Jessica and I Talk The Idaho Four

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.

The Latest on Epstein-gate with Jeffrey Epstein’s brother Mark Epstein, investigative journalist Vicky Ward, and political columnist Matt Lewis.

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!

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.

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 Question About Bryan Kohberger’s Red Flags

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.

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

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.