Bryan Kohberger, the man who pleaded guilty last summer to murdering four University of Idaho students, will not appear in court Thursday. His scheduled hearing has been vacated and will be rescheduled for a later date.
In July, Kohberger told the New York Times he wanted to retract his guilty plea and have a trial. He said he was coerced into confessing to murder and his legal team misrepresented what life in prison would be like. Kohberger is currently serving four consecutive life sentences at Idaho’s Maximum Security Institution in Kuna.
A six-week manhunt for the murderer drew international attention to the quadruple homicide. Victims Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin were all 20 and 21 years old when they were killed.
The media quickly found photos and videos of the four young friends on social media, and people across the country scrolled through online accounts of the victims, involving themselves in the investigation as detectives raced to find a suspect.
As the case returns to the headlines, it revives a media cycle that has followed the victims’ families since the first days of the killings. The constant media attention has real consequences for people close to the victims, according to new criminology research.
Danielle Slakoff is an associate professor of criminal justice at California State University-Sacramento. She said the images of four vibrant, happy young friends drew people into the case.
“In terms of true crime attention, I think the fact that it took weeks for an arrest definitely greased the true crime wheels — people were desperate for an answer to what had happened and you saw armchair sleuths pick through the publicly available information trying to get answers,” said Slakoff, who recently published two studies about the positive and negative effects of True Crime on people closest to crime victims in the international journal Crime, Media, Culture.
Slakoff and her colleague Kelli Boling, an assistant professor of advertising and public relations at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, talked to 20 people whose loved ones were featured in true crime media such as documentary series or podcasts.
“The media was very intertwined with their trauma,” said Slakoff, who added many people experienced the media showing up to question them right after their loved one was killed or went missing.
The cons of True Crime
Slakoff said one of the biggest issues with the true crime industry is how inaccurate it can be. “The word ‘true’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting,” she said.
Sensationalized, tabloid-style true crime causes pain for people closest to the victims, Slakoff said, because the stories often focus on horrific details, such as the stabbing deaths of the four University of Idaho students.
“I think in the Idaho Four case, you definitely saw a lot of focus on the brutal details of what happened, and much less so on the four lives that were lost."Danielle Slakoff
Along with speculative and sensationalist coverage, Slakoff said people in the study talked about their fear of leaving their home or workplace because of the constant media attention.
“We had people tell us they had people coming to their homes, looking in their windows, going around the back when they didn’t answer the front door,” she said.
The Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics states, “Balance the public’s need for information against potential harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance or undue intrusiveness.”
But Slakoff said participants in the study described real professional journalists, and not just social media sleuths, who were crossing those lines.
Along with being stalked and harassed, Slakoff said unfounded theories spreading on social media and online can be another stressor for people close to the victims.
“When one of our respondents told us she had moved eight times because of internet trolls, I was shocked, because uprooting your life that often after living through the trauma of a loved one’s death feels like something someone shouldn’t have to endure,” Boling said.
One of the co-victims likened it to the feeling of trying to police misinformation as it spreads across the Internet.
“It’s an impossible task."Danielle Slakoff
The pros of True Crime
“Media pressure is what makes law enforcement move” became the title of the study about the positive impacts of true crime, which Slakoff said is an indictment on the system. Many of the people in the study talked about how getting a case on the news was the only way to get an update on their missing or murdered loved one.
Boling was surprised how people in the study were able to get immediate responses from law enforcement after using an email address with a media-labeled domain name.
“That showed us the criminal justice system recognizes that true crime media coverage is notable and worth responding to, which can feel like a lifeline for folks still searching for answers or loved ones."Kelli Boling
Keeping the media pressure on the police out of fear their loved one’s case might fall by the wayside is an immense amount of pressure on families who are suffering, Slakoff said.
“I understand law enforcement is very overworked and they have lots of cases,” Slakoff said. “But I think for some of these families to just straight up say, I needed the media to put pressure on so I could get an update - I think those are hoops families should never have to go through.”
Media cycles cause pain for people close to victims
True Crime coverage on cases with tremendous media attention are part of a media cycle that flares up again and again, said Slakoff, despite how hard it is for people close to the victims to see it repeated in headlines before the coverage wanes.
Boling said the issue isn’t just about the true crime genre, but the media system as a whole.
“Today, traditional media outlets are competing with influencer creators, citizen journalists, and blatant capitalistic productions. While we expect trained journalists to follow the SPJ code of ethics, it is essentially unenforceable by law,” Boling said.
Nonprofit news outlets exist, but Boling noted that, in general, media is a for-profit industry, and whatever drives clicks, shares, and listens gets produced.
“If people stop consuming sensationalist productions, they will stop getting made,” she said.
As the case of the four students comes back into the media spotlight, Slakoff cautions people to remember how it affects people closest to the ones who were killed.
“Just because it’s over in the media cycle doesn’t mean it’s over for the families."Danielle Slakoff
