Killer Stories with Harvey Guillén - The Idaho Four Pt. 1 (with J. Reuben Appelman)

Episode Date: July 28, 2025

In the early morning hours of November 13, 2022, four students at the University of Idaho were murdered in their off-campus home. The shocking brutality of the murders garnered media attention while police searched for the killer. But for author and private investigator J. Reuben Appelman, the story was personal: his own daughter was a student at the same college as the victims. And he wanted to know about the people behind the story. Who were Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Ethan Chapin, and Xana Kernodle in life? Keep up with us on Instagram @serialkillerspodcast. J.’s book, While Idaho Slept: The Hunt For Answers in the Murders of Four College Students, is available now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One of my goals was to tell the beautiful story of these victims and to memorialize them in that way and to not exploit some of the weaknesses that they might have had that we all have. I think everything that I say is colored with a big heart, you know. Welcome to Serial Killers, a Spotify podcast. Every Monday, we bring you the true crime stories that stand out. I'm Janice Morgan. We'd love to hear from you. Follow us on Instagram at Serial Killers Podcast and share your thoughts on this week's episode.

Or if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and leave a comment. To help us tell today's story, we interviewed Jay Rubin Appelman, a private investigator and author. His most recent book covers the 2022 murders of Kalee Gonzalez, Madison Mogan, Zana Kronodal, and Ethan Chapin in their Moscow- Idaho home. We're so grateful he could share his expertise. This episode includes discussions of murder. Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen. Stay with us.

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Many tentacles in Boise reached to North Idaho at Moscow, where the University of Idaho is. And it really feels to most people anywhere in Idaho that this happened in our backyard. That's Jay Rubin Appelman. He's been many things, a poet, a private investigator, and he's the author of the book while Idaho slept, the hunt for answers and the murders of four college students. I didn't set out to write this book. I didn't say, oh, cool, these murders happened. Let's jump on this book, right? That's not what happened at all. I felt a deep amount of pain and curiosity and just strong feelings that I should be there in that space, sharing that space with the people

who were suffering. That space is Moscow, home to the University of Idaho. It's small, It's quiet and rural. It's under the radar. Most Americans have probably never heard of it. But that changes in 2022 when it becomes a household name. On the evening of November 12th, Kalee Gonzalez and Madison Mogan go out to Corner Club, a bar popular with students.

Their childhood best friends, roommates, and seniors at the University of Idaho. They're soaking up the dwindling amount of time they have together. At the end of the semester, Kaley will graduate early and travel Europe for a month. In February, she'll start a new job in Austin, Texas. It will be the first time they won't live in the same town since they were pre-teens. At Corner Club, they bump into Jack. Kaylee's on again, off-again, boyfriend.

At this point, they're off, but still cordial. Kaylee and Maddie leave the bar after 1 a.m. and are seen on surveillance cameras walking down Main Street gossiping. They stop at a local food truck, order pasta, and talk. talk with classmates while they wait for their food. Late-night snacks secured, they get a ride home to 1122 King Road. They arrive just before 2 a.m. Meanwhile, Zana Kernodal attends a party with her boyfriend, Ethan Chapin, at the Sigma Chi Frat House.

They end their night around 1.45 a.m. and settle in for the night in Zana's room, one floor below Kaylee and Maddie in the King Road residence. Two other roommates, Dylan and Bethany, have been home since around 1 a.m. and are already sleeping by the time their roommates arrive. At 2.26 a.m., Kaylee and Maddie are still awake on the third floor. Over the next 26 minutes, Kaylee calls her ex-boyfriend Jack seven times. Maddie calls him three times. All of the calls go unanswered.

