Plan to destroy Idaho house where four young people died undergoes little debate in national media
The house in Moscow, Idaho, where the murder of four young people occurred in November 2022 will undergo demolition on December 28 unless its owner, the University of Idaho, reverses course. While there is nothing like consensus on the wisdom of tearing down the building, this irreversible action looks likely to take place as scheduled.
Even though the prime suspect in the killings, Bryan Kohberger, has not yet gone on trial, and the house possesses evidentiary value, the school’s president, C. Scott Green, discusses its destruction as if this is the obvious step to take. A Change.org petition, signed by 90 people as of this writing, supports the move.
The town and the campus have endured unimaginable horror. They are trying to put memories of the slaughter of Xana Kernodle, Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, and Ethan Chapin behind them and to resume as normal a life as they can after such a traumatizing event.
Green describes the house as “the grim reminder of the heinous act that took place there” and says that “it is time for its removal and to allow the collective healing of our community to continue.”
Now, no one denies the awfulness of the crime or the long period of deep grief and painful adjustment it has brought on for the Vandal community. But Green does not have a mandate from the families of all the victims to tear the building down. Nowhere does he acknowledge that the Goncalves family is against demolition, for the self-evident reason that the house’s absence will make the logistics of the crime harder for lawyers on either side to study and make arguments about in court.
Maybe no one is ready to move back into 1122 King Road just now, but that is quite beside the point.
As Shanon Gray, an attorney for the family, said in a statement, “Isn’t it better to have the King Rd. House and not need it than to need the house and not have it? . . . This is one of the most horrific crimes in the history of Idaho and the University of Idaho wants to destroy one of the most critical pieces of evidence in the case—and it is also important to make note that there is now a demolition date before there is even a trial date set.”
Gray went on to point out that both the prosecution and the defense may yet need to undertake discovery on the crime scene, and that it is impossible to predict how jurors will reason or how much the tangible details of that scene will factor into their judgment.
Some who have left comments on the Change.org petition’s web page agree with Gray. But the university’s president, who supposedly cares about the community for whom the trial is of such vital importance in any redress and healing, is not listening.
Strange Precedent
Even if the lawyers had done all the work they ever needed to do and had no plans to revisit the scene, many questions would remain about the wisdom of destroying the building because something ugly happened there.
For some, it is hardly self-evident that the right course after a tragedy or an atrocity is to pretend it never happened or to erase from the world anything that might serve as a reminder of it. Remembering what happened is critical to summoning the will to recognize, oppose, and defeat monsters. To deny them any victory in the future. To stop terrible misdeeds from recurring. That’s one reason there is a museum and memorial at Auschwitz-Birkenau, not an empty field. And a genocide museum in Phnom Penh.
No one is talking about demolishing the mansion in Beverly Hills where the Menendez brothers killed their parents, or the one in Miami Beach on whose front steps Andrew Cunanan gunned down Gianni Versace. Tearing down 1122 King Road in Moscow, Idaho, hands a symbolic victory to Bryan Kohberger, if indeed he is the killer most of us believe him to be, because it allows his actions to determine the emotional and psychological significance of the house.
If allowed to stand, it might well serve as a symbol of the resilience of the community and a tribute to the four young people who died. From this point of view, wrecking it is a form of capitulation, an admission that the nihilistic, cowardly, senseless, evil actions of the disturbed Kohberger carry far more weight and eclipse the spirit of the four youths and the character they brought to the place. The murderer has the last laugh.
You might think that anyone contemplating the wrecking of the building would offer a profounder and more detailed rationale than simply saying “we’re in pain”—and perhaps explain whether such an action should be the default after a horrendous crime.
An Analogy
In the aftermath of the King Road slayings, this writer thought of a crime that hit a little closer to home. Tammy Zywicki, a member of my senior class at Grinnell College, disappeared while en route to the college for the start of the fall semester in August 1992. People reported having seen her beside her Pontiac T1000 on the shoulder of I-80 talking to a large-bodied trucker who had pulled over, presumably upon seeing her and the stalled car.
A few days later, Zywicki’s body turned up near the side of a road in rural Missouri. In all the years since, the police and FBI investigation has considered thousands of tips and leads and many suspects, without leading to even one arrest. Zywicki was the same age as certain of Bryan Kohberger’s victims.
One wonders whether University of Idaho president Green would shut down I-80, or that portion of it where Zywicki’s presumed abduction happened. Drivers flit back and forth on the interstate every day, oblivious or indifferent to what took place there. How dare they? Or maybe it is only houses that should be subject to demolition in the aftermath of a gruesome murder.
Imagine that the FBI finally cracks the case and locates the home in Illinois, or Missouri, or a different state, where Zywicki’s killer committed his ghastly crime. It is highly possible that the killer himself died or moved out years ago. Yet in such a scenario, C. Scott Green’s logic would require the post-hoc discovery of the site of the crime to change our perception of the house instantaneously and irrevocably from an ordinary residence with a given market value, perhaps even a place where law-abiding and productive people have been living for years now, to a useless place whose existence hinders healing and coming to terms.
A more sensible view is that destroying any house on the grounds that a vile deed has negated whatever objective value it had is a craven concession. It admits a monster’s ability to eclipse forever whatever good associations other residents have imparted or may yet impart to the structure. Such an action fixes nothing and helps no one. It compounds nihilism with more of the same. Evil gets the last laugh.
