Posted on | August 11, 2025 | No Comments
Saturday night I fell asleep watching a documentary on Prime Video (Closed for Storm, about an abandoned amusement park in New Orleans) and when I woke up about 2 a.m., another documentary was playing. That’s how it is with Prime Video — you watch one documentary, and they’ll queue up another one that plays automatically next. What percentage of their total viewership is from people like me, “sleep-watching” as it were, I don’t know, but it’s larger than zero.
Anyway, when I woke up, the show playing was One Night in Idaho, about the November 2022 murders of University of Idaho students Maddie Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin. Last month, Bryan Kohberger was sentenced to four life sentences without the possibility of parole after pleading guilty to those murders.
Because of Kohberger’s guilty plea, we didn’t get to hear prosecutors lay out their case in the courtroom, and a lot of mystery still surrounds the motive for the murders. Kohberger was a graduate student at Washington State University in Pullman, just eight miles west of Moscow, Idaho. Given the proximity of the two university towns, there’s a substantial amount of cross-socialization — WSU kids partying in Moscow, UI kids partying in Pullman. It has been suggested that Kohberger became obsessed with Maddie Mogen after encountering her while she worked a part-time job at a popular restaurant in Moscow. Kaylee Goncalves had told friends in the weeks leading up to the murders that she believed she was being stalked. Mogen and Goncalves were very similar-looking, and it may be that Kohlberger couldn’t tell them apart, if he was watching them from a distance (as evidence indicates).
VICTIMS: Madison Mogen, 21, top left, Kaylee Goncalves, 21, bottom left, Ethan Chapin, 20, center, and Xana Kernodle, 20, right.
It has also been suggested that Kohberger mas inspired by the so-called “incel” beliefs of 2014 Santa Barbara mass murderer Elliot Rodger, who was a subject Kohberger studied while getting his master’s degree in criminal justice at Desales University in Pennsylvania.
All this I knew before I woke up in the wee hours of Sunday morning to find One Night in Idaho on my TV. The part that I caught was an interview with the parents of Ethan Chapin, horrified that such a ghastly crime could have happened in Moscow, Idaho, and could have taken the life of their son and his roommates. There is no crime problem in Moscow, a town of about 25,000 people, and part of what made this atrocity so shocking was that it occurred in such a seemingly safe place.
Based on the evidence, investigators believe that Mogen and/or Goncalves were Kohberger’s intended targets — he crept into the house and went directly to their room, stabbing them to death in their sleep. The noise apparently woke up Kernodle and Chapin, who encountered Kohberger as he was about to exit the house, and he then stabbed both of them to death to make his escape. And what was the motive?
In a word, evil.
Juliet Ochieng had a rumination on the contrast between the constructive (or creative) work of God and the destructive work of Satan. (Hat-tip: Instapundit.) Juliet (whom we old-time bloggers know as “Baldilocks”) is one of the most sincere Christians you’ll meet, and it was she who, during the Great LGF Blog War of 2009, offered the theory that LGF’s Charles Johnson was demon-possessed. And I certainly can’t rule it out.
What does demonic possession mean? Most people have some kind of horror-movie idea about this, but several years ago, I read An Exorcist Explains the Demonic: The Antics of Satan and His Army of Fallen Angels by Father Gabriele Amorth, who was often called the Vatican’s chief exorcist. Consider a few of Father Amorth’s observations:
Diabolical obsessions are disturbances or extremely strong hallucinations that the demon imposes, often invincibly, on the mind of the victim. In these cases, the person is no longer a master of his own thoughts. . . . The objects of these hallucinations can be manifested as visions, as voices . . . as monstrous figures, horrifying animals, or devils. In other cases it can be an impulse to commit suicide or to do evil to others and, particularly in the young, it can lead to confusion about one’s gender.
“Diabolical obsessions” — might that category include Kohberger’s ideas about emulating Elliot Rodger, or his apparent stalking of the college girls who were his intended targets in 2022? Wouldn’t rule it out.
“Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour” (I Peter 5:8). Good advice.
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