At 4 a.m., a food delivery order arrives for Zana. Around the same time, Dylan wakes up to a sound. Her bedroom's on the second floor, and she thinks Kaylee, on the third floor, must be playing with her golden-doodle Murphy. Before she can doze off again, she hears a voice. It sounds like Kaylee says, there's someone here. Dylan opens her bedroom door and sticks her head out,

but there's no one around. Then she hears crying, this time coming from Zana's room. A male voice says to Zana something to the effect of, It's okay, I'm going to help you. At 4.17 a.m., a security camera picks up voices, or maybe cries, then a loud thud and a dog barking. Dylan hears crying again.

She opens her bedroom door and sees a man. He's wearing black clothing and a mask that covers his nose and mouth. He's around 5'10 with bushy eyebrows, and he's walking right towards her. Dylan freezes as she watches the man leave the house through the kitchen sliding glass door. She steps back into her room, locks the door, and heads to sleep.

When Dylan and Bethany wake up the next morning, they call friends over to the house. They're not sure what happened the previous night, but they know they need help. Someone calls 911, and by noon, police discover the bodies of the four students. Kaylee and Maddie are found in Maddie's bedroom. Ethan and Zana are found in Zana's bedroom.

In an instant, the quiet village gets very loud. National reporters swarm the King Roadhouse. TMZ places phone calls to locals. Fox News parks their vans outside residents' homes. The Corner Club is publicly scrutinized. There's seemingly more reporters than students in Moscow. Over the next several weeks, around 25 to 40 percent of University of Idaho attendees

returned to their hometowns in fear. Jay Rubin Appelman is one of the people drawn there in the wake of the murders. But the thing about Jay is that he isn't just there for the story. He has a personal connection to the town. My daughter went to the University of Idaho. I'd been up there a number of times visiting. I'd also been working up in North Idaho, which is five hours from where I am based in Boise

and became familiar with the communities and had a great appreciation for that place. And I have many friends whose children go to the University of Idaho. I have many friends who went to the University of Idaho. I'm not traditionally a true crime sleuth necessarily. I just ended up right. writing two books about cases that matter to me a lot. Jay's first book, The Kill Jar, covers the Oakland County Child Killings.

Between February 1976 and March 1977, four children were kidnapped, murdered, and left near roadways in Detroit, Michigan, where Jay grew up. The investigation was, at the time, one of the largest in United States history. Despite its scale, the murders remain unsolved. The murders that I wrote about in the Kill Jar happened in basically my neighborhood, and you could say the four kids were killed, and at the same time, somebody tried to abduct me. I was roughly the same age as those kids,

and I got away, but nothing happened to me, but I grew up wondering if the person who tried to abduct me was the same person who had killed these other kids who had been abducted and held in captivity and eventually murdered. And when the Internet happened, basically, I had research at my fingertips, and I started researching the case. But it was because it mattered to me,

It mattered so much to Jay. He spent 10 years researching and writing the book. In the process of that, I kept bringing my notes and murder files and stuff to local coffee shops to work on the book. And ended up meeting a private investigator who did not tell me that that's what she was at first, but kept asking me questions about what I was working on. And eventually poached me to come work for the firm that she was working at as a PI. And I learned to become private investigator basically toward the end of writing. the kill jar. When Jay became a private investigator, it wasn't exactly what you'd think. He wasn't busting people in affairs or hunting down criminals. For the first five years of his career, he worked

insurance fraud cases. Say someone has an accident at work, maybe they slip and fall. They start having shoulder pains, so they file a claim with their insurance to get their medical treatment paid for or garner lost wages. If the insurance company suspects fraud, they'll send out an investigator, someone like Jay to see if the employee is being honest about their injury. Are they presenting the injury to be worse than it actually is? Did an injury even happen? Jay visited their houses to make a determination, and the face-to-face interviewing skills he learned on the job

became crucial in his later work. And a lot of what happens is you go and you sit in their living room, you talk to them for two hours, you have like a list of questions. But a lot of what you're really doing is observing the scene, you know. But when you sit face to face with people who are, A, probably originally suffering from some sort of injury and B, also trying to, like, draw it out a little bit so that they don't get kicked back to work because it really is difficult to go back to work with an injury that you have to heal. There's a lot of life and death situations for a lot of these people. It wasn't all broken shoulders or whatever. A lot of these people were on traumatic brain injury leave.

