'Weird' last text message Idaho college murders victim sent to sister just hours before being brutally killed
On 13 November 2022, the evening that he and three friends with massacred by PHD student Bryan Kohberger, Ethan Chapin sent a suspicious text message to his triplet sister.
Hours later, the 20-year-old's body was discovered alongside that of his girlfriend Xana Kernodle, also 20, and her two 21-year-old flatmates, Kaylee Goncalves and Madison Mogen.
The four friends, all of whom were students at the University of Idaho, had been brutally stabbed to death in the beds of their off-campus accommodation in the town of Moscow, in the early hours of the morning.
Such is the story tragically recalled by members of the victims' families in the latest Prime Video documentary, One Night in Idaho: The College Murders, which landed on 11 July.
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The four-part series hears from both Chapin's triplet siblings - Hunter and Maizie - for the first time, as well as several of the victims' friends.
The Idaho murders investigation
As police officials explain in the debut episode, on the night of the killings, two other roommates were inside the property, but only one saw a suspicious looking man wearing a mask venturing through the house.
This wasn't totally out of the ordinary for the property, which frequently hosted huge parties.
Out of fear, however, the roommate remained locked in her own room until the following morning, when she called some of their friends over to the house to check on the foursome, who quickly contacted the police.
Despite responding officers confirming the quadruple homicide early, in the weeks that followed, a very limited flow of information was given by police on the case to the victims' families.
The Idaho police chief admitted during several press conferences that his team had never dealt with such a high-stakes investigation in the tiny town of Moscow, but were doing all they could to land upon possible suspects.
All he stated was that the killings were 'a targeted attack', but they could 'not conclude if the target was the residence or its occupants'.
Chapin's final text
As the Chapin family explain in the documentary, the silence from investigating officers gave them the opportunity to overthink every final interaction they'd had with Ethan in the weeks before his murder.
His triplet sister Maizie tells viewers that she'd been with her brother on the night of his death at a party at a nearby sorority.
"We left at 9pm and everyone went bag to Sigma Chi, for some reason I stayed and went to bed," she explains, adding that her brother had persisted in encouraging her to rejoin them.
"Ethan kept texting me, ‘Maizie, come hang out’. I went to sleep so I wasn’t responding to any of them."
Maizie went on to recall the final message her brother had sent, which she found suspicious the following morning.
"The last one said, ‘I love you’, which was also weird because we don’t say that to each other," she says, before breaking down in tears.
Breakthrough
Police received a horde of tip-offs from locals - who'd recorded a car with a Pennsylvania registration plate driving through the area of the murders in the days before, and the morning after.
The car was tracked to Washington State University graduate student Bryan Kohlberger, who was studying criminal justice at the time.
Around the same time, a month on from the killings, investigating officers announced they'd discovered the sheath from a knife at the victims' property, and were looking into DNA matches.
Having linked Kohberger's car to the area, officers began looking into his phone records, finding that he'd driven from Washington to Idaho the night of the massacre, and had returned home in the early hours of the morning.
Police then tracked him down to his parents' home in Pennsylvania, confirming he was the driver of the car seen in the CCTV footage, and comparing DNA they'd recovered from the family's trash to that found on the sheath.
Bryan Kohberger's arrest and trial
When the results returned, it was finally confirmed - the police had their man.
Kohberger was arrested by a SWAT team on 30 December, before he was driven to the Latah County jail in Moscow, and held without bail.
After being indicted by a grand jury on five charges - four counts of first degree murder and one count of felony burglary - prosecutors announced they were seeking the death penalty for the four brutal killings.
Despite Kohberger initially pleading not guilty, in June of this year, his team agreed to plead guilty on all counts meaning he would receive four consecutive life sentences, as long as he'd avoid capital punishment.
His sentencing will take place on 23 July.
Moving on
Discussing the ongoing case, Chapin's mother Stacy admitted she and her family haven't attended any hearings, and are trying to put the past behind them.
"The very first thing I told my kids when this heinous thing happened was that, this won't sink us as a family," she confesses in the documentary. "We'll figure it out together.
"We'd spent five months in the depths of hell, and then we just realised, okay, we just have to figure out how to move forward."
She continued: "So, we just made a deal with each other, that from that day forward, for our kids, for our family and for our friends, that we would wake up everyday and put our best foot forward.
"You forget you have a choice. You have a choice to get up and live your best life, but I still can't imagine would it must be like to be Maizie and Hunter. To have that kind of a bond with your sibling you don't know life without, then have them gone.
"But it is what it is, honestly."
Ethan's brother Hunter then confesses: "There's never a moment in my life where the thought of Ethan not being here isn't there.
"Like, that thought is just engrained in my head now he's not here, and it's something I don't think will ever go away."
Maizie then adds that she also prefers to turn a blind eye to the ins and outs of Kohberger's trial.
"It's kind of bad to say, but things are back to normal, but I think we both just try and pretend like it's normal," she explains, teary-eyed.
"I feel like that's mostly why I don't pay attention to anything else, because I just focus on the good things about him, not what else is going on."
Topics: Crime, True Crime, Documentaries, Amazon Prime, US News
Rhianna Benson