Michael Wolff: “Jeffrey Epstein Was Afraid of Trump”

Michael Wolff and I had a chat yesterday about the so-called “Epstein files.”

There were a few “news bombs” in it, regarding assertions Jeffrey Epstein made to Michael, who he confided in in his final years, because he hoped Michael would agree to write his biography.

I do urge you to remember, that per my reporting on the topic, Epstein was a con-artist, and in my experience, lied all the time. And I don’t agree with everything Michael says about Epstein. I don’t agree that the women around Epstein were adult, and I also know that there are many powerful, rich men out there who propped Epstein up financially and otherwise, who knew exactly what was going on behind closed doors in his “massage” room and are therefore worth questioning by the FBI.

I also find it impossible to believe, given Epstein’s extraordinary network and access to powerful figures around the world, that the FBI has got “nothing” other than child pornography in its files on him.

Watch the full video and read the full text on Vicky Ward Investigates.

The Man Who Introduced Me To Moscow

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.

Watch the full promo video and read the full text of insights on Vicky Ward Investigates.

Kohberger To Plead Guilty

Stunning news out of Idaho.

Bryan Kohberger is set to take a plea deal on Wednesday, if the judge accepts it. Yes, he’ll go to jail for the rest of his life for the murders of Kaylee Goncalves, Maddie Mogen, Ethan Chapin and Xana Kernodle without appeal, but he gets to live rather than face a firing squad. And he may never fully explain to the families his hideous rationale.

The closest they’ll get to that is the reporting in The Idaho Four, which does detail Kohberger’s formative years, the misogynistic world he inhabited online, and his professional disastrous descent to the bottom in the weeks before the murders occurred.

Sources tell me it was the prosecutor, Bill Thompson, who put the offer on the table. My sources also add that Thompson, who graduated law school 45 years ago, may not have wanted to go through a grueling three month trial and he was concerned that a jury can be unpredictable.

But…

The four families of the victims have waited nearly three years for a trial in which they hoped they’d get answers. Three frustrating years during which they’ve learned very little about why and how their children were murdered in their beds…

The Goncalves family is furious about the turn of events and has said so on their Facebook page. I suspect the family of Maddie Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves’s best friend, feels similarly, and also the family of Xana Kernodle. Those three families have been in sync these past years when it comes to feeling under-supported and under-informed by the police and the prosecutors.

But the Goncalves family has been the most vocal. And I get why.

You’ll read in The Idaho Four just how badly the relationship went from the get-go. The family was huddled round the TV for Sunday afternoon football, when they could see from friends of Kaylee’s with cellphones that the King Road house she’d been staying in, had police tape around it. Clearly something terrible had happened. And yet it was a few hours before anyone knocked on their door with minimal information.

And so the tension began…

Steve Goncalves has felt so unsupported that only last week he told me that he felt a lot better talking to me on the phone, than talking to them…”You, at least, are always sympathetic,” he said.

I haven’t yet got hold of Stacy and Jim Chapin, Ethan’s parents, but I suspect their reaction is different. One of the themes in The Idaho Four is how the victims’ families reflect the political divisions in the Pacific North West. Moscow is a liberal college town, but Idaho is a deeply Republican state.

Here’s a passage from the book about the moment Jim and Stacy Chapin hear about the arrest of Bryan Kohberger:

They have no idea what his connection to Ethan is, and they are not interested in finding out. The bottom line is that their son is in a jar in their basement and nothing can change that.

But when Jim sees Kohberger’s face on the news, weirdly, it resonates. “He just looked like a bad guy . . . the long, drawn face . . . he just fit the picture that I had in my mind,” he said later.

Jim is glad they’ve got him. He wants this guy to pay. And he feels certain that he will, no matter what happens next.

“Stace will shoot me for saying this . . . but . . . there’s three ways you can look at it. He’s either going to go to jail for life or he is going to be put to death or he’s going to walk out the front door. And I’m okay with any one of them. Because the outcome for him is going to be the same.”

What he means is that Kohberger is not likely to survive even if he gets off. This is Idaho, after all.