You learn a lot about people face-to-face like that when it's really important to them that you not only, believe them, but they slide in a little untruth sometimes, and you learn to pick up on those untruths. And if I had had those skills when writing the kill jar, that would have been very helpful as well. Parsing out truth from lies isn't the only thing Jay has unlocked in his time as a private investigator. He's also gained access to a host of different databases, things that come in handy when he starts researching and writing while Idaho slept. Aside from skills, one thing that would have saved me years of my life is the access to databases. that I have. Right now I can look at a license plates. Let's, for example, and say, who's driving that car, right?

So I can run the plates, as they say in the movies. But from those plates, you know, you get everything. You get an entire history, if you want. I have no access to those kind of backdoor database things that police and PIs and stuff have. So I was just doing it all with a lot of manual labor went into figuring out connections and things. Right now, I can just do that in about maybe 30 or 40 minutes versus maybe two weeks or a month. When the news of the Idaho murders breaks, Jay feels he can finally put those skills to use. But while the world is asking who is the killer, Jay is asking, who were the victims? Snoring, gasping during sleep, feeling fatigued, ask your doctor about zebbound, terseptite.

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911 calls surge, and rumors infiltrate online forums. But tonight, illuminated by candles and cell phones, the people of Moscow come together to remember Ethan Chapin, Kale Gonzalez, Zana Kronodl, and Maddie Mogan. In the weeks after the murders, the families are repeatedly called upon to talk to police in the media. They found themselves thrust into a spotlight they never wanted. Once J. Ruben Appelman decides to write a book, he knows he too will need to speak with the families, because his goal in writing while Idaho slept, he says, is to elevate public memory of the victims. I spent a lot of time trying to get details of the victim's lives from,

people who knew them closely. And basically what that means is that you're trying to get information from people who are in the deepest, darkest spots in their lives, in the tumult of mourning and chaos and heartbreak. And we're talking about parents who not only lost their children, but lost their children in such a violent way that it became relatively impossible to get any of them to talk to me for a very long time and for good reason. Also for good reason, since I was writing the book, it was important that I tried to talk to them, if for no other reason than to give them the opportunity

to say whatever they wanted to say about their children. Eventually, Jay talks to one close family member or a friend of each of the victims and the parent of one of the survivors. He doesn't get as much time with them as he would like, so he turns to social media to fill in the gaps. Jay doesn't find anything scandalous or shocking in the profiles. In fact, what strikes him is the lack of sort of details, which feels more devastatingly human. What I found interesting when I did that was looking all the way back to like junior high with Maddie and Kaylee,

talking to each other, I mean in comments, Maddie might post a picture or Kaylee might post a picture, and then one of them would comment on it to the other. And that's what I found really interesting. The comments they made to each other, or how they interacted with each other. One instance that I talked about in the book, like, why was your mom calling my mom?

One of them said in one of the comments. And as a parent, it was really touching to me. It chokes me up a lot to think about those things. And I learned so much about them from their social, not the details that people could exploit. You know, I'm not interested in doing that, but the details that make them human and heartbreakingly common, you know,

just kids having fun. and trying to be happy and trying to figure her shit out. Jay compiled everything he learned from social media and the victim's loved ones into a portrait of four bright, ambitious young people. Kaylee Gonzalez was born in June 2001 in California, but her family moved to Cordillane, Idaho when she was a year old. She loved to design her clothes and mystery novels.

