nurturing place she wanted for them. They’re thriving. Her husband, Jim—who believes Stacy’s judgment is consistently rock solid—agrees.
After the game, Jim, Stacy, Hunter, Maizie, Ethan, and Xana sprint to the boat Jim recently bought to satisfy his kids’ love of the water. They turn the music up high, blasting out Morgan Wallen’s latest album, and Jim drives the boat while the kids take turns wakeboarding and sipping drinks from the cooler.
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Stacy Chapin, Ethan’s mother, during a June 2023 appearance on Today.
Ethan and Hunter love boarding so much that early every morning, they stuff their work clothes into their backpacks and go out on the water, coming back with only five minutes to spare before their shifts. Jim drops them at the dock, and they sprint, barefoot, to their posts.
This summer, Ethan has been inseparable from Xana, who’s been staying with the Chapins most of the time. Stacy can see immediately that her son is serious about this carefree young woman. The Chapins happily welcome her as one of their own.
Changes are ahead for the upcoming fall semester. Xana is moving from the Shark Tank into a rental house on King Road. Stacy and Jim have rented Ethan an apartment in Moscow. The Sigma Chi president told Ethan that frat brothers who are double deficient—that is, with a GPA below 2.75 for two consecutive semesters—have to live outside the house.
Stacy’s only concern about her oldest triplet is how far his grades have slipped. Though she suspects Ethan will stay most nights with Xana, she knows that the forced separation from his fraternity brothers will motivate him to raise his grades high enough to return to the Sigma Chi house.
In the boat, the wind whips up and the sun slowly starts to redden and sink low into the horizon. Jim turns the boat toward the shore. Ethan turns the volume one notch higher, and they head home listening to Morgan Wallen’s “Heartless.”
If this isn’t paradise, Stacy thinks, then what is?
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Madison Mogan and Xana Kernodle, who are among the students at the center of the new book The Idaho Four.
Coeur d’Alene, Idaho
July 31, 2022
The room is spinning, like it often does when Xana has had one too many White Claws, which she has today, out on the lake.
She falls flat on her face. Feels the pain immediately.
She looks in the mirror. She’s chipped her front tooth.
Damn. She turns to Emily. She’s upset. And not because it’s going to cost money to fix the tooth.
“I don’t want to be this person anymore,” she tells her understanding friend.
Xana is well aware of her reputation as the free-spirited girl in their core friend group: Xana and Ethan, Emily, Hunter Johnson, Josie, Lin- den, Peter Elgorriaga, and Ethan’s triplet siblings, Hunter and Maizie.
But she wants to change that. Xana wants to grow up. She wants to be someone who fits into the world of Ethan and his parents. The Chapin family is fun, easygoing, but as Xana has seen, their life is different from her hardscrabble existence in her dad’s basement.
At Priest Lake, the Chapins all play golf on the local course. Xana has never played golf, but the Chapin triplets are really good. They love it, like they love all sports.
When Xana first joined them on the course, she found that hitting a golf ball was harder than it looked; out of mockery for their passion, she threw a club—then took a swig of her drink. Everyone laughed.
As Karen Alandt—Mama Karen—has noticed, Xana “is someone who is prepared to make a total fool of herself in public if it will put someone else at ease.” But Xana doesn’t want to be the butt of everyone’s jokes forever.
She never thought about the future before. But now she does. She wants to become a person who is taken more seriously.
And she wants to grow old with Ethan.
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Clockwise from top left: Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle, Madison Mogen, and Ethan Chapin. All four University of Idaho students were stabbed to death in November 2022.
Moscow, Idaho
June 2022
Maddie can hardly believe it when Kaylee walks through the front door of 1122 King Road. She’s pulled it off!
Their freshman-year Bid Day, when the best friends were acceptedby different sororities, feels like a distant dream. Here they are, in their senior year, finally getting to live together. The timing couldn’t be more perfect.
Maddie walks to the car and starts helping Kaylee unload boxes and boxes of her stuff. Everyone knows that Kaylee doesn’t travel light.
She hauls a bag through the sliding glass doors at the back and into her new room.
Everyone also knows which room is Maddie’s—she’s put the letters of her name in the window, and her signature pink cowboy boots sit on the sill. Maddie’s vanity is just behind. When it’s dark and her lights are on, anyone walking by can see her putting on her mascara.
