What a couple of weeks it has been!
First, I want to thank all of you for bearing with me these past weeks through the launch of The Idaho Four. I know you’ve been inundated with videos of me talking about little else…
But:
Last night, I was still wiping away tears after the oh-so-powerful victim impact statements made by three victims’ families in the sentencing of murderer Bryan Kohberger in the Ada County Courthouse in Boise, Idaho when I got a call from Jim ( aka my co-author, the legendary James Patterson) who told me that The Idaho Four had made it to Number One on the New York Times Non-Fiction list. (And, that it had also made it to the top of the New York Times’ combined print and e-book non-fiction list.)
I stopped crying when I heard that!
Getting to Number One has always been my goal for this book, partly because, as I reminded Jim, when we first teamed up he cleverly challenged me: “I know you’ve been on the NYT bestseller list before, but I don’t think you’ve ever been Number One before…”
That’s a dangerous thing to say to someone as competitive as me!
But I always felt in my bones that this book would touch people.
Because there was something about this horrific tragedy that spoke to all of us, including people who don’t care about True Crime. The four murdered college kids, Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle, Maddie Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves were so brimful of promise; so beautiful; so vibrant.
The photograph of them taken the day before they died, the same photograph that is on the book’s cover, radiated joy, possibility, and also normalcy.
And yet what happened to them was anything was anything but normal.
Read the full Substack article at Vicky Ward Investigates.
Yesterday afternoon, Chris Cuomo and I shot the breeze about Epstein, Trump, The Idaho Four and much else.
He and I wondered aloud why both the President and Attorney General, Pam Bondi didn’t do what they are, in fact, now doing, and ask the Court to un-redact grand jury material. It was, we agreed “a head-scratcher’.
Until, it wasn’t.
When I read the Wall Street Journal piece that was published online hours later, about Ghislaine Maxwell’s folder containing alleged birthday messages from Trump, Leslie Wexner and Alan Dershowitz to Jeffrey Epstein, I immediately did a google-search for the one thing that was missing from the piece: the year of his fiftieth birthday.
I discovered that Epstein’s 50th birthday was January 20th 2003.
That gave me chills. Why? Because it was around that date that my piece on Jeffrey Epstein, in the March edition of Vanity Fair hit newsstands. (The magazine always hit newsstands weeks before the month it was published in).
Read the rest of my thoughts and watch the full conversation at Vicky Ward Investigates.
I don’t need to tell you how iconic Tina Brown is as a writer, editor and critic.
She is also a mentor and close personal friend.
Therefore, I care greatly what she thinks. The good news: She loved The Idaho Four!
Thank you, Tina, for a fantastic conversation. You can watch it here. And, yes, of course, we get into Epstein at the end.
Thank you Kelley Smoot, intrinsic self, Bonnie Sonder, Leo, Elicia Wetstein, and many others for tuning into my live video with Tina Brown! Join me for my next live video in the app.
If you had told me 23 years ago, when I first met Jeffrey Epstein, that I’d still be reporting on him in 2025, I’d have been stunned and appalled. Back then very few people knew who he was, and he made my life hell, as I’ve written many times over.
If you’d told me one year ago, that Epstein’s ghost would try to interfere with the launch of The Idaho Four, I’d be less shocked because Epstein’s mythology refuses to die. But I’d have been just as appalled.
And yet, here we are.
Yesterday was publication day for The Idaho Four and, as those of you watched my segment with Jim Acosta yesterday may have noticed, I found myself talking equally about the book – and Jeffrey Epstein.
Yesterday, I gave this first in-depth interview about the book to Jessica, because it was her reporting on the murders Moscow in her newsletter, that drew me in to the story.
Watch the interview here with Jessica.
Watch my discussion with Jim Acosta (my former colleague at CNN) about Epstein-Gate and my new book, with James Patterson, The Idaho Four on Vicky Ward Investigates. Thanks for having me on, Jim!
You can’t just fly into a small town on the opposite side of the country and expect people to talk to you. For my research for The Idaho Four, I had a great deal of help and support in Moscow from a prominent local therapist, Dr. Rand Walker.
He and I spoke on the phone many times before I got to Moscow and he was kind enough to introduce me to a network of people he thought would be critical for my reporting. He was also kind enough to drive me around and show me 1122 King Road, the scene of the murders, and Bryan Kohberger’s student housing in Pullman in Washington State.
I’m not sure the book would have happened without him and the network he gave me. I discovered upon arrival, that because people trusted Rand, they trusted me. And once they met with me, they wanted to introduce me to others. It snowballed.
I came to love Moscow. You’ll see the town becomes a character of its own in the book. Locals, many of whom are academics, are very proud to live there.
They deeply resented that the murders put a stain on the community and that it was so widely publicized. And they hated that it caused a rift amongst them during the six weeks when no one knew who could have committed the murders. People started looking at each other’s arms in case there were signs of a knife wound. And of course, there were, given that elk-hunting is common in that part of the world.
Here’s a snippet from the book about Rand’s reaction to the murders:
Dr. Rand Walker, a trusted local therapist whom Chief Fry has put on standby to treat his traumatized officers and their families, is observing rare and frightening instances of the six-degrees-of-separation connections among the town’s residents. The fact that everyone in Moscow knows everyone else has morphed overnight from a source of comfort to something deeply unsettling.
Neighbor suddenly mistrusts neighbor. Friend mistrusts friend. Customer mistrusts vendor. People are shutting themselves in. Hiding from one another.
Walker is hearing from his patients, from townspeople, from members of his own family, that suddenly the connectivity between them all feels toxic. Walker’s son Kristian, a former UI student, knew the victims.
His girlfriend is the daughter of the owner of the Mad Greek, where Xana and Maddie worked. Now the restaurant is closed, and a handwritten placard is in the window:
We are closed temporarily to mourn the loss of two staff members. We will update FB on status of store soon. Please keep all the family and friends of yesterday’s victims in your thoughts.
— MG Family
It’s all too close to feel comfortable. Because who knows who among them is the murderer?
You can pre-order The Idaho Four here.
The Idaho Four is about much more than the story of awful murders of Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin.
There are many relevant cultural themes in it, one being the thorny question of the First Amendment on college campuses.
When does “free speech” become dangerous? And when should colleges intervene?
Should administrators at Washington State University where Bryan Kohberger was both a PhD student and a Teaching Assistant have done more when confronted with his obvious odious attitudes towards women in the classroom and out of it?
It’s a question that is on the minds of the victims’ families and one I think they hoped to get some clarity on in the trial that now won’t happen.
Watch the promo video on Vicky Ward Investigates.