That developed into an interest in true crime. After Kaylee's murder, her father, Steve, reached out to her face, favorite true crime YouTuber to spread awareness. Kaylee was the third of five children, but as her family puts it, the day she met Madison Mogan was the same day they gained a sixth sibling, which was perfect for only child Madison who went by Maddie. Born in May 2001 in Eugene Oregon, she moved to Cordillane as a toddler. Her parents divorced soon after, but Maddie remained close with her mom, dad, and stepdad. Maddie was a hard worker. She often held multiple jobs.

jobs at once, yet still made time for her friends and family. She doted on her younger cousins and saw live music with her father. She excelled academically, so in sixth grade, Maddie enrolled in the prestigious Cordillane Charter Academy, where she met Kaylee. They became best friends, inseparable. Maddie practically moved into the Gonzalves home, even joining their family vacations. Like Mary Kate and Ashley or Bonnie and Clyde, their names were always said together, identities, intertwined. That's why, after their 2019 high school graduation, both chose to attend the University of Idaho. They joined sororities, but this is where they diverged. K. Lee pledged Alpha Phi, while Maddie joined Pi Beta Phi. Still, they remained best friends and thrived

individually. Kay Lee majored in general studies and quickly got on track to graduate early. Maddie was a marketing major and made the deans list every semester. She was named the director of PR and marketing for Pi Beta Phi. During her freshman year, she met a student named Jake. They had their first date on Valentine's Day, 2021, and became an official couple in April. Maddie also became close with Zana Kernodal, one of her sorority sisters and co-workers at a restaurant in downtown Moscow. Zana was born in July 2002 and grew up in Post Falls, Idaho, alongside her sister, Jasmine, who everyone thought was her twin despite the two-year age difference.

She was an athletic standout, a talented gymnast who was also on her high school's track, volleyball, and soccer teams. Childhood wasn't easy. Zana's parents, Kara, and Jeff both struggled with drug addiction. At a young age, Jasmine and Zana were sent to live with their aunt. Eventually, Jeff turned his life around and welcomed his daughters back into his home. Zana persevered, which Jay attributes to her heart, joy, and embrace of life. She graduated from high school in 2020 and enrolled in the University of Idaho as a marketing major. She joined Pi Beta Phi and nurtured her friendships, becoming the responsible mom of her friend group. And she fell in love. Ethan Chapin was Anna's first boyfriend. He had grown up in Mount Vernon, Washington, and he loved soccer and basketball.

His entire family was active. They kayaked in the Dominican Republic and surfed in Mexico. His mother, Stacey remembered Ethan, a triplet, as the comedian of the family. He was always smiling or laughing and loved to dance to country music. The Chapin triplets all enrolled at the University of Idaho in August 2021. Ethan and his brother joined Sigma Kai while their sister joined Kappa Alpha Theta. Ethan's friends often found him at the fraternity house shooting hoops in the driveway. Ethan started dating Zana during his freshman year, and by summer 2022, she was joining the on their family vacations.

In August, Ethan, Zana, Kaylee, and Maddie returned to Moscow for the fall semester, and their paths led all four to the same place. 1122 King Road. Just south of the University of Idaho, two adjoining cul-de-sacs are lined with houses and apartments, rented mostly by students looking to live off campus. The streets are with an eyesight of Greek Grove, so many of those renters are members of the school's sororities and fraternities. One of the dwellings is a gray six-bedroom, three-bathroom house located at 1122 King Road. The three-story home was built into a hillside and has a unique design.

I describe it sometimes as being shaped kind of like a janga stack. It doesn't look like it's supposed to be built that way. In June 2022, six students signed a lease to the house. One of the renters moved out shortly before the November murders. That left Maddie, Kaylee, Zana, and their two of us. other roommates Bethany and Dylan. Zana's boyfriend Ethan was a frequent guest. The home had a long history as a party house, and the new tenants kept up that reputation. On weekends, college students poured in and out of the house, drank beer on the deck, and blasted music. The front

door was located at the end of a driveway, big enough for six cars, with extra room for guests and partygoers. Bethany lived on the first floor, Zana and Dylan on the second, and Kaylee, and Maddie on the third. On the second floor, the kitchen's sliding glass door, often left unlocked, led to a concrete patio. While researching the book, Jay never goes into the house. It's blocked off with police tape, but he spends a lot of time in the neighborhood, and he notices something eerie. The back of the house has this little wooded area, and beyond that little wooded area, there is a parking platform, and I parked up there many times on that little raised parking bluff. And from that platform, you could easily look through that small wooded area,

