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Rathdrum, Idaho

O n the one-year anniversary of Kaylee’s murder, the Goncalveses don’t go to the vigil in Moscow.

Instead, they sit in their living room on their black leather couch, familiar now to America’s many true-crime sleuths, and give TV interviews about Kaylee and their frustration with the excruciatingly slow and opaque legal path to justice.

“We said, ‘Gather it up… we’ll work with investigators and turn this around,’” Steve tells NewsNation. He repeats how, because “nobody knows her like her brother and sister,” they were ahead of investigators on the Grub Truck video and reaching out to Kaylee and Maddie’s driver.

“We went from being victims and became actively involved… and [that] could make a difference,” Steve says.

They tell their interviewers that they do have some proof that their advocacy matters.

For one thing, 1122 King Road is still standing. And on October 31, the FBI reentered the home to create a new 3D map of the crime scene.

Because of the gag order, it’s not clear to the public what drove the agency to do this.

But it’s an undeniable win for the Goncalves family.

“I knew in my heart what was best for those girls and Ethan, and I knew what was best was to keep [the house] around, until they did more,” Steve tells NewsNation’s Brian Entin.

“There will be a point when I’ll be like, ‘Let it go.’”

But that isn’t now.

The family shifts focus to another bone of contention: Kohberger’s attire for court hearings. Once John Judge took over the case, he granted Anne Taylor’s request to allow her client to appear in court unshackled and wearing a suit.

“He looks like a business executive,” Kristi explodes. According to her research, “[I’ve] never seen another murderer or whatever he is at this point in a case not in handcuffs, not in shackles, one or the other or both, and in orange.”

The absence of prison clothing is infuriating.

“It makes me sick that he sits there in his suit, and he sits there and taps his hands,” she tells Entin. “He rocks back and forth… why is he sitting there in the judge chair with a fresh haircut?”

Bill Thompson explains to the family, via Gray, that the judge allowed this out of caution: If the defense argues successfully that Kohberger has been made to look guilty on TV screens around the world before he appears in front of a jury, it could be grounds for an appeal.

But Steve assumes that with a case that’s this high profile, there will be an appeal regardless.

Steve knows there’s also a good chance that Anne Taylor will argue, due to the constant local media coverage of the case, that Kohberger will not be able to get an impartial jury in Moscow, and the trial should be moved.

If it is moved, Boise, nearly three hundred miles away, would be the most likely venue.

How is that fair to the victims’ families?

“It just seems wrong,” he says, “that an outsider comes here, does crime here… without that community having a voice and determining how the justice plays out.”

That’s why Steve chooses to be proactive.

“I want BK to look back and say, ‘If there was one thing that really brought me down, [it] was messing with Kaylee’s family. They wouldn’t let up,’” Steve said. “I would never want him to get away with it.”

He’s toying with the idea of pursuing a federal case based on Kohberger having crossed so many state lines to commit the murders. Sources at the FBI have told him that this might be a possibility. Steve knows that’s a long shot, but he’s going to explore every avenue.

For the Goncalves family, nothing is off the table. “Our motto was ‘Don’t be victims. Don’t ever be a victim.’”