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Moscow, Idaho

S omeone in a uniform needs to get in front of a mic, now!”

Art Bettge, Moscow’s mayor of just eleven months and two weeks, can scarcely believe he’s having this conversation—this fight —with the city supervisors. And with Bill Thompson, who was his neighbor for twenty years. And with James Fry.

How the heck has a former USDA biochemist with expertise in local agriculture found himself arguing about the need for law enforcement to handle the swarm of press in Moscow? He has never thought much about the business of the Moscow Police Department beyond looking at its budgets.

This is not what he’s trained for or what he anticipated when he ran for mayor.

He was elected on two main civic concerns: repairing Moscow’s roads and infrastructure in the face of state legislative budget cuts and locating a new water source for the town before its aquifer runs dry.

“I can talk your ear off about wheat,” Bettge later said.

“But I’m not good at standing up in front of the press. ”

But now he’s found himself in the middle of complete public chaos. There are helicopters hovering overhead, sniffer dogs on the college campus. Even a biochemist can see this situation could be ruinous to his beloved town.

“We look ridiculous,” he says to Thompson. He points out that all the police have said publicly is that there is no threat—yet the place appears to be overrun with “cartoon security.”

The public is getting impatient, as are some of the victims’ families. And the press is taking notice. “The lack of information” about the case, wrote reporter Katie Kloppenburg for Boise State Public Radio on November 15, “has frustrated people who say the community needs more specific answers.”

The mayor doesn’t doubt that the chief and county prosecutor will bring whoever did this to justice. He knows how good they are at their jobs.

But right now, Moscow has a public-perception problem.

And a safety problem. Crazy rumors—including one about a Colombian drug cartel being involved in the murders—are running rampant.

As Moscow’s number one public official, Bettge cannot just ignore this.

It’s a great irony that last week he signed off on the wording for a recruitment ad for a crisis communications adviser. But it hasn’t yet been posted.

So he keeps phoning, pestering people, barging into meetings of the city supervisors and yelling. And he keeps demanding the same thing.

He wants a guy in uniform to say something that sounds clarifying or at least slightly reassuring into a mic.

But Bill Thompson and Chief Fry won’t budge. Thompson even warns: “Don’t say anything, Art. You’ll misspeak and mess everything up. You aren’t trained for this.”

The city supervisors are telling Bettge the same thing. Ordering him, even, not to speak.

And yet everyone, including the New York Times, is reaching out to him for comment. And Bettge is the mayor.

He needs to make a call. He needs to say something. He needs to assure people they can walk around safely, albeit cautiously, which is what Fry and Thompson seem to think. But they want to take their time saying it.

Time is what they don’t have.

The New York Times, he thinks, is surely a safe place to give an interview. And so he does it. He’s careful. He gives context.

But in the article, the context has disappeared, and there’s just one startling takeaway:

MOSCOW, Idaho—Four students at the University of Idaho were found dead near campus in what a local official described on Monday as a “crime of passion.”

Art Bettge, the mayor of Moscow, Idaho, said in an interview that the authorities were still investigating what had transpired but that the case was being treated as a homicide.

He said the authorities did not believe that there was a “perceivable danger to the broader public,” but he declined to say how the victims had been killed or whether a suspect was at large.

“With a crime of this magnitude, it’s very difficult to work through,” Mr. Bettge said, adding that the police needed time to piece together what had transpired. “The overall assessment is that it’s a crime of passion,” he said.

Oh God, Bettge thinks when he reads it.

A crime of passion? He knows immediately that, far from soothing people, this could fan the flames of the rumor bonfire. He’s achieved the exact opposite of his objective.

“I developed a great dislike for national media very rapidly,” he said of that experience. “I tend to talk in paragraphs and they lift bits out of the middle of paragraphs, those sons of bitches.”

Art Bettge correctly guesses what the reaction of Bill Thompson and James Fry will be.

The police chief calls up the city supervisor and tells him, “Could you please tell the mayor not to talk? Or I will—and it would be better coming from you.”