which is only about 30 or 40 or 50 feet of woods, directly into the second floor of King Road, where the kitchen and living area were, as well as directly into the windows of the third floor, where Kaylee Consolvis and Madison Mogan, two of the victims, lived. Well, I was sitting up there just two weeks ago on that bluff in my car doing some research for something. And all around me, the lights and the kitchens, like in the apartments, and in it, there's a few other houses that are in front of the King Road house. I could see people walking

past the windows. And it occurred to me, you know, this is what the perpetrator saw whenever he wanted to. Now, law enforcement is tasked with finding that perpetrator, who he is, who he is, where he came from, why he targeted that house specifically. Violent crime is rare in Moscow. Usually the small police force investigates things like petty theft or burglary. There hasn't been a homicide in the city in seven years. And this time, the entire country is watching. This episode is brought to you by Prime.

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rumbling, and abdominal discomfort. Moscow, Idaho is in the northern part of the state just across the border from Washington. It's remote, around 300 miles from the state capital of Boise. According to Jay, you don't end up in the village by accident. Moscow sits in a very large sort of valley between low foothills leading to mountains. To get there, you go through really rugged mountain terrain, though. So although it's not necessarily rugged in its appearance, to get there from anywhere with more than a few thousand people,

you have to go through very high mountain elevations, roaring rivers, deep forests, just like in the movies where you see Idaho, or Montana or something. Driving into the village you're greeted by a sign. Welcome to Moscow, Heart of the Arts. The town started collecting public art in the 80s and now houses murals, sculptures, and paintings. Even the utility boxes and bus shelters

are adorned with artist's designs. As Jay describes it, downtown is picturesque and quaint. In the winter, people ditch their cars in favor of skiing down Main Street to do their shopping and dining. I just found the people very welcoming. I had always found them to be that. And especially now, I feel like after spending so much time up there,

this is a place that I would consider moving to. But in the days following the murders of four University of Idaho students, the warm and welcoming town Jay describes isn't what's being painted in the media. So Idaho, when this case first broke, you know, caught a lot of flack from mainstream media. A lot of people saying, oh, well, this po-dunk chief of police, will he be able to handle it? Or these whack-a-doe North Idahoans, you know, what are they going through? What are they thinking? You know, there was a lot of disparaging sort of undertone to a lot of what was being said in the first weeks.

Jay says Moscow's then chief of police, James Fry, is more experienced than some outlets portray him to be. He's had FBI training, and the case is personal. He's lived in the village for more than 35 years. He's just as shocked as anyone that this kind of violence could happen in his town. Jay says this makes the chief more dedicated than most. It's like he's solving the murder of a family member. Fry, who later retired in 2024, immediately brings on the help of the FBI and Idaho State Police. They are capable of solving this crime, but it won't be easy.

The perpetrator killed four people in less than 30 minutes. He seemed to disappear just as quickly as he'd arrived. There's no witnesses, leads, or suspects. And while officials can conclude the victims were stabbed, it's unclear what murder weapon was used, or where it is now. And why would someone kill four college students in their home? Nothing seems to be missing, so the motive doesn't appear to be a burglary gone wrong. There's no sign of forced entry. Was it someone the victims knew? The dozens of journalists that have moved into Moscow are asking the same questions, and Chief Fry can sense the the media is getting restless. He starts holding daily press conferences to provide as many answers as he can, but he only creates more questions. The first conference is on November 16th,

three days after the murders. Chief Fry tears up on the podium as he tells a crowded room there's no murder weapon and no suspects. The murders appear to be an isolated, targeted attack. But he can't say who was targeted or why. and worst of all, the killer is still out there. Police can't say whether or not there's a threat to the public.