Maddie took over the King Road lease from graduating Pi Phis, and she’s pulled together a great group, her family away from family. Perfect for a year of transition, which is what it’s going to be. Jake graduated and is back home in Boise, but their plan is to make it through this year together, long distance. They speak every night at eight. Maddie has been meticulous about keeping the appointment, a source of amusement for her new roommates, who are now all moved in.
Xana has taken a room on the main level. Of course Maddie invited Emily too, because Xana and Emily are almost as inseparable as Xana and Ethan, but Emily had already made plans to room with Josie, her childhood friend from Boise, next door at the Whites, the building where her boyfriend, Hunter Johnson, has also rented an apartment.
So 1122 King Road’s other two rooms went to two blond Pi Phi sophomores who finagled a way to move out of the sorority house: Dylan Mortensen, who is Emily’s Little, and Bethany Funke, Maddie’s Little.
Maddie bangs on each of their doors. “Xana, Dylan, Bethany!” she yells. “Photo time.”
They groan but accept their fate, and the five women in their skimpy, summery dresses gather on the King Road deck. Maddie hands Ethan the camera. They pose, squinting into the afternoon sun: Dylan, Xana, Bethany, Kaylee, Maddie.
Meet the Roommates, Maddie captions the photo, and she makes the post public, as she always does.
She doesn’t think of any risks associated with that. Why would she? The more followers you have, the better for your career in marketing.
Maddie’s life, in this moment, here and now, is pretty much perfect and going exactly where she wants it to.
Pool//Getty Images
Bryan Kohberger pleaded guilty in 2025 to four counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle, Madison Mogen, and Kaylee Goncalves, who were killed in November 2022 in Moscow, Idaho.
Moscow, Idaho
Emily’s Dream
The following scene, a recurring nightmare, is what Emily later says—after she’s lost her friends, before justice has brought closure—she imagines could have happened that summer. The details of the surroundings change from dream to dream, but the gist of what happens stays the same. It’s the only explanation she can come up with, the only one that makes any sense. It haunts her day and night because the uncertainty of whether it’s real or not real will never go away.
Maddie wipes down the table and turns to get fresh cutlery to seat the new customers.
As jobs go, waitressing at the Mad Greek is a pretty good gig. The forty-seat restaurant with a vegan-friendly menu isn’t one of the more popular ones in Moscow, so servers—all college kids, friends—don’t get run off their feet.
Maddie’s grateful for the pay. She can make as much as eighty bucks per shift, which covers her gas and her Ulta card and the trendy clothes she likes so much. And there’s the added bonus that the manager asked her to redo the restaurant’s website.
Maddie continues laying the table.
Then she turns and notices him. Unusual-looking. Intense bulging eyes. Thin, almost emaciated. And pale, almost ghost white. He’s raising his hand. He wants her attention.
She smooths her skirt and walks over with a smile.
He orders a vegan pizza to go. He’s staring at her intently. Maddie is used to male attention, but this time it feels . . . uncomfortable.
“I’m Bryan,” he says. “What’s your name?”
Maddie hesitates, then tells him. Why wouldn’t she? Everyone here knows it.
She hands him the check and, as he pays, he asks, “Would you like to go out sometime?”
This is an easy one, Maddie thinks. The idea of going out with this strange-looking guy is surreal. He doesn’t know it took Jake, her boyfriend, a whole two years to become her boyfriend. Maddie is anything but easy, even for guys she likes. And she doesn’t know or like this one.
Little, Brown and Company The Idaho Four: An American Tragedy
She flicks back her hair. “Uh, no,” she says. She smiles, laughs a bit. It’s a nervous habit she has, especially with guys she turns down. She doesn’t mean anything rude by it.
But this guy looks at her strangely, like he doesn’t believe what he’s hearing.
He gets up slowly, still staring at her, and walks out.
Maddie shakes her head and goes about her business. She doesn’t give the guy another thought.
She doesn’t see the guy walk to his car, a white Hyundai Elantra, sit in the driver’s seat, and type her name into his phone.
Her Instagram, with the photos of her past and present, is there for all to see: Maddie in a bikini. Maddie with her roommates. Maddie and her friends posing in skimpy clothes for a fit check before a night out.
Maddie, Maddie, Maddie.
He looks. He presses Like once, twice, three times. And he looks and likes some more.
Excerpted from The Idaho Four: An American Tragedy by James Patterson and Vicky Ward