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Moscow, Idaho

She installed a Ring camera after the murders and she can see a man standing there. He’s dressed in a Moscow PD uniform, but since last November, she doesn’t trust anything or anyone. She keeps her door locked and waits.

He knocks some more.

Eventually she speaks through the camera: “Who are you here for?”

He replies, “I’m here for Ava Wood.”

Ava had three new locks and an alarm system installed after the murders, and now she unlocks and opens the door.

He hands her an envelope and speaks in a clipped, formal voice: “You’re being subpoenaed for the State of Idaho versus Bryan Kohberger preliminary hearing in June.”

Ava thinks her legs might give way. She starts to shake. She has never been subpoenaed before.

“This is the Bryan Kohberger case?” she asks. “Who is it from?”

The officer answers, “The defense. Anne Taylor.”

The defense ?

“Do I have to show up?” she asks.

“Yes,” he tells her. “It’s illegal to disobey.”

As soon as he’s gone, Ava slams the door and, in tears, phones her parents.

Luckily, her dad is a lawyer who specializes in bad-faith litigation. He advises her to phone Thompson’s office and let them know she has been contacted.

She speaks to Stacie Osterberg, Thompson’s assistant, who suggests she should find out what Taylor wants.

So in March, Ava and her dad do a Zoom with Taylor.

On the call, Taylor homes in on something Ava told the police the day of the murders: On Friday, October 14, at one a.m., she’d heard someone climb up the metal steps to her apartment, which was across the street from 1122 King Road, and try the door.

“You could hear the jingle of my doorknob. It’s a finicky doorknob,” she said.

But the door stayed closed because Ava had put in a dead bolt during her junior year.

She told police what she now tells Taylor, that at the time, she’d looked on Snapchat to see if any of her friends were in the area, saw one, Mason Bangeman, and texted him to ask if he had just tried to let himself in.

No, he’d said. So Ava asked him to check the street. She watched through her bedroom window as Mason and a couple of friends walked into view. He texted Ava that he couldn’t see anyone.

So Ava went to sleep. She didn’t think any more about it.

Until Xana, Ethan, Kaylee, and Maddie were murdered in the house across the street.

And then she wondered aloud to the police: Was the murderer the same person who had tried to get into her apartment four weeks earlier?

Anne Taylor asks her repeatedly to describe what she can see of the street from her home. Ava says she can see the front door of 1122 King Road and the street leading up to it.

Taylor asks her if the police ever got back to her about the October incident.

The answer is no.

After Kohberger was arrested and Ava read the probable-cause affidavit, she asked if anyone in law enforcement knew if October 14 was one of the twelve times Kohberger’s phone had pinged in the King Road area.

No one will tell her.

It occurs to Ava that if Kohberger wasn’t in the area in the predawn hours of October 14, the defense could argue there was another predator running around.

But if he was…

Ava guesses from Taylor’s other questions that the lawyer is looking for holes in the accounts of the victims’ friends.

Taylor asks Ava a lot of questions: “How well did I know Maddie, Ethan, Kaylee, and Xana? What kind of people were they? Did the roommates ever fight? Did they leave their house unlocked? Did I ever attend the parties they had? How close was I with Dylan and Bethany? Were we all in the same room at the police station? Did I know anything prior to the police being called or showing up? Did I know anything while sitting outside? When did [I] find out all four of them were dead? Did I have any knowledge of Kaylee or anyone having a stalker? Did I hear anything that night? What did I do the night before? Why was I outside that morning? How did I get wrapped into this whole situation?”

Taylor apologizes for putting Ava through this, which is decent, Ava thinks.

But Ava, who is back with her parents in California, really does not want to testify.

Texts ping back and forth among her friend group. Who else has received subpoenas for the preliminary hearing on June 26?

Two of Jack DuCoeur’s housemates, including Adam Lauda, the guy in the Corner Club bar, received them.

So too has Ethan’s close friend Peter Elgorriaga.

He was with Ethan and Xana until the end of the Sig Chi party on November 13.

Unlike Ava, Adam and Peter can’t try to contest the summons because of their location. They live in Idaho.

In April, court filings show that Bethany was subpoenaed by Taylor. But because Bethany lives in Nevada, it’s been agreed she can be interviewed there instead.

How is that fair? Ava, the California resident, wonders. She writes to Taylor’s office asking if they will at least pay for her travel and accommodation.

They will.

When she attends graduation in Moscow in mid-May, she keeps thinking that her next trip to Idaho is going to feel a lot more stressful.

She’s back home in California a few days later when she hears the news: She doesn’t need to return to Moscow for a preliminary hearing because there won’t be one. Bryan Kohberger has been indicted for the murders by a grand jury Bill Thompson convened in Moscow—in secret.

All the better for the prosecution, which won’t have to show its hand and reveal its witnesses to the defense ahead of a trial.