Introducing 'The King Road Killings: An Idaho Murder Mystery'

June 13, 2023·32 min·2 clips

Twelve minutes after Zanna's 4 a.m. DoorDash delivery, authorities believe someone entered the King Road house.

The story opens in ordinary daylight. Moscow, Idaho is watching the Vandals play UC Davis, and the town is moving through the last home game of the season. Then the focus tightens around the King Road house, where Kaylee Gonsalves, Madison Mogan, Zanna Kernodle, and two other roommates were living in November of 2022. One photograph carries a lot. Jeans, sweats, crop tops, an Idaho sweatshirt, long blonde hair, tousled hair, and a signature mustache make the students feel like people from any campus weekend. Kaylee had posted it hours earlier. The narrator uses the image to get at the roommates' closeness, not to dress up the story. Friends remember Kaylee's room. Katie and Ava, identified only by first names, talk about fake succulents, little vines, pictures, inspiration stuff, and picture boards. The details are small, which is why they work. They make Kaylee's future feel close: graduation in December, an IT job, a move to Texas, and enough confidence to picture the FBI. Her ambition had humor in it. A friend remembers her practicing the line, "Kaylee Gonsalves, FBI," and it lands as funny and serious at once. Family stays close to the telling too. Olivia says Kaylee had been home for a couple of weeks, helping her mother decorate for Christmas before the next part of her life began. Then the empty space takes over. The ending turns to the questions that followed, including the nearly eight-hour gap before the 911 call and the question of someone walking past another person. The episode says that missing information fed speculation, fear, and finger-pointing. It does not offer a neat answer. It leaves the listener with uncertainty, a paused moment, and the sense that a case everyone talked about started in private rooms.

As heard by us

A restrained ABC opener on the Idaho student murders, grounded first in place, memory, and the ordinary lives cut short.

The King Road Killings opens far from the crime-scene shorthand that made the case a national obsession. Kena Whitworth starts in Moscow, Idaho, with a golden November football day, a college town filling up for the Vandals, and the King Road house as a real place where students…

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Why you'd press play

Press play for a measured guide into the King Road killings, the University of Idaho case that drew attention across the country and world.

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