The King Road homicides, which shattered the Moscow community in November of 2022, sent the Moscow Police Department into a “trial by fire,” as MPD Chief Anthony Dahlinger said in an interview with The Argonaut.
In the seven weeks leading up to the arrest of the man responsible for the brutal murders of University of Idaho students Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin, MPD officers learned what it meant to be a part of a high-profile case, something Moscow hadn’t seen since the triple-homicide of Terri Grzebielski, David Trail and Belinda Niebuhr in 2015.
The murders garnered worldwide attention from the media, bringing with it criticisms from both local and international followers of the case. Many criticized MPD’s lack of information shared with the public. The Latah County Court issued a gag order in January of 2023 preventing investigators and lawyers from publicly commenting on the case. That order was lifted on July 17, 2025, after a coalition of news media organizations, including The Argonaut, filed a motion to rescind the order. The city of Moscow has since released many case documents online.
The Idaho State Police and the FBI assisted in the investigation. Speaking to the collaboration between state, federal and local law enforcement, Dahlinger said, “We couldn’t do it on our own.”
Despite media outlets criticizing MPD for relying on help from the FBI and other police agencies, both Fry and Dahlinger believe that collaboration is what made the difference between success and failure.
“Federal law enforcement, state law enforcement and local law enforcement don’t always get along,” said Fry. “We believe that we need to continue to strive to bring those teams together for the type of outcomes that we had in this case. We went seven weeks without an argument, without a fight.”
Upon reflection, former MPD Chief James Fry, who was in charge during the time of the murders, said he wished he had held a press conference earlier than three days after the crime.
At the same time, Fry expressed the importance of maintaining the integrity of the investigation. “We’ve always been pretty tight-lipped with big cases,” he said.
Fry retired from MPD in April of 2023 and is now the chief of police in West Richland, Washington.
Dahlinger also believed what little information the team had needed to be protected for the sake of the investigation.
“We were willing to err on the side of silence, to protect the case, versus try to feed the insatiable hunger of the public and the media for immediate information,” he said.
One example was information related to the suspect’s white Hyundai Elantra.
Despite having information related to the vehicle MPD suspected to belong to the killer, the department decided to hold off on sharing that information. “It was a bit of time before we put it out publicly,” Dahlinger said, as the department felt it may tip off the suspect. “Anytime you put information out to the public, [the] suspect’s still out there, so if they know that you’re on to them, they could flee, they could do all sorts of things.”
Fry also said he wished he had the manpower to have assigned multiple officers to the families of the victims, rather than just one.
“You’re dealing with families that are heartbroken,” Fry said, adding that it was too much for one officer to deal with.
“They were going through the hardest times of their lives; it rubs off on you,” Dahlinger said, referencing the impact the grieving families had on the officer.
Despite the department’s size and inexperience with these kinds of cases, both Fry and Dahlinger believe the outcome of the case to be a success.
“In the end, I think that we successfully completed a case, and the individual who committed those crimes will never be able to hurt anyone else,” said Fry.
Despite the case having “took a toll on the department,” Dahlinger said, “we are happy to have a resolution, to know that we got the right person and that they are being held accountable. He’ll never see the light of day again. That brings a bit of closure for us.”
On July 23, Bryan Kohberger was sentenced to four consecutive terms of life in prison without the possibility of parole. This came after a plea deal was made between the prosecution and defense and announced on June 30, which took the death penalty off the table.
In response to the controversial nature of the plea, Dahlinger said, “There’s always going to be a varying level of opinions.” He then spoke to the work Latah County Prosecutor Bill Thompson and his team did in the time leading up to the sentencing, stating that there was a “wonderful amount of evidence,” and, had there not been a plea, “we would have been successful in trial.”
In the end, both felt it was time for the Moscow community to heal and move on from focusing on the tragic details of the event, but focus on memorializing the legacies of Kaylee, Maddie, Xana and Ethan.
“We should never, and we can’t ever, forget the victims and their families,” Dahlinger said.
Mackenzie Davidson can be reached at [email protected].