‘It became a game to people’: how online sleuths grew obsessed with the Idaho murders

Fri, 11 Jul 2025

New Amazon docuseries looks back at the chilling University of Idaho murders and how amateur detectives played a dangerous part in what happened next

On the morning of 13 November 2022, Hunter Johnson and Emily Alandt, two students at the University of Idaho in Moscow, answered an odd phone call. Their friend Dylan Mortensen, who lived just a few houses away, heard strange noises during the night and was scared. Her four upstairs roommates weren’t answering their phones – could they come over and check on things? Johnson and Alandt weren’t particularly concerned, Moscow being a quiet college town of unlocked doors, until they reached 1122 King Road. The usually boisterous residence, the node of a sprawling friend group, was eerily quiet. Johnson proceeded up the stairs and into the bedroom where his best friend, Ethan Chapin, 20, was staying over with his girlfriend, Xana Kernodle, also 20. Then, to spare the others the trauma of a ghastly sight, he told the girls to call 911 for an “unconscious individual”.

By now, the clinical facts of the University of Idaho murders, as they have become known, have been published and republished, dissected to death online and seared into the consciousness of even casual news consumers. So One Night in Idaho: The College Murders, a new Amazon docuseries that includes, for the first time, extensive interviews with Johnson, Alandt and other close friends and family, takes a different approach – not a chronology of the murders of Chapin, Kernodle and her roommates, Madison Mogen, 21 and Kaylee Goncalves, 21, but how the crime and its nuclear fallout landed on their loved ones. How much confusion ensued in the hours after the 911 call, as more and more friends, including Chapin’s fellow triplets, Hunter and Maizie, gathered outside the house, while police searched and said nothing; the group got confirmation that their friends had died not from officers on the scene, but from a campus shelter-in-place alert to their phones.