“You really think Steve Goncalves,” Jim asked months later with a wry smile, “is going to sit back while he walks around freely?”

The answer is no.

Standby for more…

You are going to need to read The Idaho Four to get the definitive account of what happened and why.

You can pre-order it here.

Watch the promo video here.

Inside The Hours Before Bryan Kohberger’s Arrest

There’s a big moment in The Idaho Four around a police chief who isn’t James Fry, Moscow’s police chief at the time of the college murders, that will likely take readers by surprise.

If you don’t want to know what it is, don’t watch the video or read ahead!

It comes when the FBI is readying a dawn raid on Bryan Kohberger’s parents home in Pennsylvania, in order to arrest him for the murders of Kaylee Goncalves, Maddie Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin.

It’s at this moment that Moscow Police Chief, James Fry reaches out to an old friend, Chief Gary Jenkins, who is the chief over at Washington State University, which is a ten minute drive from Moscow, in the town of Pullman in Washington State. Jenkins had just been moved to head the university campus police having been the chief in Pullman for twelve years. So, he’s worked with Fry and his team many, many times.

Watch the full promo video and read the full text of insights on Vicky Ward Investigates.

Our New Book is “In Cold Blood” 2.0 (But Factual)

People have asked me why on earth I would co-author a True Crime book, given my background as an investigative journalist who usually covers the rich and powerful at the nexus of finance, politics and the culture

My answer to that is that Jim and I aimed for to write something much broader and more important than a generic “True Crime” book right from the get-go.

There was something about this story that touched us, and we figured, would touch all of you, if we could tell the story properly. Both of us loved In Cold Blood by Truman Capote not for the gruesome murders of the Clutter family, but because of the humanity it depicts. (Yes, I know, some of the facts in it have since been debunked, but it has a lasting power, regardless).

I’ll never forget the book’s impact on me when I first read it. I stayed up all night to finish it. And then, as the sun rose, I sobbed and sobbed because (spoiler alert) of the revelation that a whole family had died unnecessarily. That the whole awful tragedy had been an accident. Sort of. And that was the real tragedy.

The only other book that’s also made me cry like that was Black Beauty, the story of a horse, which I read as a child and I remember leaping out my bed and racing to my parents shouting “Ginger died! Ginger died!’ The thought of a wrongful death was deeply, deeply upsetting then – and it is now.

So, yes, this book is about four wrongful deaths, but it’s also about life. It’s about their lives, the struggles of their friends and families, the challenges facing the police and the small town of Moscow when it suddenly finds itself in the glare of the international press. We discovered that there were political and social tensions in the town of Moscow that were simmering before November 13th 2022. And when the murders happened they boiled over.

So, we think this book isn’t just a source of tabloid headlines; we think it’s an important book with multiple layers and themes and that it’s a really good book.

Jim and I just taped a video chat you’ll see in a few days and hopefully you’ll glean from it just how much we care about The Idaho Four. And I hope you will, too.

Even if you think you won’t.

You can pre-order the book here.

Watch the promo video here.

How Did I Persuade The Police Chief In Moscow, Idaho To Talk To Me?

A main character in The Idaho Four is James Fry, the Moscow Police Chief at the time of the Idaho College murders. He subsequently retired and is now the police chief of West Richland, in Washington State.

I’ll say straight out that Chief Fry never broke the gag order and told me any of the specifics of the investigation into Bryan Kohberger. That’s not the kind of guy he is.

But he did kindly agree to let me profile him in the book. He gave me a window into his life, both personal and professional. He talked about past cases and what it was like to confront the biggest crime of his career in the spotlight of the national press.

A lot of journalists wanted to get to Chief Fry after the murders in November 2022, and he refused to be interviewed.

So I am increasingly being asked: how did you get to him?

Watch the full promo video and read the full text of insights on Vicky Ward Investigates.

Inside Reporting The Idaho Four: Tramping Around The Woods In The Poconos

One of the more unusual days reporting The Idaho Four involved time with Special Forces veteran Mark Baylis, who took me to his secluded home in the Poconos and gave me a tour of the surrounding woods, where he believes Kohberger sometimes returned after playing Airsoft with his son, Jack. Baylis believed that Kohbgerger would sit in the trees, watching him, waiting for an opportunity to break into his house. And that he’d leave Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup wrappings on the ground. Almost as a calling card.