Many locals aren't satisfied with the lack of answers, and they're scared. Just two days prior, police had released a statement telling the community they're not in danger. Now, Chief Fry seems to be walking that back. Authorities make a plea to the public. Censurvalence footage tips leads anything that might help them track down the killer. Six days after the murder, police have received over 600 tips and conducted 90 interviews. It's more than they expected, because within hours of the murders of Kaylee, Maddie, Ethan, and Zana, their faces had appeared on national news outlets and social media posts.

People on Reddit analyzed surveillance videos from the food truck Kaylee and Maddie went to before their deaths. Eagle-eyed TikTokers tried to identify a friend they talked to at the food truck. People baselessly speculated, Maybe he had something to do with it. Maybe it was Kaylee's ex-Jack, perhaps even one of the surviving roommates. It's a result of what Jay calls a changing landscape in true crime. That it might be a symbolic sort of case that no case after this would go without millions of eyeballs on it. Jay says the media attention had its pros and cons.

On one hand, civilians helped do a lot of footwork for the police. So we saw in the Moscow case millions of social media followers of this case sort of taking up arms and calling in tips that they found from data mining or, I mean, it's very, in some ways, very savvy. You know, you had people like on day three

looking at the public Venmo transactions of these victims and stuff. You're like, I wouldn't have thought of that. That's very smart. The media attention puts pressure on investigators. So do the families of the victims. Kaylee's father, Steve Gonzalez, hires private investigators.

He questions police experience. He gets information from the coroner's office. He and other friends and relatives of the victims pressure law enforcement to be more transparent about the investigation. But Steve and other family members also have to dodge rumors, suggestions that their children were drug dealers or in gambling debt.

Those rumors also end up in the tip lines. Mixed in with that were thousands of tips that were based on nothing, basically, and overwhelming the tip lines. And these tips are not just like somebody calling up. We think of tips as like, I think you should look at this guy, Brian, down the room. That's not what all the tips are.

A lot of the tips were digital assets, clips from YouTube or TikTok or wherever being sent to the FBI. Jay says the volume of tips was so large, authorities parked a digital processing trailer at the police department. They brought on dozens of agents to sift through the data. With that call for eyeballs comes a lot of people who are not necessarily seasoned investigators for having any kind of investigative acumen submitting tips to tip lines and then overwhelming those tip lines. That's a real strain on an investigation if you don't have the resources.

The constant scrutiny wears on the police, the families, and the town of Moscow itself. Now you have all these tourists as the security. security guard called them, coming to the site. And the communities are struggling with this. Like, they want this case to be over with because they want resolution to the crimes, but they also want people to leave them alone. And even today, people are still knocking on the doors of neighbors, wanting to get stories. Newscasters are setting up their tripods in front of the house still because it's a natural backdrop when you're covering this story. And this has an effect on the neighborhood. People don't want to be reminded every single day of this case that people that are living there.

But not only that, they don't necessarily like national news media personalities, seeing them in their pajamas when they carry out the garbage to the blue dumpster. By the end of November, the community has grown weary of the media, rumors, the lack of transparency from the police, and the need for justice for the Idaho Four. On December 7th, Moscow Police Department puts out a press release, asking for more tips. This time, they're looking for the driver of a white Hyundai Allantra

that was seen near King Road in the early morning hours before the murders. They also say they still don't have a suspect. But as it turns out, they know a lot more than they're letting on. Thank you for listening to Serial Killers. We're here with an episode every Monday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram

at Serial Killers podcast. And if you're tuning in on Spotify, swipe up and give us your thoughts. A big thanks to our guest Jay Rubin Appelman. His book, While Idaho Slept, is available now. This episode was written and produced by Chelsea Wood, edited by Mickey Taylor, fact-checked by Lori Siegel, and sound designed by Kelly Gary. I'm your host, Janice Morgan. Want to hear something spooky.

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