Crime and Courts

University of Idaho student killings one year later: Motive keeps mystery alive

"Four innocent college kids just living their best lives were murdered," one online sleuth said. "It's the brutality and the shock of it that makes you want to figure out why."

The slayings of four University of Idaho students one year ago stunned the bucolic college town of Moscow, bedeviled its small police force and — because of the nature of the crime and weeks without a named suspect — spawned countless conspiracies from social media sleuths fixated with finding the killer.

The mystery of who fatally stabbed housemates Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen and Xana Kernodle and Kernodle's boyfriend, Ethan Chapin, was apparently solved nearly seven weeks later with the arrest of a suspect.

But for some sleuths, even as suspect Bryan Kohberger awaits trial on four counts of first-degree murder, the conversation hasn't stopped.

"There is still so much we don't know," said Deb Aldrich-Bailey, who lives in Ohio and was drawn to the case because she has children in college. "Four innocent college kids just living their best lives were murdered, and for what? It's the brutality and the shock of it that makes you want to figure out why."

And so, Aldrich-Bailey logs on daily to the largest Facebook group devoted to the case, with more than 227,700 members. Theories over a motive are also dissected on popular Reddit pages and TikTok accounts where the hashtag #IdahoMurderMystery has more than 207.2 million views.

Read the full story at NBCNews.com here.

FBI investigators are building a model of the house were four University of Idaho students were stabbed to death last November.
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