But the police never discovered who was robbing Baylis and Kohberger has not said that he did any of this. Now he’s pled guilty to the murders of the Idaho Four, Baylis will likely not get the satisfaction of knowing whether his supicions are correct.

Here’s a sneak preview from a chapter in the book:

Watch the full promo video and get the sneak preview from a chapter in the book on Vicky Ward Investigates.

Following In Kohberger’s Footsteps

Hey Everyone,

People have asked me what it felt likt to report The Idaho Four, given it’s such a dark story.

Today I talk about the most chilling moment for me: I traced Bryan Kohberger’s footsteps and the routes he drove the night of the murder. I sat in a car behind the house at 1122 King Road, in the spot where he would have parked his car on November 13th 2022 – and on the twelve previous times when police believe he was stalking the house.

With me was Alexia “Lexi” Pattinson, a neighbor and friend of the victims. Lexi told me how most nights she’d walk out to her car parked in the cul-de-sac behind the house and see Maddie Mogen at her vanity, putting on her make-up or curling her hair. Maddie’s was the bedroom window you could see clearly from the road.

Anyone would have known it was her bedroom because she had a sign saying Maddie in the window. And a pair of pink cowboy boots.

Watch the full promo video and read the full text of insights on Vicky Ward Investigates.

Bryan Kohberger Was An Incel. What Does That Mean?

Hey Everyone,

So, in the wake of yesterday’s hearing in the Ada County Courthouse in Boise, Idaho, in which a chillingly cool, calm Bryan Kohberger said “Guilty” several times, admitting to the murder of Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin, here’s a sneak preview of what you’ll learn about his psychology in The Idaho Four. I’ll admit I never thought that this would become the textbook explainer for his crimes. I thought we’d get to a trial. But here we are….

I know that Kohberger was very familiar with Incel (Involuntary Celibate) Culture…a dark violent online world of sexually-repressed men, which is well-known to all young people these days (my own sons and their friends even joke about it). But Kohberger was an actual student of its “patron saint” Elliot Rodger whose psychology and 2014 misogynistic-fueled mass-murder suicide in a college town Kohberger learned all about in a course at De Sales University.

When I looked into Incel culture, which I knew nothing about, I’ve got to say I was repelled.

It also occurred to me that when I was in my late teens and twenties, even the most nerdy and socially-awkward among us eventually met and found someone. The idea that a young man or woman would sit alone at home on a phone or laptop and never meet or engage with anyone physically…I don’t think that was a thing.

Physical isolation seems to me to be a construct of the Internet age, and I’d agree with the social scientist Jonathan Haidt that the impact on young people is grim.

Am I wrong?

What do you think?

As a reminder, you can pre-order The Idaho Four Here.

Watch the promo video here.

 

Last Summer Bryan Kohberger’s Father Said His Son Was Innocent…

Last summer Michael Kohberger, Bryan’s father, declared to a friend that his son, Bryan, was innocent; he had not committed four murders. And that a trial would clear his name.

I guess things changed… As we learned yesterday. At the eleventh hour before a trial which has been delayed and delayed, Bryan is pleading guilty. It’s a decision that has shocked everyone, including the victims’ families.

There were signs this was coming if you knew where to look.

A couple weeks ago, someone on Bryan Kohberger’s defense team phoned Connie Saba, the mother of Bryan’s one and only childhood friend, Jeremy Saba, who died, tragically of an overdose in 2021. This person asked Connie what she remembered of Bryan’s behavior and mental health, because, he said, they were looking for ways for him to avoid the death penalty. (Obviously, the lawyers have now found a different way to achieve that objective, with a guilty plea).

Connie told him, what she told me about Kohberger for The Idaho Four. He was a strange, silent young man, in awe of her popular, athletic son. Both of them had learning disabilities. Both of them turned to drugs.

Watch the full promo video and read the full text of insights on Vicky Ward Investigates.