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In the early hours of 13 November 2022, four students from the University of Idaho – Ethan Chapin, Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle and Madison Mogen – were stabbed in their off-campus residence. The case shocked the world and went viral almost immediately.
In BBC Three’s The Idaho Murders: Trial by TikTok, Love Island star turned film-maker Zara McDermott headed stateside on a quest to understand why.
If you were on TikTok at the time, you won’t have been able to escape content about “The Idaho Murders”, as the case came to be called. In the weeks following the incident, theories spawned countless video clips: two other housemates had survived – but how? If the murders happened around 4am, why weren’t they reported until midday?
No matter that these questions had perfectly reasonable answers – as social media users searched for clues and falsely identified suspects to devastating effect, the phenomenon took on a life of its own. Even the arrest of Bryan Kohberger (who was tied to the crime with indisputable DNA evidence) seven weeks later wasn’t enough to quell the tide. As McDermott discovered, some self-appointed sleuths are still “investigating” (that is, making videos) to this day.
As hunger for new information grew in the days following the crime, footage from a local food truck featuring two of the victims was initially released to huge uproar. The van’s owner Joseph Woodall, along with a person in the video dubbed “hoodie guy”, were subjected to untold scrutiny, supposedly in the name of justice. In Woodall’s words, “people on the internet sleuth side of things were just trying to get content, dramatising tragedy”.
Making ample use of the surveillance footage as well as endless TikTok clips, the documentary perfectly captured the atmosphere of drifting down an algorithmic rabbit hole. It’s an experience I certainly recognised, as did McDermott herself: “I would be lying awake at night on TikTok trying to get all the information I could,” she recalled. “How much of what I saw on social media was actually true?”
The mindset of the content creators was harder to empathise with. Challenged on his use of the surviving housemates’ names in his videos, “citizen journalist” Jonathan Lee Riches mounted an unconvincing defence: “They were sharing all types of stuff on social media, so they chose to be public figures,” he spluttered. “Mhmm,” nodded McDermott, seemingly not in agreement.
Something other than truth was driving Riches, who seemed more interested in stringing out the case than resolving it. But while McDermott was generally pleasant and inquisitive as a host, she struggled at times to press the sleuths hard enough about their motivations, or to hold them accountable for the devastation they left in their wake.
Less clear cut was Destiny Martin, the only case study to have straddled both camps. Beginning as an over-involved content creator (“they were beautiful people, so I just want to take a moment and just grieve for them,” she said), Martin fell foul of the online mob herself when she impersonated a journalist to gain access to a press conference. “Unfortunately, I’ve had people say I’m obsessed with the victims,” she told McDermott.
“It’s kind of like watching people on TV, right? You watch actors in a movie, you get to know them through interviews,” she explained. Framed that way, the line between casual and obsessive interest looked suddenly blurry. Watching detachedly and watching with tears in your eyes – what’s the difference?
The popularity of true crime attests to our endless appetite for stories of human awfulness, but The Idaho Murders: Trial by TikTok wasn’t about its central quadruple murder so much as the people watching it. We might feel au fait with horrible stories, but what are the consequences of consuming them?
Despite some less than hot grilling, the film used extreme examples as a mirror to reflect its viewers back at themselves. Some of us might not like what we saw.
Streaming on BBC Three
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