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Montana

M oscow’s mayor, Art Bettge, is spending the holidays in his off-the-grid cabin in northwest Montana, and one morning, there’s an unexpected knock on the door.

It’s one of his neighbors. She tells him there’s been an arrest in the case.

Bettge treks with her to her cabin to borrow her Starlink internet connection. He contacts the city council and gets a sneak peek at the arrest and extradition documents. He immediately understands why it took a few weeks for the investigators to get to Kohberger’s DNA.

“The public does not realize how long DNA analysis takes and believe results should be available in TV-crime-show time frames,” he said. “In my day job as a food scientist–biochemist, I know better.”

He quickly gets up to speed on Bryan Kohberger.

Thank God the guy is from Pullman and not from Moscow, Bettge thinks.

And where the hell has Pullman been on this, anyway? Have they not been looking out for white Elantras? That was out in the public.

And as for WSU…

For WSU, he thinks, this comes at a tricky juncture. The school has lost its footing—that’s the common view in the area.

“I think they’ve sort of forgotten why they’re supposed to be there,” Bettge said. “You’re a land-grant university, which means you should be primarily involved in research associated with agriculture, mining, forestry—issues like that.”

Instead of which, the school has focused on football; the athletic department has run up a twenty-million-dollar debt.

And now the Pac-12 Conference has been depleted because, apart from Oregon State, all the other schools have left.

There are rumblings that the faculty is about to deliver a vote of no confidence in the administration.

Bettge is going to sit back and watch this unfold—with a little bit of schadenfreude.

There’s a lot of connectivity, for obvious reasons, between Moscow and Pullman—they share an airport and an aquifer but also an unspoken rivalry. After all, they are in different states. Each houses a different university.

It’s a source of pride to the Muscovites that many people who work in Pullman live in Moscow, even though it means they have to pay the 5.8 percent Idaho state income tax. (Washington has no income tax.)

Muscovites believe Moscow has a community spirit, a downtown with lots of bars and restaurants, and that Pullman, situated as it is on four hills, does not.

“You go to Pullman [at] lunch, noontime, things are happening. Go back at about six thirty or seven o’clock at night… it’s like tumbleweeds are blowing gently down the streets,” Bettge said. He launched into a joke he said he probably shouldn’t tell, but what the heck:

“What’s the difference between Pullman and yogurt? The answer is that yogurt has live culture.”

Bettge says that the sudden switch in focus will turn out to be costly for Pullman.

“I don’t know why, but WSU and Pullman were both completely and utterly unprepared for the attention to shift” in their direction, Bettge said. “They were caught flat-footed.”