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Troy, Idaho

H e’s been out in the snow for hours.

There’s something deeply therapeutic about wielding a chain saw through logs again and again.

In the two months since Kohberger’s arrest, Chief Fry has used this quiet time to think and heal, though even out here, on his land, he’s never quite able to forget those insane six weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve.

Thanks to the gag order, he’s no longer being pressured to speak to the press. Fry has said no to every media request: “Geraldo, Katie Couric, Dr. Phil—I turned them all down,” he said.

For now, it’s mostly quiet; both sides are preparing for the preliminary hearing.

At work, he’s continuing with the investigation, looking closely at Kohberger’s digital footprint and the victims’ to see if they intersect.

To see if they can find the motive.

Meanwhile, there’s a page on Reddit called Justice for Kohberger that the chief follows, “for humor” and with irritation, on which people insist that Kohberger was nowhere near the house on the night in question and conclude that Fry’s wife, Julie, who was elected county clerk in November, is somehow controlling Kohberger’s court schedule or giving her husband advance notice of hearings.

The chief adores Julie, his wife of thirty-two years—“when she speaks, she’s kind of like EF Hutton,” he said—so this Reddit nonsense irks him greatly.

One conspiracy theorist even concluded that the chief was the murderer and Kohberger was framed as a scapegoat.

Fry looks forward to setting the record straight. As he hoped, Brett Payne’s probable-cause affidavit definitely quashed some of the police department’s worst critics. He received a congratulatory letter from retired LAPD deputy chief John D. White, the chief investigator in the O. J. Simpson case:

Dear Chief Fry, Congratulations on a job well done. I told my wife after your first press conference, “This chief knows what he’s doing!” Your handling of the media investigation was a textbook example of how to handle big media cases.

And the guy who’d emailed him that this would be the next JonBenét Ramsey case turned around and congratulated him as well. “You might have got the right guy,” he wrote.

After all their back-and-forth, Fry was curious about this critic. “Tell me about yourself,” Fry replied. He learned the guy was seventy, had been in the oil business in South Dakota before he retired and moved to Florida, and had three kids.

It never ceases to astonish the chief how, when you cut through all the crap, people have more in common with each other than they think.

Even Pastor Doug Wilson came to sit in his office recently.

The cops had lost their legal battle with Christ Church over the psalm-singing arrests, and Christ Church was now suing the city for wrongful arrests and the selective prosecution of Wilson’s grandson.

But the pastor was extending an olive branch because he’d heard that Fry received death threats from Christ Church congregants over the episode. Fry told him that, yes, he’d received death threats, but not from Wilson’s congregants, some of whom were police officers.

“I don’t care who people are. We get paid and we take an oath to serve all people,” he told Wilson.

Fry wishes that Steve Goncalves felt able to trust his department more.

The chief hates to feel at odds with the family of a murder victim; he doesn’t know how it happened, but he can see that the Goncalves family feels mistreated by the cops, and they do not trust Thompson and his team either. That’s upsetting to him.

Their lawyer, Shanon Gray, is vocal in the media. He’s demanding meetings and wants to be kept in the loop about whatever the cops hand over to Thompson as part of his case.

This is often a problem in murder cases. Victims’ families think they are owed information, and by law, they do have some rights, but to protect the investigation, they can’t be told everything.

It’s not a perfect system. The chief knows that. And he’s upset that the Goncalves family has articulated how upset they are to feel left out.

Fry wants to see this case through. But the clock is ticking. He’s fifty-four years old. He believes in change. And elections for county sheriff will be held in November 2024.

That’s the one other job, apart from being police chief, he’d love to have, and by then, he thinks Captain Anthony Dahlinger will be ready to replace him.

Fry needs to think about the future.

So he’s taking a moment for himself, out here in the woods, while he can.

He’s learned the hard way: You never know what’s around the corner.